song on the banks of the Tiber--the reeds gave music no more. From the
sacred Mount in which Saturn held his home, the Dryad and the Nymph, and
Italy's native Sylvan, were gone for ever. Rienzi's original nature--its
enthusiasm--its veneration for the past--its love of the beautiful and
the great--that very attachment to the graces and pomp which give so
florid a character to the harsh realities of life, and which power
afterwards too luxuriantly developed; the exuberance of thoughts
and fancies, which poured itself from his lips in so brilliant and
inexhaustible a flood--all bespoke those intellectual and imaginative
biasses, which, in calmer times, might have raised him in literature to
a more indisputable eminence than that to which action can ever lead;
and something of such consciousness crossed his spirit at that moment.

"Happier had it been for me," thought he, "had I never looked out from
my own heart upon the world. I had all within me that makes contentment
of the present, because I had that which can make me forget the present.
I had the power to re-people--to create: the legends and dreams of
old--the divine faculty of verse, in which the beautiful superfluities
of the heart can pour themselves--these were mine! Petrarch chose
wisely for himself! To address the world, but from without the world;
to persuade--to excite--to command,--for these are the aim and glory
of ambition;--but to shun its tumult, and its toil! His the quiet cell
which he fills with the shapes of beauty--the solitude, from which he
can banish the evil times whereon we are fallen, but in which he can
dream back the great hearts and the glorious epochs of the past.
For me--to what cares I am wedded! to what labours I am bound! what
instruments I must use! what disguises I must assume! to tricks and
artifice I must bow my pride! base are my enemies--uncertain my friends!
and verily, in this struggle with blinded and mean men, the soul itself
becomes warped and dwarfish. Patient and darkling, the Means creep