Diary of a Drug Fiend

104 - The Diary of a Drug Fiend through the plains of Lombardy. Odd fragments of Shelley’s lines on the Euganean hills flitted through my mind like azure or purple phantoms. : “The vaporous plain of Lombardy Islanded with cities fair.”’ A century had commercialised the cities for the most part into cockpits and cesspools. But Shelley still shone serene as the sun itself. “Many a green isle needs must be In this wide sea of misery.” , Everything he had touched with his penhad blossomed into immortality. And Lou and I were’ living in the land which his prophetic eyes had seen. © I thought of that incomparable idyll, I will not call it an island, to which he invites Emilia, in Epipsychidion. Lou and I, my love and I, my wife and I, we were not merely going there;- we had always been there and should always be. For the name of the island, the name of the house, the name of Shelley, and the name of Lou and me, they were all one name—Love. “ The wingéd words with which my song would pierce Into the heights of love’s rare universe _ Are chains of lead about its flight of fire, I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. ” I noticed, in fact, that our physical selves seemed to be acting as projections of our thought. We were both breathing rapidly and deeply. Our faces were flushed, suffused with the sunlight splendour of our bloods that beat time to the waltz of our love. | Waltz? No, it was something wilder than a waltz. The Mazurka, perhaps. No, there was something still more savage in our souls. : I thought of the furious fandango of the gipsies of