nor lay my throbbing head on any loved bosom, nor drink from meeting eyes
an intoxicating dew, that transcends the fabulous nectar of the gods. Shall
I not then complain? Shall I not curse the murderous engine which has mowed
down the children of men, my brethren? Shall I not bestow a malediction on
every other of nature's offspring, which dares live and enjoy, while I live
and suffer?

Ah, no! I will discipline my sorrowing heart to sympathy in your joys; I
will be happy, because ye are so. Live on, ye innocents, nature's selected
darlings; I am not much unlike to you. Nerves, pulse, brain, joint, and
flesh, of such am I composed, and ye are organized by the same laws. I have
something beyond this, but I will call it a defect, not an endowment, if it
leads me to misery, while ye are happy. Just then, there emerged from a
near copse two goats and a little kid, by the mother's side; they began to
browze the herbage of the hill. I approached near to them, without their
perceiving me; I gathered a handful of fresh grass, and held it out; the
little one nestled close to its mother, while she timidly withdrew. The
male stepped forward, fixing his eyes on me: I drew near, still holding out
my lure, while he, depressing his head, rushed at me with his horns. I was
a very fool; I knew it, yet I yielded to my rage. I snatched up a huge
fragment of rock; it would have crushed my rash foe. I poized it--aimed
it--then my heart failed me. I hurled it wide of the mark; it rolled
clattering among the bushes into dell. My little visitants, all aghast,
galloped back into the covert of the wood; while I, my very heart bleeding
and torn, rushed down the hill, and by the violence of bodily exertion,
sought to escape from my miserable self.

No, no, I will not live among the wild scenes of nature, the enemy of all
that lives. I will seek the towns--Rome, the capital of the world, the
crown of man's achievements. Among its storied streets, hallowed ruins, and
stupendous remains of human exertion, I shall not, as here, find every
thing forgetful of man; trampling on his memory, defacing his works,
proclaiming from hill to hill, and vale to vale,--by the torrents freed
from the boundaries which he imposed--by the vegetation liberated from
the laws which he enforced--by his habitation abandoned to mildew and
weeds, that his power is lost, his race annihilated for ever.

I hailed the Tiber, for that was as it were an unalienable possession of