absent, every suffering seemed aggravated, and we find him—like one spoiled and pampered, with attention and love,-yielding to an irritable despondency, which even the presence of his children could not alleviate.

Che più ti resta a far per mio dispetto,

Sorte crudel? mia donna è lungi, e io privo,
De' suoi conforti in miserando aspetto
Egro qui giaccio, al' sofferir sol vivo! *

But the most remarkable of all Monti's conjugal effusions, is a canzone written a short time before his death, and when he was more than seventy years of age. Nothing can be more affecting than the subdued tone of melancholy tenderness, with which the gray-haired poet apostrophizes her who had been the love, the pride, the joy of his life for forty years. In power and in poetry, this canzone will bear a comparison with many of the more rapturous effusions of his youth. The occasion on which it was composed is thus related in a note prefixed to it by the editor. When Monti was recovering from a long and dangerous illness, through which he had been tenderly nursed by his wife and daughter, he accompanied them “in villeggiatura," to a villa near Brianza, the residence of a friend, where they were accustomed to celebrate the birthday of Madame Monti; and it was

* Opere Varie, v. iii. This sonnet to his wife was written when Monti was ill at the house of his son-in-law, Count Perticari. † Edit. 1826, vol. vi.

here that her husband, now declining in years, weak from recent illness and accumulated infirmities, addressed to her the poem which may be found in the recent edition of his works; it begins thus tenderly and sweetly—

Donna! dell' alma mia parte più cara!
Perchè muta in pensosa atto mi guati?
E di segrete stille,

Rugiadose si fan le tue pupille? &c.

"Why, O thou dearer half of my soul, dost thou watch over me thus mute and pensive? Why are thine eyes heavy with suppressed tears?" &c.

And when he reminds her touchingly, that his long and troubled life is drawing to its natural close, and that she cannot hope to retain him much longer, even by all her love and care, he adds with a noble spirit,-" Remember, that Monti cannot wholly die! think, O think! I leave thee dowered with no obscure, no vulgar name! for the day shall come, when, among the matrons of Italy, it shall be thy boast to say, 'I was the love of Monti.""

The tender translation to his daughter

E tu del pari sventurata e cara mia figlia!

as alike unhappy and beloved, alludes to her recent widowhood. Costanza Monti, who inherited no small portion of her father's genius, and all her mother's grace and beauty, married the Count

* In the original, Monti designates himself by an allusion to his chef-d'œuvre-"Del Cantor di Basville."

Giulio Perticari of Pesaro, a man of uncommon taste and talents, and an admired poet. He died in the same year with Canova, to whom he had been a favorite friend and companion: while his lovely wife furnished the sculptor with a model for his ideal heads of vestals and poetesses. Those who saw the Countess Perticari at Rome, such as she appeared seven or eight years ago, will not easily forget her brilliant eyes, and yet more brilliant talents. She, too, is a poetess. In her father's works may be found a little canzone written by her about a year after the death of her husband, and with equal tenderness and simplicity, alluding to her lonely state, deprived of him who once encouraged and cultivated her talents, and deserved her love.*

Vincenzo Monti died in October, 1828;-his widow and his daughter reside, I believe, at Milan.

CHAPTER XXIII.

POETS AND BEAUTIES,

FROM CHARLES II. TO QUEEN ANNE.

THUS, then, it appears, that love, even the most ethereal and poetical, does not always take flight

* Monti, Opere, vol. iii. p. 75.

"at sight of human ties;" and Pope wronged the real delicacy of Heloise when he put this borrowed sentiment into her epistle, making that conduct the result of perverted principle, which, in her, was a sacrifice to extreme love and pride in its object. It is not the mere idea of bondage which frightens away the light-winged god;

The gentle bird feels no captivity

Within his cage, but sings and feeds his fill.*

It is when those bonds, which were first decreed in heaven

To keep two hearts together, which began
Their spring-time with one love,

are abused to vilest purposes:-to link together indissolubly, unworthiness with desert, truth with falsehood, brutality with gentleness; then, indeed, love is scared; his cage becomes a dungeon;—and either he breaks away, with plumage all impaired, -or folds up his many-colored wings, and droops and dies.

But then it will be said, perhaps, that the splendor and the charm which poetry has thrown over some of these pictures of conjugal affection and wedded truth, are exterior and adventitious, or, at best, short-lived:-the bands were at first graceful and flowery ;-but sorrow dewed them with tears, or selfish passions sullied them, or death tore them

* Spenser.

asunder, or trampled them down. It may be so; but still, I will aver that what has been, is-that there is a power in the human heart which survives sorrow, passion, age, death itself.

Love I esteem more strong than age,

And truth more permanent than time.

For happiness, c'est different! and for that bright and pure and intoxicating happiness which we weave into our youthful visions, which is of such stuff as dreams are made of,-to complain that this does not last and wait upon us through life, is to complain that earth is earth, not heaven. It is to repine that the violet does not outlive the spring; that the rose dies upon the breast of June; that the gray evening shuts up the eye of day, and that old age quenches the glow of youth: for is not such the condition under which we exist? All I wished to prove was, that the sacred tie which binds the sexes together, which gives to man his natural refuge in the tenderness of woman, and to woman her natural protecting stay in the right reason and stronger powers of man, so far from being a chill to the imagination, as wicked wits would tell us, has its poetical side. Let us look back for a moment on the array of bright names and beautiful verse, quoted or alluded to in the preceding chapters: what is there among the mercurial poets of Charles's days, those notorious scoffers at decency and constancy, to compare with them?-Dorset and Denham, and Sedley and Suckling, and Roch