TITAN:

BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1864.


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by

TICKNOR AND FIELDS,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

THIRD EDITION.


University Press:
Welch, Bigelow, and Company,
Cambridge.

[Pg iii]

The "Titan" is Jean Paul's longest—and the author meant it, and held it, to be his greatest and best—romance; and his public (including Mr. Carlyle) seems, on the whole, to have sustained his opinion. He was ten years about it, and his other works, written in the interval, were preparatory and tributary to this.

As to the general meaning of the title there can hardly, on the whole, be any doubt. It does not refer, as the division into Jubilees and Cycles might, to be sure, suggest to one on first approaching it, to the titanic scale and scope of the work, but to the titanic violence against which it is aimed.

It seems, indeed, from a letter of the author's, that he thought at first of calling it "Anti-Titan." The only question in regard to the [Pg iv]application of the title seems to be, whether the champion of truth and justice against the moral Titans in this case was meant to be understood as represented by the hero of the story, with his friends, resisting the iniquity which moved earth and hell to ruin him, or whether the book itself is the Anti-Titan, and an age of extravagance the Titan.

A French critic says of the "Titan":—

"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological résumé, a satire, an elegy, a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization in the eighteenth century.

"How is it to end, this civilization which exaggerates alike intellectual and industrial power at the expense of the life of the soul,—wholly factitious, theatrical,—intoxicating, consuming itself with pleasure, seeking everywhere new enjoyments,—exploring all the secrets of nature, without being able to penetrate the first causes, the secrets of God,—what will be the fate of these generations supersaturated with romances, dramas, journals, with science, ambition, with vehement aspirations after the unknown and impossible?...

"In augmenting the sum of its desires, will it augment the sum of its [Pg v]happiness? Is it not going to increase immensely its capacity of suffering?

"Will it not be the giant that scales heaven—

"And that falls crushed to death?

"Titan!"

In giving his romance the title of "Titan," says the same writer, "it is not Albano de Cesara the author has in view, but his antipode, Captain Roquairol,—that romantic being, that insatiable lover of pleasure, that anticipated Byron, that scaler of heaven,—who, after having piled mountain upon mountain to attain his object, ends in finding himself buried under the ruins....

"Even while at work upon 'Hesperus,' he had formed the resolution of placing a pure man, great and noble, by the side of a reprobate, and of surrounding them both with a multitude of beings corresponding to them. He wished to concentrate in a single work all the ideas of high philosophy which he had disseminated in his other creations, and to show them followed by their natural consequences. So strong a mind could not stop there: he resolved to show the absurdity of exaggeration, whether in good or in evil, in virtue or in vice.

"Hence those reproductions of the same types, those satellites gravitating around their respective[Pg vi] planets; in fine, those parodies of the principal personages of the drama.

"By the side of the coldness and the vast plans of Don Gaspard de Cesara, we have the no less dangerous intrigues, though upon a less elevated scale, of the Minister von Froulay; by the side of the ventriloquist Uncle, the lying Roquairol; the Princess Isabelle is opposed to Linda de Romeiro, the aerial Liana to her physical counterpart, the Princess Idoine; the comic vulgarity of Dr. Sphex contrasts with the more elevated buffoonery of Schoppe; and if we have Bouverot, we have also Dion, that Greek so elegant and so noble, happy mixture of the antique and the modern, that artist so sensible and so true....

"The history of Albano, opposed to Roquairol, is the history, taken from his tenderest childhood to the epoch of his greatest development, of a being who, as the strictest consequence of a quite special education, goes through life, wounding himself with all its griefs, drinking at the source of all its lawful pleasures; suffering with nobleness, tasting of happiness, but only the purest kind; exposed every instant to see himself drawn away by fallacious principles, and nevertheless moving on with a steady step towards the end which his reason has[Pg vii] marked out for him; sacrificing to the fulfilment of his duties all the delights that a debauched court can offer a young man entering into the world. While all the personages who gravitate around him, and who represent each a different aberration from the fundamental principle of the work, fall successively at his side, victims of the natural consequences of their passions, he, strengthening himself by every fall of which he is witness, ends by attaining the loftiest position which the ambition of man can desire,—a position which he could not have expected, and for which, consequently, he had not been able to make the sacrifices that, in the course of the work, he does not cease to achieve."

The author whom we have thus copiously quoted alludes to Jean Paul's having had the idea of "Titan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us of a Philistine disparagement of the "Titan," that so many of the characters of the other work reappear here under new names. There are some critics who ought to object to the full moon, that she is only the same old moon that we had, in her first quarter or half, several nights ago. However, as we have not yet had "Hesperus" in English, nor are likely to for some time, this kind of objection will not trouble English readers of "Titan."[Pg viii]

Jean Paul has been justly praised for his success in drawing and shading female characters. Our French critic says: "Richter has the rare merit of placing on the stage in the same work six female personages, who have not a shadow of resemblance to each other, and who, from the moment of their appearance on the scene to that of their quitting it, never deviate a single minute from the character the author has given them."

The fate of his Titanide, Linda, created a loud remonstrance in Germany; and one can hardly, indeed, help feeling as if poetic justice had been a little caricatured, at least, in Richter's disposal of that half strong-headed and half headstrong woman. Painful, however, as her end is, the Translator could not listen an instant to the suggestion of omitting a line of the scenes in which that terrible tragedy is brought to a close.

When the "Titan" first appeared, complaint was made by some that there was too much of drollery, by others that there was not enough; some found too much sentimentality, others too much philosophy; the Translator has found it full, if not of that brevity which is the soul of wit (not, however, of humor), yet of that variety which is the spice of life.[Pg ix]

The Translator (or Transplanter, for he aspires to the title) of this huge production, in his solicitude to preserve the true German aroma of its native earth, may have brought away some part of the soil, and even stones, clinging to the roots (stones of offence they may prove to many, stones of stumbling to many more). He can only say, that if he had made Jean Paul always talk in ordinary, conventional, straightforward, instantly intelligible prose, the reader would not have had Jean Paul the Only.

And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose heart (to use the homely phrase) is ever in the right place.

It has seemed necessary to give a few notes, and only a few. Properly to furnish such a work with annotations would require Jean Paul's own voluminous un-commonplace-books of all out-of-the-way[Pg x] knowledge, and that Dictionary to Jean Paul which one of his countrymen began, but unfortunately carried only through one of his works, the work on Education, Levana.

The Translator desires emphatically to express his obligations to his friend, Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and to his friend, the accomplished scholar, Mr. Knorr, to whose kind and patient care whatever of accuracy or felicity there may be in his version of the first Jubilee is largely due; also, to Rev. Dr. Hedge, and all the friends who have helped him with suggestion and encouragement in this large and difficult undertaking, he makes his warmest acknowledgments;—and he closes by commending the Titan to all lovers of the humanities, confident (in the words of Mrs. Lee, in her Life of Jean Paul) that "the more it is read, the more it will be acknowledged a work of exalted genius, pure morality, and perennial beauty."

C. T. B.
Newport, R. I.

[Pg xi]

Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia once looked down into the clear-obscure of earth, and, weary of the ever-bright but cold Olympus, yearned to enter in beneath the clouds of our world, where the Soul loves more because it suffers more, and where it is sadder but more warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, with which Polyhymnia passes invisibly up and down the low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our hearts; and they mourned that their throne stood so far from the sighs of the helpless.

Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and to clothe themselves in our mortal form. They came down from Olympus; Love and little loves and genii flew playfully after them, and our nightingales fluttered to meet them out of the bosom of May.[Pg xii]

But, as they touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of light, and cast no shadows, then the earnest Queen of gods and men, Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and said: "The immortal becomes mortal upon the earth, and every spirit becomes a human being!"

So they became human beings and sisters, and were called Louisa, Charlotte, Theresa, Frederica; the little loves and genii transformed themselves into their children, and flew into their maternal arms, and the motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love in a great embrace. And when the white banner of the blooming spring fluttered abroad, and more human thrones stood before them,—and when, blissfully softened by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon each other and their happy children, and were speechless for love and bliss,—then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by over them, and recognize them, and gave them the tones wherewith the heart expresses and awakens love and joy.

And the dream was ended and fulfilled; it had, as is always the case, shaped itself after waking reality. Therefore, be it consecrated to the four fair and noble sisters, and let all which is like it in Titan be so consecrated too!

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

[Pg xiii]

FIRST JUBILEE.

PAGE

Passage To Isola Bella.—First Day of Joy in the Titan.—The Pasquin-Idolater.—Integrity of the Empire eulogized.—Effervescence of Youth.—Luxury of Bleeding.—Recognition of a Father.—Grotesque Testament.—German Predilection for Poems and the Arts.—The Father of Death.—Ghost-Scene.—The Bloody Dream.—The Swing of Fancy 1

SECOND JUBILEE.

The two Biographical Courts.—The Herdsman's Hut.—The Flying.—The Sale of Hair.—The Dangerous Bird-pole.—A Storm locked up in a Coach.—Low Mountain-Music.—The loving Child.—Mr. Von Falterle from Vienna.—The Torture Soupé.—The Shattered Heart.—Werther without Beard, but with a Shot.—The Reconciliation 70

THIRD JUBILEE.

Methods of the two Professional Gardeners in their Pedagogical Grafting-School.—Vindication of Vanity.—Dawn of Friendship.—Morning Star of Love. 110

FOURTH JUBILEE.

High Style of Love.—The Gotha Pocket-Almanac.—Dreams on the Tower.—The Sacrament
and the[Pg xiv] Thunder-Storm.—The Night-Journey into Elysium.—New Actors and Stages, and the Ultimatum of the School-Years 128

FIFTH JUBILEE.

Grand-Entry.—Dr. Sphex.—The drumming Corpse.—The Letter of the Knight.—Retrogradation of the Dying-Day.—Julienne.—The still Good-Friday of Old Age.—The healthy and bashful hereditary Prince.—Roquairol.—The Blindness.—Sphex's Predilection for Tears.—The fatal Banquet.—The Doloroso of Love 161

SIXTH JUBILEE.

The Ten Persecutions of the Reader.—Liana's Eastern Room.—Disputation upon Patience.—The picturesque Cure 197

SEVENTH JUBILEE.

Albano's Peculiarity.—The intricate Interlacings of Politics.—The Herostratus of Gaming-Tables.—Paternal "Mandatum sine Clausula."—Good Society.—Mr. Von Bouverot.—Liana's Spiritual and Bodily Presence 215

EIGHTH JUBILEE.

Le petit Lever of Dr. Sphex.—Path to Lilar.—Woodland-Bridge.—The Morning in Arcadia.—Chariton.—Liana's Letter and Psalm of Gratitude.—Sentimental Journey through a Garden.—The Flute-Dell.—Concerning the Reality of the Ideal 238

NINTH JUBILEE.

Pleasure of Court-Mourning.—The Burial.—Roquairol.—Letter to him.—The Seven last Words in the Water.—The Swearing of Allegiance.—Masquerade.—Puppet Masquerade.—The Head in the Air, Tartarus, the Spirit-Voice, the Friend, the Catacomb, and the two united Men 268[Pg xv]

TENTH JUBILEE.

Roquairol's Advocatus Diaboli.—The Festival Day of Friendship 310

ELEVENTH JUBILEE.

Embroidery.—Anglaise.—Cereus Serpens.—Musical Fantasies 334

TWELFTH JUBILEE.

Froulay's Birthday and Projects.—Extra-Leaf.—Rabette.—The Harmonica.—Night.—The Pious Father.—The Wondrous Stairway.—The Apparition 351

THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.

Roquairol's Love.—Philippic Against Lovers.—The Pictures.—Albano Albani.—The Harmonic Tête-à-tête.—The Ride to Blumenbühl 384

FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.

Albano and Liana 405

FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.

Man and Woman 432

SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.

The Sorrows of a Daughter 481

[Pg 1]

The glowing form of the youthful Cesara was still more ennobled by the earnestness of an eye always buried in the future, and of a firmly shut, manly mouth, and by the daring decision of young, fresh faculties; he seemed as yet to be a burning-glass in the moonlight, or a dark precious stone of too much color, which the world, as in the case of other jewels, can brighten and improve only by cutting hollow.

As he drew nearer and nearer, the island attracted him, as one world does another, more and more intensely. His internal restlessness rose as the outward tranquillity deepened. Beside all this, Dian, a Greek by birth and an artist, who had often circumnavigated and sketched Isola Bella and Isola Madre, brought these obelisks of Nature still nearer to his soul in glowing pictures; and Schoppe often spoke of the great man whom the youth was to see to-morrow for the first time. As the people were carrying by, down below in the street, an old man fast asleep, into whose strongly marked face the setting sun cast fire and life, and who was, in short, a corpse borne uncovered, after the Italian custom, suddenly, in a wild and hurried tone, he asked his friends, "Does my father look thus?"[Pg 3]

But what impels him with such intense emotions towards the island is this: He had, on Isola Bella, with his sister, who afterward went to Spain, and by the side of his mother, who had since passed to the shadowy land, sweetly toyed and dreamed away the first three years of his life, lying in the bosom of the high flowers of Nature; the island had been, to the morning slumber of life, to his childhood's hours, a Raphael's painted sleeping-chamber. But he had retained nothing of it all in his head and heart, save in the one a deep, sadly sweet emotion at the name, and in the other the squirrel, which, as the family scutcheon of the Borromæans, stands on the upper terrace of the island.

After the death of his mother his father transplanted him from the garden-mould of Italy—some of which, however, still adhered to the tap-roots—into the royal forest of Germany; namely, to Blumenbühl, in the principality of Hohenfliess, which is as good as unknown to the Germans; there he had him educated in the house of a worthy nobleman, or, to speak more meaningly and allegorically, he caused the pedagogical professional gardeners to run round him with their water-pots, grafting-knives, and pruning-shears, till the tall, slender palm-tree, full of sago-pith and protecting thorns, outgrew them, and could no longer be reached by their pots and shears.

And now, when he shall have returned from the island, he is to pass from the field-bed of the country to the tanvat and hot-bed of the city, and to the trellises of the court garden; in a word, to Pestitz, the university and chief city of Hohenfliess, even the sight of which, until this time, his father had strictly forbidden him.

And to-morrow he sees that father for the first time![Pg 4] He must have burned with desire, since his whole life had been one preparation for this meeting, and his foster-parents and teachers had been a sort of chalcographic company, who had engraved in copper a portrait of the author of his life-book so magnificently opposite the title-page. His father, Gaspard de Cesara, Knight of the Golden Fleece (whether Spanish or Austrian I should be glad to be precisely informed myself), a spirit naturally three-edged, sharp, and brightly polished, had in his youth wild energies, for whose play only a battle-field or a kingdom would have been roomy enough, and which in high life had as little power of motion as a sea-monster in a harbor. He satisfied them by playing star-parts with all ranks in comedies and tragedies, by the prosecution of all sciences, and by an eternal tour: he was intimate and often involved with great and small men and courts, yet always marched along as a stream with its own waves through the sea of the world. And now, after having completed his travels by land and sea round the whole circumference of life, round its joys and capacities and systems, he still continues (especially since the Present, that ape of the Past, is always running after him) to pursue his studies and geographical journeyings; but always for scientific purposes, just as he visits now the European battle-fields. As for the rest, he is not at all gloomy, still less gay, but composed and calm; he does not even hate and love, blame and praise other men any more than he does himself, but values every one in his kind, the dove in hers and the tiger in his. What often seems vengeance is merely the determined, soldier-like tread wherewith a man, who can never flee and fear, but only knows how to advance and stand his ground, tramples down larks'-eggs and ears of corn.[Pg 5]

I think that the corner which I have thus snipped off from the Whistonian chart of this comet, for the benefit of mankind, is broad enough. I will, before I discourse further, reserve the privilege to myself, of sometimes calling Don Gaspard the Knight, without appending to him the Golden Fleece; and, secondly, of not being obliged by courtesy towards the short memory of readers to steal from his son Cesara (under which designation the old man will never appear) his Christian name, which, to be sure, is Albano.

As Don Gaspard was about leaving Italy for Spain, he had, through Schoppe, caused our Albano, or Cesara, to be brought hither without any one's knowing why he did it at so late a period. Was it his pleasure, perhaps, to gaze into the full spring-time of the young twigs? Did he wish to unfold to the youth some rules for rustics in the century-almanac of court life? Would he imitate the old Gauls, or the modern inhabitants of the Cape, who never suffered their sons in their presence till they were grown up and capable of bearing arms? Was nothing less than that his idea? This much only I comprehend, that I should be a very good-natured fool if I were, in the very fore-court of the work, to suffer myself to be burdened with the task of drawing and dotting out from the few data that I now have, in the case of a man so remarkable, and whose magnetic needle declines so many degrees,—a Wilkes's magnetic table of inclinations;—he, not I, is the father of his son, to be sure, and he knows of course why he did not send for him till his beard was grown.

When it struck twenty-three o'clock (the hour before sundown), and Albano would have counted up the tedious strokes, he was so excited that he was not in a condition[Pg 6] to ascend the long tone-ladder;[2] he must away to the shore of the Lago, in which the up-towering islands rise like sceptred sea-gods. Here stood the noble youth, his inspired countenance full of the evening glow, with exalted emotions of heart, sighing for his veiled father, who, hitherto, with an influence like that of the sun behind a bank of clouds, had made the day of his life warm and light. This longing was not filial love,—that belonged to his foster-parents, for childlike love can only spring up toward a heart whereon we have long reposed, and which has protected us, as it were, with the first heart's-leaves against cold nights and hot days,—his love was higher or rarer. Across his soul had been cast a gigantic shadow of his father's image, which lost nothing by Gaspard's coldness. Dian compared it to the repose on the sublime countenance of the Juno Ludovici; and the enthusiastic son likened it to another sudden chill which often comes into the heart in company with too great warmth from another's heart, as burning-glasses burn feeblest precisely in the hottest days. He even hoped he might perchance melt off by his love this father's heart, so painfully frozen to the glaciers of life: the youth comprehended not how possible it was to resist a true, warm heart, at least his.

Our hero, reared in the Carthusian monastery of rural life, and more in past ages than his own, applied to every subject antediluvian gigantic standards of measurement; the invisibility of the Knight constituted a part of his greatness, and the Moses'-veil doubled the glory which it concealed. Our youth had, in general, a singular leaning toward extraordinary men, of whom others stand in dread. He read the eulogies of every great man with[Pg 7] as much delight as if they were meant for him; and if the mass of people consider uncommon spirits as, for that very reason, bad,—just as they take all strange petrifactions to be Devil's bones,—in him the reverse was the case: in him love dwelt a neighbor to wonder, and his breast was always at the same time wide and warm. To be sure, every young man and every great man who looks upon another as great, considers him for that very reason as too great. But in every noble heart burns a perpetual thirst for a nobler, in the fair, for a fairer; it wishes to behold its ideal out of itself, in bodily presence, with glorified or adopted form, in order the more easily to attain to it, because the lofty man can ripen only by a lofty one, as diamond can be polished only by diamond. On the other hand, does a litterateur, a cit, a newspaper carrier or contributor wish to get a glimpse of a great head,—and is he as greedy for a great head as for an abortion with three heads,—or a Pope with as many caps,—or a stuffed shark,—or a speaking-machine or a butter-machine,—it is not because his inner man is burdened and beset by the soul-inspiring ideal of a great man, pope, shark, three-headed monster, or butter-model, but it is because he thinks, in the morning, "I can't help wondering how the creature looks," and because, in the evening, he means to tell how he looks, over a glass of beer.

Albano looked from the shore with increasing restlessness across the shining water toward the holy dwelling-place of his past childhood, his departed mother, his absent sister. The songs of gladness thrilled through him as they came floating along on the distant boats; every running wave—the foaming surge—raised a higher in his bosom; the giant statue of St. Borromæus,[3] looking[Pg 8] away over the cities, embodied the exalted one (his father) who stood erect in his heart, and the blooming pyramid, the island, was the paternal throne; the sparkling chain of the mountains and glaciers wound itself fast around his spirit, and lifted him up to lofty beings and lofty thoughts.

The first journey, especially when Nature casts over the long road nothing but white radiance and orange-blossoms and chestnut-shadows, imparts to the youth what the last journey often takes away from the man,—a dreaming heart, wings for the ice-chasms of life, and wide-open arms for every human breast.

He went back, and with his commanding eye begged his friends to set sail this very evening, although Don Gaspard was not to come to the island till to-morrow morning. Often, what he wanted to do in a week, he proposed to himself for the next day, and at last did it at once. Dian tapped the impetuous Boreas on the head lovingly, and said: "Impatient being, thou hast here the wings of a Mercury, and down there too (pointing to his feet)! But just cool off! In the pleasant after-midnight we embark, and when the dawn reddens in the sky we land." Dian had not merely an artistic eye to his well-formed darling, but also a tender interest in him, because he had often, in Blumenbühl, where he had business as public architect, been the friend and guide of his childhood and youth, and because now on the island he must tear himself from his arms for some time and be absent at Rome. Since he (the public architect) considered the same extravagance[Pg 9] which he would rebuke in an old man to be no extravagance in a youth,—an inundation to be no inundation in Egypt, though it would be in Holland,—and since he assumed a different average temperature for every individual, age, and people, and in holy human nature found no string to be cut off, but only at most to be tuned, surely Cesara must have cherished toward the cheerful and indulgent teacher, on whose two tables of laws stood only, Joy and moderation! a right hearty attachment, even more hearty than for the laws themselves.

The images of the present and of the near future and of his father had so filled the breast of the Count with greatness and immortality, that he could not comprehend how any one could let himself be buried without having achieved both, and that as often as the landlord brought in anything, he pitied the man, particularly as he was always singing, and, like the Neapolitans and Russians, in the minor key, because he was never to be anything, certainly not immortal. The latter is a mistake; for he gets his immortality here, and I take pleasure in giving place and life to his name, Pippo (abbreviated from Philippo). When, at last, they paid and were about to go, and Pippo kissed a Kremnitz ducat, saying, "Praised be the holy Virgin with the child on her right arm," Albano was pleased that the father took after his pious little daughter, who had been all the evening rocking and feeding an image of the child Jesus. To be sure, Schoppe remarked, she would carry the child more lightly on her left arm;[4] but the error of the good youth is a merit in him as well as the truth.

[Pg 10]

Beneath the splendor of a full moon they went on board the bark, and glided away over the gleaming waters. Schoppe shipped some wines with them, "not so much," said he, "that there is nothing to be had on the island, as for this reason, that if the vessel should leak, then there would be no need of pumping out anything but the flagons,[5] and she would float again."

Cesara sank, silently, deeper and deeper into the glimmering beauties of the shore and of the night. The nightingales warbled as if inspired on the triumphal gate of spring. His heart grew in his breast like a melon under its glass-bell, and his breast heaved higher and higher over the swelling fruit. All at once he reflected that he should in this way see the tulip-tree of the sparkling morn and the garlands of the island put together only like an artificial, Italian silk-flower, stamen by stamen, leaf by leaf; then was he seized with his old thirst for one single draining draught from Nature's horn of plenty; he shut his eyes, not to open them again, till he should stand upon the highest terrace of the island before the morning sun. Schoppe thought he was asleep; but the Greek smilingly guessed the epicurism of this artificial blindness, and bound, himself, before those great insatiable eyes the broad, black taffeta-ribbon, which, like a woman's ribbon or lace mask, contrasted singularly and sweetly with his blooming but manly face.

Now the two began to tease and tantalize him in a friendly way with oral night-pictures of the magnificent adornments of the shores between which they passed. "How proudly," said Dian to Schoppe, "rises yonder the[Pg 11] castle of Lizanza, and its mountain, like a Hercules, with twelvefold girdles of vine-clusters!" "The Count," said Schoppe in a lower tone to Dian, "loses a vast deal by this bandaging of his eyes. See you not, architect, to speak poetically, the glimmer of the city of Arona? How beautifully she lays on Luna's blanc d'Espagne, and seems to be setting herself out and prinking up for to-morrow in the powder-mantle of moonshine which is flung around her! But that is nothing; still better looks St. Borromæus yonder, who has the moon on his head like a freshly-washed night-cap; stands not the giant there like the Micromegas of the German body politic, just as high, just as stiff and stark?"

The happy youth was silent, and returned for answer a hand-pressure of love;—he only dreamed of the present, and signified he could wait and deny himself. With the heart of a child from whom the curtains and the after-midnight hide the approaching Christmas present of the morrow, he was borne along in the pleasure-boat, with tightly bandaged eyes, toward the approaching, heavenly kingdom. Dian drew, as well as the double light of the moonshine and the aurora permitted, a sketch of the veiled dreamer in his scrap-book. I wish I had it here, and could see in it how my darling, with the optic nerves tied up, strains at once the eye of dream directed toward the inner world, and the ear of attention so sharply set toward the outer. How beautiful is such a thing, painted,—how much more beautiful realized in life!

The mantle of night grew thinner and cooler,—the morning air fanned livingly against the breast,—the larks mingled with the nightingales and with the singing boatmen,—and he heard, beneath his bandage, which was[Pg 12] growing lighter and lighter, the joyful discoveries of his friends, who saw in the open cities along the shore the reviving stir of human life, and on the waterfalls of the mountains the alternate reflections of clouds and ruddy sky. At last the breaking splendors of morn hung like a festoon of Hesperides-apples around the distant tops of the chestnut-trees; and now they disembarked upon Isola Bella.

The veiled dreamer heard, as they ascended with him the ten terraces of the garden, the deep-drawn sigh and shudder of joy close beside him, and all the quick entreaties of astonishment; but he held the bandage fast, and went blindfold from terrace to terrace, thrilled with orange-fragrance, refreshed by higher, freer breezes, fanned by laurel-foliage,—and when they had gained at last the highest terrace, and looked down upon the lake, heaving its green waters sixty ells below, then Schoppe cried, "Now! now!" But Cesara said, "No! the sun first!" and at that moment the morning wind flung up the sunlight gleaming through the dark twigs, and it flamed free on the summits,—and Dian snatched off the bandage, and said, "Look round!" "O God!" cried he with a shriek of ecstasy, as all the gates of the new heaven flew open, and the Olympus of nature, with its thousand reposing gods, stood around him. What a world! There stood the Alps, like brother giants of the Old World, linked together, far away in the past, holding high up over against the sun the shining shields of the glaciers. The giants wore blue girdles of forest, and at their feet lay hills and vineyards, and through the aisles and arches of grape-clusters the morning winds played with cascades as with watered-silk ribbons, and the liquid brimming mirror of the lake hung down by[Pg 13] the ribbons from the mountains, and they fluttered down into the mirror, and a carved work of chestnut woods formed its frame.... Albano turned slowly round and round, looked into the heights, into the depths, into the sun, into the blossoms; and on all summits burned the alarm-fires of mighty Nature, and in all depths their reflections,—a creative earthquake beat like a heart under the earth and sent forth mountains and seas.... O then, when he saw on the bosom of the infinite mother the little swarming children, as they darted by under every wave and under every cloud,—and when the morning breeze drove distant ships in between the Alps,—and when Isola Madre towered up opposite to him, with her seven gardens, and tempted him to lean upon the air and be wafted over on level sweep from his summit to her own,—and when he saw the pheasants darting down from the Madre into the waves,—then did he seem to stand like a storm-bird with ruffled plumage on his blooming nest, his arms were lifted like wings by the morning wind, and he longed to cast himself over the terrace after the pheasants, and cool his heart in the tide of Nature.

Ashamed, he took, without looking round him, the hands of his friends and pressed them in mute fervor, that he might not be obliged to speak. The magnificent universe had painfully expanded, and then blissfully overflowed his great breast; and now, when he opened his eyes, like an eagle, wide and full upon the sun, and when the blinding brightness hid the earth, and he began to be lonely, and the earth became smoke and the sun a soft, white world, which gleamed only around the margin,—then did his whole, full soul, like a thunder-cloud, burst asunder and burn and weep, and from the pure, white[Pg 14] sun his mother looked upon him, and in the fire and smoke of the earth his father and his life stood veiled.

Silently he went down the terraces, often passing his hand across his moist eyes to wipe away the dazzling shadow which danced on all the summits and all the steps.

Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our fellow-men more warmly; and when we must pity or forget them, thou still remainest with us, reposing before the moist eye like a verdant chain of mountains in the evening red. Ah, before the soul in whose sight the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, gray drizzle,—and before the heart, which, in the subterranean passages of this life, meets no longer men, but only dry, crooked-up mummies on crutches in catacombs,—and before the eye which is impoverished and forsaken, and which no human creature will any longer gladden,—and before the proud son of the gods whom his unbelief and his lonely bosom, emptied of humanity, rivet down to an eternal, unchangeable anguish,—before all these thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful comforter; and the bleeding son of the gods, cold and speechless, dashes the drop of anguish from his eyes, that they may rest, far and clear, on thy volcanoes, and on thy Springs, and on thy suns!

I could wish nothing finer for one whom I held dear, than a mother,—a sister,—three years of living together on Isola Bella,—and then in the twentieth, a morning hour when he should land on the Eden-island, and, enjoying all this with the eye and memory at once, clasp and strain it to his open soul. O thou all too[Pg 15] happy Albano, on the rose-parterre of childhood,—under the deep, blue sky of Italy,—in the midst of luxuriant, blossom-laden citron-foliage,—in the bosom of beautiful nature, who caresses and holds thee like a mother, and in the presence of sublime nature, which stands like a father in the distance, and with a heart which expects its own father to-day!

The three now roamed with slow, unsteady steps through the swimming paradise. Although both of the others had often trodden it before, still their silver age became a golden age, by sympathy with Albano's ecstasy; the sight of another's rapture wakes the old impression of our own. As people who live near breakers and cataracts speak louder than others, so did the majestic sounding of the swollen sea of life impart to them all, even Schoppe, a stronger language; only he never could hit upon such imposing words, at least gestures, as another man.

Schoppe, who must needs fling a farewell kiss back to dear Italy, would gladly still have conserved the last scattered drops that hung around the cup of joy, which were sweet as Italian wines, full of German fire without the German acid. By acid he meant leave-taking and emotion. "If fate," said he, "fires a single retreating shot, by Heaven, I quietly turn my nag and ride whistling back. The deuce must be in the beast (or on him) if a clever jockey could not so break his mourning steed that the creature should carry himself very well as a companion-horse to the festive steed.[6] I school my sun-horse as well as my sumpter-horse far otherwise."

First of all, now, they took possession of this Otaheite-island[Pg 16] by marches, and every one of its provinces must pay them, as a Persian province does its emperor, a different pleasure. "The lower terraces," said Schoppe, "must deliver to us squatter-sovereigns the tithe of fruit and sack, in citron and orange fragrance,—the upper pays off the imperial tax in prospects,—the Grotto down below there will pay, I hope, Jews-scot in the murmur of waters, and the cypress-wood up yonder its princess's tribute in coolness,—the ships will not defraud us of their Rhine and Neckar toll, but pay that down by showing themselves in the distance."

It is not difficult for me to perceive that Schoppe, by these quizzical sallies, aimed to allay the violent commotions of Cesara's brain and heart; for the splendor of the morning enchantment, although the youth spoke composedly of lesser things, had not yet gone from his sight. In him every excitement vibrated long after (one in the morning lasted the whole day), for the same reason that an alarm-bell keeps on humming longer than a sheep-bell; although such a continuing echo could neither distract his attention nor disturb his actions or his words.

The Knight was to come at noon. Meanwhile they roamed and revelled and went humming about in stiller enjoyment with bees-wings and bees-probosces through the richly-honeyed Flora of the island; and they had that serene naturalness of children, artists, and Southern people, which sips only from the honey-cup of the moment; and, accordingly, they found in every dashing wave, in every citron-frame, in every statue among blossoms, in every dancing reflection, in every darting ship, more than one flower which opened its full cup wider under the warm sky, whereas, with us, under our cold one, it fares as with the bees, against whom the frosts of[Pg 17] May shut the flowers up. O, the islanders are right! Our greatest and most lasting error is, that we look for life, that is, its happiness, as the materialists look for the soul, in the combination of parts, as if the whole or the relation of its component parts could give us anything which each individual part had not already. Does then the heaven of our existence, like the blue one over our heads, consist of mere empty air, which, when near to, and in little, is only a transparent nothing, and which only in the distance and in gross becomes blue ether? The century casts the flower-seeds of thy joy only from the porous sowing-machine of minutes, or rather, to the blest eternity itself there is no other handle than the instant. It is not that life consists of seventy years, but the seventy years consist of a continuous life, and one has lived, at all events, and lived enough, die when one may.

When, at length, the three sons of joy were about to seat themselves in the dining-hall of a laurel grove before their meat-and-drink offering, which Schoppe had stored away in the provision ship at Sesto, at that moment, a genteel stranger, elegantly dressed in one color, came through the twigs, with slow, stately steps, up to the reclining company, and addressed himself, forthwith, without inquiry, to Cesara, in slow, soft, and precisely pronounced German: "I am intrusted with an apology to Sir Count Cesara."—"From my father?" asked he quickly. "Beg pardon,—from my prince," replied the stranger; "he forbade your noble father, who arose ill, to travel in the cool of the morning, but towards evening he will meet you. In the mean time," he added, with a[Pg 18] gracious smile and a slight bow, "I sacrifice something on the noble Knight's account, in commencing the pleasure of being longer with you hereafter, Sir Count, by bringing you disappointment." Schoppe, who was neater at guessing than at speaking, immediately broke out,—for he never let himself be imposed upon by any man: "We are then pedagogic copartners and confederates. Welcome, dear Gray-leaguesman!"[7] "It gives me pleasure," said the stranger, coldly, who was dressed in gray.

But Schoppe had hit it; the stranger was hereafter to occupy the place of chief tutor to Cesara, and Schoppe was collaborator. To me this seems judicious; the electric-sparkling Schoppe could serve as the cat's-skin, the fox-tail, the glass cylinder, which should completely charge our youth, composed as he was of conductors and non-conductors; the chief tutor, as principal, being the operator and spark-taker, who should discharge him with his Franklin's-points.

The man was named Von Augusti, was Lector to the prince, and had lived much in the great world; he seemed, as is the case with all of this court-stamp, ten years older than he really was, for he was in fact only just thirty-seven.

One would have to suffer for it from the inverted ink-pots of the reviewing Xanthippes, if one should leave the reviewers or Xanthippes in any uncertainty as to who the prince really was of whom we have all made mention above. It was the hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess, in whose village of Blumenbühl the Count had been brought up, and into whose chief city he was next to remove. The Hohenfliess Infante was hurrying back, in a great dust and all[Pg 19] out of breath, from Italy, wherein he had left much spare coin and land-scrip, to Germany, in order there to coin, upon his own account, allegiance-medals, because his reigning father was going down the steps into the hereditary sepulchre, and was even now within a few paces of his coffin.

During dinner the Lector Augusti spoke of the lovely scenery with true taste, but with little warmth and impulse, preferring it by far to some Tempestas[8] in the Borromæan palace. Thence he passed on, in order to have occasion of mentioning the Knight as often as possible, to the personalities of the Court, and confessed that the German gentleman, M. de Bouverot, stood in especial favor,—for with courtiers and saints everything goes by grace,—and that the Prince was uncommonly afflicted in his nerves, &c. Courtiers, who, for the most part, cut their very souls according to the pattern of another's, do, however, draw up their ministerial reports of court so copiously and seriously for the uninitiated, that the reader of their gazettes must needs either laugh or go to sleep; a court-man and the book Des Erreurs et de la Verité call the general of the Jesuits God, the Jesuits men, and the non-Jesuits beasts. Schoppe listened with a dreadful pucker and twist of feature; he hated courts bitterly. Young Albano thought not much better of them; nay, as he was fond of venture, and liked much better to work and fight with the arm than with the fingers of the inner man, and delighted in tackling to the snow-plough and harrow and sowing-machine of life war-horses and thunder-steeds, instead of a team of clever home-and field-horses, of course people who went carefully[Pg 20] and considerately to work, and would rather do light, lacquered work, and delicate ladies' work, than Hercules'-labors, he did not particularly fancy. However he could not but feel a respect for the modesty of Augusti, (based as it was upon a noble self-reliance,) which never let him say a word about himself, as well as for the knowledge he had gained by travel.

Cesara,—by the way I shall continue through this Cycle to write it with a C, agreeably to the Spanish orthography; but in and after the 4th, since I am not used to that letter in my orthography, and cannot be forever misrepresenting myself through a long book, it will be written with a Z,—Cesara could not hear enough from the Lector about his father. He related to him the last act of the Knight in Rome, but with an irreligious coldness which produced in the youth a chill of a different kind. Don Gaspard, namely, had laid a wager with a German Nuncius, picture against picture, that he would take a certain German (Augusti would not name him), whose life was only one prolonged, moral filth-month in the princely stable of Epicurus, and in two days, without seeing him, would convert him for as long a time as the Nuncio should desire. The latter accepted the wager, but caused the German to be secretly watched. After two days the German locked himself up, became devout, pale, still, bed-ridden, and in conduct came near to a true Christian. The Nuncio watched the mischief for a week, then demanded the sudden retransformation, or the Circe's wand, which should bring back again the beastly shape. The Knight touched the German with the wand, and the Epicurean swine stood there perfectly sound and well. I know not which is the more inexplicable, the miracle, or the cold-bloodedness of the thing. But the[Pg 21] Lector could not say with what menstrua Gaspard forced these rapid solutions and evaporations and precipitations.

At length the Lector, who had long been frappé with the vocation and the collaboratorship of the singular Schoppe, came, by polite circumlocutions, upon the question, how the Knight had become acquainted with him. "Through the Pasquino," he replied. "He was just stepping round the corner of the Palazzo degli Ursini, when he saw some Romans and our hereditary prince standing round a man who was on his knees (they were my knees) before the statues of Pasquino and Marforio, and offering to them the following prayer: Dear Castor and Pollux! why do ye not secularize yourselves out of the ecclesiastical estate, and travel through my Germany in partibus infidelium, or as two diligent vicars? Could you not go round among the cities of the empire as missionary preachers and referendaries, or post yourselves as chevaliers d'honneur and armorial bearers on either side of a throne? Would to God they might at least vote thee, Pasquino, royal high-chaplain and master of ceremonies in the court chapels, or let thee down from the roof by a rope at the christening as baptismal angel! Say, could not you twins, now, once come forward and speak as petition-masters-general in the halls of the Diet, or, as magistri sententiarum, oppugn one another within the walls of the universities on Commencement days? Pasquino, can no Delia Porta[9] restore thee, were it only so far that thou mightest, at least, at Congresses and treaty-makings of the diplomatic corps, play the silhouetteur as the figure-head of the stove, or must you serve at the highest only in university libraries, as the busts of[Pg 22] critical editors? Ah, gay pair, would that Chigi, who stands here beside me, might only model you into a portable pocket edition for ladies, I would put you by, and not take you out of my pocket till I reached Germany! I can, however, do it even here on the island," said Schoppe; whereupon he drew forth the satirical work of art; for the renowned architect and modeller, Chigi, who heard him, had really cast a copy of it. Schoppe went on to tell how Don Gaspard then seriously stepped up to him, and asked him, in Spanish, who he was. "I am (he answered also in Spanish) actual Titular librarian to the Grand Master at Malta, and a descendant of the so-called grammatical dog, the toothed humanist, Scioppius (German Schoppe); my baptismal name is Pero, Piero, Pietro (Peter). But many here call me, by mistake, Sciupio or Sciopio (extravagance)."

