Gori] most, knew and
appreciated him and is not to be consoled for such a loss. I told him
already last July, so many, many times, that he was not well, that he
was growing visibly thinner day by day. Oh! I ought never to have left
him in this state."

A letter, this one on Gori's death, which may induce us to forgive the
letters of Alfieri of which we have seen a reflection in those of Mme.
d'Albany: the passionate grief for the lost friend making us feel that
there is something noble in the possibility of even the morbid grief at
the lost mistress. More touching still, bringing home what each of us,
alas! must have felt in those long, dull griefs for one who is not
our kith and kin, whom the thoughts of our nearest and dearest, of our
work, of all those things which the world recognises as ours in a sense
in which the poor beloved dead was not, does not permit us to mourn in
such a way as to satisfy our heart, and the longing for whom, half
suppressed, comes but the more pertinaciously to haunt us, to make the
present and future, all where he or she is not, a blank; more touching
than any letter in which Alfieri gives free vent to his grief for poor
Gori, is that note which he wrote upon the manuscript of his poem on
Duke Alexander's murder, after the annotation saying that this work was
resumed at Siena, the 17th July 1784--"O God! and the friend of my heart
was still living then"; the words which a man speaks, or writes only for
himself, feeling that no one, not those even who are the very flesh and
blood of his heart, can, since they are not himself, feel that terrible
pang at suddenly seeing the past so close within his reach, so
hopelessly beyond his grasp.

The death of Gori seemed the only circumstance which diminished the
happiness of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany; nay, it is not heartless,
surely, to say that, cruel as was that wound, there was doubtless a
quite special sad sweetness in each trying to heal it in the other, in
the redoubled love due to this fellow-feeling in affliction, the new
energy of affection which comes to the survivors whenever Death calls
out the warning, "Love each other while I still let you." But they had
still to pay, and pay in many instalments, the price of happiness
snatched before its legitimate time.

Supposed to be living apart from Alfieri, the Countess could not,
therefore, take him back with her to Italy, where, according to the
stipulations of the act of separation, she wa