Alas! it was not real love, it was but its shadow in my heart. But I was too young and too ingenuous not to be deceived by it myself. I thought that I adored her as so much innocence, beauty, and love deserved to be adored by a lover. I told her so, with that accent of sincerity which emotion imparts; with that impassioned restraint which is imparted by solitude, darkness, despair, and tears. She believed it because she required that belief to live, and because she had enough passion in her own heart to make up for its insufficiency in a thousand other hearts. The autobiographer is summoned away by his mother, and he goes, lacerating Graziella's heart, but swearing a thousand oaths of fealty to his beloved. Alas! the "treacherous air of absence" undid all--with him, though not with her. He blames himself in retrospect--gently--and pities himself lamentably, as follows: I was at that ungrateful period of life when frivolity and imitation make a young man feel a false shame in the best feelings of his nature ... I would not have dared to confess ... the name and station of the object of my regret and sadness.... How I blush now for having blushed then! and how much more precious was one of the joy-beams or one of the tear-drops of her chaste eyes than all the glances, all the allurements, all the smiles for which I was about to sacrifice her image! Ah! man, when he is too young, cannot love! He knows not the value of any thing! He only knows what real happiness is after he has lost it.... True love is the ripe fruit of life. At twenty, it is not known, it is imagined. A farewell letter from Graziella dying: "The doctor says that I shall die in less than three days. I wish to say farewell to thee ere I lose all my strength. Oh! if I had thee near me, I would live! But it is God's will. I will soon speak to thee, and forever, from on high. Love my soul! It shall be with thee as long as thou livest. I leave thee my tresses, which were cut off for thy sake one night. Consecrate them to God in some chapel in thy own land, that something belonging to me may be near thee!" The autobiographer "complied with the order contained in her dying behest." He says: "From that day forward, a shadow of her death spread itself over my features and over my youth." He apostrophizes the remembered Graziella as follows: