That gate of dreams was closed, but I shall always feel that, for an hour, it was granted to me to see the vanished life so dear to my imagination.

If the picture corresponded to nothing real, tell me who can, by what power I reconstructed, to the last perfection of intimacy, a world known to me only in ruined fragments.
Daylight again, but no gleam of sun.

I longed for the sunshine; it seemed to me a miserable chance that I should lie ill by the Ionian Sea and behold no better sky than the far north might have shown me.

That grey obstruction of heaven's light always weighs upon my spirit; on a summer's day, there has but to pass a floating cloud, which for a moment veils the sun, and I am touched with chill discouragement; heart and hope fail me, until the golden radiance is restored.
About noon, when I had just laid down the newspaper bought the night before--the Roman _Tribuna_, which was full of dreary politics--a sudden clamour in the street drew my attention.

I heard the angry shouting of many voices, not in the piazza before the hotel, but at some little distance; it was impossible to distinguish any meaning in the tumultuous cries.