The company passed back the way they came, two of the common soldiers alone remaining, except the boy Adrian, who lingered behind a few moments, striving to console Rienzi, who, as one bereft of sense, remained motionless, gazing on the proud array as it swept along, and muttering to himself, “Justice, justice!  I will have it yet.”

The loud voice of the elder Colonna summoned Adrian, reluctantly and weeping, away.  “Let me be your brother,” said the gallant boy, affectionately pressing the scholar’s hand to his heart; “I want a brother like you.”

Rienzi made no reply; he did not heed or hear him—­dark and stern thoughts, thoughts in which were the germ of a mighty revolution, were at his heart.  He woke from them with a start, as the soldiers were now arranging their bucklers so as to make a kind of bier for the corpse, and then burst into tears as he fiercely motioned them away, and clasped the clay to his breast till he was literally soaked with the oozing blood.

The poor child’s garland had not dropped from his arm even when he fell, and, entangled by his dress, it still clung around him.  It was a sight that recalled to Cola all the gentleness, the kind heart, and winning graces of his only brother—­his only friend!  It was a sight that seemed to make yet more inhuman the untimely and unmerited fate of that innocent boy.  “My brother! my brother!” groaned the survivor; “how shall I meet our mother?—­how shall I meet even night and solitude again?—­so young, so harmless!  See ye, sirs, he was but too gentle.  And they will not give us justice, because his murderer was a noble and a Colonna.  And this gold, too—­gold for a brother’s blood!  Will they not”—­and the young man’s eyes glared like fire—­“will they not give us justice?  Time shall show!” so saying, he bent his head over the corpse; his lips muttered, as with some prayer or invocation; and then rising, his face was as pale as the dead beside him,—­but it was no longer pale with grief!

From that bloody clay, and that inward prayer, Cola di Rienzi rose a new being.  With his young brother died his own youth.  But for that event, the future liberator of Rome might have been but a dreamer, a scholar, a poet; the peaceful rival of Petrarch; a man of thoughts, not deeds.  But from that time, all his faculties, energies, fancies, genius, became concentrated into a single point; and patriotism, before a vision, leapt into the life and vigour of a passion, lastingly kindled, stubbornly hardened, and awfully consecrated,—­by revenge!

Chapter 1.II.  An Historical Survey—­not to Be Passed Over, Except by Those Who Dislike to Understand What They Read.