the vast and deserted ruins by which the house of Rienzi was surrounded.  They surrendered themselves, without much question of the future, to the excitement—­the elysium—­of the hour:  they lived but from day to day; their future was the next time they should meet; beyond that epoch, the very mists of their youthful love closed in obscurity and shadow which they sought not to penetrate:  and as yet they had not arrived at that period of affection when there was danger of their fall,—­their love had not passed the golden portal where Heaven ceases and Earth begins.  Everything for them was the poetry, the vagueness, the refinement,—­not the power, the concentration, the mortality,—­of desire!  The look—­the whisper—­the brief pressure of the hand, at most, the first kisses of love, rare and few,—­these marked the human limits of that sentiment which filled them with a new life, which elevated them as with a new soul.

The roving tendencies of Adrian were at once fixed and centered; the dreams of his tender mistress had awakened to a life dreaming still, but “rounded with a truth.”  All that earnestness, and energy, and fervour of emotion, which, in her brother, broke forth in the schemes of patriotism and the aspirations of power, were, in Irene, softened down into one object of existence, one concentration of soul,—­and that was love.  Yet, in this range of thought and action, so apparently limited, there was, in reality, no less boundless a sphere than in the wide space of her brother’s many-pathed ambition.  Not the less had she the power and scope for all the loftiest capacities granted to our clay.  Equal was her enthusiasm for her idol; equal, had she been equally tried, would have been her generosity, her devotion:—­greater, be sure, her courage; more inalienable her worship; more unsullied by selfish purposes and sordid views.  Time, change, misfortune, ingratitude, would have left her the same!  What state could fall, what liberty decay, if the zeal of man’s noisy patriotism were as pure as the silent loyalty of a woman’s love?

In them everything was young!—­the heart unchilled, unblighted,—­that fulness and luxuriance of life’s life which has in it something of divine.  At that age, when it seems as if we could never die, how deathless, how flushed and mighty as with the youngness of a god, is all that our hearts create!  Our own youth is like that of the earth itself, when it peopled the woods and waters with divinities; when life ran riot, and yet only gave birth to beauty;—­all its shapes, of poetry,—­all its airs, the melodies of Arcady and Olympus!  The Golden Age never leaves the world:  it exists still, and shall exist, till love, health, poetry, are no more; but only for the young!