Gaspard had an impartial, deep-reaching eye for every spirit, even though it were most unlike his own; and, least of all, did he seek a repetition of himself. He therefore took the librarian home with him. Since, now, the latter seemed to live solely by portrait-painting, and was besides just meaning to go back to Germany, he accordingly proposed to this rich, many-eyed, rough spirit, Albano's society, which only the present fellow-laborer, Augusti, was to share with him. But there were four things which the librarian demanded beforehand, as preliminaries,—a sitting from the Count, his profile, and—when both these had been granted—yet a third and a fourth, in the following terms: "Must I suffer myself to be calendered[10] by the three estates, and forced to take on gloss and smoothness by polishing-presses? I will not; whithersoever else, be it to heaven or hell, I will[Pg 23] accompany your son, but not into the stamping-washing-roasting-melting-and-forcing-works of great houses." This was granted easiest of all; besides, the second Imperial vicegerent of the paternal supremacy, Augusti, was appointed to the business in question. But upon the fourth point they came near falling out. Schoppe, who would rather be an outlaw than a slave or a freedman, and whose ground, no less imperially free than fruitful, would not endure a hedge, could accommodate himself only to accidental, undetermined services, and felt obliged to decline the fixum of a salary. "I will," said he, "deliver occasional sermons, but none of your weekly sermons; nay, it may be, oftentimes, I shall not enter the desk for a half-year together." The Knight considered it beneath him to be under obligations, and drew back, till Schoppe hit upon the diagonal road, and said he would give his society as a don gratuit, and should expect of the Knight, from time to time, a considerable don gratuit in return. As for the rest, Schoppe was now full as dear to the Knight as the first-best Turk of the Court who had ever helped him up his carriage-steps; his trial of a man was like a post-mortem examination, and after the trial he neither loved nor hated more cordially; to him, as he looked into the show-piece of blustering life, the manager and the first and second mistresses, and the Lears and Iphigenias and heroes were no friends, nor were the Kasperls and the tyrants and supernumeraries foes, but they were simply different actors in different parts. Ah, Gaspard, standest thou, then, in the front box, and not also on the stage of life itself? And dost thou not in the great drama recognize, like Hamlet, a lesser one? Ay, does not every stage imply, after all, a twofold life,—a copying and a copied?

[Pg 24]

Either the glass or two (or more) of wine, or else his annoying contrast to the elegant, sedate Lector, set Schoppe's winnowing-mill with all its wheels in motion, though this humor of his found small scope on the enchanting island; and when Augusti expressed a wish that Schoppe might go to Germany under happier auspices than other painters, the latter drew forth a pack of gilded pictures of German patron saints, and said, shuffling them: "Many a one would here lay a papal miserere on the desk and sing it off, particularly if, like me, he had to go into winter quarters among the German ice and fog-banks in the middle of spring;—and it is with reluctance, I am free to confess, I leave the Harlequin and Pulzinella and Scapin, and the whole comedia dell' arte behind. But the gentlemen saints whom I here shuffle have brought the lands under their charge into high and dry condition, and one passes through them with comfort. Mr. Architect, you laugh, but you know altogether too little of what these painted heavenly advowees hourly undertake in behalf of the German circles. Mr. Architect, show me, after all, a country anywhere, in which so many cudgels, programmes, professors, Perukes-allongées, learned advertisements, imperial notices, cits and surburbans, ceremonies, coronations, and Heidelberg tubs, but without indwelling Diogeneses, are to be mustered together as in the aforementioned? Or I appeal to you, Mr. Von Augusti! Point out to me, I pray, one single territory which is provided with such a Long Parliament, namely, a most lengthy Diet of the Empire, as it were, an extraordinarily wholesome pillula perpetua[11] which the patient is incessantly[Pg 25] swallowing, and which as incessantly purges him; and who is not reminded, as well as myself, in this connection, of the capitulatio perpetua, and in general of the body politic of the Empire, that perpetuum immobile,—and on good grounds?" Here Schoppe drank. "The body of the Empire becomes thereby, like the first principle of morals, or like virgin earth, altogether insoluble; nay, supposing one of us were to take an electoral sword, and cut it in two therewith, as if it were an earwig, still the half with the teeth would, like the cloven earwig, turn round and eat the latter half clean up,—and then there would be the whole continuous earwig rejoined and well fed into the bargain. It is not by any means to be regretted as a consequence of this close nexus of the Empire, that the corpus can devour and digest its own limbs, as the brook-crab does its stomach, without any real harm to itself, so that the corpus, like a Homeric god, can only be wounded, but not killed. Take this bunchy polypus-stalk, I often say, mash it to a pulp with Rösel,—turn it wrong side outward like a glove,—like Lichtenberg, cut the polypus in two dexterously with a hair,—like Trembley, stick and incorporate several severed limbs into one another, as other naturalists do imperial cities, abbeys, small provinces into greater, or the reverse,—and then examine after some days; verily, magnificent and whole and well, thy polypus will be found sitting there again, or my name is not Schoppe."

The Count had heard him again and again on this subject, and could therefore more easily and properly smile; the Lector, however, was learning all this for the first time, and even the comic actor is not such to his new hearers. But amidst all these diversions there still sounded on in Albano's soul a confused tumult, like the murmuring[Pg 26] of the waterfall of the coming times. He peered longingly through the wavering seams of the laurel-foliage, out toward the shining hills, when Dian said, in his painter's-language: "Is it not as if all the gods stood, with thousands of cornucopias, on the mountains around Lago Maggiore, and poured down wine and cascades, till the lake, like a goblet of joy, foams over and gushes down with the brimming juice?" Schoppe replied: "Pleasures of exceeding flavor, like pineapples, have the misfortune, that, like pineapples, they make the gums bleed." "I think," said Augusti, "that one ought not to reflect much upon the pleasures of life, any more than upon the beauties of a good poem; one enjoys both better without counting or dissecting them." "And I," said Cesara, "would calculate and dissect from very pride; whatever came of it I would abide, and I should be ashamed to be unhappy about it. If life, like the olive, is a bitter fruit, then grasp both with the press, and they will afford the sweetest oil." Here he rose to remain alone on the island till evening; he asked indulgence, but gave no excuse. His lofty, ambitious soul was incapable of descending to the smallest lie, even towards an animal. In Blumenbühl he used daily to entice the tame pigeons near him by holding out food; and his foster-sister often begged him to catch one; but he always said, "No," for he would not betray the confidence even of a brute creature.

While they followed him with their eyes, as he slowly retired through the laurel shades, with the shadows dancing after him and stray sunbeams gliding down over him, and, as in a dream, gently bent the branches apart with his hands extended before him, Dian broke forth: "What a statue of Jupiter!" "And the ancients," said Schoppe, joining in, "believed, moreover, that every god dwelt in[Pg 27] his own statue." "A magnificent, threefold breadth of brow, nasal bridge, and breast!" continued Dian. "A Hercules planting olive-trees on Olympus!" "It struck me very much," said the Lector, "that, after considerable study, I could read in his countenance what I wished and what was mutually contradictory,—coldness, warmth, innocence and gentleness, most readily defiance and force." Schoppe added: "It may be still harder for himself to compel such a congress of warring powers within him to become a peace-congress." "How beautifully," said the humanly feeling Dian, "must love sit upon so mighty a form, and how sublimely must anger!" "Those are two poetic beauties," replied Schoppe, "out of which two Pedagogiarchs and Zenophons, like us, can make little with their Cyrus in their Cyropædia."

Zesara had tasted only three glasses of wine; but the must of his thick, hot blood fermented under it mightily. The day grew more and more into a Daphnian and Delphic grove, in whose whispering and steamy thicket he lost himself deeper and deeper,—the sun hung in the blue like a white glistening snow-ball,—the glaciers cast their silvery glances down into the green,—from distant clouds it thundered occasionally,[12] as if spring were rolling along in his triumphal chariot far away towards us at the north,—the living glow of the climate and the hour, and the holy fire of two raptures, the remembered and the expected, warmed to life all his powers. And now that fever of young health seized upon him, in which it always seemed[Pg 28] to him as if a particular heart beat in every limb,—the lungs and the heart are heavy and full of blood,—the breath is hot as a Harmattan wind,—and the eye dark in its own blaze,—and the limbs are weary with energy. In this overcharge of the electrical cloud he had a peculiar passion for destroying. When younger, he often relieved himself by rolling fragments of rock to a summit and letting them roll down, or by running on the full gallop till his breath grew longer, or most surely by hurting himself with a penknife (as he had heard of Cardan's doing), and even bleeding himself a little occasionally. Seldom do ordinary, and still seldomer extraordinary, men attain full-blooming youth of body and spirit, but when it does happen, so much the more luxuriantly does one root bear a whole flower-garden.

With such emotions Albano now stood alone behind the palace towards the south, when a sport of his boyish years occurred to him.

He had, namely, often in May, during a heavy wind, climbed up into a thick-limbed apple-tree, which supported a whole green hanging cabinet, and had laid himself down in the arms of its branches. And when, in this situation, the wavering pleasure-grove swung him about amidst the juggling play of the lily-butterflies and the hum of bees and insects and the clouds of blossoms, and when the flaunting top now buried him in rich green, now launched him into deep blue, and now into the sunshine, then did his fancy stretch the tree to gigantic dimensions: it grew alone in the Universe, as if it were the tree of endless life, its root pierced far down into the abyss, the white-red clouds hung upon it as blossoms, the moon as a fruit, the little stars glistened like dew, and Albano reposed in its infinite summit, and a storm swayed the summit from day into night and from night into day.[Pg 29]

And now he stood looking up to a tall cypress. A southeast breeze had arisen from its siesta in Rome, and flying along had cooled itself by the way in the tops of the lemon-trees and in a thousand brooks and shadows, and now lay cradled in the arms of the cypress. Then he climbed up the tree, in order at least to tire himself. But how did the world stretch out before him, with its woods, its islands, and its mountains, when he saw the thunder-cloud lying over Rome's seven hills, just as if that old spirit were speaking from the gloom which once wrought in the seven hills as in seven Vesuviuses, that had stood before the face of the earth so many centuries with fiery columns, with erect tempests, and had overspread it with clouds and ashes and fertility, till they at last burst themselves asunder! The mirror-wall of the glaciers stood, like his father, unmelted before the warm rays of heaven, and only glistened and remained cold and hard,—from the broad expanse of the lake the sunny hills seemed on every hand to rise as from their bath, and the little ships of men seemed to lie fast stranded in the distance,—and, floating far and wide around him, the great spirits of the past went by, and under their invisible tread only the woods bowed themselves, the flower-beds scarcely at all. Then did the outward past become in Albano his own future,—no melancholy, but a thirst after all greatness that inhabits and uplifts the spirit, and a shrinking from the unclean baits of the future painfully compressed his eyelids, and heavy drops fell from them. He came down, because his internal dizziness grew at last to a physical. His rural education and the influence of Dian, who reverenced the modest course of nature, had preserved the budding garden of his faculties from the untimely morning sun and hasty growth; but the expectation[Pg 30] of the evening and the journey he had taken had conspired to make the day of his life now too warm and stimulating.

Roaming and dreaming, he lost himself among orange-blossoms. Suddenly it was to him as if a sweet stirring in his inmost heart made it enlarge painfully, and grow void, and then full again. Ah, he knew not that it was the fragrances which he had here in childhood so often drunk into his bosom, and which now darkly but powerfully called back every fantasy and remembrance of the past, for the very reason that fragrances, unlike the worn-out objects of the eye and ear, seldomer present themselves, and therefore the more easily and intensely renew the faded sensations. But when he happened into an arcade of the palace, which was colored mosaically with variegated stones and shells, and when he saw the waves playing and dancing on the threshold of the grotto, then did a moss-grown past all at once reveal itself: he sounded his recollections,—the colored stones of the grotto lay as it were full of inscriptions of a former time before his memory. Ah, here had he been a thousand times with his mother! She had showed him the shells and forbidden him to approach the waves; and once, as the sun was rising and the rippled lake and all the pebbles glistened, he had waked up on her bosom, in the midst of the blaze of lights.

O, was not, then, the place sacred, and was not here the overpowering desire pardonable, which he had so long felt to-day, to open a wound in his arm for the relief of the restless and tormenting blood?

He scratched himself, but accidentally too deep, and with a cool and pleasant exaltation of his more lightly-breathing nature he watched the red fountain of his arm[Pg 31] in the setting sun, and became, as if a burden had fallen off from him, calm, sober, still, and tender. He thought of his departed mother, whose love remained now forever unrequited. Ah, gladly would he have poured out this blood for her,—and now, too, love for his sickly father gushed up more warmly than ever in his bosom. O come soon, said his heart, I will love thee so inexpressibly, thou dear Father!

The sun grew cold on the damp earth,—and now only the indented mural crown formed by the gold wedges of the glacier-peaks glowed above the spent clouds,—and the magic-lantern of nature threw its images longer and fainter every moment, when a tall form, in an open red mantle, came slowly along towards him round the cedar-trees, pressed with the right hand the region of its heart, where little sparks glimmered, and with the half-raised left crushed a waxen mask into a lump, and looked down into its own breast. Suddenly it stiffened against the wall of the palace in a petrified posture. Albano placed his hand upon his light wound, and drew near to the petrified one. What a form! From a dry, haggard face projected between eyes which gleamed on, half hid beneath their sockets, a contemptuous nose with a proud curl,—there stood a cherub with the germ of the fall, a scornful, imperious spirit, who could not love aught, not even his own heart, hardly a higher,—one of those terrible beings who exalt themselves above men, above misfortune, above the earth, and above conscience, and to whom it is all the same whatever human blood they shed, whether another's or their own.

It was Don Gaspard.

The sparkling chain of his order, made of steel and precious stones, betrayed him. He had been seized with[Pg 32] the catalepsy, his old complaint. "O father!" said Albano, with terror, and embraced the immovable form; but it was as if he clasped cold death to his heart. He tasted the bitterness of a hell,—he kissed the rigid lip, and cried more loudly,—at last, letting fall his arm, he started back from him, and the exposed wound bled again without his feeling it; and gnashing his teeth with wild, youthful love and with anguish, and with great ice-drops in his eyes, he gazed upon the mute form, and tore its hand from its heart. At this Gaspard, awaking, opened his eyes, and said, "Welcome, my dear son!" Then the child, with overmastering bliss and love, sank on his father's heart, and wept, and was silent. "Thou bleedest, Albano," said Gaspard, softly holding him off; "bandage thyself!" "Let me bleed; I will die with thee, if thou diest! O, how long have I pined for thee, my good father!" said Albano, yet more deeply agitated by his father's sick heart, which he now felt beating more heavily against his own. "Very good; but bandage thyself!" said he; and as the son did it, and while hurrying on the bandage, gazed with insatiable love into the eye of his father,—that eye which cast only cold glances like his jewelled ring; just then, on the chestnut-tops which had been to-day the throne of the morning sun, the soft moon opened soothingly her holy eye, and it was to the inflamed Albano, in this home of his childhood and his mother, as if the spirit of his mother were looking from heaven, and calling down, "I shall weep if you do not love each other." His swelling heart overflowed, and he said softly to his father, who was growing paler in the moonlight, "Dost thou not love me, then?" "Dear Alban," replied the father, "one cannot answer thee enough: thou art very good,—it is very good." But[Pg 33] with the pride of a love which boldly measured itself with his father's, he seized firmly the hand with the mask, and looked on the Knight with fiery eyes. "My son," replied the weary one, "I have yet much to say to thee to-day, and little time, because I travel to-morrow,—and I know not how long the beating of my heart will let me speak." Ah, then, that previous sign of a touched soul had been only the sign of a disordered pulse. Thou poor son, how must thy swollen sea stiffen before this sharp air,—ah, how must thy warm heart cleave to the ice-cold metal, and tear itself away not without a skin-peeling wound!

But, good youth! who of us could blame thee that wounds should attach thee as it were by a tie of blood to thy true or false demigod,—although a demigod is oftener joined to a demi-beast than a demi-man,—and that thou shouldst so painfully love! Ah, what ardent soul has not once uttered the prayer of love in vain, and then, lamed by the chilling poison, like other poisoned victims, not been able any longer to move its heavy tongue and heavy heart! But love on, thou warm soul! like spring-flowers, like night-butterflies, tender love at last breaks through the hard-frozen soil, and every heart, which desires nothing else than a heart, finds at last its bosom!

The Knight took him up to a gallery supported by a row of stone pillars, which lemon-trees strewed all over with perfumes and with little, lively shadows, silver-edged by the moon. He drew two medallions from his pocket-book,—one represented a remarkably youthful-looking female face, with the circumscription, "Nous ne[Pg 34] nous verrons jamais, mon fils." "Here is thy mother," said Gaspard, giving it to him, "and here thy sister"; and handed him the second, whose lines ran into an indistinct, antiquated shape, with the circumscription, "Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère." He now began his discourse, which he delivered in such a low tone and in so many loose sheets (one comma often coming at one end of the gallery and the next at the other), and with such an alternation of quick and slow paces, that the ear of any eavesdropping inquisitor keeping step with them, under the gallery, had there been one down there, could not have caught three drops of connected sound. "Thy attention, dear Alban," he continued, "not thy fancy, must now be put on the stretch. Thou art, unhappily, to-day too romantic for one who is to hear so many romantic things. The Countess of Cesara ever loved the mysterious; thou wilt perceive it in the commission which she gave me a few days before her death, and which I was obliged to promise I would execute this very Good-Friday."

He said further, before beginning, that, as his catalepsy and palpitation of the heart increased critically, he must hasten to Spain to arrange his affairs, and, still more, those of his ward, the Countess of Romeiro. Alban made one brotherly inquiry about his dear sister, so long separated from him; his father gave him to hope he should soon see her, as she intended to visit Switzerland with the Countess.

As I do not perceive what people will gain by it, if I insert those (to me) annoying geese-feet[13] with the everlasting "said he," I will relate the commission in person. There would, at a certain time (the Knight said), come to him three unknown persons,—one in the morning, one[Pg 35] at noon, and one in the evening,—and each one would present him a card, in a sealed envelope, containing merely the name of the city and the house wherein the picture-cabinet, which Albano must visit the very same night, was to be found. In this cabinet he must touch and press all the nails of the pictures till he comes to one behind which the pressure makes a repeating-clock, built into the wall, strike twelve. Here he finds behind the picture a secret arras-door, behind which sits a female form with an open souvenir and three rings on her left hand, and a crayon in her right. When he presses the ring of the middle finger, the form will rise amidst the rolling of the internal wheel-work, step out into the chamber, and the wheel-work, which is running down, will stop with her at a wall whereon she indicates, by the crayon, a hidden compartment, in which lie a pocket-perspective glass and the waxen impression of a coffin-key. The eye-glass of the perspective arranges by an optical anamorphosis the snarl of withering lines on the medallion of his sister, which he had to-day received, into a sweet, young form, and the object-glass gives back to the immature image of his mother the lineaments of mature life. Then he is to press the ring-finger, and immediately the dumb, cold figure will begin to write with the crayon in the souvenir, and designate to him, in a few words, the place of the coffin, of whose key he has the waxen impression. In the coffin lies a black marble slab, in the form of a black Bible; and when he has broken it he will find a kernel therein, from which is to grow the Christmas-tree of his whole life. If the slab is not in the coffin, then he is to give the last ring of the little finger a pressure,—but what this wooden Guerike's weather-prophet of his destiny would do, the Knight himself could not predict.[Pg 36]

I am fully of opinion that from this bizarre testament the repeating-work and half of the wheel-work might easily be broken out, (just as clocks are now made in London with only two wheels,) without doing the dial-work or the movement of the hands the least injury.

Upon Albano all this testamentary whirl and whiz had, contrary to my expectation, almost no effect; excepting to produce a more tender love for the good mother who, when she already beheld, in the stream of life below, the swift image of the pouncing hawk of death, thought only of her son. Upon the fixed, iron countenance of his father he so gazed during this narrative with tender gratitude for the pains he had taken to remember and relate, as almost to lose the thread of the discourse, and in the moonshine and to the eye of his fancy the Knight grew to a Colossus of Rhodes, hiding half the horizon of the present, a being for whom this testamentary memory-work seemed almost too trivial.

Thus far Don Gaspard had spoken merely as a genuine man of the world, who always excludes from his speech (into which no special, intimate relations enter) all mention or flattery of a person, of others as well as of himself, and regards even historical persons merely as conditions of things, so that two such impersonalities with their grim coldness seemed to be only two speaking logics or sciences, not living beings with beating hearts. O, how softly did it flow, like a tender melody, into Albano's lovesick heart, which the pure and mild moon, and the glimmering island-garden of his early days, and the voice of his mother sounding on and echoing in his soul, all conspired to melt, when at length the father said: "So much have I to tell of the Countess. Of myself I have nothing to say to thee but to express my constant satisfaction[Pg 37] hitherto with thy life." "O, give me, dearest father, instruction and counsel for my future government," said the enraptured man, and as Gaspard's right hand twitched convulsively toward his more hurriedly beating heart, he followed it with his left to the sick spot and pressed intensely the hysterical heart as if he could arrest by grasping at the spokes this down-hill-rolling wheel of life. The Knight replied: "I have nothing more to say to thee. The Linden City (Pestitz) is now open to thee; thy mother had shut it against thee. The hereditary Prince, who will soon be Prince, and the minister, Von Froulay, who is my friend, will be thine. I believe it will be of service to thee to cultivate their acquaintance."

The sharp-sighted Gaspard saw at this moment suddenly flit across the pure, open countenance of the youth strange emotions and hot blushes, which nothing immediate could explain, and which instantly passed away, as if annihilated, when he thus continued: "To a man of rank, sciences and polite learning, which to others are final ends, are only means and recreations; and great as thy inclination for them may be, thou wilt, however, surely, in the end give actions the preference over enjoyments; thou wilt not feel thyself born to instruct or amuse men merely, but to manage and to rule them. It were well if thou couldst gain the minister, and thereby the knowledge of government and political economy which he can give thee; for in the sketch of one country as well as of one court thou hast the grand outlines of every greater one to which thou mayest be called, and for which thou wilt have to educate thyself. It is my wish that thou shouldst be even a favorite of the Prince and the Court, less because thou hast need of connections than because thou needest experience. Only through men are men to be[Pg 38] subdued and surpassed, not by books and superior qualities. One must not display his worth in order to gain men, but gain them first, and then, and not until then, show his worth. There is no calamity like ignorance; and not so much by virtue as by understanding is man made formidable and fortunate. Thou hast at most to shun men who are too like thee, particularly the noble." The corrosive sublimate of his irony consisted here, not in his pronouncing "noble" with an accented, ironical tone, but in his pronouncing it, contrary to what might have been expected, coldly and without any tone at all. Albano's hand, still on his, had for some time slipped down from his father's heart along the sharp-edged steel chain of his order to the golden, metal-cold lamb that hung from it. The youth, like all young men and hermits, had too severe notions of courtiers and men of the world: he held them to be decided basilisks and dragons,—although I can still excuse that, if he means by basilisks only what the naturalists mean,—wingless lizards,—and by dragons, nothing but winged ones, and thus regards them only as amphibia, hardly less cold and odious than Linnæus defines such to be. Besides, he cherished (so easily does Plutarch become the seducer of youth whose biographer he might have been, like me) more contempt than reverence for the artolatry (loaf and fish service) of our age, always transubstantiating (inversely) its god into bread,—for the best bread-studies or bread-carts,—for the making of a carrière,—for every one, in short, who was not a dare-devil, and who, instead of catapultas and war machines, operated with some sort of invisible magnetic wands, suction-works, and cupping-glasses, and took anything in that way. Every young man has a fine season in his life when he will accept no office, and every young woman has the[Pg 39] same in hers, when she will accept no husband; by and by they both change, and often take one another into the bargain.

As the Knight advanced the above propositions, certainly not offensive to any man of the world, there swelled in his son a holy, generous pride,—it seemed to him as if his heart and even his body, like that of a praying saint, were lifted by a soaring genius far above the race-courses of a greedy, creeping age,—the great men of a greater time passed before him under their triumphal arches, and beckoned him to come nearer to them: in the east lay Rome and the moon, and before him the Circus of the Alps,—a mighty Past by the side of a mighty Present. With the proud and generous consciousness that there is something more godlike in us than prudence and understanding, he laid hold of his father, and said: "This whole day, dear father, has been one increasing agitation in my heart. I cannot speak nor think rightly for emotion. Father, I will visit them all; I will soar away above men; but I despise the dirty road to the object. I will in the sea of the world rise like a living man by swimming, and not like a drowned man by corruption. Yes, father, let Fate cast a gravestone upon this breast, and crush it, when it has lost virtue and the divinity and its own heart."

What made Albano speak so warmly was that he could not avoid an irrepressible veneration for the great soul of the Knight; he continually represented to himself the pangs and the lingering death of so strong a life, the sharp smoke of so great a coldly quenched fire, and inferred from the emotions of his own living soul what must be those of his father, who in his opinion had only gradually thus crumbled upon a broad bed of black, cold worldlings, as the diamond cannot be volatilized except on a bed of dead, burnt-out, blacksmith's coals.[Pg 40] Don Gaspard, who seldom, and then only mildly, found fault with men,—not from love, but from indifference,—patiently replied to the youth: "Thy warmth is to be praised. All will come right in good time. Now let us eat."

The banquet-hall of our Islanders was in the rich palace of the absent Borromæan family. They conceded to the lovely island the prize-apple of Paris and the laurel-wreath. Augusti and Gaspard wrote their eulogies upon it in a clear, easy style, only Gaspard used the more antitheses. Albano's breast was filled with a new world, his eye with radiance, his cheeks with joyous blood. The Architect extolled as well the taste as the purse of the hereditary Prince, who by means of both had brought with him to his country, not artistic masters indeed, but still masterpieces, and at whose instance this very Dian was going to Italy to take casts for him there of the antiques. Schoppe replied: "I hope the German is as well supplied with painters' academies and painters' colics as any other people; our pictures on goods, our illuminated Theses in Augsburg, our margins of newspapers, and our vignettes in every dramatic work, (whereby we had an earlier Shakespeare Gallery than London,) our gallows-birds hung in effigy,—are well known to every one, and show at first sight how far we carry the thing. But I will even allow that Greeks and Italians paint as well as we; still we tower far above them in this, that we, like nature and noble suitors, never seek isolated beauty, without connected advantage. A beauty which we cannot also roast, sell at auction, wear, or marry, passes with us only for just what it is worth; beauty is with us (I hope)[Pg 41] never anything else but selvage and trimming to utility, just as, also, at the Diet of the Empire, it is not the side-tables of confectionery, but the session-tables, that are the proper work-tables of the body politic. Genuine Beauty and Art are therefore with us set, painted, stamped only on things which at the same time bring in something; e. g. fine Madonnas only in the journals of fashion,—etched leaves only on packages of tobacco-leaves,—cameos on pipe-bowls,—gems on seals, and wood-cuts on tallies; flower-pieces are sought, but on bandboxes,—faithful Wouwermanns, but in horses' stalls before the stallions,[14]—bas-reliefs of princes' heads, either on dollars or on Bavarian beer-pitcher covers, but both must be of unalloyed pewter,—rose-pieces and lily-pieces, but on tattooed women. On a similar principle, in Basedow's system of education, beautiful painting and the Latin vocabulary were always linked together, because the Institute more easily retains the latter by the help of the former. So, too, Van der Kabel never painted a hare to order, without requiring for himself one freshly-shot model after another to eat and copy. So again, the artist Calear painted beautiful hose, but painted them immediately on to his own legs."

The Knight heard such talk with pleasure, though he neither laughed at nor imitated it; to him all colors in the prism of genius were agreeable. Only to the Architect it was not enough in Greek taste, and not courtly enough for the Lector. The latter turned round to the departing Dian, with a somewhat flattering air, while Schoppe was recovering breath for renewed detraction of us Germans,[Pg 42] and said: "Formerly Rome took away from other lands only works of art, but now artists themselves."

Schoppe continued: "So also our statues are no idle, dawdling citizens, but they all drive a trade;—such as are caryates hold up houses; such as are angels bear baptismal vessels; and heathen water-gods labor at the public fountains, and pour out water into the pitchers of the maidens."

The Count spoke warmly for us, the Lector brilliantly: the Knight remarked, that the German taste and the German talent for poetic beauties made good and explained their want of both for other beauties (on the ground of climate, form of government, poverty, &c.). The Knight resembled a celestial telescope, through which the planets appear larger and the suns smaller; like that instrument, he took away from suns their borrowed lustre, without restoring to them their true and greater glory; he cut in twain, indeed, the noose of a Judas, but he extinguished the halo on a Christ's head, and in general he sought to make out ingeniously a parity and equality between darkness and light.

Schoppe was never silenced (I am sorry that in his toleration-mandate for Europe the German Circles should have been left out). He began again: "The little which I just brought forward in praise of the serviceable Germans has, it seems, provoked contradiction. But the slight laurel-crown which I place upon the holy body of the Empire shall never blind my eyes to the bald spots. I have often thought it commendable in Socrates and Christ, that they did not teach in Hamburg, in Vienna, or in any Brandenburg city, and go through the streets with their disciples; they would have been questioned, in the name of the magistrates, whether they could not[Pg 43] work; and had both been with families in Wetzlar, they would have extorted from the latter the negligence-money.[15] Touching the poetic art, Sir Knight, I have known many a citizen of the Empire who could make but little out of an ode unless it were upon himself: he fancied he could tell when poetic liberties infringed upon the liberty of the Empire: such a man, who certainly always marched to his work regularly, composedly, and considerately in Saxon term-times, was exceedingly pained and perplexed by poetic flights. And is it, then, so unaccountable and bad? The worthy inhabitant of an imperial city binds on in front a napkin when he wishes to weep, in order that he may not stain his satin vest, and the tears which fall from his eyes upon a letter of condolence he marks as he would any darker punctuation: what wonder, if, like the ranger, he should know no fairer flower than that on the posteriors of the stag, and if the poetical violets, like the botanical,[16] should operate upon him as a mild emetic. Such were, according to my notion, one way at least of warding off the reproach which is flung at us Germans."

What a singular night followed upon this singular day! Sleepy with travelling, all went to rest; only Albano, in whom the hot eventful day still burned on, said to the Knight that he could not now, with his breast full of fire, find coolness and rest anywhere but under the cold stars and the blossoms of the Italian spring. He leaned against a statue on the upper[Pg 44] terrace, near a blooming balustrade of citrons, that he might sweetly shut his eyes beneath the starry heaven, and still more sweetly open them in the morning. Even in his earlier youth had he, as well as myself, wished himself upon the Italian roofs of warm lands, in order, not as a night-walker, but as a regular sleeper, to wake up thereon.

How magnificently there does the eye open upon the radiant hanging gardens full of eternal blossoms above thee, whereas on thy German sweltry feather-pillow thou hast nothing before thee, when thou lookest up, but the bed-tail!

While Zesara was thus traversing waves, mountains, and stars with a stiller and stiller soul, and when at last garden and sky and lake ran together into one dark Colossus, and he sadly thought of his pale mother, and of his sister, and of the announced wonders of his future life, a figure dressed all in black, with the image of a death's-head on its breast, came slowly and painfully, and with trembling breath, up the terraces behind him. "Remember death!" it said. "Thou art Albano de Zesara?" "Yes," said Zesara, "who art thou?" "I am," it said, "a father of death.[17] It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so."

The limbs of the man continued to quake all over, in a frightful and almost audible manner. Zesara had often wished an adventure for his idle bravery; now he had it before him. Meantime, however, he kept a sharp watch with his eye, and when the monk said, "Look up to the evening star and tell me when it goes down, for my sight is weak," he threw only a hasty glance upwards. "Three stars," said he, "are still between it and the Alps." "When[Pg 45] it sets," the father continued, "then thy sister in Spain gives up the ghost, and thereupon she will speak with thee here from Heaven." Zesara was hardly touched by a finger of the cold hand of horror, simply because he was not in a room, but in the midst of young Nature, who stations her mountains and stars as watchmen around the trembling spirit; or it may have been because the vast and substantial bodily world, so near before us, crowds out and hides with its building-work the world of spirits. He asked, with indignation: "Who art thou? What knowest thou? What wilt thou?" and grasped at the folded hands of the monk, and held both imprisoned in one of his. "Thou dost not know me, my son," said the father of death, calmly. "I am a Zahouri,[18] and come from Spain from thy sister; I see the dead down in the earth, and know beforehand when they will appear and discourse. But their apparition above ground I do not see, and their discourse I cannot hear."

Here he looked sharply at the youth, whose features suddenly grew rigid and lengthened, for a voice like a female and familiar one began slowly over his head: "Take the crown,—take the crown,—I will help thee." The monk asked: "Is the evening-star already gone down? Is it talking with thee?" Zesara looked upward, and could not answer; the voice from Heaven spake again, and said the same thing. The monk guessed as much, and said: "Thus did thy father hear thy mother from on high, when he was in Germany; but he had me thrown into prison for a long time, because he thought I deceived him." At the mention of his "father," whose disbelief of the spiritual Zesara knew, he hurried[Pg 46] the monk, by his two hands held fast in his own single and strong one, down the terraces, in order to hear where the voice might now be. The old man smiled softly; the voice again spake above him, but in these words: "Love the beautiful one,—love the beautiful one,—I will help thee." A skiff was moored to the shore, which he had already seen during the day. The monk, who apparently wished to do away the suspicion of a voice being concealed anywhere, stepped into the gondola, and beckoned him to follow. The youth, relying on his bodily and mental strength and his skill in swimming, boldly pushed off with the monk from the island; but what a shudder seized upon his innermost fibres, when not only the voice above him called again, "Love the beautiful one whom I will show thee,—I will help thee," but when he even saw, off toward the terrace, a female form, with long, chestnut-brown hair, and dark eyes, and a shining, swan-like neck, and with the complexion and vigor of the richest climate, rise, like a nobler Aphrodite, revealed down to her bosom, from out the deepest waves. But in a few seconds the Goddess sank back again beneath the surface, and the spirit-voice continued to whisper overhead, "Love the beautiful one whom I showed thee." The monk coldly and silently prayed during the scene, of which he heard and saw nothing. At length he said: "On the next Ascension-day, at the hour of thy birth, thou wilt stand beside a heart which is not within a breast, and thy sister will announce to thee from Heaven the name of thy bride."

When before us feeble, rheumy creatures, who, like Polypuses and flowers, only feel and seek, but cannot see the light of a higher element, a flash darts, in the total eclipse of our life, through the earthly mass which[Pg 47] hangs before our higher sun,[19] that ray cuts in pieces the nerve of vision, which can bear only forms, not light; no burning terror wings the heart and the blood, but a cold shudder at our own thoughts, and in the presence of a new, incomprehensible world, chains the warm stream, and life becomes ice.

Albano, from whose teeming fancy a chaos might spring as easily as a universe, grew pale; but it was with him as if he lost not so much his spirit as his understanding. He rowed impetuously, almost unconsciously, to the shore,—he could not look the father of death in the face, because his wild fancy, tearing everything to pieces, distorted and distended all forms, like clouds, into horrid shapes,—he hardly heard the monk when he said, by way of farewell, "Next Good Friday, perhaps, I may come again." The monk stepped on board a skiff which came along of itself (propelled, probably, by a wheel under the water), and soon disappeared behind, or in, the little Fisher's island (Isola peschiere).

For the space of a minute Alban reeled, and it appeared to him as if the garden and the sky and all were a floating and fleeting fog-bank,—as if nothing were, as if he had not lived. This arsenical qualm was at once blown away from his stifled breast by the breath of the Librarian, Schoppe, who was piping merrily at the chamber window; all at once his life grew warm again, the earth came back, and existence was. Schoppe, who could not sleep for warmth, now came down to make his own bed also on the tenth terrace. He saw in Zesara an intense inward agitation, but he had long been accustomed to such, and made no inquiries.

[Pg 48]

Not by reasonings, but by pleasantries, is the ice most easily melted in our choked-up wheel-work. After a chatty hour, not much more was left of all that had passed in the youth's mind than a vexatious feeling and a happy one; the former, to think that he had not taken the monk by the cowl and carried him before the Knight; and the latter, at the remembrance of the noble female form, and at the very prospect of a life full of adventures. Still, when he closed his eyes, monsters full of wings, worlds full of flames, and a deep-weltering chaos, swept around his soul.

At last, in the cool of the after-midnight, his tired senses, under a slow and dissolving influence, approached the magnetic mountain of slumber; but what a dream came to him on that still mountain! He lay (so he dreamed) on the crater of Hecla. An upheaved column of water lifted him with it, and held him balanced on its hot waves in mid-heaven. High in the ethereal night above him stretched a gloomy tempest, like a long dragon, swollen with devoured constellations; near below hung a bright little cloud, attracted by the tempest,—through the light gauze of the little cloud flowed a dark red, either of two rose-buds or of two lips, and a green stripe of a veil or of an olive-twig, and a ring of milk-blue pearls or of forget-me-not,—at length a little vapor diffused itself over the red, and nothing was there but an open, blue eye, which looked up to Albano infinitely mild and imploring; and he stretched out his hands towards the enveloped form, but the water-column was too low. Then the black tempest flung hailstones, but in their fall they became snow, and then dew-drops,[Pg 49] and at last, in the little cloud, silvery light; and the green veil swept illuminated in the vapor. Then Albano exclaimed, "I will shed all my tears and swell the column, that I may reach thee, fair eye!" And the blue eye grew moist with longing, and closed with love. The column grew with a loud roaring, the tempest lowered itself, and pressed down the little cloud before it, but he could not touch it. Then he tore open his veins and cried, "I have no more tears, but all my blood will I pour out for thee, that I may reach thy heart." Under the bleeding the column rose higher and faster,—the broad, blue ether began to swim, and the tempest was dissipated like spray, and all the stars that it had swallowed came forth with living looks,—the little cloud, hovering freely, floated gleaming down to the column,—the blue eye, as it approached, opened slowly, and suddenly closed and buried itself deeper in its light; but a soft sigh whispered in the cloud, "Draw me to thy heart!" O, then he flung his arms through the flashing light and swept away the mist, and snatched a white form, that seemed to be made of moonlight, to his glowing breast. But ah! the melting snow of the light escaped from his hot arms,—the beloved one melted away and became a tear, and the warm tear found its way through his breast, and sank into his heart, and burned therein; and his heart began to dissolve, and seemed as if it would die.... Then he opened his eyes.

