gleams; and even in his frivolous days at the Academy Alfieri carried a
Virgil in his pocket and wept and trembled over Ariosto's verse.

It was the instant response of Odo's imagination that drew the two
together. Odo, as one of the foreign pupils, was quartered in the same
wing of the Academy with the students of Alfieri's class, and enjoyed an
almost equal freedom. Thus, despite the difference of age, the lads
found themselves allied by taste and circumstances. Among the youth of
their class they were perhaps the only two who already felt, however
obscurely, the stirring of unborn ideals, the pressure of that tide of
renovation that was to sweep them, on widely-sundered currents, to the
same uncharted deep. Alfieri, at any rate, represented to the younger
lad the seer who held in his hands the keys of knowledge and beauty. Odo
could never forget the youth who first leant him Annibale Caro's Aeneid
and Metastasio's opera libretti, Voltaire's Zaire and the comedies of
Goldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion's sympathy with
his own half-dormant tastes the first incentive to a nobler activity.
Certain it is that, in the interchange of their daily comradeship, the
elder gave his friend much that he was himself unconscious of
possessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo's more vivid
sensibility an outline of the formless ideals coiled in the depths of
his own sluggish nature.

The difference in age, and the possession of an independent fortune,
which the laws of Savoy had left Alfieri free to enjoy since his
fifteenth year, gave him an obvious superiority over Odo; but if
Alfieri's amusements separated him from his young friend, his tastes
were always drawing them together; and Odo was happily of those who are
more engaged in profiting by what comes their way than in pining for
what escapes them. Much as he admired Alfieri, it was somehow impossible
for the latter to condescend to him; and the equality of intercourse
between the two was perhaps its chief attraction to a youth surfeited
with adulation.

Of the opportunities his new friendship brought him, none became in
after years a pleasanter memory to Odo than his visits with Vittorio to
the latter's uncle, the illustrious architect Count Benedetto Alfieri.
This accomplished and amiable man, who had for many years devoted his
talents to the King's service, was lodged in a palace adjoining the
Academy; and thither, one holiday afternoon, Vittorio co