miniscences--most of them bitter,
sorrowful, or contemptuous, throng across his mind, shaping themselves
into poignant verse:

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay;
'Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.

* * * * *

Oh! could I feel as I have felt,--or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in desert found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So, 'midst the wither'd waste of life, those tears would flow to me.

A meagre breakfast,--of claret and soda with a few mouthfuls of some
Italian dish,--somewhat restores his natural vivacity: and he listens
with cynical amusement to Fletcher's blood-curdling stories of the
phantoms who have made night hideous. For the famous old feudal Palazzo,
with its dungeons and secret chambers, has been immemorially infested
with ghosts, and harassed by inexplicable noises. Fletcher has already
begged leave to change his room, and then refused to occupy his new
room, because, as his master reports, "there are more ghosts there than
in the other!... There is one place where people were evidently walled
up ... I am bothered about these spectres, as they say the last occupants
were too." However, he is laughing as he descends the magnificent
staircase,--the reputed work of Michael Angelo,--laughing until the
shrill querulous cries of peevish children make him stop and frown. He
has allowed the Leigh Hunts, with their large and fractious family, to
occupy for the present the ground-floor of the Palazzo; and children
are his pet abhorrence. "I abominate the sight of them so much," he has
already told Moore, "that I have always had the greatest respect for
the character of Herod!" No child figures in any of his poems: his own
paternal feeling towards "Ada, sole daughter of my house and home," is
merely a fluctuating sentiment.

He shrugs his shoulders and enters his great _salon_, again moody and
with a downcast air: and throws himself upon a couch in gloomy reverie.
Snatches of poetry wander through his thoughts--poetry intrinsically
autobiographical, for "the inequalities of his style are those of his
career," and his imaginary heroes are endless reproductions of himself,
"the wandering outlaw of his own