d deserted ruins by which the house
of Rienzi was surrounded. They surrendered themselves, without much
question of the future, to the excitement--the elysium--of the hour:
they lived but from day to day; their future was the next time they
should meet; beyond that epoch, the very mists of their youthful love
closed in obscurity and shadow which they sought not to penetrate: and
as yet they had not arrived at that period of affection when there was
danger of their fall,--their love had not passed the golden portal where
Heaven ceases and Earth begins. Everything for them was the poetry,
the vagueness, the refinement,--not the power, the concentration, the
mortality,--of desire! The look--the whisper--the brief pressure of the
hand, at most, the first kisses of love, rare and few,--these marked the
human limits of that sentiment which filled them with a new life, which
elevated them as with a new soul.

The roving tendencies of Adrian were at once fixed and centered; the
dreams of his tender mistress had awakened to a life dreaming still, but
"rounded with a truth." All that earnestness, and energy, and fervour of
emotion, which, in her brother, broke forth in the schemes of patriotism
and the aspirations of power, were, in Irene, softened down into one
object of existence, one concentration of soul,--and that was love. Yet,
in this range of thought and action, so apparently limited, there was,
in reality, no less boundless a sphere than in the wide space of her
brother's many-pathed ambition. Not the less had she the power and
scope for all the loftiest capacities granted to our clay. Equal was her
enthusiasm for her idol; equal, had she been equally tried, would have
been her generosity, her devotion:--greater, be sure, her courage; more
inalienable her worship; more unsullied by selfish purposes and sordid
views. Time, change, misfortune, ingratitude, would have left her the
same! What state could fall, what liberty decay, if the zeal of man's
noisy patriotism were as pure as the silent loyalty of a woman's love?

In them everything was young!--the heart unchilled, unblighted,--that
fulness and luxuriance of life's life which has in it something of
divine. At that age, when it seems as if we could never die, how
deathless, how flushed and mighty as with the youngness of a god, is all
that our hearts create! Our own youth is like that of the earth itself,
when it peopled the woods and waters with divinities; when life