But what an unearthly waking! The little, white, spent cloud, stained with storm-drops, still hung bending down over him, in Heaven,—it was the bright, lovingly near moon, that had come in above him. He had bled in his sleep, the bandage of his wounded arm having been pushed off by its violent movement. His raptures[Pg 50] had melted the night-frost of ghostly terror. In a transfiguring euthanasia, his firm being fluttered loosely around like an uncertain dream,—he had been wafted and rocked upward into the starry heaven as on a mother's breast, and all the stars had flowed into the moon and enlarged her glory,—his heart, flung into a warm tear, gently dissolved therein,—out of him was only shadow, within him dazzling light,—the wind of the flying earth swept by before the upright flame of his soul, and it bent not. Ah, his Psyche glided with keen, unruffled, inaudible falcon-pinions, in silent ecstasy through the thin air of life....

It appeared to him as if he were dying, for it was some time before he became aware of the increasing warmth of his bleeding left arm, which had lifted him into the long Elysium that reached over from his dreaming into his waking state. He refastened the bandage more tightly.

All at once he heard, during the operation, a louder plashing below him than mere waters could make. He looked over the balcony, and saw his father and Dian, without a farewell,—which, with Gaspard, was only the poisonous meadow-saffron in the autumnal moment of leave-taking,—fleeing, like blossom-leaves dropped out of the flower-wreath of his life, away across the waves amid the swan-song of the nightingales!... O, thou good young man, how often has this night befooled and robbed thee! He spread out his arms after them,—the pain of the dream still continued, and inspired him,—his flying father seemed to him a loving father again,—in anguish he called down, "Father, look round upon me! Ah, how canst thou thus forsake me without a syllable? And thou too, Dian! O comfort me, if you hear me!"[Pg 51] Dian threw kisses to him, and Gaspard laid his hand upon his sick heart. Albano thought of that copyist of death, the palsy, and would gladly have held out his wounded arm over the waves, and poured out his warm life as a libation for his father, and he called after them, "Farewell! farewell!" Languishing, he pressed the cold, stony limbs of a colossal statue to his burning veins, and tears of vain longing gushed down his fair face, while the warm tones of the Italian nightingales, trilling in response to each other from bank and island, sucked his heart till it was sore with soft vampyre-tongues.——Ah, when thou shalt be loved, glowing youth, how thou wilt love!—In his thirst for a warm, communicative soul, he woke up his Schoppe, and pointed out to him the fugitives. But while the latter was saying something or other consolatory, Albano gazed fixedly at the gray speck of the skiff, and heard not a word.

The two continued up, and refreshed themselves by a stroll through the dewy island; and the sight of the alto-rilievo of day, as it came out in glistening colors from the fading crayon-drawings of the moonlight, woke them to full life. Augusti joined them, and proposed to them to take the half-hour's sail over to Isola Madre. Albano heartily besought the two to sail over alone, and leave him here to his solitary walks. The Lector now detected, with a sharper look, the traces of the young man's nightly adventures,—how beautifully had the dream, the monk, the sleeplessness, the bleeding, subdued the bold, defiant form, and softened every tone, and that mighty energy was now only a magic waterfall by moonlight![Pg 52] Augusti took it for caprice, and went alone with Schoppe; but the fewest persons possible comprehend, that it is only with the fewest persons possible, (and not with an army of visitors,) properly only with two,—the most intimate and like-minded friend and the beloved object,—one can bear to take a walk. Verily, I had as lief kneel down to make a declaration of love openly, in the face of a whole court, on the birthday of a princess,—for show me, I pray, the difference,—as to gaze on thee, Nature, my beloved, through a long vanguard and rear-guard of witnesses to my enraptured attitude!

How happy did solitude make Albano, whose heart and eyes were full of tears, which he concealed for shame, and which yet so justified and exalted him in his own mind! For he labored under the singular mistake of fiery and vigorous youths,—the idea that he had not a tender heart, had too little feeling, and was hard to be moved. But now his enervation gave him a soft, poetical forenoon, such as he had never before known, and in which he would fain have embraced tearfully all that he had ever loved,—his good, dear, far-off foster parents in Blumenbühl; his poor father, ill just in spring, when death always builds his flower-decked gate of sacrifice; and his sister, buried in the veil of the past, whose likeness he had gotten, whose after-voice he had heard this night, and whose last hour the nightly liar had brought so near to him in his fiction. Even the nocturnal magic-lantern show, still going on in his heart, troubled him by its mysteriousness, since he could not ascribe it to any known person, and by the prediction that at his birth-hour, which was so near,—the next Ascension-day,—he should learn the name of his bride. The laughing day took away, indeed, from the ghost-scenes their deathly hue,[Pg 53] but gave to the crown and the water-goddess fresh radiance.

He roamed dreamily through all holy places in this promised land. He went into the dark Arcade where he had found his childhood's relics and his father, and took up, with a sad feeling, the crushed mask which had fallen on the ground. He ascended the gallery, checkered with lemon-shadows and sunbeams, and looked toward the tall cypresses and the chestnut summits in the far blue, where the moon had appeared to him like an opening mother's eye. He approached a cascade, behind the laurel-grove, which was broken into twenty landing-places, as his life was into twenty years, and he felt not its thin rain upon his hot cheeks.

He then went back again to the top of the high terrace to look for his returning friends. How brokenly and magically did the sunshine of the outward world steal into the dark, holy labyrinth of the inner! Nature, which yesterday had been a flaming sun-ball, was to-day an evening star, full of twilight: the world and the future lay around him so vast, and yet so near and tangible, as glaciers before a rain appear nearer in the deepening blue. He stationed himself on the balcony, and held on by the colossal statue; and his eye glanced down to the lake, and up to the Alps and to the heavens, and down again; and, under the friendly air of Hesperia, all the waves and all the leaves fluttered beneath their light veil. White towers glistened from the green of the shore, and bells and birds crossed their music in the wind: a painful yearning seized him, as he looked along the track of his father; and, ah! toward the warmer Spain, full of voluptuous spring-times, full of soft orange-nights, full of the scattered limbs of dismembered giant mountain-ridges,[Pg 54] heaped around in wild grandeur,—thither how gladly would he have flown through the lovely sky! At length, joy and dreaming and parting were all melted into that nameless melancholy, in which the excess of delight clothes the pain of limitation,—because, indeed, it is easier to overflow than to fill our hearts.

All at once Albano was touched and smitten,—as if the Divinity of Love had sent an earthquake into his inner temple, to consecrate him for her approaching apparition,—as he read on a young Indian-tree near him the little sign bearing its name,—the "Liana." He gazed upon it tenderly, and said again and again, "Dear Liana!" He would fain have broken off a twig for himself; but when he reflected, that if he did water would run out of it, he said, "No, Liana, I will not cause thee to weep!" and so forbore, because in his memory the plant stood in some sort of relationship to an unknown dear being. With inexpressible longings to be away, he now looked toward the temple-gates of Germany,—the Alps. The snow-white angel of his dream seemed to veil herself deep in a spring-cloud, and to glide along in it speechless,—and it was to him as if he heard from afar harmonica-tones. He drew forth, just for the sake of having something German, a letter-case, whereon his foster-sister Rabette had embroidered the words, "Gedenke unserer" (Think of us): he felt himself alone, and was now glad to see his friends, who were gayly rowing back from Isola Madre.

Ah, Albano, what a morning would this have been for a spirit like thine ten years later, when the compact bud of young vigor had unfolded its leaves more widely and tenderly and freely! To a soul like thine would have arisen at such a period, when the present was pale before it, two worlds at once,—the two rings around the Saturn[Pg 55] of time,—that of the past and that of the future: then wouldst thou not merely have glanced over a short interval of race-ground to the pure, white goal, but turned thyself round, and surveyed the long, winding track already run. Thou wouldst have reckoned up the thousand mistakes of the will, the missteps of the soul, and the irreparable waste of heart and brain. Couldst thou then have looked upon the ground without asking thyself: "Ah, have the thousand and four earthquakes[20] which have passed through me, as through the land behind me, enriched me as these have enriched the soil? O, since all experiences are so dear,—since they cost us either our days, or our energies, or our illusions,—O why must man every morning, in the presence of Nature, who profits by every dew-drop that stands in a flower-cup, blush with such a sense of impoverishment over the thousand vainly dried tears which he has already shed and caused! From springs this almighty mother draws summers; from winters, springs; from volcanoes, woods and mountains; from hell, a heaven; from this, a greater,—and we, foolish children, know not how from a given past to prepare for ourselves a future, which shall satisfy us! We peck, like the Alpine daw, at everything shiny, and carry the red-hot coals aside as if they were gold-pieces, and set houses on fire with them. Ah! more than one great and glorious world goes down in the heart, and leaves nothing behind; and it is precisely the stream of the higher geniuses which flies to spray and fertilizes nothing, even as high waterfalls break and flutter in thin mist over the earth."

Albano welcomed his friends with atoning tenderness; but the youth became, as the day waxed, as dull and[Pg 56] heavy-hearted as one who has stripped his chamber at the inn, settled his bill, and has only a few moments left to walk up and down in the bare, rough stubble-field, before the horses are brought. Like falling bodies, resolutions moved in his impetuous soul with increasing velocity and force every new second: with outward mildness, but inward vehemence, he begged his friends to start with him this very day. And so in the afternoon he went away with them from the still island of his childhood, speedily to enter, through the chestnut avenues of Milan, on a new theatre of his life, and to come upon the trap-door, which opens down into the subterranean passage of so many mysteries.

Before I dedicated Titan to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor and Feudal Provost of Flachsenfingen, Mr. Von Hafenreffer, I first requested permission from him in the following terms:—

"Since you have assisted far more in this history than the Russian Court did in Voltaire's Genesis-History of Peter the Great, you cannot confer any handsomer favor upon a heart longing to thank you, than the permission to offer and dedicate to you, as to a Jew's God, what you have created."

But he wrote me back on the spot:—

The Latin line is a cipher, and shall remain dark to the public. What the same public has to demand in the way of Introductory Programme consists of four explanations of title, and one of fact.

The first nominal explanation, which relates to the Jubilee Period, I get from the founder of the Period, the Rector Franke, who explains it to be an Era or space of time, invented by him, of one hundred and fifty-two Cycles, each of which contains in itself its good forty-nine tropical Lunar-Solar years. The word Jubilee is prefixed by the Rector for this reason, that in every seventh year a lesser, and in every seven times seventh, or forty-ninth, a greater, Jubilee-, Intercalary-, Indulgence-, Sabbath-, or Trumpet-year occurred, in which one lived without debts, without sowing and laboring, and without slavery. I make a sufficiently happy application, as it seems to me, of this title, Jubilee, to my historical chapters, which conduct the business-man and the business-woman round and round in an easy cycle or circle full of free Sabbath-, Indulgence-, Trumpet-, and Jubilee-hours, in which both have neither to sow nor to pay, but only to reap and to rest; for I am the only one who, like the bowed and crooked-up drudge of a ploughman, stand at my writing-table, and see sowing-machines, and debts of honor, and manacles, before and on me. The seven thousand four[Pg 58] hundred and forty-eight tropical Lunar-Solar years which one of Franke's Jubilee periods includes are also found with me, but only dramatically, because in every chapter just that number of ideas—and ideas are, indeed, the long and cubic measure of time—will be presented by me to the reader, till the short time has become as long to him as the chapter required.

A Cycle, which is the subject of my second nominal definition, needs by this time no definition at all.

The third nominal definition has to describe the obligato-leaves, which I edit in loose sheets in every Jubilee period. The obligato-leaves admit absolutely none but pure contemporaneous facts, less immediately connected with my hero, concerning persons, however, the more immediately connected with him; in the obligato-leaves, moreover, not the smallest satirical extravasate of digression, no, not of the size of a blister, is perceptible; but the happy reader journeys on with his dear ones, free and wide awake, right through the ample court-residence and riding-ground and landscape of a whole, long volume, amidst purely historical figures, surrounded on all sides by busy mining-companies and Jews'-congregations, advancing columns on the march, mounted hordes, and companies of strolling players,—and his eye cannot be satisfied with seeing.

But when the Tome is ended, then begins—this is the last nominal definition—a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my honey-moons, because I make less honey therein[Pg 59] than I eat, busily employed, not as a working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb. Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'Horen,' Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened?

As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the contrat-social among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always stick to the subject-matter,—which is the history,—because otherwise people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this, that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty volumes, or even a longer one,—as in this, for instance,—thinks or laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,—which sentence has been already executed on me more than once.

Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present reduced to a prescriptive right and[Pg 60] confirmed into a servitude, the reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,—as I do here,—have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a matter of course, not only the tribute as alms, but also the don gratuit as quarterly assessment. So does not merely the cultivated Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.

I come now to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor, Von Hafenreffer, who is the subject of my promised exposé of fact.

It must have been formerly learned from the 45th Dog-Post-Day, who governs Flachsenfingen, namely, my revered father. This striking promotion of mine was, at the bottom, more a step than a spring; for I was, previously, no less than a Jurist, consequently the germ or bud of an embryo Doctor utriusque, and consequently a nobleman, since in the Doctor the whole spawn and yolk of the Knight lies; therefore the former, as well as the latter, when anything chances by, lives upon his saddle or stirrup, although less in a robber's castle than in a robber's chamber; I have, therefore, since the preferment, changed less myself than my castle of residence;—the paternal seat in Flachsenfingen is at present my own.

I care not now to eat my sugar-cake at court with sin,—although one earns sugar-cake and manna more comfortably than ship-bread,—but I represent, in order to[Pg 61] make a profit upon my adventure, the whole Flachsenfingen Department of Foreign Affairs at home here in the castle, together with the requisite deciphering chancery. This, then, is what we shall do: we have a Procurator in Vienna, two Residents in five Imperial cities, a Secretary of the Comitia in Ratisbon under the Cross-Bench,[21] three Chancery-clerks of the circle, and an Envoyé-Plenipotentiary at a well-known and considerable court not far from Hohenfliess, who is no other than the aforementioned Mr. Feudal Provost Von Hafenreffer. To the latter my father has even advanced a complete silver-service, which we lend him, till he shall have received his recall, because it is for our own interest that a Flachsenfingen ambassador should, while abroad, do extraordinary honor, by his extravagance, to the princely hat or coronet of Flachsenfingen.

Now it is no joke to stand on such a post as this of mine; the whole legation-writing-and-reading company write to me under frank, the chiffre banal and the chiffre déchiffrant are in my hands, and I understand, as it seems to me, the whole mess. It is unutterable, all that I thus learn: it could not be read by men nor drawn by horses, if I were disposed to hatch, biographically, and feed and reel off the whole silk-worm seed of novels, which the corps of ambassadors send me every post-day in closely-sealed packages. Yes (to use another metaphor), the biographical timber which my float-inspection launches for me from up above,—now into the Elbe, now into the Saale, now into the Danube,—stands already so high before me in the ship-yard, that I could not use it up, supposing I drove on the æsthetical building of my biographical fools'-ships, masquerade-balls, and[Pg 62] enchanted castles, day and night, year out and year in, and never danced, nor rode, nor spoke, nor sneezed again in my life....

Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against many another spawn, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports, would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean cloister-passages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now, for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent women of the world, veimers[22] ministers of justice, as well as jesters pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the Pointeurs.[23]

I come back to my ambassador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies me—without neglecting other duties—from month to month with as many personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;—the smallest trifles are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different way of thinking from that of other ambassadors, who in their reports make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every cul de sac, servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his opera-glass of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a hand-and-horse service[Pg 63] of good luck, no one of us can wonder,—that is, I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,—with such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,—with such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,—in short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, or Montgolfiers,[24]—it cannot of course be anything but just what is expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much) on the Sun, on Uranus and Sirius, and for which even the lucky quill-scraper who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself, and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy tooth of time,—especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by the tooth-saw of the critical file,—shall be able to make any impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but unhappily every nature holds itself,—as Dr. Crusius does the world,—not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.

The present Titan enjoys, besides, the further advantage that I at this moment inhabit and grace the paternal court, and accordingly, as draughtsman, have certain sins near and bright before my eyes in a position most favorable for observation, of which at least Vanity, Libertinism, and Idleness will stay and sit for their likeness; for fate has sowed these mushrooms and mosses as high as possible among the upper classes, because in the lower and broader they would have spread too much, and sucked them[Pg 64] dry,—which seems to be the pattern of that same foresight by which ships always have their assafœtida which they bring from Persia hanging overhead on the mast, in order that its stench may not contaminate the freight on deck. Moreover, I have up here in the court all the new fashions already around me for my observation and contempt, before they have been, down below there, only traduced, not to say commended,—e. g. the fine fashion of the Parisians, that women shall by a slight tuck in their dress show their calves, which they do in Paris, in order to let it be seen that they are not gentlemen, who, as is well known, walk on wooden legs,—this fashion will to-morrow or day after to-morrow (for it has arrived on an individual lady) be certainly introduced. But the females of Flachsenfingen imitate this fashion on quite another ground,—for gentlemen among us have no defect,—and that is, as a way of proving that they are human beings, and not apes (to say nothing less), since, according to Camper and others, man alone has calves. The same proof was adduced ten years ago, only on higher grounds. For since, according to Haller, man is distinguished from monkey in no other respect than by the possession of a posterior, the female officers of the crown, the dressing-maids, sought as much as possible to magnify in the persons of their mistresses this characteristic of their sex by art,—by the so-called cul de Paris; and, with such a penultimate of the ultimate, it became then a jest and an amusement to distinguish at a distance of two hundred paces a woman of the world from her female ape,—a thing which now many who know their Buffon by heart will venture to do, when they are no nearer to her than too near.

Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I[Pg 65] maintain in several of the German cities;—my honored father pays for them;—in most places one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much like perspective-glasses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author, from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that a staid, quiet man, whom nobody knows but his barber, and whose course of life is like a dark, unfrequented cul de sac, but whom one of my envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror, which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all, into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,—the case may occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair, buttons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of Indian plants which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter.

People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no ambassadors near me.

But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out. No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery, and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge,[Pg 66] has seemed thus far to avert the discovery of the true names of my histories, and, indeed, with such success, that of all the manuscripts which have hitherto been despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject, not one has smelt the mouse,—and truly fortunate for the world; for so soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first volumes of Titan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.

Nothing is to be inferred from the names which I use, for I press into the service God-parents for my heroes in the most singular ways. Have I not, e. g., often of an evening, during the marching and countermarching of the German armies, who made their crusades to the holy sepulchre of freedom, gone up and down through the lanes of the camp, with my writing-tablets in my hands, and caught and entered the names of the privates,—which, just before bedtime, were called out aloud, like the names of saints,—just as they fell, in order to distribute them again among my biographical people? And has not merit been promoted thereby, and many a common soldier risen to be a nobleman fit for table and tournament, and have not provost-marshals been raised to ministers of justice, and red-cloaks to patribus purpuratis? And did ever a cock crow in all the army after this corps of observation slinking round mobilized on two legs?

For authors who wish at the same time to narrate and disguise true anecdotes, I am, perhaps, on the whole, a model and file-leader. I have studied and imitated longer than other historical inquirers those little innocent stretching and wrenching processes which can make a history unrecognizable to the very hero of the same, and I fancy[Pg 67] I know how one is to make good biographies of princes, protocols of high traitors, legends of saints, and auto-biographies; no stronger touches decide the matter than those slight ones, by which Peter of Cortona (or Beretino) in the presence of Ferdinand of Tuscany transformed a weeping child into a laughing one, and the reverse.

Voltaire demands more than once, as he always does,—for he gave mankind, like an army, every order of march three times, and repeated himself and everything else most indefatigably,—that the historian shall arrange his history after the law-table of the drama, to a dramatic focal point. It is, however, one of the first dramatic rules which Lessing, Aristotle, and the Greek models give us, that the dramatic poet must lend to every historical circumstance which he treats all that is favorable to the poetic illusion, as well as keep clear of everything opposite, and that he must never sacrifice beauty to truth, but the reverse. Voltaire gave, as is well known, not only the easy rule, but the hard model also; and this great theatre poet of the world's theatre, in his benefit dramas of Peter and Charles, never stuck to the truth where he was sure he could attain sooner to illusion. And that is properly the genuine romantic history corresponding to the historical romance. It is not for me, but for others,—namely, the Provost and the Secretaries of Legation,—to decide how far I have treated a true history illusorily. It is a misfortune that the true history of my hero can hardly ever see the light; otherwise the justice might be done me that connoisseurs would confront my poetical deviations with the truth, and thereafter give each of us more easily his own, as well the truth as myself. But this reward is what all[Pg 68] royal historiographers and scandalous chroniclers must resign nolens volens, because the true history never appears in conjunction with their works.

But in the composition of a history an author must also keep a sharp look-out upon this point, that it shall not only hit and betray no real persons, but also no false ones, and in fact nobody at all. Before I, e. g., choose a name for a bad prince, I must look through the genealogical index of all governing and governed families, in order not to use a name which some person or other already bears; thus, in Otaheite, even the words which sound like the name of the king are abolished after his coronation, and supplied by others. Now, as I was formerly acquainted with no living courts at all, I was not in a situation, when preparing the battle-pieces and night-pieces which I painted of the Cabals, the Egoism, and the Libertinism of biographical courts, to succeed in skilfully avoiding every resemblance to real ones; yes, for such an idiot as I, it was a miserable help, even, to be often laying Machiavelli open before me, in order, with the assistance of the French history, by painting from the two, to turn off the edge of the application at least upon countries in which no Frenchman or Italian ever had the influence that is generally attributed to both of them upon other Germans; just as Herder, in opposition to those naturalists who derive certain misshapen tribes of men from a half-parentage of apes, makes the very good remark that most of the resemblances to apes—the retreating skull of the Calmucks, the prominent ears of the Pevas, the slender hands in Carolina—appear just in those countries where there are no apes at all. Formerly, then, as was said, striking unlikenesses I could not succeed in hitting; now, on the contrary, every court[Pg 69] around which my legation-flotilla coasts is well known to me, and therefore secure from accidental resemblances, particularly every one which I describe,—that of Flachsenfingen, that of Hohenfliess, &c. The theatrical mask which I have on in my works is not the mask of the Greek comedian, which was embossed after the face of the individual satirized,[25] but the mask of Nero, which, when he acted a goddess on the stage, looked like his mistress,[26] and when he acted a god, like himself.

Enough! This digressive introductory programme has been somewhat long, but the Jubilee-period was so, too: the longer the St. John's day of a country, the longer its St. Thomas's night. And now let us dance along together into the book,—into this free ball of the world,—I first as leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me; so that, amidst the sounding baptismal and funeral bells in the Chinese house of this world-building,—welcomed by the singing-school of the muses,—serenaded from on high by the guitar of Phœbus,—we may dance gayly from Tome to Tome, from Cycle to Cycle, from one digression to another, from one dash to another,—till either the work comes to an end, or the workman, or everybody!

[Pg 70]

The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;—the Librarian sought a physical solution of the acoustic and optical illusion; the Lector sought a political one: he could not at all comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially meant by it all.

This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar. "Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain beats gladly a free heart.

At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they approached the goal of[Pg 72] their long riding-ground, full of countries, and now the Principality of Hohenfliess lay only one principality distant from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is known to geographical readers, Haarhaar. The Lector told the Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much because they were diplomatic relatives—although it is true that, among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old folks among the Brandenburghers—as because they were really relatives, and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two courts,—which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,—with all their heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him, namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial estate of Hohenfliess—its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and breed of horses—in the highest bloom, and to hate and[Pg 73] curse in the highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the shepherd's-flute; not of the energies and matrimonial prospects of others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must ruin!"

As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an excursion to Blumenbühl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short, that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of Blumenbühl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.

It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee, because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however, to the[Pg 74] Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned round, the tower of Blumenbühl below them to the east; from the one and from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village, and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days. He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life, and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.

But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood, when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod, over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.

It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day—and likewise on the birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not received the title yet—that this same director—that was to be—had his[Pg 75] chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pestitz, and see the Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the flail of the state, by way of experiment, into a drill-plough. He was a brisk, bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill to others, and to whom nothing made time pass heavily but pastime. "In the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it, for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,—little as there was in it,—and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.

But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to the reader?

Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only inborn not acquired sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclopædia of all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say, the rector of the place,—named Wehmeier, better known by the title of Band-box-master,—after schooling the village youth for the usual number of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest Struve's spare hours, his Otia and Noctes Hagianæ, in teaching Albano, and driving into the mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy—impelled by internal streams—alphabetic pins,—so as to make it the barrel of a speech-organ. Of[Pg 76] course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So, also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary, sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests, only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating aura seminalis to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider, you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups, instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,—and who grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the vine-dressers, with your hoeing and[Pg 77] your dunging and your clipping. O, can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all, alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt ourselves to the perception of her beauty,—can you ever, in any way, make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence it is that your élèves so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.

Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and made the mark ["with care"] with which merchants commend valuable boxes of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at evening before the new teacher from the city.

Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in reference to her companion, may[Pg 78] be compared with Luke, and mine with Matthew.[28] Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid up against this day as a birthday christening present.

But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house; for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will, however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister, Rabette, that annoying foster) said, without thinking, No, although she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,—then the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and pleaded for him, without knowing why,—then Albina protested at least he should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,—then he marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition, gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.

[Pg 79]

Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years. Exultingly did his new and old Adam—they flew side by side—flap their wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and earnings,—because an honest man like him finds always in the body politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the stone drapery remains,—nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.

The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the herdsman's mountain[Pg 80] fortification, and received from the soldier's wife the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the windows and looked in beckoning,—when Albano beheld, under the window toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,—when at the western window he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,—when he placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!" then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.

The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat. The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who, blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley, and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself[Pg 81] free and passive into the broad ether!—and so plashing up and down in the cool, all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,—or to sweep after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun, and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter, intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red clouds!...

Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones? Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,—just as if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness, and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the body the body also can lift up the soul.

The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade along with the brook, which was running[Pg 82] away into the pale-green birch thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,[29] and he loved to go with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook, deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He could not accomplish it,—the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the brook broader,—the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high overhead;—but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus, for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as the longest; but the day after either was fatal.[30]

At last, after the progress of some hours in time and space, he heard, beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called out on all sides of him, but in a cry;—it was his private patron saint, the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his account at the foot of the mountain.

He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant[Pg 83] lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white, glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,—when he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town—views of which hung in the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the mountains—distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates for him were closed,—and when, indeed, everything seemed flying westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood—ah yes, every age—often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's. Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than they show or we imagine.

Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner, and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,—and the thought that this was the birthday of his foster-father,—and his inexpressible love for his afflicted mother,[Pg 84] upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when he was alone,—and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his seeking mother.

He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.

Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep only their promises, but never a threat,—resembling the forest-officers of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws, impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to one hundred kreutzers.[31] They, however, like Solon, who gave out his laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.

I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself,[Pg 85] were I not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying back of the table dinner-service.

Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and phosphorescing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,—even as at evening we remember the morning,—and the forms of Nature drew nearer to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the screaming of the cocks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again on the shore of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy lamb-clouds!

Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes and groping too far into the garden,—besides, the blind girl did not see,—holding his arms open before him so as not to run against anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up, he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside, stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one, holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"—and as she, with a modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down on her bowed head with sweet emotion.[Pg 86]

Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,—from whose ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give them back,—she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an inner, finer band, and the blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of Dresden into her apron, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came trudging up the Pestitz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly, to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and would rather please herself in the glass than others out of it. The merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon, and a very serviceable leather queue of Würzburg fabric into the bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,—so was Lea[Pg 87] with hope,—the Jew said he must pack up,—besides, the hair-queue which he had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French Insigné, and buckled on the Würzburg sheath.

And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-god, to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.

By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of pure monkery and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape, and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires of Pestitz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....

But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious lady,—for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the male support of Titan, firmly planted by some farmers'[Pg 88] boys—to whom, moreover, Albina has intrusted the remarche-règlement of hastening his return—on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half as much as the last bird.

I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine figure!

The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.

Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every minute his élève fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments, like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus;[Pg 89] "and this too, now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God! Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting—like a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge—that children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are, and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet, in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years old,—supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.

When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps. The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in the way of[Pg 90] his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The soldier's wife wrung her hands,—the servants arranged themselves for the taking down from the cross,—the poor little fellow, in a fever, drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole." He would have done it—and put an untimely end to his life and my Titan—merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;—ah, Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler, end in a discord?—and, secondly, because he had there a singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as spectator of this début. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his pockets;—the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard, and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The[Pg 91] Band-box master was best off; for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.

Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the ground below.

Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it, from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as if they could eat him,"—as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the work-shop,—and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned, controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his staving through a window, and[Pg 92] firing, from the port-hole, a few of the most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.

By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the Würzburg queue like a tail-feather.

Wehmeier stared at the cauda prehensilis (the ring-tail), and by his attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of his—Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten, home.

The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,—yes, as a sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the cabinet of the dining-room,—and for Albano Albina had already contrived an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the vocation of the Province. Ah, but[Pg 93] what did the lady get from it all but flames, which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the sprinkling of the magister?

Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness, because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,—then step by step she took back the right,—but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their mouths,—and at last said he should just give the child up to her.

But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own, and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him—though he himself dared and did too much—to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback, or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner, and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?

Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his defiant way to the father's study, and[Pg 94] therefore to the court-martial punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning, tied on the vena cava of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"

He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated, into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant. Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation with wine.

In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of the dulcimer let his musical hammer[Pg 95] fall on the stringed floor. Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs, ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their leather aprons and culs de Paris, to take themselves off instantly.

Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle, who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing, convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones. After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon[Pg 96] himself by his rides and his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely, herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.

Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained cold and hard,—for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point, the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue, which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Würzburg appendage off over his head. Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment, with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him, "and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him, but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair as an act of[Pg 97] obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children in high life.

Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off, the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then will the old man read the Decretum over again still more slowly, so as almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it, make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry cheeks,—then will he look a pretty long time after his departing darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over the address of the diploma at his will.

Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?[Pg 98]

Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.

Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna, he said not, as usual, nolo episcopari; he did not say he was hemmed round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of fortune,—instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more common to brides,—he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and Rabette, and all.

But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as entertaining[Pg 99] acteur of the table, he had so much to do with conversing, savoir vivre, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers, chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague, and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume to himself the magnificent winter crop in Alban's sowed field as his own summer crop. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]

With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir," replied coldly and gravely the paradeur of a Falterle by the side of our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."

What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two[Pg 100] brothers-in-office!—the master of accomplishments with the motley scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him, and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,—the one flapping up like a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A magnificent set-off, I repeat!

The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his napkin open first,—which became now, as it were, introductory programme and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "Posément, Monsieur," said he to the novice, "il est messéant de déplier la serviette avant que les autres aient déplié les leurs." After some minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one à la Brittanière, with rings. "Il est mésseant, Monsieur,"[Pg 101] said the master of accomplishments, "de souffler sa soupe." The Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short, frightened into a dead calm.

When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed more inwardly than outwardly.

After the bomb, came in a pike au four, to which, as is well known, the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "Pardonnez, Monsieur," said his rival gourmand, "c'est du brochet au four, mon cher Compte; mais il est mésseant de demander le nom de quelque mets qu'il soit,—on feint de le savoir."

It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced through the Magister's marrow and bone; the instruments of passion which lay in the cut-off head of the pike au four, as in an armory, continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them, and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine, and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed[Pg 102] him most lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and the pike au four, and could not help laughing up there on his planet, to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out of him every day as that other fellow raked in.

We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,—at which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,—until at least with one word he had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son; but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like vines and bees. Besides,[Pg 103] deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by opera supererogationis in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g. Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin bow?

But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard, clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the frère terrible, wherewith they kept him under,—but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling; however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.

Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a favorable light upon his dancing and[Pg 104] music scholars therein, as well as himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old, speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes, cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider, ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody, because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I," that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly, not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only honey (i. e. a little praise).

"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow; and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat cracking under[Pg 105] his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went slowly out.

The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the close, drowsy cradle of childhood,—he had sprung at once out of the warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,—he saw the toga virilis hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"

Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation, resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of the fig-tree seeming fruits sprout forth, which are only the fleshy rinds of the blossoms!

And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,—just now must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his bosom,—he determined to pass through the coming years as through a white colonnade of monumental pillars,—already a mere Alumnus from the city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic author,—and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father? Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of[Pg 106] his inner world into a sweltry mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,—rush into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered at the little pilgrim without a hat.

But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party. This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.

The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins, wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste—because she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping hands—demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta haughtily turned upon[Pg 107] him her splendid back, covered with ringlets; beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,—so that nothing more can be hung on that,—and grazed the side of his head. She instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down, bleeding, and was carried home.

This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of anxiety, out through the village. A good genius—the yard-dog, Melak—had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves, should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted reasons,—namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy, whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed, could not give him[Pg 108] a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these inversions,—during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,—he was found by his innocent mother.

"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately, strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender emotion.

When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun. He placed[Pg 109] himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,—the sign of the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.

Verily, I have often formed the wish—and afterwards made a picture out of it—that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world, because no love moves us so deeply as returning love. It must touch Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,[34] they will tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain Immortals when they behold us under the violent tempests of life arrayed against each other on the battle-field of enmity, under double blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!

[Pg 110]

Now Wehmeier, as well as his competitor, was fain to take possession of his pupil with wholly new instructions; but what were new to him were new to himself. Like most of the older schoolmasters, he knew—of astronomy, except the little that was found in the book of Joshua, and of physics, except the few errors which existed in his rather-forgotten than torn-up manuscript books, and of philosophy, except that of Gottsched, which required, however, a riper pupil, and of other real sciences—strictly speaking, nothing, except a little history. If ever—in the literary Sahara, to which the tormenting screw of school-lessons, without end, and the beggar's or cripple's wagon of a life without pay, that had been turned rather into dross than into ore, had exiled him—new methods[Pg 111] of teaching or new discoveries came to his ears (they never came to his eyes), he noted, at the moment, that they were his own, only with a shade of variation; and he concealed from no one the plagiarism. I heartily beg, however, all silken and powdered and curly-haired Princes' instructors, blame not too sorely my poor Wehmeier, so deeply overlaid with the heavy, thick strata of fate, for his subterranean optics and his crookedness of posture, but reckon his eight children and his eight school-hours and his approaching fifties in his life's grotto of Antiparos, and then decide whether the man can, under these circumstances, come out again into light?

But yet of history he knew, as was said, something; and this he seized upon as pedagogical lucky-bone and Fortunatus's wishing-cap. Had he not already, in that epical, picturesque style of paraphrase,—whereby he could relate the smallest market-town history in such an interesting and fictitious way, (for whence will a good story-teller draw the thousand lesser but necessary touches but from his head?)—lectured out to his Albano Hübner's Biblical History, in a manner extremely touching? And which wept most during the delivery, teacher or scholar?

Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in the world,—the history of countries. But only the British and the French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history, on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer,[Pg 112] most disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?

The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the 22d October,[35] hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the 29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is compelled to listen to the case.

This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange. He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning, walk along several[Pg 113] times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen, ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within, although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,—the biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,—not the shadowy world of states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher, as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality? Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so, from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,—hair, moss, roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,—was hidden by the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full of broken inscriptions.[Pg 114]

The reader is now curious about the afternoon, when the élève is sent into the polishing-mill of the Viennite, in order to know what sort of a polishing he gets there. It cannot but make him still more curious, when I repeat that Wehmeier, who, like other literati, resembled the elephant in clumsiness and sagacity, found nothing more agreeable to think of—and, therefore, to describe—in ancient history, than a great man, who had on little, as, for instance, Diogenes, or went barefoot, like Cato, or unshaven, like the philosophers; nay, he hit the very Mittel-Mark, and drew out for himself Frederick the Second's clothes, whereby he gained as much as Mr. Pagé in Paris, and carried his shirts, like the noble Saladin's, and with similar proclamations, on poles for show, and sketched, as a second Scheiner, the best map we have of the sun-spots of snuff on Frederick. Then he took these naked, rough colossi, and piled them together into one scale, and threw into the other the light, wainscoted figures, like Falterle and the nice Nuremberg Kinder-gärten of modern courts, and besought the scholar to take notice which way the swaying tongue of the balance would incline....

I am not wholly on thy side here, Magister, since vigorous youths too easily, without any prompting, tear in pieces the thin plate of the ceremonial law, and often the platers, the head masters of ceremonies, into the bargain. For weaklings, the method is good.

Now, when Albano came to the accomplishing master, he could but faintly, on account of the loud resonance of the previous lesson,—for children of a certain depth, like buildings of a certain size, give an echo,—apprehend[Pg 115] what Falterle commanded; and only when he remained some days without the historical sensation was he more widely open to the lesser instructions, as gilded things cannot be silvered over till the gold is worn off. The misfortune was, too, that he had to go through his task-dances in the very next room to the study of the Director, who was there occupied with his own. It often happened that Wehrfritz, when Alban was as distrait and inattentive in the Anglaise as a partner in love, would cry out, while he was dictating in there, "In the name of the three devils, chassez!" Quite as many cases might one reckon in which, when the music-master, like a bass-drum, with everlasting exhortations glided away through adagio into piano, the man had to call out in there, with the strongest imaginable fortissimo, "Pianissimo, Satan! pianissimo!" Sometimes he was obliged to rise from his labors, when, in the fencing-lesson, all admonitions to "quart!" availed nothing, and open the door, and, grim with fury, say to him of Vienna, "For God's sake, sir, don't be a hare! Prick his leather soundly, if he doesn't mind!" Whereupon the courtly fencing-master would only gently encourage him to "quart thrust."

Nevertheless, he learned much. In such early years one cannot rise above the finery nor the fine arts of a Falterle, who, besides, was reinforced with the magical advantage of having shone and taught in the forbidden metropolis. Only the loud stride and the boots were not to be taken from the pupil; but the shoulders soon grew horizontal, and the head perpendicular; and the oscillating fingers, together with the restless body, were steadied with Stahl's eye-holder. In general, men with a liberal soul in a finely-built body have already, without Falterle's espalier-wall and scissors, an agreeable shape and stature.[Pg 116] Moreover, he felt toward the neat, friendly Falterle that holy first love for men wherewith a child's heart twines round all inmates of his home and village; and simply for this reason, that a lady could wind the Viennite about her ring-finger,—yes, inside of the gold ring itself,—and because he spoke and lied about the Knight of the Golden Fleece as about a king, and because he was the most agreeable creature that ever trod the earth.

