“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.

“They only are honoured, they are still celebrated:  our obscure destinies serve only to heighten the lustre of our ancestors:  our present existence leaves nothing standing but the past; it will exact no tribute from future recollections!  All our masterpieces are the work of those who are no more, and genius itself is numbered among the illustrious dead.

“Perhaps one of the secret charms of Rome, is to reconcile the imagination with the sleep of death.  Here we learn resignation, and suffer less pangs of regret for the objects of our love.  The people of the south picture to themselves the end of life in colours less gloomy than the inhabitants of the north.  The sun, like glory, warms even the tomb.

“The cold and isolation of the sepulchre beneath our lovely sky, by the side of so many funereal urns, have less terrors for the human mind.  We believe a crowd of spirits is waiting for our company; and from our solitary city to the subterranean one the transition seems easy and gentle.