There is a painful confusion in my brain, which refuses to delineate

distinctly succeeding events. Sometimes the irradiation of my friend's

gentle smile comes before me; and methinks its light spans and fills

eternity--then, again, I feel the gasping throes--

We quitted Como, and in compliance with Adrian's earnest desire, we took

Venice in our way to Rome. There was something to the English peculiarly

attractive in the idea of this wave-encircled, island-enthroned city.

Adrian had never seen it. We went down the Po and the Brenta in a boat;

and, the days proving intolerably hot, we rested in the bordering palaces

during the day, travelling through the night, when darkness made the

bordering banks indistinct, and our solitude less remarkable; when the

wandering moon lit the waves that divided before our prow, and the

night-wind filled our sails, and the murmuring stream, waving trees, and

swelling canvass, accorded in harmonious strain. Clara, long overcome by

excessive grief, had to a great degree cast aside her timid, cold reserve,

and received our attentions with grateful tenderness. While Adrian with

poetic fervour discoursed of the glorious nations of the dead, of the

beauteous earth and the fate of man, she crept near him, drinking in his

speech with silent pleasure. We banished from our talk, and as much as

possible from our thoughts, the knowledge of our desolation. And it would

be incredible to an inhabitant of cities, to one among a busy throng, to

what extent we succeeded. It was as a man confined in a dungeon, whose

small and grated rift at first renders the doubtful light more sensibly

obscure, till, the visual orb having drunk in the beam, and adapted itself

573

The Last Man