e his
father's acquiescence; indeed, he undertook to watch over our
interests, and was the channel through which we were to correspond.

My parting with Bianca was tender--delicious--agonizing.

It was in a little pavilion of the garden which had been one of our
favorite resorts. How often and often did I return to have one more
adieu--to have her look once more on me in speechless emotion--to enjoy
once more the rapturous sight of those tears streaming down her lovely
cheeks--to seize once more on that delicate hand, the frankly accorded
pledge of love, and cover it with tears and kisses! Heavens! There is a
delight even in the parting agony of two lovers worth a thousand tame
pleasures of the world. I have her at this moment before my eyes--at
the window of the pavilion, putting aside the vines that clustered
about the casement--her light form beaming forth in virgin white--her
countenance all tears and smiles--sending a thousand and a thousand
adieus after me, as, hesitating, in a delirium of fondness and
agitation, I faltered my way down the avenue.

As the bark bore me out of the harbor of Genoa, how eagerly my eyes
Stretched along the coast of Sestri, till it discerned the villa
gleaming from among trees at the foot of the mountain. As long as day
lasted, I gazed and gazed upon it, till it lessened and lessened to a
mere white speck in the distance; and still my intense and fixed gaze
discerned it, when all other objects of the coast had blended into
indistinct confusion, or were lost in the evening gloom.

On arriving at Naples, I hastened to my paternal home. My heart yearned
for the long-withheld blessing of a father's love. As I entered the
proud portal of the ancestral palace, my emotions were so great that I
could not speak. No one knew me. The servants gazed at me with
curiosity and surprise. A few years of intellectual elevation and
development had made a prodigious change in the poor fugitive stripling
from the convent. Still that no one should know me in my rightful home
was overpowering. I felt like the prodigal son returned. I was a
stranger in the house of my father. I burst into tears, and wept aloud.
When I made myself known, however, all was changed. I who had once been
almost repulsed from its walls, and forced to fly as an exile, was
welcomed back with acclamation, with servility. One of the servants
hastened to prepare my father for my reception; my eagerness to receive
the paternal embrace