friend at Avignon, and which was probably sincere.  Men rarely act according to the bias of their own tastes.) made dear and grateful to me because associated with thee!  Yes, it is these thoughts that have inspired me, when sterner ones have shrunk back appalled from the spectres that surround their goal.  And oh! my Nina, sacred, strong, enduring must be, indeed, the love which lives in the same pure and elevated air as that which sustains my hopes of liberty and fame!”

This was the language which, more even than the vows of fidelity and the dear adulation which springs from the heart’s exuberance, had bound the proud and vain soul of Nina to the chains that it so willingly wore.  Perhaps, indeed, in the absence of Rienzi, her weaker nature pictured to herself the triumph of humbling the highborn signoras, and eclipsing the barbarous magnificence of the chiefs of Rome; but in his presence, and listening to his more elevated and generous ambition, as yet all unsullied by one private feeling save the hope of her, her higher sympathies were enlisted with his schemes, her mind aspired to raise itself to the height of his, and she thought less of her own rise than of his glory.  It was sweet to her pride to be the sole confidante of his most secret thoughts, as of his most hardy undertakings; to see bared before her that intricate and plotting spirit; to be admitted even to the knowledge of its doubts and weakness, as of its heroism and power.

Nothing could be more contrasted than the loves of Rienzi and Nina, and those of Adrian and Irene:  in the latter, all were the dreams, the phantasies, the extravagance, of youth; they never talked of the future; they mingled no other aspirations with those of love.  Ambition, glory, the world’s high objects, were nothing to them when together; their love had swallowed up the world, and left nothing visible beneath the sun, save itself.  But the passion of Nina and her lover was that of more complicated natures and more mature years:  it was made up of a thousand feelings, each naturally severed from each, but compelled into one focus by the mighty concentration of love; their talk was of the world; it was from the world that they drew the aliment which sustained it; it was of the future they spoke and thought; of its dreams and imagined glories they made themselves a home and altar; their love had in it more of the Intellectual than that of Adrian and Irene; it was more fitted for this hard earth; it had in it, also, more of the leaven of the later and iron days, and less of poetry and the first golden age.

“And must thou leave me now?” said Nina, her cheek no more averted from his lips, nor her form from his parting embrace.  “The moon is high yet; it is but a little hour thou hast given me.”

“An hour!  Alas!” said Rienzi, “it is near upon midnight—­our friends await me.”

“Go, then, my soul’s best half!  Go; Nina shall not detain thee one moment from those higher objects which make thee so dear to Nina.  When—­when shall we meet again!”