It was a pleasant day, that last day at Como! For the farewells of friendship have indeed something of the melancholy, but not the anguish, of those of love.
Perhaps it would be better if we could get rid of love altogether.

Life would go on smoother and happier without it.

Friendship is the wine of existence, but love is the dram-drinking.
When they returned, they found Castruccio seated on the lawn.

He did not appear so much dejected at the prospect of Ernest's departure as Teresa had anticipated; for Castruccio Cesarini was a very jealous man, and he had lately been chagrined and discontented with seeing the delight that the De Montaignes took in Ernest's society.
"Why is this ?" he often asked himself; "why are they more pleased with this stranger's society than mine?
My ideas are as fresh, as original; I have as much genius, yet even my dry brother-in-law allows _his_ talents, and predicts that _he_ will be an eminent man! while _I_--No!--one is not a prophet in one's own country!" Unhappy man! his mind bore all the rank weeds of the morbid poetical character, and the weeds choked up the flowers that the soil, properly cultivated, should alone bear.

Yet that crisis in life awaited Castruccio, in which a sensitive and poetical man is made or marred; the crisis in which a sentiment is replaced by the passions--in which love for some real object gathers the scattered rays of the heart into a focus: out of that ordeal he might pass a purer and manlier being--so Maltravers often hoped.