As I mean in my biographies to teach tolerance and even-handed justice toward all characters, I must here lead the way with a pattern of toleration, by remarking of Falterle, that his poor, thin soul had not the power to develop itself under the stone table of the laws of etiquette, and under the wooden yoke of an imposing station. To whom did the poor devil ever do any harm? Not even to ladies, for whom indeed he was always laboring before the looking-glass, like a copperplate engraver, upon his dear self, but only, like other sculptors, by this artistic work, to display pure beauties, not to mislead them. The sea-water of his life—for he is neither a millionnaire, nor even the greatest savant of the age, although he has read about among many circulating libraries—is sweetened by the water of beauty, wherein he hourly bathes. He swills and gormandizes scarcely at all. If he curses and swears, he does it in foreign languages, as the Papist makes his prayers, and flatters very few except himself.

The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate vain persons much too violently; for such persons, after all, are more diseased in the head than in the will. I can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader, whether he ever, even when he was going about with an uncommonly vain feeling, remembers to have detected[Pg 117] any deep qualms of conscience or discords in himself, which, however, were never wanting, when he lied very much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such occasions, experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking of his inner man in the cradle of state. Hence a vain man is as hard to cure as a gambler; but for this further reason,—most sins are occasional sermons and occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word, cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness against himself, any more than he can play ninepins or fight a duel with himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter-Fair or New-Year's Day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal, margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life; many never at all,—for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost. On the contrary, one can praise and crown himself inwardly day and night, summer and winter, in every place,—in the pulpit, in the Prater, in the general's tent, on the back seat of a sleigh, in the princely chair, in any part of Germany,—for instance, in Weimar. What! and must one let this perennial balsam-plant, which continually perfumes the inner man, be plucked up or lopped off?

All these occupations and thorns were to Albano right good, sharp earthquake-conductors, since in his bosom already more subterranean storm-matter circulated than is needed to burst the thin wall of a man's chest. Now he began to get on deeper and deeper into the wild thunder-months of life. The longing to see[Pg 118] Don Zesara caught new warmth from the Roman history, which lifted up on high before him Caesar's colossal image, and wrote under it, "Zesara." The veiled Linden-city was carried over by his fancy and set upon seven hills, and exalted to a Rome. A post-horn rang through his innermost being, like a Swiss Ranz des Vaches, which builds out into the ether all summits of our wishes in long and shining mountain-chains; and it blew for him the signal of a tent-striking, and all cities of the earth lay with open gates and with broad highways round about him. And when, at this period, on a cool, clear summer morning, he marched along metrically by the side of a regiment on its way to Pestitz, so long as he could hear the sound of the drums and fifes, then did his soul celebrate a Handel's Alexander's Feast; the past became audible,—the rattling of the triumphal cars, the movement of the Spartan bands and their flutes, and the clear trumpet of Fame,—and, as if at the sound of the last trumpets, his soul arose among none but glorified dead on the unbolted earth, and, with them, still marched onward.

When History leads a noble youth to the plains of Marathon, and up to the Capitol, he would fain have at his side a friend,—a comrade,—a brother-in-arms, but no more than this,—no sister-in-arms; for a heroine injures a hero greatly. Into the energetic youth friendship enters earlier than love: the former appears, like the lark, in the early spring of life, and goes not away till late autumn; the latter comes and flees, like the quail, with the warm season. Albano already heard this lark warbling, invisible, in the air: he found a friend, not in Blumenbühl, not in the Linden-city, not in any place, but in his own bosom; and the name of that friend was—Roquairol.[Pg 119]

The case was this: For people like myself, country life is the honey wherein they take the pill of city life. Falterle, on the contrary, could not worry down the bitter country life without the silvering-over of city life: thrice every week he ran over to Pestitz, either into the boxes of the amateur-theatre as dramaturgist, or on the stage itself as actor. Now, on every such occasion, he took his little part-book out into the village with him, and there, relying on this rehearsal of the play, studied his part independently of those of his colleagues; just as, to this day, every state-servant commits his to memory without a glance at those of his fellow-performers: hence every one of us consists of only one faculty, and, as in the Russian hunting-music, knows how to fife only one tone, and must throw his strength into the pauses. Into these fragments of theatricals, then, borrowed from Falterle, Albano entered with a rapture which his master soon sought to increase by exchanging for these limited sectors of the globe the whole dramatic world.

The Viennite had long since eulogized before him the suicidal mad-cap Roquairol as a genius in learning,—and himself as particularly such in teaching; and now he adduced the proof of it from the great parts which the mad-cap always played so well. For the rest, it was not his fault that he did not exceedingly disparage the Minister's son, whom he envied, not only for his theatrical, but for his erotic achievements. For the inventively rich Roquairol had with that shot at himself in his thirteenth year saluted and won the whole female sex, and made himself, out of a sacrificial victim, priest of sacrifices, and manager of the amateuress-theatre, attached to the amateur-theatre; whereas the shy, stupid Falterle, with his still-born fancy, could never bring a charmer to any other[Pg 120] step than the pas retrograde in a minuet, or to anything more than a setting of the fingers, when he wanted to get himself set in her heart. But the vain man cannot deny others any praise which is also his own.

How must all this have won our friend's admiration for a youth whom he saw pass through his soul now as Charles Moor, now as Hamlet, as Clavigo, as Egmont! As regards the notorious masquerade-shot described in a former Jubilee period, our so inexperienced Hercules, dazzled as he was by the naked dagger of Cato, must have accredited that shot to such a kindred Heraclide, as one of his twelve tragical labors. The fee-court-provost Hafenreffer even tells me, Albano once disputed with the Vienna gentleman, who had long since let himself down from a schoolmaster to a schoolmate, about the finest ways of dying, and, in opposition to the tender Falterle, who declared himself in favor of the sleeping-potion, declared himself on Roquairol's side, even with the stronger addition: "He should like best of all to stand on the top of a tower and draw the lightning on his head!" In this latter article he shows the high feeling of the ancients, who held death by lightning to be no damnation, but a deification; but might not physical causes also have had something to do with it, for his elbows and his hair often flashed out, in the dark, electric fire, and more than once a holy circle streamed out round his head even in the cradle? The Provost is strong for this view of the matter.

Albano, at last, could find no way to cool his fiery heart but by taking paper and writing to the invisible friend, and giving it in charge to the gentleman from Vienna. Falterle, who was complaisance itself—and withal untruth itself, too—in spite of his aversion to Roquairol,[Pg 121] took the letters with him, and was heartily glad to do it ("I am quite at home at the Minister's," said he); but never delivered a single one of them, since he had as little influence in the proud Froulay-palace as with the son himself, and so he merely brought back with him every time a new and valid reason why Roquairol had not been able to answer: he was either too very busy, or in the sick-chair, or in company,—but every letter had delighted him; and our unsuspecting youth firmly believed it all, and kept on writing and hoping. It would have been handsomely done of the Legation's-counsellor, had he only, that is to say, if he could, been so obliging as to hand over to me Albano's palm-leaves of a loving heart; not for the archives of this book, but merely for my documents relating to the case, for the catalogue of petals, which I for my own private use am stitching and gluing together, of Albano's flowering-time.

Our Zesara, on entering into the years when the song of poets and nightingales flows more deeply into the softened soul, became suddenly another being. He grew stiller and wilder at once, more tender and more impetuous, as, for instance, he once flew in the highest rage to the help of a dog yelping under the blows of the cudgel. Heaven and earth, which hitherto in his bosom, as in the Egyptian system, had run into each other, that is to say, the ideal and the real, worked themselves free from each other, and Heaven ascended and receded, pure and high and brilliant,—upon the inner world rose a sun and upon the outer a moon, but the two worlds and hemispheres attracted each other and made one whole,—his[Pg 122] step became slower, his bright eye dreamy, his athlete-gymnastics less frequent,—he could not now help loving all human beings more warmly, and feeling them more near to him; and often with closed eyes he fell trembling upon the neck of his foster-mother, or out in the open air bade his foster-father, at his starting on his journeys, a more lonely and heartfelt farewell.

And now before such clear and sharp eyes the Isis-veil of Nature became transparent, and a living Goddess looked down into his heart with features full of soul. Ah, as if he had found his mother, so did he now find Nature,—now for the first time he knew what spring was, and the moon, and the ruddy dawn, and the starry night.... Ah, we have all once known it, we have all once been tinged with the morning-redness of life!... O, why do we not regard all first stirrings of human emotion as holy, as firstlings for the altar of God? There is truly nothing purer and warmer than our first friendship, our first love, our first striving after truths, our first feeling for Nature: like Adam, we are made mortals out of immortals; like Egyptians, we are governed earlier by gods than by men; and the ideal foreruns the reality, as, with some trees, the tender blossoms anticipate the broad, rough leaves, in order that the latter may not set before the dusting and fructifying of the former.

When, as often happened, Albano came home from his inner and outer roamings, at once intoxicated and thirsty,—with senses at the same time shut and sharpened, but dreaming like sleepers who feel the more painfully the putting out of the light,—at such times of course it needed only a few cold drops of cold words to make the hot, flowing soul, upon the contact of the strange, cold bodies, scatter in zigzag and globules; whereas a warm[Pg 123] mould would have rounded the fluid mass into the loveliest form.

Circumstances being such, of course no one will wonder at what I am presently to report. The dancing-, music-, and fencing-master, who boasted little of his steps, touches, and thrusts, but so much the more of his (Imperial Diet-) Literature,—for he had the new names of the months, the orthography of Klopstock, and the Latin characters in German letters sooner in his letters than any one of us,—would fain show the house of Wehrfritz that he understood a little more of literature and knew a thing or two better than other Viennites (the more so since he read absolutely nothing, not even political newspapers and novels, because he preferred real, living men); he therefore never came into the house without two pockets full of romance and verse for Rabette and Albano. He was encouraged in this by his endless officiousness, and his emulous race-running with his colleague Wehmeier in education, and the interest which he took in the youth now growing so silent, whom he wished to help out of the sweet dreams which the ruby[36] of his glittering young life inspired with the exegetic dream-books, the works of the poets. The revolution which had taken place in the youth, who now mowed away whole romantic glades of Everdingen, and plucked whole poetical flower-borders of Huysum, I have now neither time nor wish even so much as tolerably to portray, on account of the above-promised wondrous circumstance; suffice it, that Albano, so situated,—the heaven of the poetic art open before him, the promised land of Romance spread out before his eyes,—resembled a planet, assailed by several whizzing comets, and blazing up with them into a common conflagration.

[Pg 124]

But what further? The Vienna master—this I must still premise—was a vain fool (at least in matters of humility, for example, his pigmy feet, his literature, his success with women), and particularly loved, by familiar pictures of great ones and ladies, to have inferred his confederation with the originals. The poor devil was, to be sure, poor, and believed, with many other authors, that he—unlike Solomon, who prayed for wisdom and received gold—had inversely had the misfortune while supplicating for the latter to receive only the former. In short, on such grounds as these he would have been very glad, let it be observed in passing, to know that the belief prevailed in the house of Wehrfritz that he stood on very good terms with his former pupil, the Minister's daughter,—Liana, I think it was, if I read Hafenreffer's handwriting correctly,—and that he quite often saw her, and spoke with her mother. Add to this, that there was not one word of truth in the whole: through the temple in which Liana was there was no door-way for him. But so much the less could he let the Director get ahead of him, who often saw her, and always praised her more warmly at home, merely for the sake of scolding the rude innocence of Rabette, who had never been educated by anybody. The Vienna master wished also, of course, to draw the Count—to whom he only showed the coasts of Roquairol's isle of friendship afar off, but no point for landing—cunningly away from the brother through the sister (he had found it impossible longer to deceive and hold him back); for why did he paint it out before him at such length, how poisonously, some years before, the night-and death-chill brought on by that parting shot of a brother whom she too devotedly loved had fallen upon those tender, white leaves of her heart?[Pg 125]

Quite often would he, during a meal, hang up broad merit-tables, countersigned by Wehrfritz, of Liana's progress in music and painting, in order, seemingly, to stimulate his pupil on the harpsichord and in drawing to greater achievements. For if it was not for appearance' sake, why did he paste up such very long altar-pieces of Liana's charms before Rabette, that impartial one, who, vying only with parsons' daughters, and not with those of ministers, heard almost as gladly the praise of city beauties as we do of Homer's, and in whose presence only a windy fool, that would fain hold himself upright in the saddle before women by singing the praises of other women, could intone such eulogies as his were of Liana? Verily, before such a resigned and unenvious soul as Rabette,—especially as her complexion and hands and hair were none of the softest, at least harder than Falterle's,—I would not for any prize-medal in the world have undertaken, as he however did, to bring near, in high colors, the happy results with which the Minister, in order to bring over Liana's uncommonly youthful beauty, by proper training, into her present years, had done his best by means of delicate and almost meagre fare, by tight lacing, by shutting up his orangery, whose window he seldom lifted off from this flower of a milder clime,—still less would I have cared to be able to describe, like him, how she had thereby become a tender creature of pastil-dust, which the gusts of fate and the monsoons of climate could almost blow to pieces,—and that she actually could only wash herself with spirits of soap, and only with the softest linen dry herself without pain, and could not pluck three gooseberries without making her finger bleed.

The shallow Viennite, who, if he spied a man of rank[Pg 126] standing up on the cupola of a mountain, could never take off his hat before him, down in the marsh, without saying, in a low tone, at the same time, "Your most profoundly obedient servant!" and who spoke of distinguished people, at the farthest, only in familiar or satirical tones (to show his connection), but never in earnest criticism, was, of course, as became him, not the man to call old Froulay a stiff, sharp gravestone, under which two such tender flowers as his lady with the ivy (Liana) twining round her, crooked and crowded, had to wind their way out into light. Mr. Von Hafenreffer, to his honor,—in respect that he is a Legation's-Counsellor and Fee-Court-Provost,—makes here the quite different but more feeling observation, that the hard strata of such connections as those through which Liana's life-rill must needs filter and force its way, make it purer and clearer, just as all hard strata are filtering-stones of water,—and all her charms become, indeed, through her father's tyranny, torments, but also all her torments become, through her own patience, charms....

But, good Zesara, supposing now thou art compelled, daily, to hear all this,—and supposing the master of accomplishments forgets not to depict, besides, how she has never grieved him with a disobedient look, or a tardiness, how cheerfully she always brought him the paper-marks of the lessons, and, at the end, her schooling-money or an invitation,—and how carefully, mildly, and courteously she behaved toward her servants, and how one must have thought her heart could not be warmer than her very philanthropy made it, if one had not seen her still more ardent filial affection for her mother;—good Zesara, I say, what if thou hearest all this in addition to thy romances, and that, too, of the sister of thy Roquairol;[Pg 127] for every one, if it is only half practicable, loves to spin himself into one chrysalis with the sister of his friend,—and beside all this, of a maiden in the consecrated Linden-city, about which Don Gaspard, as the old Prussians[37] did about their sacred groves, draws additional mystic curtains; and, what is harder than all, just after the turning-point of thy seventeenth year, Zesara, when the monsoons and spring winds of the passions already sweep over the waves of the blood! For, of course, at an earlier period, in the midst of the learned club of so many linguists,—i. e. books of linguists, of eclectics, upper-rabbins,—of ten wise men from the East and from Greece, and, by reason of the uncommonly dazzling Epictetus'-lamps which the said Decemvirate of wise men had lighted at the day-star of the wise ones,—at such a time, I say, it was hardly to be expected of thee that love's little Turin-lantern, which he kept as yet unopened in his pocket, should strike thy eye very strongly! But now, my dear, now, I say! Truly, nowhere could any of us find less fault, if we are uncommonly attentive to it, with what he does in the 21st Cycle, than in this 20th.

[Pg 128]

Ah, this sounds far too rude and harsh for all that I have in my mind, and it is to me as if I were offering the reader, instead of the living, floating rose-fragrance, only the stiff, hard, thick, porcelain-rose! Albano, I[Pg 129] will uncover and unclose thy silent, thickly-curtained heart, so that we all may see therein the saintly image of Liana, the ascending Raphael's-Mary, but, like the pictures of the saints in Passion-week, hanging behind the veil, which thou liftest with trembling to adore it, when thou openest thy books of devotion,—the Romances,—and when thou findest therein the prayers which belong to thy saint. Even I find it hard not to do like thee and the ancients, and make a mystery of the name of thy guardian goddess,—concerning inner spiritual apparitions (for outer ones are bodily apparitions) the seer is glad to be silent nine days long;—and with thy blind belief in Liana's virtuous character being a thousand times higher than thine is, and with thy holy sense of honor, which watches over another's, it is, of course, a riddle to thee how others, for instance the Vienna master or Wehrfritz, without the least blushing, can talk so loudly and fondly of her, when thou thyself hardly darest before others to—dream of her much. Truly, Albano is a good creature! Further, how such a light Psyche as Liana, so crystallized into solid ether, somewhat like the risen Christ, can at all eat carps and pick the bones out,—or stir the stack of salad in the blue dish with the long, wooden, miniature pitch-forks,—or how it can be that she weighs half a pound more in the sedan than a blue butterfly,—or how she can laugh loud (but that, however, she never did, my friend);—all this, and in general the whole petty service of this incarnate earthly life, was, to the winged youth, a riddle and a real impossibility, or at least the reality thereof was a sort of fixed-star occultation; why shall I suppress that he would have been far less astonished at a pair of angel's footsteps stamped into Italian rocks, than at a pair of Liana's in the ground,[Pg 130] and that he would have given for any one single trace or relic of her—I mention only a thread-spool or a tambour-flower—nothing less than whole cords of the wood of the holy cross, together with casks of the holy nails, and several apostolic wardrobes, together with the holy duplicate-bodies into the bargain.

So have I often longingly wished I could have only a pound of earth from the moon, or as much as a horn of sun-dust from the sun, before me on my table and in my hands. So do most of us authors of consequence hover before a reader out of our own country in like manner as fine, ethereal images, of whom it is hard to comprehend how they can eat a slice of bacon, or drink a glass of March beer, or wear a pair of boots; it seems as if people would collapse when they read anything about Lessing's razor, Shakespeare's English saddle, Rousseau's bear-skin cap, Psalmist David's navel, Homer's sleeve, Gellert's queue-tie, Ramler's night-cap, and the bald-pate under mine, though that is not of much more consequence.

The old Provincial Director, seeing that a maiden in no way gains so much with a youth as by praises which his parents bestow upon her, made some considerable contributions toward the canonization of Liana, by frequently weighing against her the rustic Rabette, who laughed just as he did, and insinuating a contrast between his indulgent wife and the strict Minister's lady: he then took occasion to set forth in detail after what strict rules of pure composition this counterpointist (the Minister's lady) harmoniously arranged the melodious tones of Liana, and particularly how she discountenanced all rudeness and laughter. Female souls are peacocks, whose jewelled plumage must be sheltered in nice and whitened apartments, whereas ours remain clean in duck-coops.[Pg 131] Albano pictured to himself mother and daughter in the double forms in which the painters give us angels, namely, the intelligent, strict mother, as one who hides in a long cloud, with only her head visible, and Liana as a glorified child that, with its tender wings, flutters about a white cloud.

How he longed for something, though it were only a fallen, faded rose of—silk from Pestitz; and yet he could not for shame ask the Vienna teacher for anything except at the very last, after long thinking, though with a betraying glow, for one—lesson-mark; "for he had never yet seen one," he said. Falterle had one at this moment in his pocket,—the number 15, Liana's former age, was written upon it;—she might have written the number possibly;—still it was something. Ah, could he not more willingly have beset the Director for some romances out of the portable-library of the Minister's lady, in which the daughter must certainly have read, yes, and might well even have forgotten some notes of her reading? He actually did it; but Wehrfritz condemned and cursed in the beginning all romances as poisoned letters; then he forgot over five times to ask for any;—and finally he brought with him a novel of Madam Genlis, together with a Gotha pocket-almanac. These books of the blest—in comparison with which my own works and the Alexandrine Library and the blue library are only miserable remittenda—had all the stamps of women's books; for they all contained some ornament or other of female heads, namely, a thimbleful of hair-powder as they do, fag-ends of silk-ribbon as they do, for demarcation-lines and memoranda of readings,—and just the same fragrance (which Semler also praises in the books of alchemy), and which they[Pg 132] seemed to have borrowed from the blossoms of Paradise. Ah, happy reader of the fairest book (I mean the Count), canst thou ask more?

By all means; and he found more, too, namely, in the latter end of the Gotha pocket-almanac, on the two blank parchment-leaves, the words, "Concert for the Poor, the 21st February," and "Play for the Poor, the 1st Nov." I have often, in my chase after mysteries, beaten out, on these leaves, the weightiest ones from the bush. "Yes, that is my pupil's hand," said Falterle; "she and her mother seldom let such an opportunity slip, because the Minister does not allow them otherwise to give much to the poor." Do not detain me here about the beauty of her handwriting,—besides one writes better on parchment and slate than on paper, and a literary lady, exactly unlike a literary man in this, has more calligraphy than illiterate ones,—but let me hasten on to the working of these incunabula of Liana, whose Dominical characters diffuse over a loving man nothing but bright, inner Sundays of the soul, and whose leaves resemble in sanctity the Epistles which, in the Middle Ages, fell from heaven upon the earth. Now, for the first time, was it to him as if the flying angel, whose shadow hitherto had only glided over the earth, folded up his pinions, and held his downward course in the track of the shadow, not far from the spot where Albano stands. He learned the Gotha pocket-almanac by heart.

As he believed Liana to be much tenderer and better than he, and as she appeared to his fancy like Hesper, who, among all the planets, moves around the sun with the least eccentricity, and he to himself like the distant Uranus, who does so with the greatest; and since he could not, without a blaze of shame on his cheek, think[Pg 133] of falling behind the daughter and mother in moral polish, he became at once (no man knew why) more gentle, mild, compliant, attentive to his person, obedient to the Vienna teacher,—for Liana had been so too,—and his whole Vesuvius[38] was kept under by the veil of a saint. The North American adores the form which appears to him in dreams, as his guardian spirit. O, does not even thus, to the youth, a fair dream often become his genius?

A Whitsuntide, such as I am now about to describe, Albano, excepting in the Acts of the Apostles, one can hardly find anywhere else than in thine!

He had, hitherto, often listened to Liana's invalid-history with the deafness of a vigorous, fire-proof youth, when, on one occasion, the Director brought word home, that the pious lady of the Minister would let her daughter partake the sacrament on the first Whitsuntide holiday, because she was apprehensive death regarded such a creature as a strawberry, which must be plucked before the sun had shone upon it. Ah, Albano saw death at this moment groping about, and with his stony heel treading on the pale red berry and crushing it. And then this Philomela without a tongue, because she had hitherto been compelled to be dumb, had, like a Procne, sent him only the pictured history of her heavy existence, and only the leaves of parchment! All loving emotions, like plants, shoot up the most rapidly in the tempestuous atmosphere of life. Albano felt at once a wide, deep woe, and a tormenting fever-warmth in his heart, eaten hollow[Pg 134] as it was by death. In his musical and poetic phantasyings on his Oesterlein's-harpsichord, the dreamed tones of Liana's voice and the weeping music of the harmonica, which she could play, and which he had never heard, strangely mingled, like her swan-song, with his harmonies. But this was not enough; he even wrote, secretly, a Tragedy, (thou good soul!) wherein he, with wet eyes, intrusted all his tenderest and bitterest feelings to another's lips,—but he only kindled them fearfully, while he expressed them. Every one can remark that he proposed in this way to escape that babbler and spy, accident; but not every one observes—something quite original in the case; in another's name, he might, he thought, venture to give his deep pain a more passionate expression, for which, in his own name, before so many stoic classical heroes, he could not for shame muster up the courage. But in this way the classics could not touch him.

The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass bell much greater yet; namely, to such a degree, that he touchingly begged his foster-parents to let him on the first Whitsuntide holiday go to the—Holy Sacrament. The dilapidated state of the village church, wherein it could hardly be partaken a year longer, must needs speak as strongly in his favor, as the dilapidated state of Liana's health did in hers. Always will there remain in our poor human souls, separated from each other by bodies and wildernesses, the longing to be at least doing the same thing at the same time with one another, at one and the same hour to look up at the moon, or (as Addison relates) to send our prayers above it; and thus is thy wish, Albano, a human, a tender one, to kneel at the same hour with thy invisible Liana, at the steps of the altar, and then to rise fiery and commanding[Pg 135] after the coronation of the inner man! He had in the still country built up the altar of religion high and firm in his soul, as all men of lofty fancy do: on mountains are always seen temples and chapels.

But I must never accompany him into the Whitsuntide church before ascending with him the church-tower. Could anything be conceived more delicious, than when, at this period, on fair Sundays, so soon as there was nothing but the heavy sun swimming through the wide heavens, he climbed to the belfry of the tower, and, covered with the murmuring waves of the chime, looked out all alone over the earth below, and upon the western boundary hills of the beloved city? When presently the storm of sound swept and confounded all together, and when the jewel-sparkling of the ponds, and the flowery pleasure-tent of the frolicking spring, and the red castles on the white roads, and the scattered trains of church-going people slowly winding along between the dark-green corn-fields, and the stream girdling round the rich pastures and the blue mountains, those smoking altars of morning sacrifices, and the whole extended splendor of the visible creation poured into his soul with a glimmering overflow, and all appeared to him as a dim dream-landscape—O then arose his inner colosseum full of silent, godlike forms of spiritual antiques, and the torch-gleam of Fancy[39] glanced round upon them like the play of a moving magic life,—and there he saw among the gods a friend and a loved one reposing, and he glowed and trembled.... Then the bells died away with a heavy groan, and became dumb,—he stepped back from the bright spring into the dark tower,—he fastened his eye[Pg 136] only on the empty, blue night before him, into which the distant earth sent up nothing save sometimes a butterfly blown out of its course, a swallow cruising by, or a pigeon hovering overhead,—the blue veil of Ether[40] fluttered in a thousand folds over veiled gods in the distance,—O then, then the cheated heart could not but exclaim, in its loneliness, Ah! where shall I find—where, in the wide regions of space, in this short life—the souls which I love eternally and so profoundly? Ah, thou dear one! what is more painfully and longer sought, then, than a heart? When man stands before the sea and on mountains, and before pyramids and ruins, and in the presence of misfortune, and feels himself exalted, then does he stretch out his arms after the great Friendship. And when music, and moonlight, and spring and spring tears softly move him, then his heart dissolves, and he wants Love. And he who has never sought either is a thousand times poorer than he who has lost both.

Let us now step into the Whitsuntide church, where the deep stream of his fancy, for the first time in his life, overflowed, and carried his heart far away, and sounded on with it in a new channel: a physical storm had swollen this stream. Early in the forenoon, the dark powder-house of a storm-cloud stood mute near the hot sun, and was glowing with his beams; and only occasionally, during divine service, some distant, strange cloud let fall a clap on the fire-drum: but when Albano stepped before the altar with exalted, glorified emotions, and when he ventured only to mask his love for Liana in an inward prayer for her, and in a picture of her to-day's devotion, and of her pale form in the dark bride-attire of piety, and[Pg 137] when he softly felt as if his purified, sanctified soul were now more worthy of that lovely one,—just then, the tempest, with all its playing war-machines and revolving cannons,[41] marched over from the Linden-city, and passed, armed and hot, right over the church. Albano, however, in the consciousness of a holy inspiration, felt no fear; but so soon as he heard the distant rumbling of the falling avalanche, he thought only of Liana, and of its striking the Linden-city church; and now, when over his head the sun kindled with his hot looks the powder-tower of the storm-cloud, and made it fly into a thousand flashes and claps, then did that partiality for the death by lightning which had been nourished in him by the ancients drive the terrible supposition into his heart, that Liana was now dead and lost to him in the glory of transfigured holiness. O then, must he indeed also believe that now the wing of the lightning snatches him above the clouds. And when long flashes blazed about the saint and the angels of the altar, and when the trembling voices of the singers, growing louder, and the tolling of the familiar bells, mingled with the crashing thunder, and he caught, amid the deafening din, a high, fine organ-tone, which he took for one of the tones of that unheard harmonica,—then did he mount, deified, upon the triumphal and thunder-car by the side of his Liana; the theatre-curtain of life and the stage burned away from under him; and they soared away, linked together and radiant, far through the cool, pure ether!...

But the twelfth hour banished these spiritual apparitions and the tempest; Albano stepped out into a bluer, cooler, breezier sky,—and the glistening sun looked down with a friendly smile on the affrighted earth, whose bright[Pg 138] tears still quivered in all her flower-eyes. And now when in the afternoon Albano heard of the peaceful march of the thunder through Liana's city, then by his faith in her newly-assured life, and by the soft dead-gold of resting fancy, and by the holy stillness of the regenerated bosom, and by the increased fervor of his love, there grew up out of all regions of his soul an evening-red, magic Arcadia,—and never did a man enter upon a fairer one.

IT arises not merely from my courtesy towards a reading posterity, my dear Zesara, but also from a real courtesy toward thee, that I so faithfully transcribe all acts in this pastoral of thy life; in thy later days these melodious ones shall echo in thy ears refreshingly out of my book, and in the evening, after thy labors, thou wilt read nothing more gladly than my labors here.

The following night deserves its Cycle. Soon after Whitsuntide he was tormented with weekly medical notes upon a new malady of poor Liana, which had begun, just as if he had guessed right, on Sacrament-day. He heard that she was living or suffering in Lilar, the pleasure- and residence-garden of the old Prince, in company with her brother, of whose silence the Vienna master had just got up to his thousand and first reason. Now, around Lilar, although not far from Pestitz, his father had drawn no chains of prohibition. Liana's night-lamp might, perhaps, glimmer a welcome, or at all events her harmonica sound one,—yes, her brother might haply be still walking round in the garden,—the June night was, besides, serene and magnificent. Ah, in short, he started.[Pg 139]

It was late and still; far out of the sleeping village, of which all the lights were extinguished, he could still catch the flute-pieces of the clock in the castle upon the Pestitz mountain. It was a quickener to him, that his road lay for some distance along the Linden-city causeway. He fixed his eyes steadily on the western mountains, where the stars seemed to fall to her like white blossoms. Up on the distant height, the Hercules' cross-way, the right arm ran downward and wound along through groves and meadows to the blooming Lilar.

March on, drunk with joy, full of young, light images, through the Italian night, which glimmers and breathes its fragrance around thee, and which, as over Hesperia, not far from the warm moon, hangs out a golden evening-star[42] in the blue west, as if over the dwelling of the beloved soul! To thee and thy young eyes the stars as yet only shed down hopes, no remembrances; thou hast in thy hand a plucked, stiff apple-twig, full of red buds, which, like unhappy beings, become too pale when they bloom out; but thou makest not, as yet, any such applications thereof as we do.

Now he stood glowing and trembling in a dell before Lilar, which, however, a singular round wood, of walks lined with trees, still hid from his view. The wood grew up in the middle to a blooming mount, which was embosomed and encircled so curiously with broad sunflowers, festoons of cherries, and glancing silver-poplars and rose-trees, that it seemed, by the picturesque ignes-fatui of the moon, to be a single, enormous kettle-tree, full of fruits and blossoms. Albano was fain to ascend its summit, and be, as it were, on the observatory of the heaven,[Pg 140] or Lilar, spread out below; he found at last in the wood an open alley.

The foliage, with its spiral alleys, wound him round into a deeper and deeper night, through which not the moon, but only the heat lightnings, could break, with which the warm, cloudless heavens were overcharged. The magic circles of the mount rose ever smaller and smaller out of the leaves into the blossoms,—two naked children, among myrtles, had twined their arms caressingly about each other's bent head,—they were statues of Cupid and Psyche,—rosy night-butterflies were licking, with their short tongues, the honey-dew from the leaves, and the glowworms, like sparks struck off from the glow of evening, went trailing like gold threads around the rose-bushes; he climbed amid summits and roots behind the aromatic balustrade toward heaven; but the little spiral alley running round with him hung before the stars purple night-violets, and hid the deep gardens with orange summits; at length he sprang from the highest round of his Jacob's-ladder, with all his senses, out into an uncovered, living heaven; a light hill-top, only fringed with variegated flower-cups, received and cradled him under the stars, and a white altar gleamed brightly beside him in the moonlight.

But gaze down, fiery man, with thy fresh heart, full of youth, on the magnificent, immeasurable, enchanted Lilar! A second twilight-world, such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon lingers now only on the groves and triumphal gates, and on the silver-dust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all waters and[Pg 141] vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands of our present world,—wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage, and all is one lovely, magic confusion. What mean those high, open doors or arches, and the pierced groves and the ruddy splendor behind them, and a white child sleeping among orange-lilies and gold-flowers, from whose cups delicate flames trickle,[43] as if angels had flown too near over them? The lightnings reveal swans, sleeping on the waves under clouds drunk with light, and their flaming trains blaze like gold after them in among the thick trees,[44] as goldfishes turn their burning backs out of the water,—and even around thy summit, Albano, the great eyes of the sunflowers turn on thee their fiery looks, as if kindled by the sparks of the glowworms.

"And in this kingdom of light," thought Albano, trembling, "the still angel of my future hides himself and glorifies it, when he appears. O where dwellest thou, good Liana? In that white temple? or in the arbor between the rose-fields? or up there in the green Arcadian summer-house?" If love makes even pangs to be pleasures, and exalts the shadowy sphere of the earth into a starry sphere, O what an enchantment will it lend to delight! Albano could not possibly, in this outer and inner splendor, think of Liana as sick; he represented to himself just now only the blissful future, and with a yearning embrace knelt down at the altar; he looked toward the glittering garden, and pictured to himself how[Pg 142] it would be when he should one day tread with her every island of this Eden,—when holy Nature should lay his and her hands in one another upon these altar-steps,—when he should sketch to her on the way the Hesperia of life, the pastoral land of first love, and then its holy exultation and its sweet tears, and how he should not then be able to look round into the eyes of that most tender heart, because he should already know that they were overflowing with bliss. Just then he saw, in the moonshine above the triumphal arches, two illuminated forms move like spirits; but his glowing soul went on with its painting, and he imagined to himself how, when the nightingales trilled in this Eden, he should look up to her and say, in a delirium of love, "O Liana, I bore thee long ago in my heart,—once upon that mountain, when thou wast sick."...

This startled him, and he came to himself; he was indeed on the mountain,—but he had forgotten the sickness. Now, kneeling, he threw his arms around the cold stone, and prayed for her whom he so loved, and who, also, surely had prayed here; and his head sank, weeping and darkened, upon the altar. He heard human steps approaching down below on the winding hill, and, with trembling joy, he thought it might be his father; but he boldly remained on his knees. At last there stepped in across the flowery border a tall, bent old man, like the noble bishop of Spangenberg; his calm countenance smiled full of eternal love, and no pains appeared upon it, and it seemed to fear none. The old man, in mute gladness, pressed the youth's hands together as a sign that he should pray on, knelt down beside him, and that ecstasy to which frequent prayer transfigures one spread its saintly radiance over that form full of years. Singular[Pg 143] was this union and this silence. The fragment of the moon, which was all that yet jutted above the earth, burned darklier, and at last went down; then the old man rose, and, with that easiness of transition which comes from being habituated to devotion, put questions about Albano's name and residence; after the answer, he merely said, "Pray on thy way to God, the all-gracious,—and go to sleep before the storm comes, my son!"

Never can that voice and form pass away out of Albano's heart; the soul of the old man peered, like the sun in an annular eclipse, shining, full circle, out over the dark body, which strove to hide it with its earth-mould. Deeply struck, to the very roots of his nerves, Albano rose, and the broadening flashes of the lightning showed him now, down below near the enchanted garden, a second dark, entangled, horrible one, a sort of Tartarus to the Elysium. He departed with singular and conflicting emotions,—the future, and the beings therein, appeared to him, on his way, to stand very near, and already to run to and fro like theatre lights behind the transparent curtain,—and he longed for some weighty enterprise as a refreshment for his inflamed heart; but he had to rest his head, full of this heath-fire, on the pillow, and the high thunder, like a god of the night, mingled with its first claps in his dreams.

THE unknown old man lingered many days in Albano's soul, and would not stir. In fact, the channel of his life now needed a bend, to break the stress of the stream. Fate can educate men like him only by a change of circumstances, just as it can weak ones only[Pg 144] by a continuance of the same. For if it went on much longer in this way, and the chandelier in his temple should, by inner earthquakes, be thrown into ever increasing vibrations, the consequence would be, at last, that no candle could any longer burn therein. What Imperial-Diet-grievances did not Wehrfritz and Hafenreffer already jointly present on the subject, when the shipmaster Blanchard, in Blumenbühl, went up with his aerostatic soap-bubbles, and Zesara could hardly, by almost the absolute despotism of the Director, be kept back from embarking! And how divine a thing does he not imagine it would be, not only to hurl down to the earth its iron rings and arrest warrants, and soar away, perpendicularly, above all its market-rubbish and boundary-trees and Hercules'-pillars, and sweep around it as a constellation, but also to hover above the magic Lilar and the hermetically-sealed Linden-city with devouring eyes, and to lift a whole, full, heavy world to his thirsty heart, by the handle of a single look!

But fate broke the fall of this swift stream. Namely, as good luck would have it, the Blumenbühl church had this long time been daily threatening to tumble down,—and I was wishing the Whitsuntide lightning had gone in there, and had made ears and legs for the building committee,—when by still greater good luck the old Prince was taken sick. Now in the church was the hereditary sepulchre of the Prince, which could not conveniently serve, on the other hand, as the hereditary sepulchre of the church.

About this time it must needs happen that the old Princess, with the Minister Froulay, passed through the village. The two had long since commissioned themselves as Imperial vicars, business-agents, and sceptre[Pg 145] bearers of the State, because the feeble old gentleman had been glad to give up the amusements and burdens, the glitter and weight of the crown, and admit those two feudal guardians into the hereditary office of the sceptre. In short, the age of the church, together with that of the princely couple, decided the building of a new roofing and covering for the vault.

The Provincial-Director was one of the inspecting committee, and invited the distinguished company to his house; among whom, the Provincial architect, Dian, and the Counsellor of Art, Fraischdörfer, as artists, and the little princess as naturalist, are particularly to be noticed.

