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