While all this tumult was raging round the house, and within the heart of Giacomo, the student's lamp was burning, how calm, how still, in the remote and secluded chamber of his friend Petrarch! To him, out of a kind and considerate regard, and from no distrust in his zeal or attachment, the ardent lover had concealed his perilous enterprise. Remote from the whole scene, and remote from all the passions of it, sat the youthful sage; not remote, however, from deep excitements of his own. Far from it. Reflection has her emotions thrilling as those of passion. He who has not closed his door upon the world, and sat down with books and his own thoughts in a solitude like this--may have lived, we care not in how gay a world, or how passionate an existence,--he has yet an excitement to experience, which, if not so violent, is far more prolonged, deeper, and more sustained than any he has known,--than any which the most brilliant scenes, or the most clamorous triumphs of life, can furnish. What is all the sparkling exhilaration of society, the wittiest and the fairest,--what all the throbbings and perturbations of love itself, compared with the intense feeling of the _youthful thinker_, who has man, and God, and eternity for his fresh contemplations,--who, for the first time, perceives in his solitude all the grand enigmas of human existence lying unsolved about him? His brow is not corrugated, his eye is not inflamed: he sits calm and serene--a child would look into his face and be drawn near to him--but it seems to him that on his beating heart the very hand of God is lying. The poet had closed his door, and unrolled before his solitary lamp his favourite manuscript, "The Tusculan Disputations of Cicero." How well that solitary lamp burning on so vivid and so noiseless--the only thing there in motion, but whose very motion makes the stillness more evident, the calm more felt; how well that lamp--the very soul, as it seems, of the little chamber it illumines--harmonises with the student's mood! How it makes bright the solitude around him! How it brings sense of companionship and of life where nothing but it--and thought--are stirring!