"Do you know that land where the Orange-trees bloom, which the rays of heaven make fertile with love? Have you heard those melodious sounds which celebrate the mildness of the nights? Have you breathed those perfumes which are the luxury of that air, already so pure and so mild? Answer, strangers; is nature in your countries so beautiful and so beneficent?
"In other regions, when social calamities afflict a country, the people must believe themselves abandoned by the Deity; but here we ever feel the protection of heaven; we see that he interests himself for man, that he has deigned to treat him as a noble being.
"It is not only with vine branches, and with ears of corn, that Nature is here adorned; she prodigally strews beneath the feet of man, as on the birthday of a sovereign, an abundance of useless plants and flowers, which, destined to please, will not stoop to serve.
"The most delicate pleasures nourished by nature are enjoyed by a nation worthy of them—a nation who are satisfied with the most simple dishes; who do not become intoxicated at the fountains of wine which plenty prepares for them;—a nation who love their sun, their arts, their monuments, their country, at once antique and in the spring of youth;—a nation that stand equally aloof from the refined pleasures of luxury, as from the gross and sordid pleasures of a mercenary people."
"Here sensations are confounded with ideas; life is drawn in all its fulness from the same spring, and the soul, like the air, inhabits the confines of earth, and of heaven. Genius is untrammelled because here reverie is sweet: its holy calm soothes the soul when perturbed, lavishes upon it a thousand illusions when it regrets a lost purpose, and when oppressed by man nature is ready to welcome it."
"Thus is our country ever beneficent, and her succouring hand heals every wound. Here, even the pangs of the heart receive consolation, in admiring a God of kindness, and penetrating the secrets of his love; the passing troubles of our ephemeral life are lost in the fertile and majestic bosom of the immortal universe."
Corinne was interrupted, for some moments, by a torrent of applause. Oswald alone took no share in the noisy transports that surrounded him. He had leaned his head upon his hand, when Corinne said: "Here, even the pangs of the heart receive consolation;" and had not raised it since. Corinne remarked it, and soon, from his features, the colour of his hair, his costume, his lofty figure, from his whole manner in short, she knew him for an Englishman: she was struck with his mourning habit, and the melancholy pictured in his countenance. His look, at that moment fixed upon her, seemed full of gentle reproaches; she guessed the thoughts that occupied his mind, and felt the necessity of satisfying him, by speaking of happiness with less confidence, by consecrating some verses to death in the midst of a festival. She then resumed her lyre, with this design, and having produced silence in the assembly, by the moving and prolonged sounds which she drew from her instrument, began thus:
"There are griefs however which our consoling sky cannot efface, but in what retreat can sorrow make a more sweet and more noble impression upon the soul than here?
"In other countries hardly do the living find space sufficient for their rapid motions and their ardent desires; here, ruins, deserts and uninhabited palaces, afford an asylum for the shades of the departed. Is not Rome now the land of tombs?
"The Coliseum, the obelisks, all the wonders which from Egypt and from Greece, from the extremity of ages, from Romulus to Leo X. are assembled here, as if grandeur attracted grandeur, and as if the same spot was to enclose all that man could secure from the ravages of time; all these wonders are consecrated to the monuments of the dead. Our indolent life is scarcely perceived, the silence of the living is homage paid to the dead; they endure and we pass away.