Rienzi by Edward Bulwer-lytton — Read

Since that fearful hour in which Adrian Colonna had 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 every 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.