gazed upon the
lifeless form of his adored Irene, the young Roman had undergone the
usual vicissitudes of a wandering and adventurous life in those exciting
times. His country seemed no longer dear to him. His very rank precluded
him from the post he once aspired to take in restoring the liberties of
Rome; and he felt that if ever such a revolution could be consummated,
it was reserved for one in whose birth and habits the people could
feel sympathy and kindred, and who could lift his hand in their behalf
without becoming the apostate of his order and the judge of his own
House. He had travelled through various courts, and served with renown
in various fields. Beloved and honoured wheresoever he fixed a temporary
home, no change of scene had removed his melancholy--no new ties had
chased away the memory of the Lost. In that era of passionate and
poetical romance, which Petrarch represented rather than created, Love
had already begun to assume a more tender and sacred character than it
had hitherto known, it had gradually imbibed the divine spirit which
it derives from Christianity, and which associates its sorrows on
earth with the visions and hopes of heaven. To him who relies upon
immortality, fidelity to the dead is easy; because death cannot
extinguish hope, and the soul of the mourner is already half in the
world to come. It is an age that desponds of a future life--representing
death as an eternal separation--in which, if men grieve awhile for the
dead, they hasten to reconcile themselves to the living. For true is the
old aphorism, that love exists not without hope. And all that romantic
worship which the Hermit of Vaucluse felt, or feigned, for Laura, found
its temple in the desolate heart of Adrian Colonna. He was emphatically
the Lover of his time! Often as, in his pilgrimage from land to land,
he passed the walls of some quiet and lonely convent, he seriously
meditated the solemn vows, and internally resolved that the cloister
should receive his maturer age. The absence of years had, however,
in some degree restored the dimmed and shattered affection for his
fatherland, and he desired once more to visit the city in which he had
first beheld Irene. "Perhaps," he thought, "time may have wrought some
unlooked-for change; and I may yet assist to restore my country."

But with this lingering patriotism no ambition was mingled. In that
heated stage of action, in which the desire of power seemed to stir
through ever