This eBook was produced by Dagny,
and David Widger,
I ARRIVED at St. Petersburg, and found the Czarina, whose conjugalperfidy was more than suspected, tolerably resigned to the extinction ofthat dazzling life whose incalculable and god-like utility it isreserved for posterity to appreciate! I have observed, by the way, thatin general men are the less mourned by their families in proportion asthey are the more mourned by the community. The great are seldomamiable; and those who are the least lenient to our errors areinvariably our relations!
Many circumstances at that time conspired to make my request to quit theimperial service appear natural and appropriate. The death of the Czar,joined to a growing jealousy and suspicion between the English monarchand Russia, which, though long existing, was now become more evident andnotorious than heretofore, gave me full opportunity to observe that mypardon had been obtained from King George three years since, and thatprivate as well as national ties rendered my return to England a measurenot only of expediency but necessity. The imperial Catherine granted memy dismissal in the most flattering terms, and added the highdistinction of the Order founded in honour of the memorable feat bywhich she had saved her royal consort and the Russian army to the Orderof St. Andrew, which I had already received.
I transferred my wealth, now immense, to England, and, with the pompwhich became the rank and reputation Fortune had bestowed upon me, Icommenced the long land-journey I had chalked out to myself. Although Ihad alleged my wish to revisit England as the main reason of myretirement from Russia, I had also expressed an intention of visitingItaly previous to my return to England. The physicians, indeed, hadrecommended to me that delicious climate as an antidote to the ills myconstitution had sustained in the freezing skies of the north; and in myown heart I had secretly appointed some more solitary part of the DivineLand for the scene of my purposed hermitage and seclusion. It is indeedastonishing how those who have lived much in cold climates yearn forlands of mellow light and summer luxuriance; and I felt for a southernsky the same resistless longing which sailors, in the midst of the vastocean, have felt for the green fields and various landscape of theshore.
I traversed, then, the immense tracts of Russia, passed through Hungary,entered Turkey, which I had wished to visit, where I remained a shorttime; and, crossing the Adriatic, hailed, for the first time, theAusonian shore. It was the month of May—that month, of whose lustrousbeauty none in a northern clime can dream—that I entered Italy. It mayserve as an instance of the power with which a thought that, howeverimportant, is generally deemed of too abstract and metaphysical a naturedeeply to engross the mind, possessed me then, that I—no cold norunenthusiastic votary of the classic Muse—made no pilgrimage to city orruin, but, after a brief sojourn at Ravenna, where I dismissed all mytrain, set out alone to find the solitary cell for which I now sickenedwith a hermit's love.
It was at a small village at the foot of the Apennines that I found theobject of my search. Strangely enough, there blended with myphilosophical ardour a deep mixture of my old romance. Nature, to whosevoice the dweller in cities and struggler with mankind had been so longobtuse, now pleaded audibly at my heart, and called me to her embraces,as a mother calls unto her wearied child. My eye, as with a new vision,became open