[Greek: Ou men thên keinês ge chereiôn euchomai einai, Ou demas, oude phyên, epei ou pôs oude eoiken Onêtas athanatêsi demas kai eidos erizein.] O gentle Goddess! would your kindly heart have been most pained or pleased, if you could have guessed how ample was the final retribution? You never knew how often--wearied by petty public broils, worried by Penelope's shrill shrewish tongue, overborne by the staid platitudes of the prim, respectable Telemachus--your ancient lover strode over bleak rocks and gusty sand-hills, till his feet were dipped in the seething foam, and he stood straining his eyes seaward, and drinking in the wind that he fancied blew from Ogygia--the island to which no prow of mortal ever found the backward track. You never knew how often his thoughts rushed back, with a desperate longing and vain regret, to the great cave shrouded by the vine heavy with clusters of eternal grapes, deep in the greenwood where the wild birds loved to roost, girdled by the meadows thick with violets--where cedar and frankincense burned brightly on the hearth, making the air heavy with fragrance--where the wine, that whoso drank became immortal, mantled ever in unstinted goblets--where you bent over your golden shuttle, singing a low sweet song--where your dark divine eyes never wearied in their welcome. I have always thought that, of all men alive or dead, of all characters in fact or fiction, Odysseus, in his declining years, must have been the most intensely bored. But then, you know, though passing wise in his generation, he was wholly a pagan and half a barbarian. Far be it from me to insinuate, that any Christian and civilized Wanderer, when once reinstated in his domestic comforts, ever wastes a regret on a lost love beyond the sea. CHAPTER XV. PAVIA. It is said, that when a man is struck blind by lightning, he never forgets afterwards the minutest object on which his eyes rested when the searing flash shot across them. Even so, when the crash of the great misfortune is over, and we wake from dull, heavy insensibility to find the light gone out of our life for ever, we remember with unnatural distinctness the most trivial incidents of the last hours of sunshine; we actually seem to see them over again sometimes, as we grope our way, hopelessly and helplessly, through the darkness that will endure till it is changed into night; for it may be, that from our spirit's eyes the blinding veil will never be lifted, till they unclose in the dawn of the Resurrection.