forget!

What though the clouds that o'er me lour
Have tinged ye with a mournful hue,
Deep in my heart I felt your power,
And bless ye, while I sigh--Adieu!

_Velletri, March 13._--It is now a week since I opened my little book.
Ever since the 9th I have been seriously ill: and yesterday morning I
left Naples still low and much indisposed, but glad of a change which
should substitute any external excitement, however painful, to that
unutterable dying away of the heart and paralysis of the mind which I
have suffered for some days past. When we turned into the Strada
Chiaja, and I gave a last glance at the magnificent bay and the shores
all resplendent with golden light, I could almost have exclaimed like
Eve, "must I then leave thee, Paradise!" and dropped a few natural
tears--tears of weakness, rather than of grief: for what do I leave
behind me worthy one emotion of regret? Even at Naples, even in this
all-lovely land, "fit haunt for gods," has it not been with me as it
has been elsewhere? as long as the excitement of change and novelty
lasts, my heart can turn from itself "to luxuriate with indifferent
things:" but it cannot last long; and when it is over, I suffer, I am
ill: the past returns with tenfold gloom; interposing like a dark
shade between me and every object: an evil power seems to reside in
every thing I see, to torment me with painful associations, to perplex
my faculties, to irritate and mock me with the perception of what is
lost to me: the very sunshine sickens me, and I am forced to confess
myself weak and miserable as ever. O time! how slowly you move! how
little you can do for me! and how bitter is that sorrow which has no
relief to hope but from time alone!

Last night we reached Mola di Gaeta, which looked even more beautiful
than before, in the eyes of all but _one_, whose senses were blinded
and dulled by dejection, lassitude, and sickness. When I felt myself
passively led along the shore, placed where the eye might range at
freedom over the living and rejoicing landscape--when I heard myself
repeating mechanically the exclamations of others, and felt no ray of
beauty, no sense of pleasure penetrate to my heart--shall I own, even
to myself, the mixture of anguish and terror with which I shrunk back,
conscious of the waste within me? The conviction that now it was all
over, that the last and only pleasures hitherto left to me had
perished, that my mind was contracted by