The poor dancing-master got wind of the procession through a telescope, just as he was stretching his feet, full of pas, into a warm foot-bath. It will not gratify anybody, that the Vienna gentleman had but one thing in common with the old Magister,—what the Devil shares with the horse, namely, the foot, which measured its good foot and a half, Paris measure, and that, therefore, his double root, in the narrow forcing-pots of shoes, shot out into a fruit-bearing, knotty-stock, full of inoculating eyes, i. e. corns. To-day he would have cut these gordian knots in a foot-bath; but, as it was, he must, on occasion of such a visit,—although he had never stretched them,—put on his tightest children's shoes, for effect. Thus are men often caught with too tight shoes, as monkeys are with too heavy ones.

Albano, on the contrary, stood in buskins. In general, every one who simply came from Pestitz, had, in his eyes, consecrated holy earth on his soles; and here he looked with the loving reverence of a village youth upon a somewhat oldish, but red-cheeked and tall-built princess,[Pg 146] whose chin was bent up by time, and whose friendly face—perhaps, by way of hiding the many wrinkles—was buried deep in a whole bush of millinery. She kept this head moving to and fro with a smiling comparison, as of brother and sister, between him and Rabette; for mothers always look, in mothers, for the children first. He should have further known that he had before him a friend of Liana in the frizzle-headed little princess, who, although already of his age, yet with a friendly liveliness, which can never be subscribed to by the court-marshalship, looked up at all, and even took Rabette by the hand, and drew from her an indescribably good-natured and stiff smile. The formidable one of the party was to him the Minister, a man full of strong parts, both of body and soul, full of furious, murderous passions, only that they lay bound with flowery chains, and with respect to whom, although his hard face was written over only out of courtliness with the twelve friendly signs of the zodiac of love, it would not be specially apparent how one could be father and guide to the weak-nerved Liana, when the iron parts, of which man carries more in his blood than any other animal, had settled, not as in the case of Götz of Berlichingen, into his hand, but into his brow and heart.

I give merely a flying glance at the only member of the company who was intolerable to Albano,—the art-counsellor, Fraischdörfer, who had thrown off his face, like the drapery of the ancients, into folds of simple and noble greatness. This man, I must explain, had wanted for many years to have our bashful little hero sit to him, even to the very pit of his stomach, in order to represent, whether in a crayon likeness or a medallion I know not, his face, and the broad, high, Plato-like breast shining out[Pg 147] from his shirt-frills. But the bashful child played about himself with his hands and feet so lustily, that nothing could possibly be caught and copied except the naked face without the pedestal, the thorax. Before me, on the contrary, dear academy, must thou now for years keep thyself on the model-stand, like a stylite, and expose to my drawing-pen thy head and thy breast, together with its cubic contents, not to mention the groupings at all.

He had, perhaps, to thank his noble form for it, that the beautifully built, straight-nosed, and magnificently slender Dian—with his raven hair and black, eagle eye, who in every pliant motion showed a higher freedom of carriage than is gained in ball-rooms and court-saloons—came up to him warmly, and, with very few glances, saw to the green bottom of the deep but clear sea of the young man, and discerned the pearl-banks there. Albano, with his too loud, vehement voice,—with his respectful but sharply-moving eyes,—with his rooted posture,—expressed an agreeable mixture of inward culture and ascendency with external rustic modesty and mildness, like a tulip-tree not as yet cut up for a tulip-bed,—a rural hermitage and log-house with golden furniture. He had the faults of youth in its recluseness; but men and winter radishes must be sowed far apart, in order that they may grow large: men and trees that stand near together have, it is true, a more slender and tapering trunk, but no power to brave the tempest, nor such a rich crown and branching as those that stand free. With the most unembarrassed heartiness, the architect disclosed to the glowing youth, "They should from this time forth see each other every week, since he was to come daily to oversee the building of the church."

The whole Wehrfritz household is now peeping out[Pg 148] after the majestic procession, even to the last disappearing chariot-wheel, and is, of course, eager to say three words upon the lavender-water of joy that leaves such a fragrance behind it, which the procession had sprinkled into all corners and upon all pieces of furniture. From the Master of exercises—who, with the compression-machines on his feet, stood only so far as the excrescences in Purgatory, but from there up to the crown of his head in heaven (because the affable Princess had remembered very well his five positions)—even to the modest Rabette, the eulogist of her victorious rival,—and even to Albina, who was agreeably impressed with such warm, motherly love in a Fürstinn toward the Princess,—and even to the Director, who looked back with pleasure on the nobly sustained blade- and anchor-proof of his foster-son and the universal probity of this converted portion of the great world, because the man never observed that Princes and Ministers, just as they have in their wardrobes mountain- and mining-habits, so also carry about in their dressing-chamber Directorate-dresses, furred gowns of justice, consistorial sheep-skins, and women's opera-dresses;—from all these, even to the Director, the glad echo swelled, to die away in Zesara with an alarm-cannon. His ambition took arms; his liberty-tree shot forth into blossoms; the standards of his youthful wishes were consecrated and flung to the breeze of heaven; and on the myrtle crown he covered a heavy helm with a glittering, high-waving, plumed crest....

The following Cycle is composed merely for the purpose of showing how all this is to be taken.[Pg 149]

It is also my opinion that the antiphonious double choir of the two educational colleagues, Wehmeier and Falterle, had hitherto trained our Norman, as well as two similar gymnasiarchs, Governess England and domestic French instructress France, have actually educated the charity-school-girl Germany according to the best school-books, so that now we, in our turn, are in a condition to school the Poles, and, with the ferule, from the desk of our princely schools, to kantschu them down as much as is necessary.

But now too much had waked up in Albano. He felt overswelling energies which found no teacher. His father, roving round through Italy, seemed to be neglecting him. That seat of the muses, Pestitz,—which now had one more muse added to its number,—seemed to be unjustly barred against him. Often he knew not how to stay away. Fancy, heart, blood, and ambition were at boiling heat. In such a case, as in every fermenting cask, nothing is more dangerous than an empty space, whether from a want of knowledge or of occupation.

Dian filled up the cask.

He came each week from the city, as if he had to arrange the hammer-work of the church, according to plans, as well as the building of its walls. A youth who sees his first Greek cannot, at the outset, rightly believe it at all; he takes him for a classic glorification,—a printed sheet out of Plutarch. And if his heart burns like that of my hero, and if his Greek is of Spartan descent, like Dian,—namely, an unconquered Mainotte, who has been brought up in the classic double choir of the æsthetic singing-schools in Atiniah (Athens) and Rome,—then is[Pg 150] it natural that the inspired youth should stand every day in the dust-and rubbish-clouds of the falling church-walls, and wait to see his commander come forth from behind the cloudy pillar.

Dian accompanied his beloved in his walks, often read half the night with him, and took him with him on the architectural journeys which he had constantly to make into the country. He introduced him with inspired reverence into the holy world of Homer and of Sophocles, and went with him among the loftier beings of this twin Prometheus, those nobly formed, completely developed men, yet unperverted by a partial provincial culture, who, like Solomon, had a time for everything human,—for laughing, weeping, eating, fearing, and hoping,—and who shunned merely rude immoderateness; who sacrificed on the altars of all gods, but on that of Nemesis first of all. And Dian, whose inner man was a whole, from which no member is torn away, no one swollen, and all fully grown, himself went round with his darling as such a Greek of Homer and Sophocles. While Wehmeier and the foster-parents were always running after him with a pulpit and a pew, at every passionate expression of anger, or desire, or exultation, he, on the contrary, with fair, liberal freedom, made room for him to unfold himself to his full breadth and height. He respected in the youth the St. Elmo's or St. Helena's fire, as he did frost in an old man: the heart of vigorous men, he thought, must, like a porcelain vase, in the beginning, be turned too large and too wide; in the furnace of the world it would soon enough shrink up to a proper size. I too require of youth, at first, intolerance, then, after some years, tolerance,—that as the stony, sour fruit of a strong young heart, this as the soft winter-fruit of an older head.[Pg 151]

But while the Architect drew with him, and with him examined casts of the antiques and works of art, he at the same time made manifest most beautifully to the youth his love for the artistical sign of the Balance in man (who ought to be his own work of art), and his aversion to every paroxysm, which breaks the outward beauty as well as the inward into folds and wrinkles, and his desire to regulate his form and his heart after the lofty pattern of repose on the antiques.

The Architect, as artists often do, and the Swiss still oftener, preserved European culture and rural naïveté and simplicity side by side, like his beloved profession, wherein, more than in other arts, beauty and surveying reason border upon each other; he therefore at first let Albano look in and listen at the window of the philosophical lecture-hall from without, standing in the open air. He led him, not into the stone-quarry, lime-pit, and timber-yard of metaphysics, but directly into the ready-made, beautiful oratory, formed of the materials thence collected, otherwise called Natural Theology. He did not let him forge and solder ring after ring of any iron chain of reasoning, but showed such a one to him as a deep-reaching well-chain, whereby Truth, sitting at the bottom, is to be drawn up; or as a chain hanging from heaven, whereby the lower gods (the philosophers) are to draw Jupiter down. In short, the skeleton and muscle-preparation of metaphysics he concealed in the God-man of religion. And so it should be (in the beginning); grammar is learned from language more easily than the latter from the former; criticism from works of art, the skeleton from the body, more easily than the reverse; although we always do reverse it. Unfortunate is it for the youth of our day, that they are obliged to shake the[Pg 152] drops and the insects from the tree of knowledge, before the fruit.

And now he boldly threw open to him all the chamber-doors of the philosophical schools, i. e. the three heavens; for in this youthful season one still takes the wick of every learned light of the world for asbestos, as Brahmins dress themselves in asbestos; and the masses of ice around the poles of our spiritual world represent, at this early age, like the actual ones in the visible world, cities and temples on azure-blue columns.

Now when Albano had read himself to the flaming point upon some great idea or other, as Immortality or Deity, he had then to write upon it; because the Architect believed, and I too, that in the educational world nothing goes beyond writing,—not even reading and speaking; and that a man may read thirty years with less improvement than he would gain by writing a half. It is just in this way that we authors mount to such heights; hence it is that even the worst of us, if we hold out, become somewhat, at last, and write ourselves up from Schilda to Abdera, and from there away up to Grub Street.

But what a glowing hour then came on for our darling! What are all Chinese lantern-festivals to the high festival for which an inflamed youth lights up all the chambers of his brain, and in this illumination throws out his first essays?

In the forepart, and on the very threshold of the essay perhaps, Albano still crept along step by step, and made use merely of his head; but as he got further on, and his heart quivered with wings, and like a comet he must needs sweep along before only shimmering constellations of great truths, could he then restrain himself from imitating[Pg 153] the rosy-red Flamingo, who, in his passage towards the sun, seems to paint himself into a flying brand, and to clothe himself in wings of fire? When at length he reached the practical application, verily every one was like the others; in each he formed and sowed an Arcadia full of human angels, who in three minutes could cross over on a Charon's pontoon thrown in for the purpose, and land in the Elysium which floated so near: in every one of these practical applications all men were saints, all saints beatified; all mornings blossoms, and all evenings fruit; Liana perfectly well, and he not far from it—her lover;—all nations ascended more easily the noonday heights; and he upon his own, like men upon mountains, saw everything good nearer to him. Ah! the whole boggy present, full of stumps and blood-suckers, had he kicked aside, and was now encircled only with floating green worlds, full of pastures, which the sun-ball of his head had projected into the ether.

Blissful, blissful time! thou hast long since gone by! O, the years in which man reads and makes his first poems and systems, when the spirit creates and blesses its first worlds, and when, full of fresh morning-thoughts, it sees the first constellations of truth come up bringing an eternal splendor, and stand ever before the longing heart, which has enjoyed them, and to which time, by and by, offers only astronomical newspapers and refraction-tables on the morning-stars, only antiquated truths and rejuvenated lies! O, then was man, like a fresh, thirsty child, suckled and reared with the milk of wisdom; at a later period he is only cured with it, as a withered, sceptical, hectic patient! But thou canst, indeed, never come back again, glorious season of first love for the truth, and these sighs can only give me a warmer[Pg 154] remembrance of thee; and if thou ever shouldst return, it certainly could not be down here in the low mine-shaft of life, where our morning splendor consists of the little flames that play upon the quartz crystals, and our sun is a mine-lamp,—no; but it may happen then, when death reveals us, and tears away from over the heads of the pale-yellow workmen the coffin-lid of the mine-shaft, and we now again stand as first men on a new, full earth, and under a fresh, immeasurable heaven!

Into this golden age of his heart fell also his acquaintance with Rousseau and Shakespeare, of whom the former exalted him above his century, and the latter above this life. I will not say here how Shakespeare ruled, sovereign, in his heart,—not through the breathing of living characters, but by lifting him up out of the loud kingdom of earth into the silent realm of infinity. When one dips his head at night under water, there is an awful stillness round about him; into a similar supernatural stillness of the under-world does Shakespeare introduce us.

What many schoolmasters may blame in Dian is this, that he gave the youth all books indiscriminately, without any exact course of reading. But Alban asked, in later years: "Is such a course anything but folly? Is it possible? For does Fate ever arrange the appearance of new books, or systems, or teachers, or outward circumstances, or conversations, so according to paragraphs, that one needs nothing more than to transcribe all that passes upon the memory, and he shall have the order into the bargain? Does not every head need and make its own? And does more depend on the order in which the meats follow each other, or on the digestion of them?"[Pg 155]

While Dian was causing a nobler temple to go up in the heavens than the stone one in the village, the Princess, whose castrum doloris this was to be, died; they had, therefore, to deposit her remains for a time in the accommodations of a Pestitz church. This changed one or two thousand things. The Crown-prince of Hohenfliess, Luigi, must now, will he nill he, come back from Italy, to the princely chair, in which the old man, bent up with years, had, for a long time, diminutive and speechless, been rather lying than sitting,—although the Minister standing behind the princely arm-chair took off his figure and voice in a sufficiently lively manner. Don Gaspard, who had not listened to any of the previous letters of Albano, now despatched to him the following orders, which rushed like fiery wine through his veins: "On my way back from Italy we meet, in thy birthplace, Isola Bella. Thou wilt be sent for." Even readers who have not had a week's practice in folding and sealing letters of a diplomatic corps, will easily observe that the Knight of the Fleece is thinking to bring his son acquainted with the young prince, and to establish and insure their first Pestitz connections.

But I beg the world now to measure the Paradise of a man, who after so long seafaring at last sees the long shores of the new world stretch out into the ocean. Was not life at this moment open to him in a hundred directions? Laurel-wreaths, ivy-wreaths, flower-wreaths, myrtle-wreaths, wheat-garlands,—all these crowns overhung the great gate of Pestitz and its house-doors. Thou brother, thou sister, (I mean Roquairol and Liana,) what a full, yearning soul was marching to meet you! and[Pg 156] what a dreaming and innocent one! Homer and Sophocles, and the ancient history and Dian, and Rousseau, that magus of youth,—and Shakespeare and the British weeklies (wherein a higher and more human poesy speaks than in their abstract poems),—all these had left behind in the happy youth an everlasting light, an unparalleled purity, wings for every Mount Tabor, and the fairest but most difficult wishes. He resembled, not the urbane French, who, like ponds, reflect the hue of the nearest bank, but those loftier men, who, like the sea, wear the color of the boundless heavens.

In fact, now was the ripest, best point of time for his change. Through Dian and his journeys, even Albano's exterior man had been trained to grace in fashionable saloons. Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond-points enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is wounded, and even uncommon worth is an uncommon fault,—as high towers, for that very reason, appear bent over. Zesara learned, even outside the circle of country youngsters, a readiness of ideas and words, which formerly stood at his service only in a state of enthusiasm; for wit, generally a foe of the latter, was with him merely a servant and child thereof. He did not, like witty sucklings, coquette with all ideas, but he was either beset by them or not touched at all; hence came that silent, slow, unostentatious ripening of his power; he resembled mountains of a gradual ascent, which always yield more booty than those which rise abruptly. With great trees, the seed is smaller and in spring the blossoms later than in the case of small bushes.

The time ere Gaspard's messenger came to take him away was to the detained youth an eternity, and the village[Pg 157] a prison; it shrivelled up to the household-buildings of a convent. The hidden plan of his life, written, however, by encaustic into his brain, was, as with all such young men, this, to be and do nothing more than—everything; that is to say, to bless, to glorify, and to enlighten at once himself and a country,—to be a Frederick II. upon the throne; in other words, a storm-cloud, which should contain thunders of excommunication for the sinner, electrical light for the deaf, blind, and lame, showers for the insects, and warm drops for thirsty flowers, hail for enemies, an attraction for everything, for leaves and dust, and a rainbow for the end. Now, as he could not succeed Frederick II., he proposes to be hereafter minister at least,—especially as Wehrfritz made so much out of this by-sceptre,—this offshoot and chip of the mother sceptre,—and in his spare hours a great poet and philosopher withal.

I shall be delighted, Count, if thou shouldst become a second Frederick, the second and only; my book will profit by it and I myself mould my future thereby as a rare historiographer, compounded of Zenophon, Curtius, and Voltaire!

Zesara will never forget the spring evening, on which he saw a passenger in a greatcoat,—a little limping and covered with brown travelling-paint, to which his white eyeballs formed a shining contrast,—wade across the shallow brook beside the high bridge, and how, further, the passenger took with him a watch-man's cane which the then Lieutenant of the Beggar's Police had just leaned against his house-door, a vicarious fellow-laborer, and handed the said cane, on his way, to a[Pg 158] cripple, with the words: "Old man, I have nothing by me smaller than the stick. If anybody asks you about it, just tell them you are keeping guard in the village against the confounded beggar tribe, but have not eyes enough." At the same time our pilgrim reached out to a rector's little son, who needed it for about three minutes, his pocket-handkerchief.

It was of course our old Librarian by title, Schoppe, whom Don Gaspard had despatched with the note of invitation for Isola Bella. Albano's delight was so great, that only some days later did the youth mistake the odd humorist, whereas the latter soon correctly weighed the light, ardent, still wildling. Did it not fare still worse with the old Provincial Director, who, merely because he rated the body politic of the Empire as high as if he were the installed soul therein, upon Schoppe's sallies against the constitution, came out in a patriotic fury: "Sir," said he, in an excited manner, "even if there were a flaw anywhere, still a true German would be bound to maintain a profound silence on the subject, unless he can help the matter, especially in such cursed times."

The finest of all was, that, at Luigi's request, the Architect had to set out at the same time, for the purpose of fetching casts of antiques from Rome.

And now march on, that soon ye may come back again, and we may at last for once fairly enter Pestitz! It may well be expected that thou, good child (I should rather say, wild-bee), wilt take thy flight from the rural honey-tree into the glass beehive of the city, with deeper pangs than thou hadst imagined beforehand,—has not even the old foster-father gone off on his journey without saying his farewell, only to escape thine?—and, as to thy good mother, it seems to her as if one of the angry Parcæ[Pg 159] were tearing a son from her breast, as if his tender love-bond, woven only of childish familiarity, would not stretch out into the far future,—and thy sister locks herself up in the attic, her rustic heart raging with fiery torments, and cannot say anything to thee, nor give thee anything, but a letter-case previously and privately worked by her with the silken circumscription: "Remember us!" and even on thy laurel-seeking head will the triumphal arch or rainbow of leave-taking, when thou passest under it, fling down heavy, heavy drops, (ah, they will continue to hang longer on the eyes that look after thee!) thy honest old teacher Wehmeier will pour out upon thee the last stream of his words and tears, and say, and thy tender heart will not smile at it: "He is a worn out, old fellow, and has now nothing before him but the hole (the grave); thou, on the contrary, art a fresh, young blood, full of languages and antiquities and magnificent, god-given talents,—of course he shall not live to see thee make a famous man, but his children well may; and these poor worms,—thou must one day adopt them, young master!"

Thou pure soul, on every familiar house, on every dear garden and valley will sorrow, indeed, sharpen her clasp-knife, and tear open therewith softly gushing wounds in thy glowing, tender heart. What do I say? even from thy friendly morning- and evening-heights, the nunnery-gratings of thy holiest hopes, and from Liana herself, thou wilt seem to be stealing away.

But cast thy weeping eyes over the broad, blue Italy, and dry them in the spring breezes. Life begins,—the signals for the martial exercises and tournaments of manly youth are given, and, in the midst of the Olympic battle-games, thou wilt hear the music of neighboring concert- and dancing-halls magnificently pealing around thee.[Pg 160]

What phantasies are these I am playing here? What! is it not more than too well known to all of us, that he has been gone this long time, ever since the very first Jubilee-period,—yes, and come back again, and has already, ever since the second—and we are now counting the fourth—been sitting in company with the Librarian and the Lector, on horseback, before Pestitz, unable to get in, on account of the barricade of the——

[Pg 161]

Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be unravelled,—where all household gods and household fates of his nearest future lie hid,—where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of the best.[Pg 163]

Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the passers below, and a building-orator,[45] on the ridgepole of a new house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding; yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the Muses,[46] who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery eye to find his Roquairol,—after all this, when we reach his future residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.

It came from the Land-physicus[47] Sphex, his future landlord, who is to resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are domiciled the students and the city. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"

[Pg 164]

The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly, "Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had been sent after him,—fair reflections from the still land of youth, left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the clare-obscure, made the forms of youth—many of them armed, many crowned, a troop of fates and graces—beset his heart, which had hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft and languid for three minutes; verily, to a youth, especially this one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer, are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the physical.

Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son, who, with two others, named Boerhave[Pg 165] and Galen, had hitherto been acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?" asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears, and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.

The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary, prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz, and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son, and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death, postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much silk in a period of such political embezzlement.[Pg 166] "But," replied Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs, like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children, the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies, we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means, to announce."

Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while, brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open, with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover; but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook his head still[Pg 167] more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to conceal.

At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of the letter!

When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress, and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well, and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti: "The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which live on fruits, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on leaves,—for instance, the leaf-lice,—cleave together nest-wise." Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation and[Pg 168] season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it. Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common, but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance of bodies.

The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly, simple, flabby man, named Malt, he had a year since, when certain symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead. Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.

As to the drum, the corpse is obliged—since he is full as hard of hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the very reason that he never hears one—to carry that round, strapped to him,[Pg 169] because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his employer and prosector has to censure in him.[49] The Doctor now began to scold at him down below—Schoppe stood listening at the window—in the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can, and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret of thy trouble with me,—there is no real blessing upon our grease,—and one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father, verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."

The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs, when translated, thus:—

"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence of thy sister's asphyxias;[Pg 170] it was written on Good Friday, and looked forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain. I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful, armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the jongleur fast; but bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!

"G. de C."

"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion, and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals. "Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not,[Pg 171] however, in this case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the most beloved.

In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their household arrangements,—which, however, had never yet been able to efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of the Linden-city,—the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the world a bill of fare raisonné of all the show-dishes in the gallery; but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban, in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of his mother's,[50] and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had no one been there.

But the Princess Julienne was there, whom he (as we all do) still recognized right well as a Blumenbühl acquaintance, as she also did him. She was truly full of youthful charms, but one did not find these out till one had been for two days violently in love with her; that made her every minute afterward prettier, as in fact love is rather the father than the son of the goddess of grace, and his quiver the best casket of jewels and the richest[Pg 172] toilet-box, and his bandage the best mouchoir de Venus and beauty-patch that I know.

She was just sketching the gypsum-cast of a noble old head, which seemed to the Count as if it must have been drawn from the antique-cabinet of his memory, and toward which his swelling heart flowed out right lovingly; but he could not recall the original. At last Julienne, in despite of etiquette, said, looking up most kindly, "Ah, dear Augusti, my father lies dead in Lilar." The word Lilar suddenly colored, in Albano, the pale image of recollection,—perfectly like this white bust had the old man in the moonshine looked, who, in that poetical summer-night, pressed Zesara's hands together on the mountain for prayer, and said, "Go home to sleep, dear son, ere the storm comes." Now another would have inquired after the name of the bust, and then, and not till then, have disclosed the nocturnal history; but the Count, in his warmth, did merely the latter, after waiting a short time for the conversation to run out. Augusti, when Albano began the history—to him a foreign one—of his acquaintance with the original, was on thorns to interrupt him; but Julienne gave him a nod, to let him go on, and the youth true-heartedly communicated to the sympathizing soul the beautiful meeting, with a tenderness of emotion and fire, both of which increased when her eyes flowed over into her smiles. "It was my father,—that is his cast," said Julienne, weeping and glad. Albano, after his manner, clasped his hands together, with a sigh, before the bust, and said, "Thou noble, heartily-beloved form!" and his large eye gleamed with love and sorrow.

The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life is truly only a longer[Pg 173] punishment of bearing arms (as, according to the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,—but the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count (while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever, and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),—and how she and Fräulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved; how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as one going to bed.

We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again, like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the grave; and when, like flowers sleeping[Pg 174] at evening, they become undistinguishable, and grow all alike, even before death makes them so.

The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana. But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.

The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but they loved each other intensely,—with eyes, lips, and hearts,—like two good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano, as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates to the highest heavens in his innermost being!

Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself without the fee-provost Hafenreffer),[Pg 175] have been able to observe anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in his face, and rapidity of utterance.

Into the midst of these delineations and enjoyments the successor, or rather the afterwinter of the cold old man, Luigi, suddenly entered. With a flat, carved work of spongy face, on which nothing expressed itself but the everlasting discontent of life-prodigals, and with a little full-grown miniver[51] on his head (as forerunner of the wisdom-teeth), and with the unfruitful superfetation of a voluminous belly, he came up to Albano with the greatest courtliness, in which a flat frostiness towards all men stood prominent. He immediately began to dust about him with the bran of empty, rapid, disconnected questions, and was constantly in a hurry; for he suffered almost more ennui than he caused; as in general, there is no one with whom life drags so disagreeably as with him who tries to make it shorter. Luigi had run over the earth as quickly as through a powdering room, and had, as in such a room, become decently gray; the milk-vessels of his outer and inner man had, because they were to be converted into cream-pots and custard-cups, for that very reason, perverted themselves into poison-cups and goblets of sorrow. As often as I pass along before a painted prince's-suite in a corridor, I always fall upon my old project, and say, with entire conviction: "Could we only contrive for once, like the Spartans and all the older nations, to get a regent to the throne in a healthy state, then we should have a good one into the[Pg 176] bargain, and all would go well. But I know these are no times for such a thing. It is a sin, that only at torture do surgeons and physicians assist, not at joy, to point out nicely the degree of pleasure as they do of the rack, and to indicate the innocent conditions."

Albano, a stranger in the company and in the eyes of this class of men, looked upon the gulf between himself and Luigi as much less deep than it was; it was merely annoying and uncomfortable to him, as it is to certain people, when, without their knowledge, a cat is in the chamber. The progress of moral enervation and refinement will yet so cleanse and equalize all our exteriors,—and according to the same law, indeed, by which physical weakness throws back the eruptions of the skin and drives them into the nobler parts,—that verily an angel and a satan will come at last to be distinguishable in nothing except in the heart. Alban had already brought with him from Wehrfritz, whom he always heard contending for the right of the province against the prince, an aversion to his successor; so much the more easily flamed up in him a moral indignation, when Luigi turned toward the pictures and drew aside the curtains or aprons from several of the most indecent, in order, not without taste and knowledge, to appraise their artistic worth. A copied Venus of Titian, lying upon a white cloth, was only the forerunner. Although the innocent hereditary prince made his voyage pittoresque through this gallery with the artistical coldness of a gallery inspector and anatomist, and sought more to show than to enrich his knowledge, still the inexperienced youth took it all up with a deaf and blind passionateness, which I know not how to vindicate in any way, not even by the presence of the princess, and so much the less, because in the first place she busily[Pg 177] divided her soul only between the gypsum-bust and its copy, and because, secondly, in our day, ladies' watches and fans (if they are tasty) have pictures on them which Albano would want other fans to hide. The two flames of wrath and shame overspread his face with a glowing reflection; but his awkward honesty of scorn contrasted with the ease of the Lector, who with his cold tone, quite as precise as it was light, preserved independence and protected purity. "They please me not, one of them," he said, with severity: "I would give them all away for a single storm of Tempesta's." Luigi smiled at his scholar-like eye and feeling. When they stepped into the second picture-chamber, Albano heard the Princess going away. As this apartment threatened him with still more rent veils of the unholiest, he took his leave without special ceremony, and went back without the Lector, who had to-day to give a reading.

Never did Schoppe grasp his throbbing hand more heartily than this time; the aspect of an abashed young man is almost fairer (especially rarer) than that of an abashed virgin; the former appears more tender and feminine, as the latter appears more strong and manly, by a mixture of the indignation of virtue. Schoppe, who, like Pope, Swift, Boileau, forced into combination a sacred reverence for the sex with cynicism of dress and language, emptied the greatest vials of wrath upon all libertinage, and fell like a satirical Bellona upon the best free people; this time, however, he rather took them under his protection, and said, "The whole tribe love the blush of shame in others decidedly, and defend it more willingly than shamelessness, just as (and on the same kind of grounds) blind persons prefer the scarlet color. One may liken them to toads, who set the costly toad-stone[Pg 178] (their heart) on no other cloth as they do upon a red one."

The Lector—who with all his purity and correctness would, nevertheless, without hesitation, have helped a Scarron write his ode on the seat of a duchess—when he would treat the matter of the Count's flight, was at a loss what to make of it, when the latter sprinkled him with some rose-vinegar, and said, "The bad man's father is lying on the board, and one lies before his own iron brow: O, the bad man!" Certainly the physical and moral nearness of the two fair female hearts, and his love for them, had done most to excite the Count against Luigi's artistic cynicism. The Lector merely replied, "He would hear the same at the Minister's and everywhere; and his false delicacy would very soon surrender." "Do the saints," inquired Schoppe, "dwell only upon the palaces and not in them?" For Froulay's bore upon its platform a whole row of stone apostles; and on one corner stood a statue of Mary, which was to be seen from Sphex's house among nothing but roofs.

Youthful Zesara! how does this marble Madonna chase the blood-waves through thy face, as if she were the sister of thy fairer one, or her tutelar and household goddess! But he took care not to hasten his entrance into this Lararium of his soul, namely, the delivery of his father's letter of introduction, by a single whisper, for fear of suspicion; so many missteps does the good man make in the very gentile fore-court of love; how shall he stand in the fore-court of the women, or get a footing in the dim Holy of Holies?[Pg 179]

The Court now caused to be made known in writing (it could not speak for sorrow) that the dead Nestor had departed this life. I set aside here the lamentation of the city, together with the rejoicing of the same over the new perspective. The Land-physicus Sphex had to eviscerate the Regent like a mighty beast,—whereas we subjects are served up with all our viscera, like snipes and ground-sparrows, on the table of the worms. At evening, there reposed the pale one on his bed of state,—the princely hat and the whole electrical apparatus of the throne-thunder lay quite as still and cold beside him on a Tabouret; he had the suitable torches and corpse-watchers around him. These Swiss-guards of the dead (the sound of the word rings through me, and I at this moment see Liberty lying on her bed of state in the Alps, and the Swiss guarding her) consist, as is well known, of two regency-counsellors, two counsellors of the exchequer, and so on. One of the exchequer-counsellors was Captain Roquairol. It can be only touched upon here, in the way of interpolation, how this youth, who of financial matters understood little more than a treasury-counsellor in ——h,[52] arose, nevertheless, to be a counsellor in war-matters there,—namely, against his own will, through old Froulay, who (in himself no very sentimental gentleman) was always reviving and retouching the youthful remembrances of the old Prince, because, in this tender mood, one could get from him by begging what one would. How odious and low! so can a poor prince have not a smile, not a tear, not a happy thought, out of which some court-mendicant, who sees it,[Pg 180] will not make a door-handle to open something for himself, or a dagger-handle to inflict a wound; not a sound can he utter which some forester and bugle-master of the chase shall not pervert to the purpose of a mouth-piece and tally-ho.

Julienne, at nine o'clock in the evening, visited the only heart which, in the whole court, beat like hers and for hers,—her good Liana. The latter gladly offered her forehead to her commencing sick-headache, and sought only to feel and to still another's pain. The friends, who, before strangers' eyes, only displayed pleasantry, and before each other only a tender, enthusiastic seriousness, sank more and more deeply into this mood before the severe and religious lady of the Minister, who never found in Julienne so much soul as in the soft hour after weeping, as stock-gilliflowers begin to scent the air when they are sprinkled. Not the struggle, but the flight of pain, beautifies the person; hence the countenance of the dead is transfigured, because the agonies have cooled away. The maidens stood enthusiastically together at the window, the waxing moonlight of their fancy was made full moonlight by that of the outer world; they formed the nun's-plan to live together, and go in and out together for life. Often it seemed to them, in this still hour of emotion (and the thought made them shudder), as if the murmuring wings of departed souls swept by over them (it was only a couple of flies, who, with feet and wings, had caught a few tones on the harp of the Minister's lady); and Julienne thought most bitterly of her dead father in Lilar.

At last she begged the sister of her soul to ride with her this night to Lilar, and to share and assuage the last and deepest woe of an orphan. She did it willingly;[Pg 181] but the "yes" was hard to extort from the Minister's lady. I see the gentle forms step, from their long embrace in the carriage, out into the mourning chamber at Lilar,—Julienne, the smaller of the two, with quivering eyes and changing color; Liana, more pale with megrim and mourning, and milder and taller than her companion, having completed her growth in her twelfth year.[53]

Like supernatural beings the two maidens beamed upon Roquairol's soul, already burning in every corner. A single tear-drop had power to bring into this calcining oven boiling and desolation. Already this whole evening had he been glancing at the old man with fearful shudderings at the childish end of that faded spirit, which once had been as fiery as his own now was; and the longer he looked, so much the thicker smoke-clouds floated from the open crater of the grave over into his green-blooming life, and he heard therein a thundering, and he saw therein an iron hand glowing and threatening to grasp at human hearts.

Amidst these grim dreams, which illuminated every inner stain of his being, and which sternly threatened him that a day would come, when, in his volcano too, there would remain nothing fruitful but the—ashes, the mournful maidens entered, who, on their way, had wept only over the face that had grown cold, and now wept still more heavily over the form that had grown beautiful; for the hand of death had effaced from it the lines of the last years,—the prominent chin, the fire-mounds of the passions, and so many pains underscored with wrinkles, and had, as it were, painted upon the earthly tabernacle[Pg 182] the reflection of that fresh, still morning light which now invested the disrobed soul. But upon Julienne a black taffeta-plaster on the eyebrows, which had been left behind by a blow,—this sign of wounds made a more violent impression than all signs of healing: she observed only the tears, but not the words of Liana. "O, how beautifully he rests there!" "But why does he rest?" said her brother, with that voice, murmuring from his innermost being, which she recognized as coming from the amateur-stage; and grasped her hand with agitation, because he and she loved each other fervently, and his lava broke now through the thin crust: "for this reason,—because the heart is cut out of his breast, because the wheel is broken at the cistern, because the fire-wheel of rapture, the fountain-wheel of tears, moves therein no more!"

This cruel allusion to the opening of the body wrought terribly on the sick Liana. She must needs avert her eyes from the covered breast, because the anguish cramped the breath in her lungs; and yet the wild man, desolating others as well as himself, who had hitherto been silent by the side of the stiff corpse-guard, went on with redoubled crushing: "Feel'st thou how painfully this cricket-ball of fate, this Ixion's wheel of the wishes, rolls within us? Only the breast without a heart is calm."

At once Liana took a longer and more intense look at the corpse; an ice-cold edge, as if of death's scythe, cut through her burning brain,—the funeral torches (it seemed to her) burned dimmer and dimmer,—then she saw in the corner of the chamber a dark cloud playing and growing up;—then the cloud began to fly, and, full of gushing night, rushed over her eyes,—then the thick[Pg 183] night struck deep roots into her wounded eyes, and the affrighted soul could only say, "Ah, brother, I am blind!"

Only hard man, but no woman, will be able to conceive that an æsthetic pleasure at the murderous tragedy found its way into Roquairol's frightful anguish. Julienne left the dead, and her old sorrow, and, with the new one, flung herself around her neck, and moaned: "O my Liana, my Liana! Seest thou not yet? Do look up at me!" The distracted and distracting brother led on the sister, upon whose pale cheeks only single drops fell like hard, cold water, with the sharp question: "Does no destroying angel, with red wings, whiz through thy night; hurls he no yellow vipers at thy heart, and no sword-fish into thy network of nerves, in order that they may be entangled therein, and whet their saw-teeth in the wounds? I am happy in my pain; such thistles scratch us up,[54] according to good moralists, and smooth us down too. Thou anguish-stricken blind one, what say'st thou,—have I made thee truly miserable again?" "Madman!" said Julienne, "let her alone: thou art destroying her." "O, he is not to blame for that," said Liana; "the headache long since made it misty to my eyes."

The friends took their departure in double darkness, and therein will I leave it with all its agonies. Then Liana begged her maiden to say nothing of it to her mother so little time before sleep, since it might, perhaps, go away in the night. But in vain; the Minister's lady was accustomed to close her day on the bosom and lips of her daughter. The latter now came in, led along, and sought her mother's heart with a groping, sidelong motion, and, in this beloved neighborhood, could no[Pg 184] longer refrain from a softer weeping; then, indeed, all was betrayed and confessed. The mother first sent for the Doctor before she, with wet eyes and with her gentle arms around her, heard her afflicted daughter's story. Sphex came, examined the eyes and pulse, and made no more of it than a nervous prostration.

The Minister, who had everywhere in the house leading-hounds with fine—ears, came in, upon being informed; and while Sphex stood by, he made, except long strides, nothing but this little note, "Voyez, Madame, comme votre le Cain[55] joue son rôle à merveille."

As soon as Sphex had gone out, Froulay let loose several billion-pounders and hand-grenades upon his lady. "Such," he observed, "are the consequences of your visionary scheme of education (to be sure his own, in respect to his son, had not turned out specially well). Why did you let the sick ninny go?" He would himself have still more gladly allowed it from courtly views; but men love to blame the faults which they have been saved the trouble of committing; in general, like head-cooks, they had rather apply the knife to the white- than to the dark-feathered fowl. "Vous aimez, ce me semble, à anticiper le sort de cette reveuse un peu avant qu'il soit decidé de nôtre."[56] Her silence only made him the more bitter. "O, ce sied si bien à votre art cosmétique que de rendre aveugle et de l'être, le dieu de l'amour s'y prête de modèle." Wounded by this extreme severity,—especially as the Minister himself had chosen and commanded this very cosmetic education of Liana, against the maternal wishes, to gratify his political ones,—the mother had to go and[Pg 185] hide and dry her wet eyes in her daughter's bosom. Married men and the latest literati regard themselves as flints, whose power of giving light is reckoned according to their sharp corners. Our forefathers ascribed to a diamond belt the power to kindle love between spouses. I also still find in jewels this power; only this stone (which appertains to the flint species) leaves one, after the marriage-compact, as cold and hard as it is itself. Probably Froulay's marriage-bond was one of such precious stone.

