who have heard your conversation.  But I have been inoculated with a little of your prolixity.  The fact is, my dear R——­ts, that somebody has tried to make a fool of you, and what he did not succeed in doing, you have done for him and for yourself.”

* * * *

Towards the latter end of August, Count Guiccioli, accompanied by his lady, went for a short time to visit some of his Romagnese estates, while Lord Byron remained at Bologna alone.  And here, with a heart softened and excited by the new feeling that had taken possession of him, he appears to have given himself up, during this interval of solitude, to a train of melancholy and impassioned thought, such as, for a time, brought back all the romance of his youthful days.  That spring of natural tenderness within his soul, which neither the world’s efforts nor his own had been able to chill or choke up, was now, with something of its first freshness, set flowing once more.  He again knew what it was to love and be loved,—­too late, it is true, for happiness, and too wrongly for peace, but with devotion enough, on the part of the woman, to satisfy even his thirst for affection, and with a sad earnestness, on his own, a foreboding fidelity, which made him cling but the more passionately to this attachment from feeling that it would be his last.

A circumstance which he himself used to mention as having occurred at this period will show how over-powering, at times, was the rush of melancholy over his heart.  It was his fancy, during Madame Guiccioli’s absence from Bologna, to go daily to her house at his usual hour of visiting her, and there, causing her apartments to be opened, to sit turning over her books, and writing in them.[44] He would then descend into her garden, where he passed hours in musing; and it was on an occasion of this kind, as he stood looking, in a state of unconscious reverie, into one of those fountains so common in the gardens of Italy, that there came suddenly into his mind such desolate fancies, such bodings of the misery he might bring on her he loved, by that doom which (as he has himself written) “makes it fatal to be loved[45],” that, overwhelmed with his own thoughts, he burst into an agony of tears.

During the same few days it was that he wrote in the last page of Madame Guiccioli’s copy of “Corinne” the following remarkable note:—­

“My dearest Teresa,—­I have read this book in your garden;—­my love, you were absent, or else I could not have read it.  It is a favourite book of yours, and the writer was a friend of mine.  You will not understand these English words, and others will not understand them—­which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian.  But you will recognise the hand-writing of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which was yours, he could only think of love.  In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours—­Amor