“Go to Italy! of this he thought by day, and dreamed by night; and to accomplish this was the crowning ambition of the boy’s life.
“He was willing to toil, to endure privation and fatigue, could he but visit that land where heavenly beauty is depicted on the canvas, where the marble wants but the clasp of him of old to warm it into life, and where the soft blue of the sky, and the delicious atmosphere brooding over the glories of centuries gone by, make it the Mecca of the artist’s heart.
“But amid all these dreams of the future, all these ambitious aspirings of the gifted youth, death cast his dark shadow over that peaceful dwelling, and the mother, the guardian angel of the fatherless boy, was borne away to be a dweller in the silent land.
“With what passionate earnestness did he call upon her name. How did he long to lie down by her side. His mother! his mother! she had taught his lisping accents their first prayer; she had watched over his little bed, and moistened his parched lips when he was ill with fever—so ill, that his mother’s watchful tenderness was all, under God, that saved him from the grave. As he grew older, she had spoken to him, not like the boy he was in years, but like the man to whom she would impart her thoughts, and with whose mind of almost premature development, she might hold converse, and feel herself understood. And now, in his fifteenth year, when he was thinking of all that he could, nay, of all that he would do for her, his mother had died! Who can wonder that the boy pined, and sat upon her grave, and longed for her companionship, and wept as if his heart must break.
——
CHAPTER II.
Then all the charm
Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair
Vanished, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each misshapes the other.