is autobiography; a thought too
terrible not to be genuine: he or his beloved must die first; one or the
other must have the horror of remaining alone, widowed of all interest
on earth. How constantly this idea haunted him, and with what painful
vividness, is apparent from a letter which I shall translate almost _in
extenso_; as, together with those few words which I have quoted about
Gori's death, it shows the passionate tenderness that was hidden, like
some aromatic herb beneath the Alpine snow, under the harsh exterior of
Alfieri.

The letter is to Mme. Teresa Mocenni at Siena, and relates to the death
of Mario Bianchi, who had long been her devoted _cavaliere servente_.
"Your letter," writes Alfieri, "breaks my heart. I feel the complete
horror of a situation which it gives me the shivers merely to think may
be my situation one day or other; and oh! how much worse would it not be
for me, living alone, isolated from everyone, closed up in myself. O
God! I hope I may not be the survivor, and yet how can I wish that my
better self (_la parte migliore di me stesso_) should endure a situation
which I myself could never have the courage to endure? These are frightful
things. I think about them very often, and sometimes I write some bad
rhymes about them to ease my mind; but I never can get accustomed either
to the thought of remaining alone, nor to that of leaving my lady."
"Some opinions," he goes on--and this hankering after Christianity on
the part of a man who had lived in eighteenth-century disbelief seems
to bear out what Mme. d'Albany told the late Gino Capponi, that had
Alfieri lived much longer he would have died telling his rosary,--"some
opinions are more useful and give more satisfaction than others to a
well-constituted heart. Thus, it does our affection much more good to
believe that our Mario (Bianchi) is united to Candido (another dead
friend) and to Gori, that they are talking and thinking about us, and
that we shall meet them all some day, than to believe that they are all
of them reduced to a handful of ashes. If such a belief as the first is
repugnant to physics and to mathematical evidence, it is not, therefore,
to be despised. The principal advantage and honour of mankind is that it
can feel, and science teaches us how not to feel. Long live, therefore,
ignorance and poetry, and let us accept the imaginary as the true. Man
subsists upon love; love makes him a god: for I call _God_ an intensely
felt l