doubt, of
this refractoriness may be accounted for by his absence from all those
whose slightest word or look would have done more with him than whole
volumes of correspondence; but by no cause less powerful and revulsive
than the struggle in which he had been committed could a disposition
naturally diffident as his was, and diffident even through all this
excitement, have been driven into the assumption of a tone so
universally defying, and so full, if not of pride in his own pre-eminent
powers, of such a contempt for some of the ablest among his
contemporaries, as almost implied it. It was, in fact, as has been more
than once remarked in these pages, a similar stirring up of all the best
and worst elements of his nature, to that which a like rebound against
injustice had produced in his youth;--though with a difference in point
of force and grandeur, between the two explosions, almost as great as
between the outbreaks of a firework and a volcano.

Another consequence of the spirit of defiance now roused in him, and one
that tended, perhaps, even more fatally than any yet mentioned, to sully
and, for a time, bring down to earth the romance of his character, was
the course of life to which, outrunning even the licence of his youth,
he abandoned himself at Venice. From this, as from his earlier excesses,
the timely warning of disgust soon rescued him; and the connection with
Madame Guiccioli which followed, and which, however much to be
reprehended, had in it all of marriage that his real marriage wanted,
seemed to place, at length, within reach of his affectionate spirit that
union and sympathy for which, through life, it had thirsted. But the
treasure came too late;--the pure poetry of the feeling had vanished;
and those tears he shed so passionately in the garden at Bologna flowed
less, perhaps, from the love which he felt at that moment, than from the
saddening consciousness how differently he could have felt formerly. It
was, indeed, wholly beyond the power, even of an imagination like his,
to go on investing with its own ideal glories a sentiment which,--more
from daring and vanity than from any other impulse,--he had taken such
pains to tarnish and debase in his own eyes. Accordingly, instead of
being able, as once, to elevate and embellish all that interested him,
to make an idol of every passing creature of his fancy, and mistake the
form of love, which he so often conjured up, for its substance, he now
degenera