He had already suffered one of those
disappointments which are the rule rather than the exception, and
his first love had ended as first love always does when it ends
fortunately--in disappointment. He scarcely knew the object of his
passion, a young girl of humble lot, whom he used to hear singing at
her loom in the house opposite his father's palace. Count Monaldo
promptly interfered, and not long afterward the young girl died. But
the sensitive boy, and his biographers after him, made the most of
this sorrow; and doubtless it helped to render life under his father's
roof yet heavier and harder to bear. Such as it was, it seems to have
been the only love that Leopardi ever really felt, and the young
girl's memory passed into the melancholy of his life and poetry.
But he did not summon courage to abandon Recanati before his
twenty-fourth year, and then he did not go with his father's entire
good-will. The count wished him to become a priest, but Leopardi
shrank from the idea with horror, and there remained between him and
his father not only the difference of their religious and political
opinions, but an unkindness which must be remembered against the
judgment, if not the heart, of the latter. He gave his son so meager
an allowance that it scarcely kept him above want, and obliged him to
labors and subjected him to cares which his frail health was not able
bear.
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