What though the clouds that o’er me lour
      Have tinged ye with a mournful hue,
    Deep in my heart I felt your power,
      And bless ye, while I sigh—­Adieu!

Velletri, March 13.—­It is now a week since I opened my little book.  Ever since the 9th I have been seriously ill:  and yesterday morning I left Naples still low and much indisposed, but glad of a change which should substitute any external excitement, however painful, to that unutterable dying away of the heart and paralysis of the mind which I have suffered for some days past.  When we turned into the Strada Chiaja, and I gave a last glance at the magnificent bay and the shores all resplendent with golden light, I could almost have exclaimed like Eve, “must I then leave thee, Paradise!” and dropped a few natural tears—­tears of weakness, rather than of grief:  for what do I leave behind me worthy one emotion of regret?  Even at Naples, even in this all-lovely land, “fit haunt for gods,” has it not been with me as it has been elsewhere? as long as the excitement of change and novelty lasts, my heart can turn from itself “to luxuriate with indifferent things:”  but it cannot last long; and when it is over, I suffer, I am ill:  the past returns with tenfold gloom; interposing like a dark shade between me and every object:  an evil power seems to reside in every thing I see, to torment me with painful associations, to perplex my faculties, to irritate and mock me with the perception of what is lost to me:  the very sunshine sickens me, and I am forced to confess myself weak and miserable as ever.  O time! how slowly you move! how little you can do for me! and how bitter is that sorrow which has no relief to hope but from time alone!

Last night we reached Mola di Gaeta, which looked even more beautiful than before, in the eyes of all but one, whose senses were blinded and dulled by dejection, lassitude, and sickness.  When I felt myself passively led along the shore, placed where the eye might range at freedom over the living and rejoicing landscape—­when I heard myself repeating mechanically the exclamations of others, and felt no ray of beauty, no sense of pleasure penetrate to my heart—­shall I own, even to myself, the mixture of anguish and terror with which I shrunk back, conscious of the waste within me?  The conviction that now it was all over, that the last and only pleasures hitherto left to me had perished, that my mind was contracted by the selfishness of despondency, and my quick spirit of enjoyment utterly subdued into apathy, gave me for a moment a pang sharper than if a keen knife had cut me to the quick; and then I relapsed into a kind of torpid languor of mind and frame, which I thought was resignation, and as such indulged it.