But the lady only said, "Dear Minister, leave we that! only spare you the sick one." "Voilà précisement ce qui fût votre affaire," said he, laughing scornfully. In vain did Liana eloquently and touchingly pour out to him her mistaken yet moving convictions, (aimed at the wall, however,) and plead for her brother, which everlasting advocacy of all sorts of people (which proved too much) was her only failing;—all in vain, for his sympathy with an afflicted one consisted in nothing but fury against the tormentors, and his love toward Liana showed itself only in hatred of the same. "Peace, fool! But Monsieur le Cain comes not into my house, madam, till further orders!" Out of forbearance, I say nothing further to the old conjugal bully than go—to the devil, or at least to bed.

The German public may still remember the obligato-sheets promised in the Introductory Programme, and ask me what has become of them. The foregoing Cycle was the first, most excellent Public; but see through the matter, how it is with obligato-sheets, and that perhaps as much history lies therein as in any one Cycle, however it may be called.[Pg 186]

The Count had not yet learned anything of Liana's misfortune, when he, with the others, went down to the dinner of the Doctor, who to-day was very hospitable. They found him seized with a most violent fit of laughter, his hands thrust into his sides, and his eyes bent over two little ointment vessels on the table. He stood up, and was quite serious. The fact was, he found in Reil's Archives of Physiology, that, according to Fourcroy and Vauquelin, tears dye violet-juice green, and therefore contain alkali. In order to prove the proposition and the tears, he had thrown himself into a chair, and laughed in right hearty earnest, so as afterward to cry and get a drop or two for the brine-gauge of the proposition; he would gladly have wrought himself into another kind of emotion, but he understood his own nature, and knew that nothing could be got out of it so,—not a drop.

He left the guests alone a moment,—the lady was not yet to be seen,—Malt sat on an ottoman,—the children had satirical looks,—in short, Impudence dwelt in this house as in her temple. Ridicule had no effect upon the old man, and he only countermanded what displeased himself, not what displeased others.

At length the rosy-cheeked wife of the physician flourished into the apartment,—as preparatory course or preamble of the dinner,—with three or four esprits or feathers in her cap,—with a dapple neck-apron,—in a red ball-dress, from which waltzing had taken out the color in which she had rouged,—and with a perforated fancy-fan. If I wished, I could be interested in her; for, touching these esprits (since the esprit, like the brain in Embrya, often sets itself upon the brain-pan, and there suns itself), she thought women and partridges were best served up at table with feathers on their heads;[Pg 187] touching the fan, she meant to have it understood she had just come from a morning call (whereby she very clearly implied that ladies could no more go through the streets without their fan-stick than joiners without their rule); touching the rest, she knew the guest was a Count. Accordingly, it appears that she belongs to the honorables, who (for the most part), like rattlesnakes, are never better to be enjoyed than when one has previously put the head out of the way; but that we have still time enough to believe, when we come to understand her better.

The beautiful Zesara was for her blind, deaf, dumb, destitute of smell, taste, feeling; but there are many women whom one cannot, with the greatest pains and tediousness, displease; Schoppe could do it more easily. Sphex, for his own personal predilections, made more out of a cell of fat in Malt than out of the whole cellular texture of a lady, even of his own; like all business people, he held women to be veritable angels, whom God had sent for the ministration of the saints (the business men).

The dinner course began. Augusti, a delicate eater, enjoyed much, and took not only to the fine service, but to the torn napkins; the like of which he had often had in his lap at court, because there, in morals and in linen, rents are preferred to plasters. Soon, as usual, came forth even the outposts and first skirmishes of miserable dishes, the common prophets and forerunners of the best tit-bits, although at a hundred tables I have cursed them, that they did not, like good monthly magazines, give the best pieces first, and the most meagre last. The Doctor had already said to the three boys,—"Galen, Boerhave, Van Swieten, what is the polite way of sitting?" and the[Pg 188] three physicians had already shoved three right hands between the waistcoat buttons, and three left hands into the waistcoat pockets, and sat waiting, "bolt upright" when good chap-sager was brought in for the dessert. Sphex partly expressed pleasure in cheese, partly a horror of it, just as he found it in the way of his shop-business. He remarked, on one hand, how joiners, in their glue-pot, had no better glue than what stood here before them,—it had just that binding quality in a man,—yet he would rather, for his own individual self, with Dr. Junker, apply it externally, like arsenic; but he also confessed, on the other hand, that the chap-sager for the Lector was poison. "I would pledge myself for it," said he, "that you, if one could examine you, would be found hectic! the long fingers and the long neck speak in my favor, and particularly are white teeth, according to Camper, a bad sign. Persons, on the contrary, who have a set of teeth like my lady there may feel safe."

Augusti smiled, and merely asked the Doctor's lady, at what time one could best gain access to the Minister.

Such poisonous reflections, as well as cats'-dinners,[57] he gave out, not from satirical malice, but from mere indifference to others, whom, like an honest man, he never suffered in the least to sway him in his actions. With the liberty-cap of the doctor's hat on his head, he received, from his medical indispensableness, so many academic freedoms, that he, between his four house-walls, ate and acted not more freely than between the showy, bristling pale-work of the court. Did he ever there—I ask that—let a drop of sweet wine pass his lips without previously drawing out an Ephraimite, which did not itself outlive the probation-day, and hanging it in the glass,[Pg 189] merely to prove before the court whether the Ephraimite therein did not grow black? And if the silver did so, was there not as good as a demonstration of the wine being oversmoked, and could not the physician have applied the whole right neatly, court, sweetness, blackening, poisoning, and oversmoking, if he had been the man to do it?

The Lector's accidentally inquiring about the time of seeing the Minister was what Albano had to thank for saving him from first learning the painful misfortune in the house of the Minister, or in the presence of the blind girl herself. "You can," answered Sara, the Doctoress, "also despatch the servant; he will subscribe for you all; I, however, pity none as I do the daughter." Now broke loose a storm of questions about the unknown accident. "It is so," began the physician, sulkily; but soon (because he saw in some eyes water for his mill, and because he sought to roll off all medical blame from himself upon Captain Roquairol) he set himself as well as he could to pathetic detail, and lied almost like a sentimentalist. With an unobserved hint to the affected lady, he pushed an empty dish towards her as a lachrymatory, in order that nothing might be lost. From the eclipsed eyes of the vainly struggling youth, this first woe of his life snatched some great drops. "May recovery be possible?" asked Augusti, exceedingly troubled, on account of his connection with the family.

"Certainly; it is a mere affection of the nerves," replied Schoppe, briskly, "and nothing more." Whytt relates, that a lady who had too much acid in her stomach (in the heart it were still worse) saw everything in a cloud, as girls do at the approach of sick-headache. Sphex, who had lied only for the sake of pathos and[Pg 190] alkali, and who was vexed that the Librarian should have been of his private opinion, answered just as if the latter had not spoken at all. "The highest degree of consumption, Mr. Lector, often winds up with blindness, and it were well, in this case, to prescribe for both. Meanwhile I am acquainted with a certain periodical nervous blindness. I had the case in a lady[58] whom I brought out of it merely by blood-letting, smoke of burnt coffee, and the evening fog from the water; this we are now trying again in the case of our nervous patient. A dutiful physician will, however, always wish the devil would take mother and brother."

In other words, the return of Liana's periodical malady almost distracted him. Offences against his honor, his love, his sympathy, never wrought the Physicus into a heat; through all such he kept on his glazed frost surtout; but disturbances of his cures heated him even to the degree of flying to pieces; and so are we all a kind of Prince-Rupert's-drops, which can bear the hammer and never break, till one just breaks off the little thread point, and they fly into a thousand splinters; with Achilles, it was the heel, with Sphex, the medical D.'s ring-finger, with me, the writing-finger. The Doctor now shook out the contents of his heart, as some call their gall-bladder; he swore by all the devils he had done more for her than any and every physician,—he had, however, already foreseen that such a stupid education—merely to look well and pray and read and sing—would prove a cursed poor economy,—he had often longed to break the harmonica-bells and tambour-needles,[59]—he[Pg 191] had often called the attention of the mother, with sufficient distinctness and without indulgence, to Liana's so-called charms, and to her sensibility, her bright redness of cheeks, and velvet-soft skin; but had seemed to himself, by so doing, almost to gratify more than to distress her. The only thing that delighted him was, that the maiden had, some years before, caught a deadly sickness from the first holy sacrament, from which he had tried to keep her away, because he had already experienced, in the case of a fourth patient, the most melancholy consequences from this holy act.

To the astonishment of every one my Count took part against all with Roquairol. Ah, thy first spring-storms were even now whirling round imprisoned in thy bosom, without a friendly hand to give them an outlet, and thou wouldst cover thy bloody grief! And wast thou not seeking a spirit full of flames, and eyes full of flames for thine own, and wouldst thou not rather have entered into brotherhood with a thundering hell-god than with an insipid pietistical saint, forever gnawing like a moth? Sharply he asks the Doctor, "What have you done with the Prince's heart?" "I have it not," said Sphex, startled; "it lies in Tartarus,[60] although it would have been more profitable to science had one been permitted to put it among one's preparations; it was large and very singular." He was thinking how often—when he could—he had, as an augur, during the dissection, secretly slipped aside one or another important member—as a princely or a cavalier-robber, à la minutta—for his[Pg 192] study,—a honey-bag which he gladly cut out for himself with his anatomical honey-knife.

"Has the young lady, then, an unhappy passion, or anything of the sort?" inquired Schoppe. "More than one," said Sphex; "cripples, idiots, young orphans, blind Methusalems,—all these passions she has. Sports and young gentlemen, I often say to the old lady, would be better for her health."

But on this point, in the requirement of cheerfulness, I give in to him. Joy is the only universal tincture which I would prepare; it works uniformly as antispasmodicum, as glutinans and astringens. The oil of gladness serves as ointment for burns and chills at once. Spring, for example, is a spring-medicine; a country-party, an oyster-medicine; a recreation at the watering-places is, in itself, a glass of bitters; a ball is a motion; a carnival, a course[61] of medicine;—and hence the seat of the blest is at the same time the seat of the immortals.

"Yes, he had finally," the Doctor concluded,—"as they were people of rank,—prescribed a dose of pride (of the meadows), which manifests all the officinal healing powers of joy; taken in a stronger dose, it works fully as well as enjoyment itself, enlivens the pulse, steels the fibres, opens the pores, and chases the blood through the long venous labyrinth.[62] In the case of his weakly lady, such as they saw her there, he had used, he said, this medicament long ago by dresses and a doctor's rank, and had helped her to her legs thereby. But he would rather cure sixty common women than one distinguished one,—and[Pg 193] he should regret, as family physician, merely his receipts and medical opinions, in case, as he certainly believed, the fair Liana should go hence."

The first question which Albano, who never missed anything that was said, put to Augusti on the way back from the Doctor's, was, What the Doctor's wife meant by the subscribing servant? He explained it. There is, namely, in Pestitz, as in Leipsic, an observance, that when a man dies or falls into any other misfortune, his family place a blank sheet of paper, with pen and ink, in the entrance-hall, in order that persons, who take and show a nearer interest, may send a lackey thither, to set their names on the paper as well as he knows how; this merchant-like indorsement of the nearer interest, this descending representative system by means of servants, who are generally, now-a-days, the telegraphs of our hearts, sweetens and alleviates for both cities great sorrow and sympathy through pen and ink.

"What! is that it? O God!" said Alban, and grew unusually indignant, as if people were forcing servants upon him as chrysographs and business-agents of his feelings. "O ye egotistical jugglers! through the pen of scribbling lackeys do ye pour yourselves out? Lector, I would condole with Satan himself more warmly than thus!"

Why is this veiled spirit so lively and loud? Ah, everything had moved him. Not merely lamentation over poor Liana, persecuted by all the nightly arrows of destiny, entered like iron into his open heart, but also amazement at the gloomy intermingling of fate with his young life. Roquairol's ever-recurring expression, "Breast without a heart," sounded to him as if it must be familiar; at last the converse of the expression came[Pg 194] to his thoughts, the word of the Sphinx on the island, "Heart without a breast." So, then, even this riddle was solved, and the place fixed, when he was to hear, contrary to every expectation, the prophecy of the loved one; but how incomprehensible,—incomprehensible!

"O yes! Liana she is called, and no God shall change the name," said his innermost soul. For in earlier years even the most vigorous youth prefers, in maidens, interesting delicacy of health and a tender fulness of feeling and a moisture of the eye,—just as, in general, at Albano's age, one values the flood (later the ebb) of the eyes too highly, although, too often, like an over-rich inundation, they wash away the seed-corns of the best resolutions;—whereas, at a later period, (because he proposes to himself marriage and housekeeping,) he looks out rather for bright and sharp than after moist eyes, and for cold and healthy blood.

As Albano, for the most part, drew down the fire from his internal clouds on the discharging chains of the harpsichord strings,—seldomer into the Hippocrene of poetry,—so did he now unconsciously make out of his inner charivari a passage on the harpsichord. I transpose his fantasy into my fancy in the following manner. On the softest minor-tones the blindness, with its long pains, passed by, and in the whispering-gallery of music he heard all the soft sighs of Liana repeated aloud. Then harder minor-tones led him down into Tartarus, to the grave and heart of the friendly old man who had once prayed with him, and then, in this spirit-hour, fell softly, like a dew-drop from heaven, the sound, Liana! With a thunder-clap of ecstasy he fell into the major-key, and asked himself, "This delicate, pure soul could fate promise to thy imperfect heart?" And when he answered[Pg 195] himself, that she would perhaps love him, because she could not see him,—for first love is not vain; and when he saw her led by her gigantic brother, and when he thought of the high friendship which he would give and require of him; then did his fingers run over the keys in an exalting war-music, and the heavenly hours sounded before him, which he should enjoy, when his two eternal dreams should pass over livingly out of night into day, and when brother and sister should furnish at once, to his so youthful heart, a loved one and a friend. Here his inner and outer storms softly died away, and the evenly-balanced temperament of the instrument became that of the player....

But a soul like his is more easily appeased with sorrow than with joy. As if the reality had already arrived, he pressed on still further; indescribably fair and unearthly, he saw Liana's image trembling in her cup of sorrow; for the crown of thorns easily ennobles a head to a Christ's head, and the blood of an undeserved wound is a redness on the cheek of the inner man, and the soul which has suffered too much is easily loved too much. The tender Liana appeared to him as already spun into the funeral veil for the Flora of the second world, as the tender limbs of the bee-nymph lie transparently folded over the little breast,—the white form of snow, which had once, in his dream, melted away on his heart, opened the bright little cloud again, and looked, blind and weeping, upon the earth, and said, "Albano, I shall die before I have seen thee."—"And even if thou shouldst never see me," said the dying heart in his breast, "yet will I still love thee. And even if thou shouldst soon pass away, Liana, still I gladly choose sorrow, and walk faithfully with thee till thou art in heaven."... Heaven[Pg 196] and hell had both at once drawn aside their curtains before him,—only a few notes, and those the same as before, and only the highest, and that only interruptedly and faintly, could he any longer strike; and at last his hands sank down, and he began to weep, but without too severe pangs,—as the storm which has unburdened itself of its lightnings and thunders stands now over the earth only as a soft, diffused rain.

[Pg 197]

But why shall I not do the same, and let at least one or two lymphatic veins of my water-treasure leap up and run out? I limit myself to ten persecutions of the reader,—calling my ten aphorisms thus, merely because I imagine the readers to be martyrs of their opinions,[Pg 198] and myself the Regent who converts them by force. The following aphorism, if one reckons the foregoing as the first persecution, is, I hope, the

Nothing sifts and winnows our preferences and partialities better than an imitation of the same by others. For a genius there are no sharper polishing-machines and grinding-disks at hand than his apes. If, further, every one of us could see running along beside him a duplicate of himself, a complete Archimimus[63] and repeater in complimenting, taking off the hat, dancing, speaking, scolding, bragging, &c.; by Heaven! such an exact repeating-work of our discords would make quite other people out of me and other people than we are at present. The first and least step which we should take toward reflection and virtue would be this, that we should find our bodily methodology, e. g. our walk, dress, dialect, our oaths, looks, favorite dishes, &c., no better than those of all others, but just the same. Princes have the good fortune that all courtiers around them station themselves as faithful supernumerary copyists and pier-mirrors of their selves, and propose to improve them by this Helot-mimicry. But they seldom attain their good end, because the Prince,—and that were also to be feared of me and the reader,—like the principle of non-distinguendum, does not believe in any real twins, but imagines that in morals, as in catoptrics, every mirror and mock rainbow shows everything inverted.

[Pg 199]

It is easier and handier for men to flatter than to praise.

In the centuries before us humanity appears to us to be growing up; in those which come after us, to be fading away; in our own, to burst forth in glorious bloom: thus do the clouds, only when in our zenith, seem to move straight forward, those in front of us come up from the horizon, the others behind us sail downward with fore-shortened forms.

What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes then cease.[64]

The old age of women is sadder and more solitary than that of men; spare, therefore, in them their years, their sorrows, and their sex! In fact, life often resembles the trap-tree with its spines directed upward, on which the bear easily clambers up to the honey-bait, but from which he can slide down again only under severe stings.

Have compassion on Poverty, but a hundred times more on Impoverishment! Only the former, not the latter, makes nations and individuals better.

Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's.

When two persons, in suddenly turning a corner, knock[Pg 200] their heads together, each begins anxiously to apologize, and thinks only the other feels the pain and that he himself has all the blame. (Only I excuse myself without any embarrassment, for the very reason that I know, by my persecutions, how the other party thinks.) Would to God we did not invert this in the case of moral offences!

Deluded and darkened man, living on from the mourning veil to the corpse-veil, thinks there is no further evil beyond that which he has immediately to overcome; and forgets that after the victory the new situation brings a new struggle. Hence, as before swift ships there swims a hill of water and a corresponding billowy abyss glides along close behind, so always before us is there a mountain, which we hope to climb, and behind us still a deep valley out of which we seem to have ascended.

Thus does the reader vainly hope now, after having stood out ten persecutions, to ride into the haven of the story, and there to lead a peaceable life, free from the troubled one of my characters; but can any spiritual or worldly arm, then, protect him against scattered similes,—against hemispherical headaches,—whimsies,—reviews,—curtain-lectures,—rainy months,—or in fact honey-moons, which come in at the end of every volume?—

Now for our History! In the evening Albano and Augusti went with the paternal letter of credit to the Minister's. The frostiness and pride of that individual the Lector endeavored, on their way, to varnish over by praising his laboriousness and discernment. With a knocking at his heart the Count seized the door-knocker to the heaven- or hell-gate of his future destiny. In the antechamber—that higher servant's apartment and Limbus[Pg 201] infantum et patrum—there were still people enough, for Froulay regarded an antechamber as a stage, which must never be empty, and on which, as in the Jewish temple, according to the Rabbins, for those who kneel and pray, it is never too close. The Minister's lady was not present as a patient here, merely because she was looking after one of her own elsewhere. The Minister also was not here,—because he made few ceremonies, and only demanded uncommonly many,—but in his working-cabinet; he had heretofore had his head under the warm throne-canopy and taken a deep bite into the forbidden apple of the Empire, therefore he willingly made a sacrifice (not to others, but of others), and let himself, as a saintly statue, be hung round with votive limbs, without having to bestir his own, and, like St. Franciscus at Oporto, with letters of thanks and petitions which he never opens.

Froulay came, and was—as ever, aside from business—as courteous as a Persian. For Augusti was his home friend,—i. e. the Minister's lady was his home-friend,—and Albano was not a good person to run against; because one had occasion for his foster-father in the votes of the Province, and because the youth by a peculiar and proper pride of his own commanded men. There is a certain noble pride through which merits shine brighter than through modesty. Froulay had not the most comfortable part before him; for the Court of Haarhaar was as disaffected toward the Knight of the Fleece, as he was toward it;[65] but Haarhaar was to be without doubt (according to all Italian surgical reports) and in a few years[Pg 202] (according to all nosological ones) the heir of his inheritance and throne. Now the bad thing about it was, that the Minister, who, like a good Christian, looked mainly to the future, had to creep along between the German Herr von Bouverot, on the one hand, who was secretly a creature of Haarhaar, and the demands of the present moment, on the other.

He received the Count, I said, in an uncommonly obliging manner, as well as the Lector, and disclosed to the two that he must present to them his lady, who desired their acquaintance. He sent word to her, but, without waiting an answer, conducted them both into her apartment. Now was it to the youth as if the heavy door of a still and holy temple turned on its hinges. Even I too, at this moment, during their passage through the rooms, share so in his foolishness that I fall into full as great anxiety, as if I went in behind them. When we entered the eastern room, which was extended out at pleasure by picturesque paper-tapestry into a latticed arbor of woodbine, there sat merely the Minister's lady, who received us pleasantly, with firm and cold reserve in look and tone. Her severely closed and faintly-marked lips mutely spoke a seriousness which is the gift of a good heart, and a stillness which is the ornament of beauty,—as many wings, only when they are folded, shower down peacocks'-eyes,—and her eye gleamed with the good-will of reason; but the eyelids had been, by stern years, drawn deeply in, with a sickly expression, over the mild sight. Ah, as oftentimes between newly-married people a dividing sword was laid, so did Froulay grind daily at a three-edged one which separated him and her! Singularly did the impure roil on his face contrast with the aftersummer serenity on[Pg 203] hers, although before witnesses, as it seemed, he took away the irony from his courteousness towards her, and kept hatred, as others do love, only for solitude.

Fortunately this nut-tree, which threw an unwholesome, frosty nut-shadow on the whole flowerage of love and poetry, soon transplanted itself back again among more congenial guests. The Minister's lady, after the first expressions of courtesy, directed herself more to the Lector, whose correct, civilian's measure accorded entirely with her religious one; especially as only he could ask and condole with her about Liana. She replied, that this room of Liana's had been left exactly as it was the evening the blindness came on, in order that, when she recovered, it might remain for her a pleasant remembrancer, or a mournful one for others, if she did not. O, deeply moved Albano, if every absence glorifies, how much more must it do so with so many traces of the beloved object's presence! I confess, except a loved one, I know of nothing lovelier than her sitting-room in her absence.

On Liana's work-table lay a sketched outline of a Christ's head near the open Messiah,—a folded walking-veil, together with the green walking-fan, with inscribed wishes of female friends,—some cut-out envelopes,—the gossiping letter of one of Froulay's tenants,—a whole lacquerwork sheep-fold, with wagon, stalls, and house, with whose Lilliputian Arcadia she had proposed to please Dian's children,[66]—a plucked leaf from the thinning album of a female friend, which she had trimmed with an India-ink flower border and then planted full of fair wishes, of which fate had robbed her own life. Ah, beautiful heart, how fondly would[Pg 204] I sketch and hand round something like a tabular view of all the little mosaic of thy lightsome past, had the fee-provost entered more intimately into these matters! But what moves me and the Count more deeply is a framed embroidery, on which her needle, like an ingrafting-knife, had, on that dark day, ingrafted a rose with two buds, and which wanted nothing more but the thorns. O, these had destiny only too fully developed on thy roses of joy, and then pressed them so deeply through thy breast even to the heart!

At no hour of his life was Albano's love so tender and holy as at this, or his sympathy so fervent. Fortunately, the Minister's lady was all the time looking out of the window into the garden, and did not perceive his emotion. At last she went on to point out Liana's harmonica, which stood near; then was his heart too full and visible; he started with the hasty words, he had never yet heard one, and stepped before it. Ah, he was fain to touch something whereon her finger had so often rested. He laid his hand, as upon a sacred thing, on those prayer-bells which had so often trembled under hers for pious thoughts; but they gave him no answer, till the Lector, a connoisseur in the A B C as in the technology of all arts, gave him in three words the indispensable instructions. Now did he drink into his soul, full of sighs and struggles, the first tri-clang, the first plaintive syllables of that mother-tongue of the pining breast,—ah, of those mutes'-bells which the inner man shakes in his hand, because he has no tongue! and his veins beat wildly like wings which wafted him up from the ground, and bore him to a higher prospect than that which opens into the last joy or the last agony. For in strong men great pains and joys become overlooking heights of the whole road of life.[Pg 205]

I know not whether many readers will believe the fault possible, which he now actually committed. The Minister's wife, in the course of conversation, had very naturally—apropos of Liana and Roquairol—fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be broken in childhood or the heart in old age. Ah, she and her daughter themselves knelt, indeed, full of patience, before fate, whether loading or armed; although the mother's was a pious patience, which looked more to Heaven than to the wound, Liana's a loving patience, which resigns itself to new sorrows as to old sicknesses, as a queen does on coronation-day to the pains and friction of her heavy jewelry, and like a child that sweetly sleeps away and more sweetly dreams away his scars. But Zesara, who like a wolf fled the very clanking of a chain, and new, exasperated, against everything of the kind, from the light carcanets and chains of knighthood even to the heavy harbor-chains which obstruct the passage of youth out into the laboring sea, could not restrain himself, especially with that heart of his so full of emotions, from saying, in too great warmth: "Man must defend himself; sooner would I, in a free struggle, empty all my veins on the stirring battle-field than shed one drop from them bound to the rack."—"Patience," said the Minister's lady, who was full of it, "contends and conquers also, only in the heart."—"Dear Count," said Augusti, alluding not merely to Arria,[67] "the women must always say to the men, 'It does not hurt!'"

I have not till now had an opportunity to make known this fault of Albano, that he never spoke his opinion[Pg 206] more freely and strongly than just then when he had reason to fear losing one or two heavens of his life by the stake; in cases of less danger he could be more yielding. Although, therefore, he observed that the Minister's lady was painfully reminded thereby of the muscular, but also hard-grasping, hand of her wild son,—or much rather for the very reason that he observed it, and because he proposed to be armor-bearer to this future friend,—he stuck to his opinion, threw all instruments for breaking in the young manly will out of the school-rooms into the street, and said, in his strongly relieved style: "The Goths preferred never to send their children to school, in order that they might remain lions. Even if maidens must be soaked in milk a day before planting them out in the civil world, boys, however, must be stuck, like apricots, with the stony shell in the earth, because they will soon enough throw off and forsake the stone by their rooting and growth."—The Lector, with his fine openness,—a crystal vase with golden edge,—remarked, with a gentle reprimand of Alban's impetuosity, that at least the way in which they had severally adduced their proofs was one of those very proofs themselves; and women needed and showed more patience with persons, and we more with things.

The Minister's wife, who imagined herself listening more to her son than to his friend, was silent, and stepped nearer to the window. Amid these war-troubles the evening had wheeled her resplendent moon up over the eastern mountains, and the streams of her light flowed in at this moment, from all quarters, through the whole garden that lay stretched out before the eastern room, and lay in its broad alleys and flower-circles, when all at once a little round house appeared through upshooting[Pg 207] water-jets, kindled into triumphal arches by the moon-light, and stood, even to its Italian trellised roof, all in a blaze. With soft emotion, the Minister's lady said: "On that water-house stands my Liana; she is trying the evaporation of the fountain; the physician promises himself much therefrom. And Providence grant it!"

But the agitated Zesara, with all his sharp eyes, could not, however, in the full dazzling light of the level moon, and behind the quivering nunnery-grate of confined silver-or lymphatic-veins, individualize anything at this moment from the glimmering Eden, except an undistinguishable, still, white form. But it was enough for a weeping and burning heart. "Thou angel of my youthful dreams," thought he, "may it be thou! I greet thee with a thousand woes and joys. Ah! can there then be sorrows in thee, thou heavenly soul!" And it came over him, that if she were here in the room, with her afflicted and enchanting form, she would melt his whole being with sympathy, and he could now have cast off the embrace of the brother, by whose hand fate had closed her soft eyes in that long dream.

The stifling air of the most painful sympathy caused him to look away, and turn round, and fasten on the open Messiah those eyes whose drops he would not show; but the recollection that he was repeating her last reading-pleasure made them fall only hotter and thicker. Suddenly something darkening, which fluttered down before the window like a falling raven, directed his look again to Liana, over whom stood a fully illuminated little cloud, as if it were a risen or descending saintly halo. Immortals seemed to dwell thereupon as on Ossian's clouds, awaiting their sister; and when she at length moved and slowly sank down into the water-house, seemed it not[Pg 208] then as if her garment of flesh were passing into the earth, and her peaceful spirit into the cloud?

Here Augusti, as the mother had to follow the returning invalid into the sick-chamber, gave him the hint for departure, which he took willingly; his love contented itself for the present with solitude, and with the hope of another meeting. Young love and young birds need, in the beginning, only to be warmed by covering, and not till later to be nourished.

But a paraclete or comforter whispered softly in the ear of the youth's heart as they departed: to-morrow thou wilt see her only a few steps from thee in the garden! And that is very easily brought about; he has only, at evening-twilight to-morrow, when the evening-walker makes use of her eye-medicine, to repair to the alley, and from among the leaves look freely up into the magic countenance, and then drink in the whole doctrine of felicity in one paragraph, one passage, breath, moment;—but what a prospect!

The Count begged the Lector not to sit long with the busy Minister. When they found him again, he hardly—behind a pile of public documents—remembered, after considerable (perhaps counterfeited) thought, that they had been there, and deeply regretted that they were going away. Ah, the comforter is whispering all the evening and all night,—To-morrow, Albano!

As the juggling night threw our Albano from one side and vision to the other,—for not the near past but the near future wearies us with rehearsals of our waking acts, with dreams,—how glad he was, in the[Pg 209] morning, that his fairest future had not yet gone by. Two very Eulenspiegelish wishes often lodge in man: I often form the wish with my whole heart, that some real joy of mine, e. g. a master-work, a pleasure-journey, &c., might yet at last have an end; and, secondly, the wish above referred to, that one or another pleasure might stay away a little longer.

The evening came with the greatest pleasure of all, when Zesara, like Le Gentil starting for the East Indies, set off for the eastern park of the Minister, to observe the transit of his evening star Venus; but only through the moon. Before the lighted windows of the palace he stopped among the people, and reflected, whether it were quite allowable thus to run into the garden; but really, had he been turned back, his thirsting heart would have carried him in through a whole Clerus and Diplomatic Congress posted before the gate. Boldly he strode along through the noisy palace before a barricade of tackled carriages, turned the iron lattice-gate, and stepped hastily into the nearest leafy avenue. Here, attended by a torch-dance of gleaming hopes, he went to and fro, but his eye was a telescope, and his ear was a hearing-trumpet. The green avenue wound up over the garden till it grew into another near the bath-house; into this he entered so as not to meet the blind one, or rather her attendant.

But nothing came. To be sure he had not, like the moon,—as was, indeed, to have been expected of him,—come a half-hour too late, but in fact a half-hour too early. The moon, that star which leads wise men full of incense to the adoration, at last let fall broad, long, silver-leaves, like festive tapestry, into Liana's eastern room,—the Madonna on the palace was arrayed in the[Pg 210] halo and nun's-veil of her rays,—the Minister's wife stood already at the window,—Nature played the larghetto[68] of an enchanted evening in deeper and deeper strains,—when Albano caught nothing further except a smaller one, made up of mere tones, which came from the bath-house, the pleasure-seat of all his wishes, and which, dying, would fain breathe its last with the spring-day. But he could not guess who played it. One might have inferred that it was Roquairol, merely because he afterward, as I shall relate, according to the April-like nature of his musical temperament, sprang up out of pianissimo into a too wild fortissimo. The brother, exiled by his father, could at least in the bath-house see and console his dear sister, and show her his love and his penitence; although his stormy repentance makes a second necessary, and at last became only a more pious repetition of his fault.

Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art) dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to the Selam-cipher, signify hopes; but really one after another was short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,—he kept plucking away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves[Pg 211] from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance, when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo, and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of sparkling silver. Albano looked out....

Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly beautiful form! As Grecian gods stand and look unearthly before the torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation and no effort had as yet cast a wave,—and the thin, tender, scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,—and the face like a perfect pearl, oval and white,—and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the May-flowers over her heart,—and the delicate grace's-proportions, which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,—and the ideal stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a finger upon the balustrade, as if the Psyche only floated over the lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,—and the large blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow!

Thou too fortunate man!—to whom the only visible[Pg 212] goddess, Beauty, appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,—the past fades away,—the near tones seem to steal from the depth of distance,—the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with splendor the mortal breast!

Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or later?—and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow?

For Liana—into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle through—was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she thought a linden-top concealed it;—and this uncertain inclination so suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away? And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her companion, and—O God! she knows not where they stand."

But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor of the next life.

A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana, and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked[Pg 213] down, and Albano started back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face, upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink, tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling tones of the brother and of the nightingale,—the eyelids quivered oftener over the gleaming eyes,—and at last the gleam became a quiet tear,—it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs, though unwounded, weep.

There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment, in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir itself,—that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,—kneel before her,—tell her thy whole heart;—what though thou then art lost forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!—and then cool and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah! before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."

Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall, and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As he passed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a shining lily[69] from the next world, which, to herself, is[Pg 214] a sign that she is soon to pass thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe them.

Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now shines to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O, at some future time after yet many years, when this glowing rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it, glimmer after thee as a white rose-parterre of memory!

[Pg 215]

That she does not, says Hafenreffer; these are nothing but confounded lies; the case is quite otherwise, thus:—

Zesara never stole a second time into Froulay's garden; a proud blush of shame darted over him at the very thought of the painful blush with which he should come in contact, for the first time, with a mistrustful or inquiring eye.

But in this wise the dear soul remained hid from him until her recovery, as the May-month did from her; and he silently tormented himself with reckonings up of her sufferings and doubts of her cure. He was ashamed to be taking any pleasure during her period of sadness, and forbade himself the enjoyment of spring and the visiting of Lilar: ah! he knew too, full well, that the loving spring and Lilar, where she had received so many joys and the last wound, would make his heart too ungovernable and too full.

His thirst for knowledge and worth, his pride, which bade him stand in a glorious light with his father and his two friends, impelled him onward in his career. With all his native fire he threw himself upon jurisprudence, and took no longer any other walks than between the lecture-room and his study-chamber. To this zeal he was driven by a characteristic passion for completeness; everything imperfect was to him almost a physical horror; he was shocked at defective collections, broken sets[Pg 217] of monthly magazines, lawsuits left to sleep, libraries, because he could never read them out, people who died as aspirants for office, or in the midst of building-plans, or without a rounded system of thought, or as journeymen clothiers' boys or shoemakers' apprentices, and even Augusti's flute-playing, which he only took up by the way. It was the same energy which made him hold the bridle of Psyche's winged horse tight, and stick the rowel of the spur into him; even when a child he had experimented on this kind of force, in the holding of his breath, or in the painful pressure of a sore spot,—and, by Heaven! he now, figuratively, did both again. There dwelt in him a mighty will, which merely said to the serving-company of impulses, Let it be! Such a will is not stoicism, which rules merely over internal malefactors, or knaves, or prisoners of war, or children, but it is that genially energetic spirit, which conditions and binds the healthy savages of our bosoms, and which says more royally to itself, than the Spanish regent to others, I, the king!

Ah, of course (how could his warm soul do otherwise?) he often stood, at midnight, before the breezy window, and looked tearfully at the white Madonna of the ministerial palace, silvered by the pure moon. Yes, in the daytime, he often sketched in his souvenir (it happened to be a fountain and a form behind it, nothing more), or he read in the Messiah (naturally going on with the canto which he had already begun at the house of the Minister's lady), or he informed himself about nervous maladies, (was he, perhaps, with all his studying, guarded against them?) or he let the fire of his fingers run over the strings,—nay, he would have plucked nothing but roses, although with thorns, had this been their blooming season.[Pg 218]

And this sighing, stifled soul must shut itself up! O, he began already to fear every key of the harpsichord would become a stylus, the instrument itself a box of letters, and all actions treacherously legible words. For he must keep silent. The first young love, like that of business people (those of the Electorate of Saxony excepted), needs no instruments of speech, at most only a portable inkstand and pen. Only worldly people, who repeat their declarations of love quite as often as the players, are in a situation—and on similar grounds—to publish them, just as the players do. But in the holier season of life the image of the most beloved soul is hung, not in the parlor and antechamber, but in the dim, silent oratory: only with loved ones do we speak of loved ones. Ah, it was with reluctance that he even heard others speak of his saint; and he often stole (with the altar of incense in his bosom) out of the room where people were carrying round for her a censer more full of coal-smoke than of frankincense.

They were expecting every day in Pestitz the return of the German gentleman M. de Bouverot, who had been in Haarhaar, putting the last retouching hand to the almost sketched marriage contract between Luigi and a Haarhaar princess, Isabella. Augusti was not partial to him, and even said Bouverot had no honnêteté;[72] and related the following, but with the soft irony of a man of the world:

Some years before, Bouverot had been sent by the court of Haarhaar[73] to the Pope at Rome, in relation to[Pg 219] certain canonical difficulties; just at the time when Luigi also made the princely procession to Rome, together with his Romish indictions.[74] Now Haarhaar, which in truth already went chapeau-bas with the princely hat of Hohenfliess, and had every possible officinal prospect of wearing it, would not, for this very reason, present the appearance of looking with cold eyes on the extinction of the race of Hohenfliess, the more, as the very male support of the line, Luigi, even in his first years, was not a hero of any great nervous significance. Nay, it must needs be a matter of some consequence to the court of Haarhaar that the good thin autumn-flowerage should return, if possible, otherwise than it went out; and even on such grounds it privily instructed the German gentleman to rule and watch over all his pleasures and pains as maître de plaisirs,—especially with maîtresses de plaisirs,—in such a manner as to give perfect satisfaction in this respect. Meanwhile, if our princely abiturient[75] had started pure as a fœtus, unhappily he was brought back ground down to a punctum saliens, especially as, by sundry caprioles and other leaps through the hoop of pleasure, he was spoiled for the leap into the knight's saddle. It may be possible that the German gentleman was too sanguine in his expectations of the rejuvenescence of the Prince; yes, he may have imitated the youth-restoring, wondrous essence of the Marquis d'Aymar,[76] whereby an innocent old lady, who anointed herself with the elixir more than her years required, was, through the excessive renovation, reduced to a little child. In short, by this crusade under the Knight of the Cross, Bouverot, the princely seat of[Pg 220] Hohenfliess—as is often the consequence of crusades—will be left open at the proper time, and Haarhaar will seat itself thereon.

