CHAPTER II.

A favorable breeze bore Corinne to Leghorn in less than a month: she suffered from fever the whole time; and her debility was such that grief of mind was confused with the pain of illness; nothing seemed now distinct. She hesitated, on landing, whether she should proceed to Rome, or no; but though her best friends awaited her, she felt an insurmountable repugnance to living in the scenes where she had known Oswald. She thought of that door through which he came to her twice every day; and the prospect of being there without him was too dreary. She decided on going to Florence; and believing that her life could not long resist her sorrows, thus intended to detach herself by degrees from the world, by living alone, far from those who loved her, from the city that witnessed her success, whose inhabitants would strive to reanimate her mind, expect her to appear what she had been, while her discouraged heart found every effort odious. In crossing fertile Tuscany, approaching flower-breathed Florence, Corinne felt but an added sadness. How dreadful the despair which such skies fail to calm! One must feel either love or religion, in order to appreciate nature; and she had lost the first of earthly blessings, without having yet recovered the peace which piety alone can afford the unfortunate. Tuscany, a well-cultivated, smiling land, strikes not the imagination as do the environs of Rome and Naples. The primitive institutions of its early inhabitants have been so effaced, that there scarcely remains one vestige of them; but another species of historic beauty exists in their stead--cities that bear the impress of the Middle Ages. At Sienna, the public square wherein the people assembled, the balcony from which their magistrate harangued them, must catch the least reflecting eye, as proofs that _there_ once flourished a democratic government. It is a real pleasure to hear the Tuscans, even of the lowest classes, speak; their fanciful phrases give one an idea of that Athenian Greek, which sounded like a perpetual melody. It is a strange sensation to believe one's self amid a people all equally educated, all elegant; such is the illusion which, for a moment, the purity of their language creates.

The sight of Florence recalls its history, previous to the Medicean sway. The palaces of its best families are built like fortresses: without, are still seen the iron rings, to which the standards of each party were attached. All things seem to have been more arranged for the support of individual powers, than for their union in a common cause. The city appears formed for civil war. There are towers attached to the Hall of Justice, whence the approach of the enemy could be discerned. Such were the feuds between certain houses, that you find dwellings inconveniently constructed, because their lords would not let them extend to the ground on which that of some foe had been pulled down. Here the Pazzi conspired against the De Medici; there the Guelfs assassinated the Ghibellines. The marks of struggling rivalry are everywhere visible, though but in senseless stones. Nothing is now left for any pretenders but an inglorious state, not worth disputing. The life led in Florence has become singularly monotonous: its natives walk every afternoon on the banks of the Arno, and every evening ask one another if they _have_ been there. Corinne settled at a little distance from the town; and let Prince Castel Forte know this, in the only letter she had strength to write: such was her horror of all habitual actions, that even the fatigue of giving the slightest order redoubled her distress. She sometimes passed her day in complete inactivity, retired to her pillow, rose again, opened a book, without the power to comprehend a line of it. Oft did she remain whole hours at her window; then would walk rapidly in her garden, cull its flowers, and seek to deaden her senses in their perfume; but the consciousness of life pursued her, like an unrelenting host: she strove in vain to calm the devouring faculty of thought, which no longer presented her with varied images; but one lone idea, armed with a thousand stings, that pierced her heart.