"But adventure arouses affections and feelings, and touches strings, which are sure to exist in human nature; never does the blood flow more lightly and freely through our veins; never does our mental life develop more ozone than in these tempests of passion, quickly as they pass away again in the sky. Also, if that enduring bond and that nobility of feeling is wanting, which only true love of the soul is capable of giving, yet something remains that ennobles the fleeting transport of passion, the rapture about beauty which is so closely united to love, but which has paled and must be repudiated in our circumstances. "But where do these homes of adventure lie more than in the masked land of Italy? Are we not thrilled with those spirits of revelry which in the Venetian Carnival of that glorious _maestro_ spring and dance upon the strings, and seem to be beside themselves in wild exhilaration? "Here upon the Rialto, there upon the market place, mysterious glances beckon to us, seductive pressure of the hand invites us. This is a proud beauty of the people, who at other times wears the _fazzoletto_, that is a lady of position who seeks a _cicisbeo_. And upon the Roman Corso, when the long row of carriages drives down the street, we stand upon the carriage step and a delicate hand presses a bouquet into ours. Here adventure has risen and increased until it became crime, and gazed ominously and fatally at us out of the soft eyes of a Lucrezia Borgia and a Beatrice Cenci. "But what heaven also in the land of Boccaccio, what rapture in the air, what charm in the aroma of the perfumes, which are set free by the day's glowing sun, which the evening's breeze wafts over the meadows, above the marble floors in the villas and in their sleeping chambers! There one must be a pedant, like the man from Arpinum, to think and to write of duty in a Tusculum; we other men follow Horace's example, wreath our heads with roses, take a wine bowl in our hands, and a beautiful Lydia in our arms.