mansion was rarely invaded.
It was precisely the spot which proffered rest to a man weary of the
world, and indulged the memories which grow in rank luxuriance over the
wrecks of passion. And he whose mind, at once gentle and self-dependent,
can endure solitude, might have ransacked all earth for a more fair and
undisturbed retreat.

But not to such a solitude had the earlier dreams of Adrian dedicated
the place. Here had he thought--should one bright being have
presided--here should love have found its haven: and hither, when love
at length admitted of intrusion, hither might wealth and congenial
culture have invited all the gentler and better spirits which had begun
to move over the troubled face of Italy, promising a second and younger
empire of poesy, and lore, and art. To the graceful and romantic but
somewhat pensive and inert, temperament of the young noble, more
adapted to calm and civilized than stormy and barbarous times, ambition
proffered no reward so grateful as lettered leisure and intellectual
repose. His youth coloured by the influence of Petrarch, his manhood
had dreamed of a happier Vaucluse not untenanted by a Laura. The visions
which had connected the scene with the image of Irene made the place
still haunted by her shade; and time and absence only ministering to his
impassioned meditations, deepened his melancholy and increased his love.

In this lone retreat--which even in describing from memory, for these
eyes have seen, these feet have trodden, this heart yet yearneth for,
the spot--which even, I say, in thus describing, seems to me (and haply
also to the gentle reader) a grateful and welcome transit from the
storms of action and the vicissitudes of ambition, so long engrossing
the narrative;--in this lone retreat Adrian passed the winter, which
visits with so mild a change that intoxicating clime. The roar of the
world without was borne but in faint and indistinct murmurings to his
ear. He learned only imperfectly, and with many contradictions, the
news which broke like a thunderbolt over Italy, that the singular and
aspiring man--himself a revolution--who had excited the interest of all
Europe, the brightest hopes of the enthusiastic, the profusest adulation
of the great, the deepest terror of the despot, the wildest aspirations
of all free spirits, had been suddenly stricken from his state, his name
branded and his head proscribed. This event, which happened at the
end of December, reached Ad