“My dearest Teresa,—I have read this book in your garden;—my love, you were absent, or else I could not have read it. It is a favourite book of yours, and the writer was a friend of mine. You will not understand these English words, and others will not understand them,—which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian. But you will recognize the handwriting of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which was yours, he could only think of love. In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours—Amor mio—is comprised my existence here and hereafter. I feel I exist
* One of these notes, written at the end of the 5th chapter, 18th book of Corinne (“Fragmens des Pensées de Corinne”) is as follows:— “I knew Madame de Staël well,—better than she knew Italy,—but I little thought that, one day, I should think with her thoughts, in the country where she has laid the scene of her most attractive productions. She is sometimes right, and often wrong, about Italy and England; but almost always true in delineating the heart, which is of but one nation, and of no country,—or, rather, of all. “Byron. “Bologna, August 23, 1819.” |
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| 242 | NOTICES OF THE | A. D. 1819. |
“But all this is too late. I love you, and you love me,—at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events. But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you.
“Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and the ocean divide us,—but they never will, unless you wish it.
