the hand of a blind power only, most willingly would I have placed my head on the sod, and closed my eyes on its loveliness for ever.  But fate had administered life to me, when the plague had already seized on its prey—­she had dragged me by the hair from out the strangling waves—­By such miracles she had bought me for her own; I admitted her authority, and bowed to her decrees.  If, after mature consideration, such was my resolve, it was doubly necessary that I should not lose the end of life, the improvement of my faculties, and poison its flow by repinings without end.  Yet how cease to repine, since there was no hand near to extract the barbed spear that had entered my heart of hearts?  I stretched out my hand, and it touched none whose sensations were responsive to mine.  I was girded, walled in, vaulted over, by seven-fold barriers of loneliness.  Occupation alone, if I could deliver myself up to it, would be capable of affording an opiate to my sleepless sense of woe.  Having determined to make Rome my abode, at least for some months, I made arrangements for my accommodation—­I selected my home.  The Colonna Palace was well adapted for my purpose.  Its grandeur—­ its treasure of paintings, its magnificent halls were objects soothing and even exhilarating.

I found the granaries of Rome well stored with grain, and particularly with Indian corn; this product requiring less art in its preparation for food, I selected as my principal support.  I now found the hardships and lawlessness of my youth turn to account.  A man cannot throw off the habits of sixteen years.  Since that age, it is true, I had lived luxuriously, or at least surrounded by all the conveniences civilization afforded.  But before that time, I had been “as uncouth a savage, as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome”—­and now, in Rome itself, robber and shepherd propensities, similar to those of its founder, were of advantage to its sole inhabitant.  I spent the morning riding and shooting in the Campagna—­I passed long hours in the various galleries—­I gazed at each statue, and lost myself in a reverie before many a fair Madonna or beauteous nymph.  I haunted the Vatican, and stood surrounded by marble forms of divine beauty.  Each stone deity was possessed by sacred gladness, and the eternal fruition of love.  They looked on me with unsympathizing complacency, and often in wild accents I reproached them for their supreme indifference—­for they were human shapes, the human form divine was manifest in each fairest limb and lineament.  The perfect moulding brought with it the idea of colour and motion; often, half in bitter mockery, half in self-delusion, I clasped their icy proportions, and, coming between Cupid and his Psyche’s lips, pressed the unconceiving marble.