On Arriving At Naples, I Hastened To My Paternal Home.
My heart yearned
for the long-withheld blessing of a father's love.
As I entered the
proud portal of the ancestral palace, my emotions were so great that I
could not speak. No one knew me. The servants gazed at me with
curiosity and surprise. A few years of intellectual elevation and
development had made a prodigious change in the poor fugitive stripling
from the convent. Still that no one should know me in my rightful home
was overpowering. I felt like the prodigal son returned. I was a
stranger in the house of my father. I burst into tears, and wept aloud.
When I made myself known, however, all was changed. I who had once been
almost repulsed from its walls, and forced to fly as an exile, was
welcomed back with acclamation, with servility. One of the servants
hastened to prepare my father for my reception; my eagerness to receive
the paternal embrace was so great that I could not await his return;
but hurried after him.
What a spectacle met my eyes as I entered the chamber! My father, whom
I had left in the pride of vigorous age, whose noble and majestic
bearing had so awed my young imagination, was bowed down and withered
into decrepitude. A paralysis had ravaged his stately form, and left it
a shaking ruin. He sat propped up in his chair, with pale, relaxed
visage and glassy, wandering eye. His intellects had evidently shared
in the ravage of his frame.
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