I confess reluctantly that Albano, in the beginning,—because, with all his sharp-sightedness, his purity was quite as great,—comprehended the fact only confusedly; but when he did get the idea, it was to him pharmaceutic manna, as it was to Schoppe Israelitish. "The Knight of the Cross," said the latter, "beareth not his cross in vain,—it does him quite as much service as one daubed on the houses in Italy does to them: not a soul may do on either of them what even in Rome may be done before every antechamber."

Not long after that our three friends were going out into the street just at the hour when the noisy carriages rolled along to tea and play, when a litter was carried by before them with the seat backward, whereupon, however, a man was sitting. "Holy Father!" cried Schoppe, "in there sits, bodily, Cephisio, from Rome, who must sometime or other give me a sound drubbing."—"Softly, softly!" said Augusti, "that is the German gentleman; Cephisio is his Arcadian name."[77]—"Well, I rejoice so much the more that I once in my life had a hearty, downright set-to with the red-nose," said he, turning round and accompanying the litter, with his arms thrust under it, for almost ten paces, in order to get a better view of the caged bird, before the latter snatched-to the curtains. Albano caught a glimpse within the litter, as it passed swiftly along, only of a sharp eye drawn like a dagger, and a red-glowing nose-bud.

Schoppe came back and related the transactions in[Pg 221] Rome. He said, against all mortal sinners, blood-guilty men, and imps of iniquity he bore no such bitter and grim wrath as against professional bankers, croupiers,[78] and Grecs; if he had a canker-worm-iron wherewith he might scrape away this vermin from the earth, or a cochineal-mill wherewith he might grind them to powder, he would do it most cordially. "O heavens!" he then broke out, "had I in fact my foot just stretched out over the curling, coiling worm-stalk (and though that foot had the gout in it), I would gladly dash it down upon them, and tread out the vile filth." But what he could, he did. Being his own travelling servant, and a decoy-spider, darting to and fro through all Europe, he had full often the pleasure of getting these faro-leaf-caterpillars and leaf-sappers under his thumb,—of becoming their pretended associate,—learning their tactics,—and then rolling some fire-wheel or other into their hissing snakes'-hole. I am not intimately instructed whether it is known in Leipsic who the ringleader was that, a short time since, at the fair, played a mock-police with mimic-constables, and broke up a bank;—at least the bankers were altogether out on the subject, because they were expecting the real police the next day, and were begging for some indulgences and illegal-benefits; but I am in a condition here to name the thief-catcher: it was Schoppe. The spoils he applied mostly to the purpose of running new mines under the faro-tables.

With Cephisio he had played his cards otherwise. He stepped up before his bank, and looked on for some minutes, and at last presented a card with a shield-louis-d'or. It won, and he showed behind the card a long roll[Pg 222] of louis. Bouverot would not pay this roll. "He had not seen anything," he said. "What is your croupier sitting there for, then?" said Schoppe, and pronounced them swindlers, if they did not pay. To escape greater damage, they paid him his winnings. He took the money coldly, and departed, with these words to the Pointeurs: "Gentlemen, I assure you, you are playing here with finished cheats; but they have paid me only because I knew them." Amidst the increasing stiffness and paleness of the partners he turned, and slowly, with his broad-shouldered, compact figure, and his knotty cudgel, walked away unscathed.

Augusti wished from his heart—for the persecution's sake—that Bouverot might not know the Librarian again. They found at home an invitation from the Minister to tea and supper. "The poor daughter!" said Augusti; "for the sake of this Bouverot, the half-blind one must go to-morrow to the table." Meanwhile, our youth will then surely see her again at last, and only a spring-day separates him from the dearest object! If Augusti is right, then my observation fits in here, that a good sound villain is always the motive-pike which sets the still, quaker-like carp-tribe in the pond to swimming; the hidden pock-matter, which brings cold children at once to life.

Liana's eyes healed, but only slowly: Nature would not lead her at once out of her sombre prison into the sun; she could now, like the philosophers, just recognize light rather than forms. Nevertheless, the Minister issued cabinet orders that she should day after to-morrow play on the harmonica, appear at the[Pg 223] souper, and even make the salad, and thereby mask her blindness. He sometimes commanded impossible things, in order to meet with as much disobedience as his anger needed for the purpose of venting itself in punishment. Certain people keep themselves all day long full of vexation beforehand for some coming event or other, like urinal phosphate, which always boils under the microscope, or forges, wherein every day fire breaks out.

The Minister's lady pronounced her soft, firm, No. About the harmonica she said she had asked the Doctor, in his name, who had strictly forbidden it; and the rest was an impossibility. Here he could already, he felt so like it, be angry at several things, especially at the asking of the Doctor, which, however, had not yet taken place; he grew mad enough, and swore he should act according to his own principles, and devil a bit did he care for other people's.

This principle was in the present case the German gentleman. That is to say, the above-mentioned anecdote—Bouverot's guardianship of the hereditary Prince on his travels, or the design of the thing—had at both courts come to be the common talk in assemblies and at tables, and was hidden only from the Prince Luigi; for on thrones, there are almost no mysteries to any one excepting him (hardly his wife) who sits thereupon, as in whispering-galleries the people in distant corners hear everything aloud, only not he who stands in the middle. The German gentleman was, therefore, in the Hohenfliess system, the important port-vein and pulmonary artery wherewith even Froulay would water himself. The latter is obliged throughout to serve the present and the future, or two masters, of whom the one of Haarhaar might very soon be his.[Pg 224]

Bouverot was attached not merely to Froulay the minister, but to Froulay the father; a man like him, who causes to be sent after him from Italy a whole cabinet of Art, and whose acquaintance with the arts has so long knit together even him and the Prince, must know how to prize a Madonna of such carnation as Liana, and of the Romish school, and, what is more, who, detached from the canvas, moved as a full, breathing rose. As to marrying the rose, that he could not propose to himself, because he was a German Herr.

He had not seen her since his Italian tour,—nor had the Count either,—to both the Minister wished to show her as a round pearl of special whiteness and figure. Froulay had—which after all happens oftener than we imagine—quite as much vanity as pride; the latter to repel blame, the former to court praise. But I should have now to write a tournament-chronicle to tell posterity the half of all his raging and racing and lance-thrusts, in a fight wherein he served under the banners of enmity, vanity, and avarice. He was no more to be hunted to death than a wolf. All weapons were alike to him, and he was ever taking sharper and more poisonous ones. In the old judicial duels between man and wife, the man stood commonly up to his stomach in a pit, in order to bring his strength down to a level with the woman's, and she struck at him with a stone tied up in a veil; but in the matrimonial duels the man seems to stand in the free air and the woman in the earth, and she often has only the veil without the stone.

In this combat there stepped between the two a shining peace-angel who caught the wounds, namely, Liana. The daughter, who had an enthusiastic love for her mother, and the womanly reverence for the stronger sex toward her[Pg 225] father, and who suffered so endlessly under their strifes, fell upon her mother's neck and begged her to allow her what her father demanded; she would certainly do everything so as not to excite observation; she would take the greatest pains and practise herself specially beforehand,—ah, he would otherwise only be still more unkind to her poor brother,—this discord, merely on her account, was so painful to her, and perhaps more injurious than playing on the harmonica.

"My child, thou knowest," said the mother, for now she had asked, "what the physician said yesterday against the harmonica; the rest is at thine own risk!" Liana kissed her joyfully. She must needs be led to her father, that she might make known to him aloud the gladness of her obedience. "I thank you, and be hanged," said he, softly; "it is simply your cursed duty." She left him with her joy dissipated to atoms, but without any great pangs; she was already accustomed to this.

The Lector, while they were yet on their way to the Minister's, begged Albano to moderate the fire of his assertions and his pantomimes. He made known to him only so much of the family-jar as was necessary, in order that he might not, by a mistaken idea of her restoration, throw Liana into embarrassment. As they entered the card-room, everything was already in full blaze.

As, at this time, no one is presented to him, I must do it; they are disciples (at least twelfth disciples) of the Minister.

And first, I introduce to thee the holy President of[Pg 226] Justice, Von Landrok, a good apothecary's-balance of Themis, which weighs out scruples, and wherein no false weights lie; but what is quite as bad, much smut, rubbish, and rust. Those at the ombre-table near by are the lords and ladies of Vey, Flöl, and Kob, sleek, fine souls, like minerals in cabinets, polished off on the show-side, but on the concealed base still jagged and scratching.

Go with me to the entrance of the next apartment; here I have to present to thee the young but fat canon Von Meiler, who, in order to line and stuff out and pad his inner man with a thick, warm, outer one, needs to fleece no more peasants yearly than the number of linden-trees the Russian peels for his bark-shoes, namely, one hundred and fifty.

The apartment into which thou art looking I present to thee as a fly-glass full of courtiers, who, in order to enter into the kingdom of heaven, have become not merely children, but in fact embryons of four weeks, who, as is well known, look like flies; if Swift desires of his servants nothing more than the shutting-to of the doors, these wish nothing of their employer and bread-provider but the leaving-open of the same.

I have the honor to set before thee yonder—it is he who is not playing—the holy Church-Counsellor, Schäpe, who would fain be chief chaplain to the court; a soft scoundrel, who soaks and softens the seed-corns of the divine and human word, like melon-seed (they are thereby to spring up sooner in the heart), so long in sugared wine, that they rot in it; a spiritual lord who never in his life offered any other prayers than the two which he always refuses, the fourth and fifth.[79]

[Pg 227]

But the Lector will soon name to thee, at the window, every one of the lords and dames, coldly, gently, and without pantomime. At present the Minister himself conducts thee to a gentleman, one of the players, with a cross on, who drinks water with saltpetre, and is continually licking his dry mouth; it is Bouverot,—he is just rising in thy presence; examine the cold, but impudent and cutting, sharply-ground eye, whose corners resemble a pair of open tinman's-shears, or a trap set,—the red nose, and the hard, lipless mouth, whose reddish crab's-claw, worn off by whetting, pinches together,—the cocked-up chin, and the whole stocky, firm figure. Albano does not surprise him; he has already seen all men, and he inquires about no one.

The Minister refreshed the youth, whose inner being was one snarl, with the promise that at supper he would present to him his daughter. He offered him a game; but Alban replied, with a too youthful accent, he never played.

He could now roam round through the lanes of the card-tables, and survey whatever he wished. In such a case one posts himself, if there is no one of the company whom he can endure, exactly before or beside the face he detests the most, in order inwardly to lash himself into vexation at every word and every feature of the countenance. Albano might have had many visages in his eye which were, at least in a small degree, intolerable, and by which he might have stationed himself;—nay, no sufficient reasons could have been assigned why he should not have given his whole attention to a certain chaffy, dried up paste-eel, a weakling full of impertinence, who was observing through an eye-glass the card constellations as they came up, while Albano could extend the[Pg 228] feelers of his optic nerves even to the spots on the cards in the second apartment;—there would, indeed, have been no reasons, had not the German gentleman been there; before him he must place himself; of him he knew the most and the worst; he stood in distant connection with Schoppe, even with Liana. Furies! in the neighborhood of certain faces the pinions of the soul crumple up and mew themselves as swans' and pigeons' feathers are crushed before eagles' quills; it was as uncomfortable and close for all the innocent feelings in such a roomy breast as Albano's, as it is to a flock of pigeons into whose cote some one has thrown the tail of a polecat.

I cannot disguise the fact, he muttered and growled inwardly at all the man did and had,—whether it was his having fingers whose points were finely shaved for the faro-game, and whose nails had been somewhat peeled off by an altogether worse game of hazard yet,—or his looking occasionally through the hair of his eyebrows,—or (only once) squashing a fly by a sudden snapping to of his lips like a fly-trap,—or his uttering now a line of German and now of French, which I expect of good circles, whereas only low people never bring out a German word, except a few, such as Lansquenet,[80] canif (kneif), birambrot (bier am brod), excepted. Suffice it, he thought always of Schoppe's fine expression: "There are men and times at which and with whom nothing could be more refreshing to an honest man than—to give them a sound drubbing." Duelling is quite as good, thought the Count.

However, Schoppe must here be justified by an authority. Namely, the author himself, otherwise such a soft, warm swan-skin, could never stand behind card-table-chairs[Pg 229] without becoming a complete game-cock, and spreading out his scratching, bristly wing the wider the longer he idly looked on; the reason is this, that in general one finds only those people more and more tolerable and better upon acquaintance, with whom one pursues and purposes the same kind of objects.

Albano wished heartily he had his brother-in-arms Schoppe with him now; he went often, it is true, to Augusti to vent himself; but he always sought to pacify him; yes, by keeping himself constantly engaged with the church-counsellor, he cut off from him the opportunity of betraying his youthful, inexperienced soul to listeners. Moreover, the Lector chose afterward for half an hour—what familiar friends often do in the absence of familiar female friends—the latter (namely, absence).

The Count stood some time behind Bouverot's seat, and looked into a Chinese mirror, japanned on the inside with grotesque figures, and changed his position constantly, till he brought Cephisio's face to appear therein right beside a painted dragon, just by way of comparison;—all this went on, interrupted, however, by constantly increasing heart-beatings for Liana, when the servants opened the doors to the supper-hall; and now his heart thumped even to pain, and his form, already so blooming with youth, hung all full of the roses of happy and modest confusion.

With beating heart and burning cheek he made his way into the midst of the motley promenading throng with some old lady or other, who, in her vanity, misunderstood him, and at once hung on his arm[Pg 230] like a spring-bracelet, and who got nothing from him but—answers. With flying and piercing glances he stepped into the bright hall, which seemed as if it were made of crystallized light, and into the sea of heads. He was just making some answer when he caught, in the tumult behind him, the low words, "I certainly hear my brother,"—and immediately the still lower refutation, "It is my Count." He turned round; between the Lector and her mother stood the dear Liana, a modest, timid, pale-red angel, in a black silk dress, over which ran only the glittering spring-frost of a silver chain, and with a light ribbon in her blond hair. The mother presented her to him, and the tender cheek bloomed more redly,—for she had, indeed, confounded the similar voices of the guest and the brother,—and she cast down those beautiful eyes which could see nothing. Ah, Albano, how violently thy heart trembles now that the past has become present, the moonlit night a spring morning; and this still form, now so near thee, works far more mightily than in any dream! She was too holy in his sight for him to have been able to utter a lie before her about the apparent recovery; he preferred silence;—and thus the warmest friend of her life came to her the first time only veiled and dumb.

The Lector soon led her away to her seat under the second lustre; opposite her sat her mother (probably, for this reason, that the good, unconscious daughter, who surely could not always be letting her eyelids fall, might raise them with friendliness and propriety towards a beloved being); the German gentleman, as an acquaintance, seated himself, without further ceremony, on her right, Augusti on her left,—Zesara, as Count, came far up above beside the highest lady.[Pg 231]

Deuse take it! that is, unfortunately, so often my own case! I assert the upper seat of honor,—and observe, a mile below me, the daughter, but, like a myops, only half of her, and can bring about nothing the whole evening. Do pray transpose me without any scruples down beside her,—you have to deal with nothing more than a puffed-up man,—why, on earth, as in the heavens, must, then, the largest planets be placed exactly the farthest from their sun?

I now draw my readers to the Minister's table, not to show them the ministerial pomp ingrafted upon avarice, or his dance of honor hemmed in between the parallel lines of etiquette, or even his family arms, which were carried round on every chafing-dish and salt-cellar, and with the ice and mustard,—enough for us to know the ubiquity of the insignia upon his flower-pots, shirts, bed-clothes, dog's cravats, and all his thoughts; but the reader shall just now look only at my hero.

He is very prominent. Upon such a new-comer, people, in a residence-city, have already, before he has fairly given the driver his drinking-money, got all possible light of nature and revelation; nineteen of the company were fastened upon him as his moral odometers. The boldness of his nature and his rank made up with him for worldly tact, which was missed nowhere except in this, that he never took sides except in the very strongest manner, and always ran off into general and cosmopolitan observations. But see, I pray you!—O, I wish Liana could see it,—how the rosy glow and the fresh green of his healthiness shines among the yellow sicklings of the age, out of whom, as from ships on the African coast of youth, all the pitch that held them together had run out,—and how the cheek-redness of spiritual health, a tender,[Pg 232] ever-returning suffusion (from anxiety about Liana) graces him, whereas most of the world's people at the table seem, like cotton wool, to take all colors more easily than red!

He looked and listened, against the salvation-laws of visiting, too much to Liana. She ate, under the heightened redness of a fear of mistaking, only sparingly, but without embarrassment; the Lector, with easy hand, barred up against her the smallest road to error. What astonished him was, that she covered such a sensitive and easily weeping heart with such an unembarrassed cheerfulness of countenance and conversation. Young man! that is, with the most delicate maidens, free from pangs of love, no covering and disguise, but an enjoying of the moment and habitual courtesy! She retained so considerately (what she had probably learned beforehand) the relative rank of the familiar voices, that she never directed her answer to the wrong place. She, however, looked often to her mother with full eyes, and smiled then still more serenely, not, however, for the purpose of deceiving, but from real, hearty love.

Touching her salad, the best and most fit to be a prince's table-guest among my female readers, who had seen her mix it, would have taken several fork-loads thereof. Uncommonly charming was it, when, growing more earnest and red, she drew off her glove before the blue, celestial hemisphere of glass; with white hands and supple arms, without a silken fold, worked away in the green, between the blue of the glass and the black of the silk; considerately felt for the vinegar-and oil-castors, and poured out as much as her practice (and the deciphered advice of the Lector,—at least so it seems to me) directed. By heavens! the dressing is, in this case, the salad; and[Pg 233] the vain Minister, who had no understanding of pictures, had a great eye for things that would make good pictures.

The mother seemed scarcely to look at the leaf-mixing. To the Count, the Minister's lady seemed to-day to have only good-breeding and no pious strictness; but he did not yet sufficiently know those polished women, who have refinement without wit, sensibility without fire, clearness without coldness; who borrow of the snail his feelers, his softness, his coolness, and his dumb gait, and who demand and deserve more confidence than they obtain.

At this moment came in Cephisio, like an angel among three men in the fiery furnace, but a dark angel. To the Count, his contiguity of seat, and every word he addressed to Liana, was already a crucifixion,—only to pass with a look from her to him was an agony, little different from that which I should have, if I had spent a day at Dresden in the antique Olympus of ancient gods, and then, on going out, should fall into a refectory full of swollen monks, or into a naturalist's cabinet full of stuffed malefactors' skins and bottled embryo-spiders. However he was pacified—in my opinion, only deceived—by one thing, that the German gentleman did not blaze away in lyrics beside her, was neither in heaven nor out of his head, but in his head, and quite composed and very polite. There are no pigeons, Count,—ask the farmers,—which the hawks oftener pounce upon than the glossy white ones!

The German gentleman now produced a snuff-box, with a neat picture of Lilar, and asked Liana how it pleased her; he liked the sentimentality of it particularly.

The Lector was terrified, leaned forward toward the box-piece, and threw out a few opinions beforehand which should guide the half-blind one in forming her own; but after she had passed it two or three times obliquely[Pg 234] against the lights and near before her eyes, she was able to express an original opinion herself, that the child illuminated by the half-sunken sun, who is drawn aloft by a flower-chain under the triumphal arch, was, to her feelings, "so very lovely." Here—and I have observed the same case in a half-blind lady of powerful fancy and receptive sense of art—the effort and the artistic sense, or the spiritual eye, came to meet the bodily half-way. The box, as well as its snuff, was presented farther on, and came down along to the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, upon whom the new Prince's love of the arts and the favorite's knowledge in them now placed new crowns; he found fault with nothing but the white of the blossoms. "Spring," said he, "is, by reason of its wearisome whiteness, a mere monochrome; I have visited Lilar only in autumn." "There is the nightingale's song, too, which we of course cannot paint, but yet we can hear it," said Liana, cheerfully; he was her teacher, and now, in the technology of painting, even her father's. Over all her acquisitions and inner fruits and blossoms the rose of silence had been painted; to that her tyrannical father had entirely accustomed her, and especially before men, in whom she always revered copied fathers.

When the landscape came to Albano, and he held before him in miniature that spring night when Lilar and the noble old man appeared to him so enchantingly,—and as he touched what the dear soul had handled,—and now in his own soul all accordant strings trembled,—just then the Devil struck again a dissonant chord of the seventh:—

"The Prince, gracious sir," said the Minister to the German gentleman, "was yesterday buried in private; only eight days hence we have the public interment. We are obliged to hasten, because the suspension of the court-mourning[Pg 235] lasts until the inauguration, on ascension-day, is gone by." I am too much excited to express myself upon the eternal master of ceremonies, Froulay, who would have raised a lantern-tax in the sun, and bridge-toll before park-bridges and asses'-bridges; but Albano, dazzled by so many side-lights and glancing rays,—reminded of Liana's sorrow over the old man, of his birthday, of the heart without a breast, and of the madness of the world,—was not in a condition, however much he had intended appearing in gentleness and lambs' clothes before Froulay, to keep the latter on; but he must needs (and louder than he meant), in opposition to his next neighbor, the Church Counsellor, Schäpe, with too great youthful exasperation (not lessened by the eager listening of Liana for the brotherly voice) declare himself against many things,—against the everlasting dead sham-life of men,—against the ceremonial haughtiness of a soulless form,—against this starving on love merely from making false shows of it;—ah, his whole heart burned on his lip!

The honest Schäpe, whom I just now called a scoundrel, took, with several expressions of countenance, Albano's part. But I do not by any means, friend Albano!—thou hast yet to learn for the first time that men, in respect to ceremonies, modes, and laws, like a flock of sheep, will, in a body, provided the bell-wether can only be got to leap over a pole, continue to leap carefully over the same place when the pole has been taken away;—and the most and highest leaps, in the state, are those we make without the pole. But a youth would be an ordinary one who should love civil life very early, however certain it is that he and we all judge too bitterly the faults of every office which we do not ourselves hold.

The company listened in silence, and, out of politeness, only inwardly admired; on Liana fell a tender seriousness.[Pg 236]

They rose,—the closeness vanished,—so did his zeal;—but, whether it came from the speaking, or the contemplation of the loved object, or from a youthful over-leaping of the hedges of visiting-propriety,—(it arose not, however, from want of manners),—the fact is not to be denied (and I do my best, too, to give it exactly) that the Count left the poor old lady who had been escorted in by him,—Hafenreffer himself knows not her name,—left her standing, and, I believe unconsciously, took Liana under his escort. Ah, her! What shall I say of the magic nearness of the dreamed-of soul,—of the light resting of her hand, felt only by the arm of the inner man, not of the outer,—of the shortness of the heavenly way, which should have been at least as long as Frederick Street? Verily, he himself said nothing,—he thought merely of the abominable Inhibitorial-room, where their separation must take place,—he trembled at every effort to speak. "You have, perhaps," said Liana, lightly and openly, who loved to hear the friendly voice, especially after the warm discourse, "already visited our Lilar?"—"Truly not; but have you?" he said, too much confused. "My mother and I have made it our favorite home every spring."

Now were they in the parting-chamber. Alas! there and thus he stood with her, who saw nothing, for some seconds immovable, and looked straight before him, wanting to say something, till he was aroused by her mother, who was eagerly seeking, for her affection, which the whole evening had been nourishing, a sequestered hour on her daughter's heart,—and so all was over, for both vanished like apparitions.

But Alban was as a man who is deserted by a glorious dream, and who all the morning is so inwardly blest, but remembers the dream no more. And yet, stands not[Pg 237] Lilar open to him, and will he not surely see it, so soon as ever Liana can see it too?

Never was he more gentle. The attentive Lector, in this warm, fruitful seed-time, threw in some good seed. He said, as they looked out together into the moonlit night, Albano had this evening hardly brought forward anything but thorny and exaggerated truths, which only imbitter, but do not enlighten. At another time the Count would have asked him whether he should have carried himself like Froulay and Bouverot, who, with all possible tolerance, presented theses and antitheses to each other, like an academical respondent and opponent, who previously prepare in concert logical wounds and plasters of equal length;—but to-day he was very kindly disposed towards him. Augusti had so delicately and affectionately cared for mother and daughter,—he had, without blackening or whitewashing, said much good, but nothing hastily, and his expositions had been calmly listened to: he had neither flattered nor offended. Albano, therefore, replied, softly: "But it is surely better to imbitter, dear Augusti, than to put to sleep. And to whom shall I then say the truth but to those who have it not nor any faith in it? Surely not to others." "One can speak any truth," said he, "but one cannot reckon as truth every mode and mood in which he speaks it."

"Ah!" said Albano, and looked up; beneath the starry heaven stood the marble Madonna of the palace, like a patron saint, softly illuminated,—and he thought of her sister,[81]—and of Lilar,—and of spring,—and of many dreams,—and how full his heart was of eternal love, and that he had as yet no friend and no loved one.

[Pg 238]

With the Count it had been troubled weather since last evening. For the patient, modest form which he had seen shone, like the purpose of a great deed, before all the images of his soul; and in his dreams, and before he sank to slumber, her gentle voice became the Philomela of a spring-night. Withal, he heard them continually talking about her, especially the Doctor, who every morning announced further progress of the ocular cure, and at last placed Liana's setting out for Lilar nearer and nearer. To hear of a loved one, however, even the most[Pg 239] indifferent thing, is far mightier than to think of her. He heard further, that her brother, since the murder of her eyes, had withdrawn entirely from the city, in which he would not again appear except on a so-called festive-steed at the Prince's funeral;—and around this Eden, or rather around its creatress, so high a garden-wall had been run, and he went round the wall and found no gate.

I know nothing more odious than this; but in what residence-city is it otherwise? If I ever wrote a Romance (of which there is no probability), one thing I affirm openly, there is nothing which I would so sedulously shun as a residence-city, and a heroine in it saintly enough for a canoness. For the conjunction of the upper planets is more easily brought about than that of the upper class of lovers. Does he wish to speak alone with her at Court or at tea or in her family, there stands the Court, the tea-party, the family close by;—will he meet her in the park, she rides, like the Chinese couriers, double, because we give a consciousness to maidens, as nature gives all important organs, duplicate, just as we give good wine double bottom;—will he meet her at least accidentally in the street, then there stalks along behind her (if the street lies in Dresden), a sour servant as her plague-vinegar, soul-keeper, curator sexus, chevalier d'honneur, genius of Socrates, contradictor, and Pestilentiary. In the country, on the other hand, the parson's daughter takes a run (that is all), because the evening is so heavenly, about the fields of the parsonage, and the candidate needs do nothing more than put on his boots. Really, among people of rank, the mantle of (erotic) love seems in the beginning to be a Dr. Faust's mantle, which swears to soar over everything, whereas it merely covers over everything; only, at last, there[Pg 240] stands a Schreckhorn, a Mount Pilate, and a Jungfrau, before one's nose.

Blessed hero! On Friday came the Lector, and reported, that on Monday the illustrious deceased—namely, his empty coffin—is to be buried, and Roquairol rides the festive-steed,—and Liana is almost well, for she goes with the Minister's lady to-morrow to Lilar, in all probability to escape some sad black-bordered notes of condolence,—and, on the following ascension-day comes the consecration and masquerade....

Blessed hero! I repeat. For hitherto what hast thou possessed of the blooming vale of Tempe, except the barren heights whereon thou stood'st looking down into the enchantment?

On the May-Saturday-evening, at 7 o'clock, every vapor disappeared from the sky, and the brightly departing sun went to meet a glorious Sunday. Albano, who then, at length, meant to visit the unseen Lilar, was, on the evening before, as sacredly happy as if he were celebrating confession eve before the first holy supper;—his sleep was one constant ecstasy and awaking, and in every dream a mimic Sunday morning rose, and the future became the dark prelude of the present.

Early on Sunday he was about to sally forth, when he had to pass by the half-glass door of the Doctor. "Sir Count, one moment!" cried he. When he entered, the Doctor said, "Directly, dear Sir Count!" and went on with what he was about. To the painters, who, in future centuries, will draw from me as they have hitherto from Homer, I present the following group of the Doctor as[Pg 241] a treasure; he lay on his left side; Galen was smoothing down his father's back with a little scratch-brush, while Boerhave stood near him with a broad comb, and kept dragging that instrument perpendicularly (not obliquely) through the hair. He always said he knew nothing that cheered him up so, and was such a good aperient, as brush and comb. Before the bed stood Van Swieten in a thick fur, which the correctioner had to wear when the weather was warm and his behavior bad, in order that he might, thus arrayed, be laughed at, as well as half roasted.

Two girls stood waiting there in full Sunday gala, and were thinking of going out into the country to see a parson's daughter, and to the village church; these he first mauled, limb by limb, with the hammer of the law. He loved to make his children antipodes of Romish defendants, who appear in rags and tatters, and so he set them in the pillory, all ruffled and tasselled, especially before strangers. The Count had already this long time, on the red children's account, been standing with his face turned toward the open window; he could not, however, refrain from saying, in Latin, "Were he his child, he would long ago have made way with himself; he knew nothing more degrading than to be scolded in finery." "It takes so much the deeper hold," said Sphex, in German, and fired only these few farewell shots after the girls: "You are a pair of geese, and will do nothing in church but just cackle about your rags and tags; why don't you mind the parson? He is an ass, but he preaches well enough for you she-asses; in the evening do you tell me every word of the sermon."

"Here is a laxative drink, Sir Count, which, as you are going to Lilar, I beg you to give the Architect's lady for[Pg 242] her little toads; but don't take it ill!" By the deuse! that is what precisely those people most frequently say, who, themselves, never take anything ill. The Count,—who at another time would have contemptuously turned his back upon him,—now blushing and silent before the preserver of his Liana, put it into his pocket, because, too, it was for the children of his beloved Dian, to whose spouse he wished to bear greetings and news.

Lilar is not, like so many princely gardens, a torn-out leaf of a Hirschfeld,—a dead landscape-figurant and mimic- and miniature-park,—one of those show-dishes which are now served up and sketched at every court, of ruins, wildernesses, and woodland-cottages, but Lilar is the lusus naturæ and bucolic poem of the romantic and sometimes juggling fancy of the old Prince. We shall soon enter in a body behind our hero, but only into Elysium. Tartarus is something entirely different, and the second part of Lilar. This separation of the contrasts I praise even more than all. I have long wanted to go into a better garden than the common chameleonic ones are, where one hands you China and Italy, summer-house and charnel-house, hermitage and palace, poverty and riches (as in the cities and hearts of the proprietors), all on one dish, and where day and night, without an aurora, without a mezzotinto, are placed side by side. Lilar, on the contrary,—where the Elysium justifies its happy name by connected pleasure-tents and pleasure-groves, as the Tartarus does its gloomy one, by lonesome, veiled horrors,—that is drawn right out of my heart.

But where is our youth now going with his dreams?[Pg 243] He is yet on the romantic road that leads into Lilar, properly the first garden-walk of the same. He strolled along an embowered road, which gently rose over hills, with open orchards, and into yellow-blooming grounds, and which, like the Rhine, now forced its way through green, ivy-clad rocks, and now opened its flying, smiling shores behind the twigs. Now the white benches under jessamine bushes and the white country-seats became more frequent; he drew nearer, and the nightingales and canary-birds[82] of Lilar came roving along, like birds announcing land. The morning blew fresh through the spring, and the indented foliage yet held fast its light, ethereal drops. A carrier lay sleeping on his rack-wagon, which the beasts, browsing right and left, safely drew along the smooth road. Albano heard, in the Sunday stillness, not the war-cry of oppressive labor, but the peace-bells of the towers: in the morning chime the future speaks, as in evening chimes the past; and at this golden age of the day there stood, also, a golden age in his fresh bosom.

Now the fork-tailed chimney-swallows began to quiver with their purple breasts over the heavenly blue of the wild germanders, announcing the approach of our dwellings as well as their own; when his road seemed about to pass through an old, open, ruined castle, overhung with rich, thick leaves, like scales, at whose entrance, or egress, a red arm, pointing aside with the white inscription, "Way out of Tartarus into Elysium," stretched out toward a neighboring thicket.

His heart rose within him at this double nearness of such opposite days. With long steps he pressed on[Pg 244] toward the Elysian wood, which seemed to be cut off from him by a broad ditch. But he soon came out of the bush-work before a green bridge, which flung its arch like a giant serpent across the ditch, not, however, on the earth, but among the summits of the trees. It bore him in through a blooming wilderness of oaks, firs, silver-poplars, fruit-trees, and lindens. Then it brought him out into the open country, and now Lilar, from the east, flung, over the wide-extending spikes of grain, the splendor of a high golden ball to meet him. The bridge sank gently with him again into fragrant, glimmering broom, and beneath and beside him sang and fluttered canary-birds, thrushes, finches, and nightingales, while the well-fed brood slept under the covert of the bridge. At last, after passing an arched avenue, it came up again to the light, and now he saw the blooming mountain cupola with the white altar, whereon he had knelt on a night of his youth; and farther to the south behind him, the veil and dividing-wall of Tartarus, a high-reared wood; and as he stepped onward, Elysium opened upon him more broadly,—a lane of small houses with Italian roofs full of little trees, smiled joyfully and familiarly upon the sight out of the green world-map of dells, groves, paths, lakes; and in the east five triumphal gates opened passages into a wide-extending plain, waving on like a green-glistening sea, and in the west five others stood opposite to them with opened lands and mountains.

As Albano passed down along the slowly-descending sweep of the bridge, there came forth into view, now blazing fountains, now red beds, now new gardens enfolded in the great one, and every step created the Eden anew. Full of awe he stepped out, as upon a hallowed soil, on the consecrated earth of the old Prince and the[Pg 245] pious father[83] and Dian and Liana; his wild course was arrested, and entangled, as if by an earthquake; the pure paradise seemed made merely for Liana's pure soul; and now for the first time a timid question about the propriety of his hasty journey, and the loving fear of meeting for the first time her healed eye, made his happy bosom grow uneasy.

But how festal, how living, is all around him! On the waters which gleam through the groves swans are gliding; the pheasant stalks away into the bushes, deer peep curiously behind him out of the wood through which he has come, and white and black pigeons run busily under the gates, and on the western hills hang bleating sheep by the side of reposing lambs; even the breast of the turtle-dove in some hidden valley trembles with the languido of love. He strode through a long, high-bushed rose-field, that seemed a settlement and plantation of hedge-sparrows and nightingales, which hopped out of the bushes on the growing grass-banks, and ran out in vain after little worms; and the lark sailed away on high over this second world, made for the more innocent of God's creatures, and sank behind the gates into the grain-fields.

Intoxicate thyself more and more, good youth, and link thy flowers into a chain as closely as the boy toward whom thou art hastening. For, overhead, on the Italian roof, before whose balustrade-breastwork silver-poplars, girdled about with broad vine-leaves, played, and which, in the spring-night, he had taken for a bower in roses,[Pg 246] stood a blooming boy bent forward, who was letting down a chain of marigolds, and kept fastening on new rings to the too short green cable. "My name is Pollux," he answered briskly to Alban's soft question, "but my sister is named Helena,[84] but my little brother is named Echion." "And thy father?" "He is not here now, he is away off there in Rome; just go in to mother Chariton, I am coming immediately." On what fairer day, in what fairer place, with what fairer hearts could he come into the holy family of the beloved Dian, than on this morning, and with this mood?

He went into the bright, laughing house, which was full of windows and green Venetian blinds. When he entered into the spring-room he found Chariton, a young, slender woman, looking almost like a girl of seventeen,[85] with the little Echion at her breast, defending herself against the sickly and excitable Helena, who, standing in a chair under the window, kept swinging in a many-leaved sling of a vine-branch, and trying to girdle and blind therewith the eyes of her mother. With charming confusion, wishing at once to rise, with her left hand to remove the leafy fetters without tearing, and to cover up the suckling more closely, she stepped forward, inclining her head, to meet the beautiful youth, with childlike friendliness and warmth, but with infinite shyness, not on account of the rank indicated by his dress, but because he was a man, and looked so noble, even like her Greek. He told her, with an enchanting love, which, perhaps, she[Pg 247] had never seen so magnificently pictured, on his strong countenance, his name, and the gratitude which his heart kept in store for her husband, and the news and greetings which he had brought from him. How the innocent fire blazed out of the dark eyes of the timid creature! "Was then my lord," so she called her husband, "very well and happy?" And so she began now, unembarrassed as a child, a long examination all about her husband.

Pollux came dancing in with his long chain. Alban playfully took out the Doctor's medicine from his pocket, and said, "This is what you are to take." "Must I drink it right down, mother?" said the hero. Here she inquired quite as naively after the detailed prescriptions of the Doctor, until the little suckling at her breast rebelled, and drove her into a by-room to sit over the cradle. She excused herself, and said the little one must go to sleep, because she was going to walk with Liana, for whom she was looking every minute.

Children love powerful faces. Alban was at once the favorite of children and dogs, only he could never act with the little jumping troop, on the childish playground, when grown spectators were in the boxes.

"I can do a good many things!" said Pollux. "And I can read, sir!" rejoined Helena to her brother. "But then only in German; but I can read Latin letters splendidly, you!" replied the little man to her, and ran round through the room after readings and specimens; but in vain. "Man, wait a little!" said he, and ran up-stairs into Liana's chamber, and brought one of Liana's letters.[Pg 248]

Albano knew not that Liana had the upper—so bloomingly shaded—chamber reserved for her own private use, wherein she frequently—especially when her mother remained behind in the city—drew, wrote, and read. The childlike Chariton, inspired with the love-draught of friendship, did not know at all how she could possibly so much as show her warmth of kindness to the fair, affectionate friend: ah, what was a chamber? Now into this always open room came the children, whom Liana sometimes heard read; and thus was Pollux able on the present occasion to fetch out of the solitary room the sheet which she had written this morning.

While Albano, during the errand, sat so alone in the keeping-room of the far-off friend of his youth, near his still, pale daughter, who looked now at him and now at a toy sheep-fold, as well known to him as Liana's eastern chamber, when the morning breeze swept in the glorious hum through the cool window, especially when, in the light cut-work of the floor the Chinese shadows of the vine and poplar foliage crinkled into each other, and when, at length, Chariton began to sing the suckling to sleep with a quicker, louder lullaby, which sounded to him like her echoing sigh after the fair land of her youth; then was his full heart, which had been already so stirred by all the events of the morning, wondrously moved, and—especially by the flickering sham-fight of the shadows—almost to tears; and the child looked up more and more meaningly into his face.

