There was not that Roman Campagna, whose irresistible charm is incessantly calling after me; those waves and that sun were not the waves and the sun that bathe and light the promontory on which Plato[224] taught his disciples, that Sunium where I heard the cricket sing, in vain asking Minerva for the hearth of the priests of her temple; but after all, such as she was, this England, surrounded by her ships, covered with her herds and professing the cult of her great men, was charming and redoubtable. To-day her valleys are darkened by the smoke of forges and workshops, her roads changed into iron ways; and along those roads, in lieu of Milton and Shakespeare, move wandering boilers. Already the nurseries of knowledge, Oxford and Cambridge, are assuming a deserted aspect: their colleges and their Gothic chapels, half-abandoned, distress the eye; in their cloisters, near the sepulchral stones of the middle ages, lie, forgotten, the marble annals of the ancient peoples of Greece: ruins guarding ruins. By these monuments, around which the void was beginning to form, I left that part of my spring days which I had re-found; I parted a second time with my youth, on the same shore where I had abandoned it formerly: Charlotte had suddenly reappeared like that luminary, the delight of the shades, which, delayed by the flight of the months, should rise in the middle of the night. If you are not too weary, read in these Memoirs of the effect which the sudden vision of that woman produced upon me in 1822. When she had distinguished me before, I did not know those other Englishwomen who came to flock round me in my hour of power and renown: their homage was as fickle as my fortune. To-day, after sixteen new years have passed away since my embassy in London, after so many new destructions, my eyes are carried back to the daughter of the land of Desdemona and Juliet: she counts now in my memory only from the day on which her unexpected presence rekindled the torch of my recollections. A new Epimenides[225], awakened after a long sleep, I fix my gaze upon a beacon so much the brighter in that the others are extinguished along the shore; one alone excepted will shine long after me.