All that it hoped
      My heart believed,
    And when most trusting,
      Was most deceived.

    A shadow hath fallen
      O’er my young years;
    And hopes when brightest,
      Were quench’d in tears.

    I make no plaint—­
      I breathe no sigh—­
    My lips can smile,
      And mine eyes are dry.

    I ask no pity,
      I hope no cure—­
    The heart, tho’ broken,
      Can live, and endure!

We left Milan two days ago, and arrived early the same day at Brescia; there is, I believe, very little to see there, and of that little, I saw nothing,—­being too ill and too low for the slightest exertion.  The only pleasurable feeling I can remember was excited by our approach to the Alps, after traversing the flat, fertile, uninteresting plains of Lombardy.  The peculiar sensation of elevation and delight, inspired by mountain scenery, can only be understood by those who have felt it:  at least I never had formed an idea of it till I found myself ascending the Jura.

But Brescia ought to be immortalized in the history of our travels:  for there, stalking down the Corso—­le nez en l’air—­we met our acquaintance L——­, from whom we had parted last on the pave of Piccadilly.  I remember that in London I used to think him not remarkable for wisdom,—­and his travels have infinitely improved him—­in folly.  He boasted to us triumphantly that he had run over sixteen thousand miles in sixteen months:  that he had bowed at the levee of the Emperor Alexander,—­been slapped on the shoulder by the Archduke Constantine,—­shaken hands with a Lapland witch,—­and been presented in full volunteer uniform at every court between Stockholm and Milan.  Yet is he not one particle wiser than if he had spent the same time in walking up and down the Strand.  He has contrived, however, to pick up on his tour, strange odds and ends of foreign follies, which stick upon the coarse-grained materials of his own John Bull character like tinfoil upon sackcloth:  so that I see little difference between what he was, and what he is, except that from a simple goose,—­he has become a compound one.  With all this, L——­ is not unbearable—­not yet at least.  He amuses others as a butt—­and me as a specimen of a new genus of fools:  for his folly is not like any thing one usually meets with.  It is not, par exemple, the folly of stupidity, for he talks much; nor of dullness, for he laughs much; nor of ignorance, for he has seen much; nor of wrong-headedness, for he can be guided right; nor of bad-heartedness, for he is good-natured; nor of thoughtlessness, for he is prudent; nor of extravagance, for he can calculate even to the value of half a lira:  but it is an essence of folly, peculiar to himself, and like Monsieur Jacques’s melancholy, “compounded of many simples, extracted from various objects, and the sundry contemplation of his travels.”  So much, for the present, of our friend L——.