h devotion enough, on the part of the woman,
to satisfy even his thirst for affection, and with a sad earnestness, on
his own, a foreboding fidelity, which made him cling but the more
passionately to this attachment from feeling that it would be his last.

A circumstance which he himself used to mention as having occurred at
this period will show how over-powering, at times, was the rush of
melancholy over his heart. It was his fancy, during Madame Guiccioli's
absence from Bologna, to go daily to her house at his usual hour of
visiting her, and there, causing her apartments to be opened, to sit
turning over her books, and writing in them.[44] He would then descend
into her garden, where he passed hours in musing; and it was on an
occasion of this kind, as he stood looking, in a state of unconscious
reverie, into one of those fountains so common in the gardens of Italy,
that there came suddenly into his mind such desolate fancies, such
bodings of the misery he might bring on her he loved, by that doom which
(as he has himself written) "makes it fatal to be loved[45]," that,
overwhelmed with his own thoughts, he burst into an agony of tears.

During the same few days it was that he wrote in the last page of Madame
Guiccioli's copy of "Corinne" the following remarkable note:--

"My dearest Teresa,--I have read this book in your garden;--my
love, you were absent, or else I could not have read it. It is a
favourite book of yours, and the writer was a friend of mine. You
will not understand these English words, and _others_ will not
understand them--which is the reason I have not scrawled them in
Italian. But you will recognise the hand-writing of him who
passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which
was yours, he could only think of love. In that word, beautiful in
all languages, but most so in yours--_Amor mio_--is comprised my
existence here and hereafter. I feel I exist here, and I fear that
I shall exist hereafter,--to _what_ purpose you will decide; my
destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, seventeen years of
age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had stayed there,
with all my heart,--or, at least, that I had never met you in your
married state.

"But all this is too late. I love you, and you love me,--at least,
you _say so_, and _act_ as if you _did_ so, which last is a great
consolation in a