y breast, and Italy had become the El Dorado of wealth, or
the Utopia of empire, to thousands of valiant arms and plotting minds,
there was at least one breast that felt the true philosophy of the
Hermit. Adrian's nature, though gallant and masculine, was singularly
imbued with that elegance of temperament which recoils from rude
contact, and to which a lettered and cultivated indolence is the
supremest luxury. His education, his experience, and his intellect, had
placed him far in advance of his age, and he looked with a high contempt
on the coarse villanies and base tricks by which Italian ambition
sought its road to power. The rise and fall of Rienzi, who, whatever his
failings, was at least the purest and most honourable of the self-raised
princes of the age, had conspired to make him despond of the success of
noble, as he recoiled from that of selfish aspirations. And the dreamy
melancholy which resulted from his ill-starred love, yet more tended
to wean him from the stale and hackneyed pursuits of the world. His
character was full of beauty and of poetry--not the less so in that it
found not a vent for its emotions in the actual occupation of the poet!
Pent within, those emotions diffused themselves over all his thoughts
and coloured his whole soul. Sometimes, in the blessed abstraction of
his visions, he pictured to himself the lot he might have chosen had
Irene lived, and fate united them--far from the turbulent and vulgar
roar of Rome--but amidst some yet unpolluted solitude of the bright
Italian soil. Before his eye there rose the lovely landscape--the palace
by the borders of the waveless lake--the vineyards in the valley--the
dark forests waving from the hill--and that home, the resort and refuge
of all the minstrelsy and love of Italy, brightened by the "Lampeggiar
dell' angelico riso," that makes a paradise in the face we love. Often,
seduced by such dreams to complete oblivion of his loss, the young
wanderer started from the ideal bliss, to behold around him the solitary
waste of way--or the moonlit tents of war--or, worse than all, the
crowds and revels of a foreign court.

Whether or not such fancies now, for a moment, allured his meditations,
conjured up, perhaps, by the name of Irene's brother, which never
sounded in his ears but to awaken ten thousand associations, the Colonna
remained thoughtful and absorbed, until he was disturbed by his own
squire, who, accompanied by Montreal's servitors, ushered