"and I--I will be wretched rather than you shall be so!"

His heart rebuked him even for that last sentence. This pure and devoted
attachment, was it indeed an unhappiness to obtain, and a sacrifice to
return! Stung by his thoughts, and impatient of rest, he hurried into the
air;--he traversed the city; he passed St. Sebastian's Gate, gained the
Appia Via, and saw, lone and sombre, as of old--the house of the departed
Volktman. He had half unconsciously sought that direction, in order to
strengthen his purpose, and sustain his conscience in its right path. He
now hurried onwards, and stopped not till he stood in that lovely and
haunted spot--the valley of Egeria--in which he had met Lucilla on the day
that he first learned her love. There was a gloom over the scene now, for
the day was dark and clouded: the birds were silent; a heavy oppression
seemed to brood upon the air. He entered that grotto which is the witness
of the most beautiful love-story chronicled even in the soft south. He
recalled the passionate and burning emotions which, the last time he had
been within that cell, he had felt for Lucilla, and had construed
erroneously into real love. As he looked around, how different an aspect
the spot wore! Then, those walls, that spring, even that mutilated
statue, had seemed to him the encouragers of the soft sensations he had
indulged. Now, they appeared to reprove the very weakness which hallowed
themselves--the associations spoke to him in another tone. The broken
statue of the river god--the desert silence in which the water of the
sweet fountain keeps its melancholy course--the profound and chilling
Solitude of the spot--all seemed eloquent, not of love, but the broken
hope and the dreary loneliness that succeed it! The gentle plant (the
capillaire) that overhangs the sides of the grotto, and nourishes itself
on the dews of the fountain, seemed an emblem of love itself after
disappointment--the love that might henceforth be Lucilla's--drooping in
silence on the spot once consecrated to rapture, and feeding itself with