Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/796

788 Amours de Voyage. [May,

VI. CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

YES, it relieves me to write, though I do not send; and the chance that Takes may destroy my fragments. But as men pray, without asking Whether One really exist to hear or do anything for them,-- Simply impelled by the need of the moment to turn to a Being In a conception of whom there is freedom from all limitation,- So in your image I turn to an ens rationis of friendship. Even to write in your name I know not to whom nor in what wise.

VII. CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

THERE was a time, methought it was but lately departed, When, if a thing was denied me, I felt I was bound to attempt it; Choice alone should take, and choice alone should surrender. There was a time, indeed, when I had not retired thus early, Languidly thus, from pursuit of a purpose I once had adopted. But it is over, all that! I have slunk from the perilous field in Whose wild struggle of forces the prizes of life are contested. It is over, all that! I am a coward, and know it. Courage in me could be only factitious, unnatural, useless.

VIII. CLAUDE TO EUSTACE.

ROME is fallen, I hear, the gallant Medici taken, Noble Manara slain, and Garibaldi has lost il Moro ;- Rome is fallen; and fallen, or falling, heroical Venice. I, meanwhile, for the loss of a single small chit of a girl, sit Moping and mourning here,-for her, and myself much smaller. Whither depart the souls of the brave that die in the battle, Die in the lost, lost fight, for the cause that perishes with them? Are they upborne from the field on the slumberous pinions of angels Unto a far-off home, where the weary rest from their labor, And the deep wounds are healed, and the bitter and burning moisture Wiped from the generous eyes? or do they linger, unhappy, Pining, and haunting the grave of their by-gone hope and endeavor? All declamation, alas! though I talk, I care not for Rome, nor Italy; feebly and faintly, and but with the lips, can lament the Wreck of the Lombard youth and the victory of the oppressor. Whither depart the brave?-God knows; I certainly do not.

IX. MARY TREVELLYN TO MISS ROPER.

He has not come as yet; and now I must not expect it. You have written, you say, to friends at Florence, to see him, If he perhaps should return;-but that is surely unlikely. Has he not written to you?-he did not know your direction. Oh, how strange never once to have told him where you were going! Yet if he only wrote to Florence, that would have reached you. If what you say he said was true, why has he not done so? Is he gone back to Rome, do you think, to his Vatican marbles?— 0 my dear Miss Roper, forgive me! do not be angry!- You have written to Florence;-your friends would certainly find him.