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Melchior, the honest Balthazar is right. My grandmother was a Venetian, and she had the fair hair of the boy the eye too, is hers and oh!" bending his head aside and veiling his eyes with his hand, "I see the anxious gaze that was so constant in the sainted and injured Angiolina, after my greater wealth and power had tempted her kinsmen to force her to yield an unwilling hand!
For some time she was an Angiolina and he a Marino Faliero, a good old man; but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men, and the venerable Count did not object to her availing herself of the privileges of her country in selecting a cicisbeo; an Italian would have made it quite agreeable: indeed, for some time he winked at our intimacy, but at length made an exception against me, as a foreigner, a heretic, an Englishman, and, what was worse than all, a Liberal.
Imagine that I have told you these stories sitting under the vine and fig-tree of some villetta, while Angiolina has gone to call the padrone, who will only be too glad to see you. But, ecco! at last our padrone comes.
No youth was born to fairer hopes, nor did Italy know one more joyous than myself, the morning I received the hand of Angiolina; and yet two short years saw all those hopes withered, this joyousness gone, and a cloud thrown across my prospects which has never disappeared.
Or it was, he imagined, as she would look ten years later, when her age had begun to tell on her, and her still buoyant freshness was gone. It was the same feeling that had come to him on the Angiolina steps, at Abbazia.
Be tender of this fragile flower that Providence hath put under thy protection, Sigismund; cherish it as thou valuest thine own soul; the generous and confiding love of a virtuous woman is always a support, frequently a triumphant stay, to the tottering principles of man. Oh! had it pleased God earlier to have given me Angiolina, how different might have been our lives!
Adieu, my Angiolina." When the Carmelite re-entered the apartment of Donna Violetta his face was covered with the hue of death, and his limbs with difficulty supported him to a chair. He scarcely observed that Don Camillo Monforte was still present, nor did he note the brightness and joy which glowed in the eyes of the ardent Violetta.
The united tenderness and dignity of Faliero's words to Angiolina, before he goes to the meeting of the conspirators, would, if there were nothing else, be enough to show how rightly in his better moods the poet appreciated the conditions of the family.
In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his pictures of Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote the invocations to the shade of Astarte, and his letters in prose and verse to Augusta; but the above passage could never have been written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Shelley.
"These were my first offerings to my wife, in return for the gift she had made me of the precious babe," said the Doge, in such a smothered voice as we are apt to use when examining objects that recall the presence of the dead "Blessed Angiolina! these jewels are so many tokens of thy pale but happy countenance; thou felt a mother's joy at that sacred moment, and could even smile on me!"
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