"Beneath ----'s eyes The reclaim'd Paradise Should be free as the former from evil; But, if the new Eve For an apple should grieve, What mortal would not play the devil?"[1]
[Footnote 1: The Genoese wits had already applied this threadbare jest to himself. Taking it into their heads that this villa (which was also, I believe, a Casa Saluzzo) had been the one fixed on for his own residence, they said "Il Diavolo é ancora entrato in Paradise."]
Another copy of verses addressed by him to the same lady, whose beauty and talent might well have claimed a warmer tribute from such a pen, is yet too interesting, as descriptive of the premature feeling of age now stealing upon him, to be omitted in these pages.
"You have ask'd for a verse:--the request In a rhymer 'twere strange to deny, But my Hippocrene was but my breast, And my feelings (its fountain) are dry.
"Were I now as I was, I had sung What Lawrence has painted so well; But the strain would expire on my tongue, And the theme is too soft for my shell.
"I am ashes where once I was fire, And the bard in my bosom is dead; What I loved I _now_ merely admire, And my heart is as grey as my head.
"My life is not dated by years-- There are _moments_ which act as a plough, And there is not a furrow appears But is deep in my soul as my brow.
"Let the young and the brilliant aspire To sing what I gaze on in vain; For sorrow has torn from my lyre The string which was worthy the strain.
The following letters written during the stay of this party at Genoa will be found,--some of them at least,--not a little curious.
"How is your gout? or rather, how are you? I return the Count ----'s Journal, which is a very extraordinary production[1], and of a most melancholy truth in all that regards high life in England. I know, or knew personally, most of the personages and societies which he describes; and after reading his remarks, have the sensation fresh upon me as if I had seen them yesterday. I would however plead in behalf of some few exceptions, which I will mention by and by. The most singular thing is, _how_ he should have penetrated _not_ the _fact_, but the _mystery_ of the English ennui, at two-and-twenty. I was about the same age when I made the same discovery, in almost precisely the same circles,--(for there is scarcely a person mentioned whom I did not see nightly or daily, and was acquainted more or less intimately with most of them,)--but I never could have described it so well. _Il faut étre Français_, to effect this.