Then came Pollux back with his two quarto leaves, and now set himself at once to his lesson. The very first page[Pg 249] composed the melody to Alban's inner songs; but he could neither guess the authoress nor the date of the letter, except further along, by a desultory sort of reading to and fro. The leaves belonged to previous ones; not so much as a grain of writing-sand evinced their recent birth (for Liana was too courtly to use any); further, all the names were disguised; that is to say, Julienne, to whom they were directed, had unfortunately in Argenson's bureau de décachetage, where she resided, i.e. at court, demanded them in cipher, and she accordingly took the name of Elisa; Roquairol was called Charles, and Liana her little Linda. Linda, as will be well remembered, is the baptismal name of the young Countess of Romeiro, with whom the Princess on the day of that (for Roquairol) so bloody masquerade had established an eternal heart- and letter-alliance; Liana, to whose pure, poetic eyes every noble woman became a blessed saint and heroine, the opaque jewel a bright, pure, transparent one, loved the high Countess as if with the heart of her brother and her female friend at once, and the gentle soul named herself, unconscious of her worth, only the little Linda of her Elisa.

Nor did Albano recognize the delicate running-hand; Julienne loved the French language even to its letters, but Liana's resembled not the scrawled Gallic protocols, but the neatly-rounded handwriting of the English.

Here is her leaf at last. O thou lovely being! how long have I thirsted for the first sounds of thy refreshing soul!

"'Do I then gaze again with blessed eyes into thy blooming world, thou All-loving One, and weep again, because I am happy? Why did I then fear? When I went under the earth in the darkness like the dead, and caught only a distant sound of the loved ones and of spring above me, why was my feeble heart in fear that there was no more hope for life and light? For thou wast by me in the darkness, and didst lead me up out of the vault into thy spring; and around me stood thy joyous children, and the serene heavens, and all my smiling loved ones! O, I will now hope more steadfastly! Continue thou to break off from the sick plant all rank flowers, that the[Pg 254] rest may more fully ripen! Thou dost indeed lead thy human creatures into thy heaven and to thyself over a long mountain; and they go through the storms of life along the mountain, only overshadowed, not smitten, by the clouds, and only our eye grows wet. But when I come to thee, when Death again throws his dark cloud over me, and draws me away from all that I love into the deeper cavern, and thou, All-gracious, settest me free once more, and bearest me into thy spring,—into a still fairer one than this, which is itself so magnificent,—will then my frail heart, near thy judgment-seat, beat as gladly as to-day, and will the mortal bosom dare to breathe in thy ethereal spring? O, make me pure in this earthly one, and let me live here, as if I were already walking in thy heaven!'"

If even you, ye friends, who have never seen her, are yet won and touched by the patient, pure form, which can resignedly rejoice that the storm-cloud has, after all, only sent down rain-drops upon it, and no hailstones, how must she then have agitated the deeply-moved heart of her friend! He felt a consecration of his whole being, just as if Virtue came down incarnate in this shape from heaven, to hallow him with her smile, and then flew back in a shining path, and he followed, inspired and exalted, in her track.

He urged the boy instantly to carry back the leaves, in order to spare her and himself—as she might appear any moment—the most painful of surprises; yet he firmly resolved—cost what it might—to be true, and confess to her, this very day, what he had done.

The little fellow ran up stairs and down again, remained a long time before the door, and came in with[Pg 255] Liana by the hand, who was dressed in white, with a black veil. She looked in and around a little perplexed, as she with both hands pushed back the veil from her friendly face; but she heard Chariton's lullaby. She did not know him till he spoke; and then her whole beautiful being reddened like an illuminated landscape after an evening shower: she had the pleasure, she said, of knowing his father. Probably she knew the son still better by Julienne's and Augusti's pictures, and on more congenial sides; her sisterly heart was certainly moved, too, by his brotherly voice; for the charm, and even preferableness, of resemblance and copy is so great, that one who looks like even an indifferent person becomes more dear to us, like the echo of an empty sound, merely because, in this case as in the imitative art, the past and absent, shining through the fancy, become a present.

The gradually lowering tone of the mother's lullaby announced the sinking of the infant to slumber, and at last the diminuendo died away, and Chariton, with glistening eyes, ran to take Liana's hand. A frank and serene friendship bloomed between the innocent hearts, and held them entwined, as the vine does the neighboring poplars. Chariton related to her what Albano had related, with a reliance upon her most fervent sympathy. Liana listened to her friend with eager attention; but that was quite as much as if she were looking at the historical source itself that was so near at hand.

At last they began a journey through the garden. Pollux very reluctantly, and only after Liana's promise to draw him a horse again to-day, stayed behind[Pg 256] as patron-saint of the cradle. Alban said, to the extreme joy of the Architect's wife, who could now show the beautiful man everything, that he had seen but little of Lilar yet. How bewitchingly the two forms, linked in friendship, walked before him side by side! Chariton, although a matron, yet of a Grecian slenderness, fluttered along as a younger sister beside the lily-form of her somewhat taller Liana. The former seemed, according to the classification of the landscape-painters, nature in motion; Liana, nature in repose. As he joined Liana again, by whose left hand Helena was running along,—the mother on the right,—he found her softly-descending profile indescribably touching, and around the mouth he recognized lines which sorrow had drawn, the scars of returning days; while the lovely maiden, on the sunny side of the front face, as in her easy conversation, manifested a free, benignant cheerfulness, which Albano, who had never knocked at the school-room door of any young ladies' academy, found it hard to reconcile with her tearful poetry. O, if the tear of woman passes away lightly, so flutters away still more lightly woman's smile; and the latter, still oftener than the former, is only appearance!

He tried, from a longing of the thirsty heart, to catch the little one's hand, but she hung with both upon Liana's left; presently, however, she skipped away, and plucked three iris-flowers,—which, like her, resembled butterflies,—and gave one to her mother, and two to Liana, with the words, "Give him one too!" And Liana handed it to him, lifting her friendly face upon him as she did so with that holy maiden-look which is bright and attentive, but not searching, expressive of childlike sympathy without giving and demanding. Nevertheless, several times during the day did she let those holy eyes sink down;[Pg 257] but what compelled her to it was, that on Zesara's rocky face, softened though it was by love, there rested a physiognomical right of the stronger: he seemed to look upon a shy soul with a hundred eyes, and his two true ones blazed as warmly, although quite as purely, as the sun's eye in the ether.

The iris-flowers have this peculiarity, that one smells them, another not; only to these three beings in one did the cups open themselves equally wide, and they rejoiced long over this community of enjoyment. Helena ran forward and disappeared behind a low bush; she sat on a child's bench by a child's table, awaiting, with a smile, the grown people. The good old Prince had low moss-benches, little garden-chairs, little table- and pot-orangeries, and the like, placed everywhere, for the children, about the resting-places of their elders; for he loved to draw these refreshing open flowers of humanity near to his heart! "One wishes so often," said Liana, "to live in the patriarchal time, or in Arcadia, or in Otaheite; children are, indeed,—do you not believe so?—everywhere the same, and one has already in them what only the most remote time and the most remote region can insure." He indeed believed it, and gladly; but he kept asking himself, How can such an unstained Aphrodite be born out of the dead sea of a court, as pure dew and rain arise out of the briny water of the ocean?

While speaking, she occasionally drew an uncommonly graceful—how shall I write it—H'm! after her words, which, although a grammatical blunder at court, betrayed an unspeakable good nature; but I describe it, not in order that all my fair readers may let this attractive interjection be heard the very next Sunday.

"The same," replied Albano,—but he meant it well,—"holds[Pg 258] of the animals: the swan yonder is like the one in Paradise." She took it just as it was meant; but the reason was the pious Father Spener, her teacher; for at Albano's question touching Lilar's abundance of beautiful and gentle creatures, she answered: "The old Lord loved these creatures with a real tenderness, and they could often bring him even to tears. The pious Father thinks so too; he says, since they do everything at God's behest by instinct, accordingly it seems to him, when he contemplates the care of the parents for their young, just as if the Infinitely Gracious One were doing it all himself." They ascended now a half-shaded bridge, over a long water-mirror hung round with quivering poplars, wherein Liana's emblem, namely, a swan, slept on the water-rings, the bent neck beautifully nestled on the back, the head upon the wing, and gently wafted more by the breezes than by the waves. "So reposes the innocent soul!" said Alban, and thought, perhaps, of Liana, but without the courage to confess it. "And thus it awakes!" Liana added with emotion, as this white magnified dove slowly raised its head from the wing; for she thought of her mother's waking on this very day.

Chariton, as if all made up of salient points, was continually turning to Liana, and asking: "Shall we go this way? or in through there? or out through here? If my lord were only here! he knows all about it." She would gladly have led him round every fount and every flower, and looked into the youth's face as lovingly as into that of her friend. Liana said to her, on the cross way at the bridge: "I think the flute-dell yonder, with the gleaming gold ball, will perhaps be pleasantest, especially for a lover of music; and, besides, they will look for me there, when they bring the harp to my[Pg 259] mother." She had promised to come back to her as soon as that arrived. She shunned every path toward the south, where Tartarus frowned behind its high curtain.

Liana spoke now of the contest between painting and music, and of Herder's charming official report of this strife. She, although a votary of the pencil, gave in her vote, as was natural to the female and the lyric heart, entirely for tones, and Albano, although a good pianist, was rather for colors, "This magnificent landscape," said Albano, "is in fact a picture, and so is every fair human form." "Were I blind," said Chariton, naively, "then I should not see my lovely Liana." She replied: "My teacher, the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, also set painting above music. But to me, when I hear music, it is as if I heard a loud past or a loud future. Music has something holy; unlike the other arts, it cannot paint anything but what is good."[90] Verily, she was herself a moral church-music, the angel-stop in the organ. The pure Albano felt, by her side, the necessity and the existence of a yet tenderer purity; and it seemed to him as if a man might injure, even unconsciously, a soul like this, whose understanding was hardly anything more than a finer feeling,—as window-glasses of pure transparency are often broken, because they appear as if they were not. He turned round mechanically, because he was always one step in advance, and not only the blooming Lilar, but also Liana's full form, shone at once and transfigured into his soul. To clasp her to his heart was not now his yearning, but to snatch this being, who had so often suffered, from every flame; to rush for her, sword in[Pg 260] hand, upon her foe, to bear her mightily through the deep, cold hell-floods of life;—that would have illuminated his existence.

They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with her into a pathless oak-grove;—she looked upon him so contentedly and open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears. Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,—but like an angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!

They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,—into that resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have[Pg 261] gone round freely, without sleep. Chariton—from her earnestness much more busy—had, after a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the blooming veil, which retired as they approached;—and Albano beheld now the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the higher terrace,—everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs, from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold globe beside the sun,—the last mirror of his dying evening-glance. "Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually repeating.

Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height, behind a statue of a Muse,—for the Nine Muses beamed from the green Tempe,—seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile with the knitting-work which she[Pg 262] had taken from her friend, "wishes very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your Charles like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.

All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and out of the bowers,—more and more continually joined them,—they quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,—at last flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared toward heaven;—they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps, and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue spring,—and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of May,—and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.

Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid summer-night;—but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,—certainly not against sun and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated form, played—a sublime contrast to himself—with the ringlets of the little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.[Pg 263]

At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.

A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,—by heaven, I must say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed from him.

O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou, this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err,[Pg 264] so hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love in their hearts,—if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the other,—"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life, before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like thee!"—O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!

The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange! how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path, and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried[Pg 265] along after them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the awakened strings as from an Æolian harp, and bore them onward with it; and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping. And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!

But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the loved objects only in, and not on, your bosoms, am I not, like the Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the Archimime, who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead of a past, has only given a future,—wilt thou not one day say to me, I should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies, for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it not been for these Phœnix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me than with the rest of you?

Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in memory, or beforehand in hope, you would, therefore, rather have the present day without[Pg 266] either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the middle; but as to the past and the future,—neither of which can any man live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,—you will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.

By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso would fain translate poetic dreams into waking reality[91] is more foolish than the North American, who realizes his nightly ones: he proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch, bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our present ideals,—as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love here below,[Pg 267] which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but then—no, for the Then of the life hereafter, this little Now, has no voice; but if, I say, here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral life, and every dream a day,—ah, even then would desire still remain enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;—in Arcadia we should pine after Utopia; and on every sun we should see an unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should—sigh as we do here!

[Pg 268]

This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal- and prefiguring-burial of the illustrious deceased, the old pious Father Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the[Pg 269] run-down wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and evening-offering of friendship.

Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to talk a long while,—all Pestitz societies were auxiliary funeral societies, and full of burial-marshals,—every scaffolding of the neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary, rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,—the Lector had already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off winter-garb, and found it to fit,—the court-marshal had not a minute's rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come to him now before its time,—the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in heaven himself as was the illustrious deceased,—the women had risen from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy drapery-paintresses a long chain of coats and of their wearers probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their husbands.

Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings, Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus, and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon be ready to be stretched[Pg 270] to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's, and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it." "You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano, caught and stopped her.

Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her lazy Jack[92] of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things, either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a clothes'-rod of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count had she an eye,—under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.

Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer[Pg 271] the walk or gang was a press-gang,[93] the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a bird-net,[94] and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers, and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra, they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back with astonishment.) "Black?—black is a travelling-color, and bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color; and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the Jews in Morocco,[95] shall appear in black.

[Pg 272]

"Pestalozzi, madam—but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap it during the procession, so as to catch something of the muffled funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress, posture, image-worship, superstition, and love for charlatans, approach daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi, that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy, and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and caricatures, but also this very black of joy."

Among the children,—of whom the uneducated alone were not ill-bred,—Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which they were engraving on their bread and butter; and Galen showed his satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have made Mama have!"

The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she offered to go in, assuring her he would not let her pass till she surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough. He continued:—

"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest[Pg 273] and a Jewish king[96] it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,[97] he had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds, answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a Droit d'Aubaine, a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No, madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by their dying, as Marcion[98] asserted of Christ's journey to hell, bring up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out of hell into the heaven of the new administration.

"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a sale for them;—an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once strikes the whole metropolis,—even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only one word more, love: I assure you there is nothing coming yet but the company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse, which might[Pg 274] easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order that the procession may have no other pensées than Anglaises[99].... O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."

But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark chain. He praised them for opening the bal masqué of the new administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything, not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi,[Pg 275] Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be led along and held up on both sides.

In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells, opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing more loudly than all—one will hardly guess what—proclaimed before him the partings of life,—namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our hearts,—he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.

As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to himself in his season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form; before the tired, older man, in Gothic.

Schoppe generally began with comic humor, and ended[Pg 276] with tragic; so also now did the empty mourning-chest, the crape of the horses, their emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an eminence, to which the contemplation of a multitude of men at once always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal, tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed frenzy of mankind, and his own too.

Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol, on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides. A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of passion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart, and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How painfully does the noble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a close bonsoir, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon me,—we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and kicking,—and[Pg 277] there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and trailing his long crape,"—in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the Librarian.

All at once Schoppe, out of patience with this general emotion, said: "What a masquerade for the sake of a mask! Rag and tag for a piece of rag-paper! Throw a man quietly into his hole, and call nobody to see. I always admire London and Paris, where they toll no alarm-bells, nor set the neighborhood stirring, when the undertaker carries one, who has fallen asleep, to bed." "No, no," said Zesara, full of capacity for grief, "I admire it not: to whomsoever the holy dead are of no consequence, to him the living are so too;—no, I will gladly let my heart break into one tear after another, if I can only still remember the dear being."

O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before which the coffin of the coffin passed by, there stood a bronze statue of the old man on horseback, who saw pass by below him the unsaddled mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle, which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as absent, so soon as it is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the players on the stage.

But had not the gray hermit, Spener, laid upon the sunken breast of that deeper hermit a double youth?[Pg 278] O, in this frosty hour of pomp and pageantry, counts not the faithful Julienne every tone of the funeral bell with the beads of her tears,—that poor daughter whom sickness has exempted from the ceremonials, not from pain, who now has lost her last but one, perhaps her last relative, since her brother is hardly one? And will not Liana, in her Elysium, guess the farce of sorrow which is acted so near to her over behind the high trees in Tartarus? And if she suspects anything, O how profoundly will she mourn!

All this the noble youth heard in his soul, and he thirsted hotly after the friendship of the heart: it was to him as if its mountain- and life-air floated down from eternity, and blew the grave-dust away from his life-path, and he saw, up yonder, the Genius place his inverted torch upon the cold bosom, not to extinguish the immortal life, but to enkindle the immortal love.

He could not now do otherwise than go forth into the open air, and, amid the flying tones of spring and the deep, hollow murmur of the receding dead march, write the following words to Liana's brother, in which he said to him, after a youthful style, Be my friend!

[Pg 281]

How gloriously,—before all the beating veins of the inner man, like those of the outer in old age, have stiffened into gristle, and all the vessels have become inflexible and earthy, and the moral pulse, like the physical, hardly makes sixty strokes in a minute, and before the shy old fool, at every emotion, reserves a piece of his nature which he keeps cold and dry, and which is to wait for another occasion, as sprinkled raspberry leaves always remain dry on the rough side,—how gloriously, I say, before this period of espionage, does a youth, especially an Albano, step along his path, how freely, boldly, and exultingly! and seeks with equal confidence the friend and the foe, and closes with him, to fight either for him or against him!

Let this excuse Albano's fiery letter! The next day he received from Roquairol this answer:—

The redness of mortification rushed over the Count's face at this artificial postponement of the acquaintance; he felt that, after such a tone from the heart, he would have immediately, without a dead interim of five days, and without an homage-day masquerade in a double sense, gone to his friend and become his. But now he swore no longer to run to meet him, but only to wait for him. However, the roused indignation soon subsided, and he began to invent fairer and fairer mitigations for the first leaf of the so-long-sought favorite. Charles might certainly, e. g. not wish to mix up the holy time of the first[Pg 282] recognition with this bustle of taking the allegiance-oath,—or that first suicidal masquerade might have made every succeeding one an inspiring era of a new second life,—or he knew, perhaps, in fact, about Albano's birthday,—or, finally, this glowing spirit chose to run or fly on his own track.

Meanwhile, his note made the Count reproach himself for his own letter, as if it had been a sin against his Schoppe; he held it to be a sin, in one friendship, to yearn after another; but thou mistakest, fair soul! Friendship has steps which lead up on the throne of God, through all spirits, even to the Infinite: only love is satiable, and, like truth, admits no three degrees of comparison; and a single being fills its heart. Moreover, Albano and Schoppe, in such a mutual metempsychosis of their ideas, and such a near relationship of their pride and nobility, held each other far more dear than they showed to each other. For, as Schoppe, in fact, showed nothing, one could love him in return only with the finger on the lip, but, perhaps, so much the more strongly. Albano was a burning-hot concave mirror, which has its object near, and represents it erect behind itself; Schoppe one which holds the object far off, and throws an inverted image of it into the air.

On the evening before his birthday, and the day of allegiance, Albano stood alone at his window, and pondered his past,—for a last day is more solemn than a first: on the 31st of December I reckon up three hundred and sixty-five days and their fates; on the first of January I think of nothing, because, in fact, the whole future is transparent, or may be all out in five minutes;—while the vesper-bell pealed over the fast-closing twentieth year of his life, and the vesper-hour rose within him, he measured[Pg 283] the abside-line[101] of his moral being, and looked up at the towering pile of the approaching morrow, which hung full either of spring-showers or hailstones. Never yet had he so tenderly surveyed the circle of his beloved beings, or glanced through the open doors of futurity, as at this time.

But the fair hour was spoiled by Malt, who burst in with the information that the limping gentleman had leaped overboard. From the dormer-window might be seen a returning village funeral-procession, conglomerated around the spot on the bank where Schoppe had plunged in. With frightful wildness—for in Albano indignation was next-door neighbor to terror and pain—he dragged along with him, as he flew to the rescue, the lazy provincial physician, and even threatened him with hard words; for Sphex was going to wait for a carriage, and meanwhile represent to himself the possible cases of too late preparations for a rescue, and besides, perhaps, cherished a hope of serving up Schoppe, on the anatomical table, as Doctor's-feast of science.

The youth ran out with him,—through corn-fields, amidst tears and amidst curses,—with alternate clenched fist and outspread palm, and his eye grew more and more dim and dizzy, and his heart hotter and hotter, the nearer they approached the dark circle. At last they could not only see the Librarian, but also hear him; in good case he turned towards them his curly head from among the reeds, and, occasionally, as he was haranguing the mourning-retinue, he flung up, in a fiery manner, his hairy arm above the water-plants.

[Pg 284]

Of course the case stood thus:—

His sorites, as long as he lived, was the following: "He had come into the world, not feet foremost, but head foremost, and, accordingly, carried his head and nose high and lofty,[102] because he could not help it. Now he knew of no more genuine freedom than health;—every malady shuts up and warps the soul, and the earth is, merely for that reason, a universal block-house, la salpetrière and house of bruises;[103]—whoso made use of an oyster-snail-viper medicine was himself a slimy, snaky, sticking viper, oyster, snail, and therefore the ever-free savages killed their invalids, and the vigorous Spartans gave no patient an office, least of all the crown;—and strength was especially necessary, in our degenerate days, in order to maul qualified subjects, because, to his certain knowledge, the fist with some substance in it was the best plaintiff's plea and actio ex lege diffamari which a citizen could institute."

Therefore he bathed summer and winter in ice-cold water, just as he, for the same reason, kept himself temperate in all things.

Now, then, in this odious May-weather, he had merely, in his gray hussar-cloak,—at home, his night-gown,—and with shoes down at the heel, gone to the water-side; he had previously stripped himself at the house so as to be ready as soon as he should arrive at the bank. The mourning-company, who saw him go at his swift pace down to the water, and at last throw off everything and leap in, could not but believe the man meant to drown himself, and ran in a body to his bathing-place, not to[Pg 285] let him do it. "Do not drown himself!" cried the mourning-company of blacks, while yet afar off. He just let them come on till he could discourse the matter to them somewhat nearer, in the following wise:—"I am yet open to conviction; I can hear reason, good folk, though I am already standing up to my neck in the water; but suffer yourselves to be correctly informed in this case, dear Cherstens generally, for so Christians were called in the time of Charles. I am a poor Sacramentarian, and can hardly recollect what I have hitherto lived on, it was so bloody-desperate little. Whatever I have undertaken in this world, no blessing went with it, but it was all crab's-track backwards and forward. I set up, in Vienna, a neat little magazine of snipes' dung, but I made nothing out of it for want of snipes. I took hold on the other end, and hawked about in Carlsbad, for the lords and great ones, who are accustomed to set a picture upon every old stool and piece of trumpery, fine engravings for waste-paper and privy purposes, in order that, instead of the mere printed paper, they might have something tasty for consumption; but the whole set was left, a dead loss, on my hands, because the manner was too hard and not ideal enough. In London I prepared ready-made speeches (for I am a litterateur) to be used by men who are hanged, and yet would fain have something to say for themselves: I offered them to the richest parliamentary orators, and even knaves of booksellers, but came near having to use the speeches for myself. I would gladly have got my living by vomiting,[104] but that requires funds. I tried once to get a settlement as note-stand to a count's regiment,[Pg 286] because it looks stupid enough on drill- and parade-days to see every one with a musical flap hanging on his shoulder, from which his next neighbor behind plays. I offered for a trifle to wear all the musicalia on my own person, and stand before them with the notes; but the first-lieutenant (who is at once in the regency and in the treasury) thought it would make the fifers laugh when they came to blow. Thus has it fared with me from time immemorial, dear Cherstens—but don't trample about on my precious cloak there! As ill luck would have it, I entered into wedlock with a lady of Vienna, who was endowed with melted seals;[105] her name was Prænumerantia Elementaria Philanthropia;[106] you don't know what this means in German,—a real hell-broom, who chased me, all heated, like a hunted stag, into the reeds here. Cherstens, I should defame myself in the water, were I to come out plainly with the whole story of our woful condition;[107] ... in short, my Philanthropia before marriage was soft as the spines of a new-born hedge-hog, but in the nuptial state, when the foliage was off, I saw, as on trees in winter, one raven's- and devil's-nest after another. She was all the time dressing herself and dressing herself, till it was time to undress; when a fault in me or the children had been removed, she would still continue to scold a little, as one continues to vomit, when the emetic and everything is out; she indulged me preciously little, and had I had a Fontanel[108] she would have reproached me for the[Pg 287] fresh pea which I should have been obliged every day to put into it; in short, we two pulled opposite ways,—the linch-pin of love came out in the struggle, and I came with the forward-wheels down into the water here, and my Prænumerantia stays with the hind-wheels at home. See, my women, this is why I do violence to myself—besides, the gnawing-man[109] would have, at any rate, caught me by the throat; but behold yourselves in me as in a mirror! For when a man who is a litterateur, and therefore, as you yet know by the case of Fichte, goes about as instituted overseer, schoolmaster, and mentor of the human race, leaps overboard before his wife's face, and lets his Ephorie and tutorship go, you may conclude from this of what your own husbands, who cannot measure themselves with me at all in learning, are capable, in case you are such Prænumerantias, Elementarias, and Philanthropias as unfortunately you have the appearance of being. But," he concluded suddenly, as he saw Albano and the Doctor, "clear yourselves away; I am going to drown myself!"

"Ah, dear Schoppe!" said Albano. Schoppe blushed at his situation. "It must be a clown," said the retiring funeral retinue. "What child's foolery is this, then?" asked Sphex, resenting Albano's former passion and the anatomical misshot, and derived satisfaction from telling the story of the latter's rage. Schoppe knew how heartily the noble youth loved him, and he would not say anything, because he was ashamed, but he swore to himself (in the grotesque style to which he was accustomed even in soliloquy) very shortly to let him into his breast-cavern, and show him hanging therein a whole, wild heart full of love.[Pg 288]

The blue day on which an ascension, a rendering of allegiance, and a birthday were to be celebrated already stood over Pestitz, after having cast off its morning-red,—two horses were already harbingers of four, the lowly coach-box, of the highest,—the country nobility already went down, uncomfortably frizzled, into the rooms of the inn, and scolded at being cheated out of the fairest weather for heath-cock coupling, and the city nobility, yet unpowdered, spoke of the day, but without real earnestness,—the court-micrometer,[110] the court-marshal, was surrounded by all his quartermasters,—the court-transit-instruments,[111] the courtiers, instead of their half-holiday, when they work only in the afternoon, had a whole working-day, and were already standing at the wash-table,—the allegiance-preacher, Schäpe, believed almost every word of his discourse, because he had read it too many times over, and the nearness of publication infused emotion into him,—there was no longer a domino to be had for the evening, except among the Jews,—when a man alighted at the door of the Doctor's house, who among all others was the most honest and hearty about the allegiance, the Director Wehrfritz. There were a son and a father in each other's arms, a fiery youth and a fiery man. Albano seemed to him no longer to be the old Albano, but—warmer than ever. He brought with him from "his women," as he called them, congratulatory letters and birthday presents; he himself made not much[Pg 289] of the birthday or forgot it, and Albano had only celebrated it a little just after waking. These festivals belong more to the other sex, who gladly toy with times and seasons in the way of loving and giving.

The Titular Librarian marched out to a village, named Klosterdorf, where the Mayor with his family, after an ancient custom, had to imitate the Prince with his, and so, as commissioner, drive in the allegiance of the neighboring circle; this, Schoppe said, he still was pleased with, but the other worked too fatally on his inwards. The Director, dazzled by the prospects of the day, and posted in the front with an official speech to the chivalry, fell into a quarrel with Schoppe. "The Exchequer and the Court," said he, "have been, of course, from time immemorial, such as they are; but the Princes, dear sir, are good; they are themselves sucked dry, and then they seem to be the suckers." "Somewhat," rejoined Schoppe, "as the death-vampyres only give out blood from themselves, while they appear to take it; but I make up for that again by attributing wholly to the Regents, besides the sins of others, the merits, victories, and sacrifices of others also; herein they are the pelicans, who shed a blood for their children which really at a distance seems to be their own."

All went off: Schoppe, out into the country; Wehrfritz, to church with the procession; Albano, into a spectator's-box in the allegiance-hall; for he would not in any wise be stuck into the train of the Prince, not even as embroidery. Soon the noisy stream of pomp came sounding back into the hall. The chivalry, the spirituality, and the cities mounted the stage, where the oath was to be taken. In the court-yard of the castle one foot stood upon another, and a needle might, to be sure, have reached the[Pg 290] ground, but no one could do so, to pick it up; everybody looked up at the balcony, and cursed before he swore. The Prince, too, stayed not away; the throne, that graduated and paraphrased princely seat, stood open, and Fraischdörfer had decorated it with beautiful mythological and heraldic shoulder-pieces and appendages.

Opposite the Count bloomed the court-dames, and below them a rose and a lily, Julienne and Liana. As one lifts his eye from the stiff frosty landscape of winter to the blue breathing heavens which looked down upon our spring evenings, and wherein the light summer clouds floated and the rainbow stood, so did he glance over the shining snow-light of the court at the lovely Grace of spring, around whom remembrances hung, like flowers, and who now stood so far aloof, so cut off, so imprisoned in the heavy finery of the court! Only through her friend, who sits beside her, was she gently melted and harmonized with the dazzling present.

Now began fine official speeches, the longest being made by the old Minister, the shortest by Wehrfritz: the Prince let the warm eulogies glide over his December-visage without thawing it down,—a mistaken indifference! For the praise of the Minister, as well as of other court-servants, may yet help him with posterity, since, according to Bacon, no praise is of more consequence than that which servants give, because they surely know their master best.

Then the Upper-Secretary, Heiderscheid, read Luigi's genealogical table, and illuminated the hollow family-tree, together with its dryness, and the last pale green twig; with sunken eyes Julienne heard this amid the vivat of the people, and Albano, never subdued by one thought alone, saw her eyes, and could not, however intently[Pg 291] the Regent listened, avoid the funeral picture, how, one day, and that very soon, this extinguished man would bear down after him the name of his whole race into the vault; he saw them carving the inverted arms and hanging the shield upside down, and heard the shovels strike against the helmet and fling the earth after the coffin. Gloomy idea! the tender sister would certainly have wept, had she only been alone!

At last the turn came to those, to whom it never comes first, although they are the only ones who have a hearty meaning in such ceremonies. Heiderscheid stepped out on the balcony, and caused the noisy swarming multitude to stretch out the forefinger and thumb, and repeat the oath after him. The mass, always fascinated, shouted their vivat; in the dazzled eyes gleamed the confident expectation of a better regency and love for the unknown individual. The Count, whom a multitude generally made enthusiastic, as it did Schoppe melancholy, glowed with the inspiration of brotherly love and thirst for achievement; he saw princes, like omnipotent ones, holding sway on their eminences, and saw the blooming provinces and the gay cities of a wisely-ruled land spread out before him; he represented to himself how he, were he a prince, could, with the electric sparkling of the sceptre-point, dart, with an animating shock, into millions of united hearts at once, whereas he could now, with so great difficulty, scarcely kindle a few of the nearest; he saw his throne, as a mountain in morning light, pouring out, instead of lava, navigable streams through the lands, and breaking the storms, with a hum of harvests and festivals around its feet; he thought to himself how far, from such a high place, he could send light abroad, like a moon, which does not hide the sun by day, but, from her[Pg 292] elevation, flings his distant brightness into the night,—and how he would, instead of only defending, create and educate freedom, and be a regent for the sake of forming self-regents.[112] "But why am I not one?" said he mournfully.

Noble youth! do thy estates, then, furnish thee no subjects? But just so does the lesser prince believe he would govern a duchy quite otherwise, and the higher one believes the same in regard to a kingdom, and so does the highest, in regard to universal monarchy.

Meanwhile, all through this singular uneasy day, wild perspectives of youth passed to and fro before him, and the old spirit-voice, which he was going to meet to-day, repeated in him the dark exhortation, Take the crown! Wehrfritz came back in the evening with a red face from the fiery allegiance-banquet, and Albano took an agitated leave of him, as if of the ebb and calm of life—his childish youth; for to-day he launched out deeper into its waves. Schoppe came back and wanted to have him before the sight-hole of his show-box, wherein he slid through the vicariate-allegiance-swearing in Klosterdorf, in a series of comic pictures; but these contrasted too severely with higher ones, and gave little pleasure.

At night Albano put on his beautiful, serious character-mask, that of a knight-templar,—for a comic one his form, and almost his mood, was too great;—the latter was made still more solemn by this funeral dress of a whole murdered knightly order. After he had caused to be described to him once more the awful paths of Tartarus, and the burial-place of the Prince's heart, to avoid mistaking of the way in the night, he went forth, about[Pg 293] ten o'clock, with a high-heaving bosom, which the night-larvæ[113] of fancy, together with friendship and love and the whole future, conspired to excite.

Albano stepped, for the first time, into the inverted puppet-world of a masquerade, as into a dancing realm of the dead. The black forms, the slit masks, the strange eyes, gleaming as out of night behind them, which, as in that mouldering Sultan in the coffin, alone remained alive,—the mingling and mimicking of all ranks, the flying and ring-running of the clinking dance, and his own solitude under the mask,—all this translated him, with his Shakespearian frame of spirit, into an enchanted and ghostly island full of juggleries, chimeras, and metamorphoses. Ah, this is the bloody scaffold, was his first thought, where the brother of thy Liana rent his young life, like a mourning-garment; and he looked fearfully round, as if he feared Roquairol might again attempt death.

Among the masks he found no one under which he could suppose him to be; this meaningless cousinship of standing parts, footmen, butchers, Moors, ancestors, &c.,—these could not conceal any loved one of Albano's. Lonesomely and inquisitively he paced up and down behind the rows of the Anglaise; and more than ten eyes, which glistened opposite in the annular eclipse of the lace mask,—for women, from their open-heartedness, do not love masks, but are fond of showing themselves,—followed the powerfully and pliantly built form, which, with the bold helm and plume, with the crossed white[Pg 294] mantle and the gleaming mail on his breast, seemed to bring a knight out of the heroic age.

At last a masked lady, who was chatting between unmasked ones, came up to him with long steps and large feet, and boldly grasped his hand as if for a dance. He was extremely embarrassed at the boldness of the summons, and about the choice of an answer; it is valor precisely that loves to marry itself to gallantry, as the Damascene blade, besides hardness, possesses a perpetual fragrance; but the lady only wrote in his hand his initials, with the interrogation-mark after them,—"v. C.?" and after the Yes, the charming one said, softly, "Do you not remember me? the master of exercises, Von Falterle?" Albano testified, notwithstanding his dislike of the part, a real joy at finding again a companion of his youth. He asked which mask was Captain Roquairol; Falterle assured him he had not yet arrived.

By this time—as the footmen, the butchers, Falterle, &c., were only the snow-drops of this masquerade-spring—better flowers—violets, forget-me-nots, and primroses—had sprung up or come in. For one such forget-me-not I see a churl entering, puffed out behind and before, and convex like a burning-glass, who now opened the back-door and shook out confects from his hump-back, and then the front-door and produced sausages. Hafenreffer, however, writes me the invention has once before appeared at a masquerade in Vienna. Then came a company of German play-cards, which shuffled and played out and took each other; a fine emblem of atheism, which exhibits it wholly free from the absurdity wherewith men have so loved to disfigure it! Mr. Von Augusti appeared also, but in simple dress and domino; he became (incomprehensibly to the Count) very soon the[Pg 295] polar-star of the dancers, and the controlling Cartesian vortex of the dancing-school.

With what miserable, black ammunition-biscuit and beggar's-bread of enjoyment these people get along! thought Albano, to whom, all day long, his dreams, those Jupiter's-doves, had been bringing ambrosia. And how pale and stale is their fire, their fancy, and their speech, he thought too. Verily, a life down in a gloomy glacier-chasm! for he imagined everybody must speak and feel as intensely and ardently as he.

Now came a limping man, with a great glass-chest on his belly; of course it was easy to recognize the Librarian; he had on—either because he sent too late, or would not pay, for a domino—something black, which he had borrowed of a mourning-cloak lender, and was covered from shoulder-blade to shin-bone with awful masks, which he, with many finger-signs, offered mostly to those people who played their parts behind the opposite kind, e. g. short-nosed ones to long noses. He was waiting for the beginning of a hop Anglaise, the notes for which stood just on the hand-organ of his chest; then he, too, began; he had therein an excellent puppet-masquerade which had been planed out by Bestelmaier, and now he set the little masks to hopping parallel with the great ones. His object was a comparative anatomy of the two masquerades, and the parallelism was melancholy. Besides, he had rigged it all out with by-work: little dumb persons swung their little bells in the chest; a tolerably grown-up child rocked the cradle of an inanimate doll, with which the little fool still played; a mechanic was working away at his speaking machine, by which he was going to show the world how far mere mechanism could go toward giving life to puppets; a[Pg 296] live, white mouse[114] sprang out by a little chain, and would have upset many of the club, if he could have broken it; a starling, buried-alive, a true first Greek comedy and school for scandal in miniature, was practising upon the dancing-company the death-blow of the tongue with perfect freedom and without distinction; a looking-glass-wall mimicked the living scenes of the chest so deceptively, that every one took the images for true puppets.

The point of this comico-tragic dagger came home directly enough upon Albano, as, besides, the hopping wax-figure-cabinet of the great masquerade seemed to double the solitude of man, and to separate two selves by four faces; but Schoppe went further.

In his glass case stood a faro-bank, and by it a little man, who cut out the masked banker in black paper, but into a likeness of the German gentleman; this picture he carried into the card-chamber, where a bank-keeping mask—most certainly Cephisio—must needs hear and see him. The banker looked at him some time inquiringly. Another, dressed wholly in black, with a dying expression, which represented the Hippocratica facies,[115] did the same. Albano looked towards it with a fiery glance, because it occurred to him it might be Roquairol, for it had his stature and torch-like eye. The pale mask lost much, and kept redoubling its loss; at that it drank out of a quill immoderate draughts of Champagne wine. The Lector came up; Schoppe kept on playing before the eyes that crowded round; the pale mask looked steadily and sternly at the Count. Schoppe took off his[Pg 297] own before Bouverot; but there was another under it; he pulled this off; it disclosed an under-mask of the under-mask; he carried on the process to the fifth root;—at last his own rough face came forth, but bronzed with gold-beater's skin and distorted, as it turned towards Bouverot, with an almost frightful glaze and smile.

The pale mask itself seemed to start, and hastened with long strides off into the dancing-hall; it threw itself wildly into the wildest of the dance. This, too, confirmed Albano's conjecture, as well as its great defying hat, which seemed to him a crown, because he prized nothing more highly about manly attire than fur, cloak, and hat.

More and more fingers continually drew the letters "v. C." in his hand, and he nodded composedly. The time surrounded him with manifold dramas, and everywhere he stood between theatre-curtains. As with uneasy head and heart he stepped to the window, to see whether he should soon have moonshine for his night-walk, he saw a heavy hearse, flanked by torches, move along across the market, which was conveying a manor-lord to his family-vault; and the undisturbed night-watchman called out, behind the creeping dead man, the beginning of the spirit-hour and of a birth-hour, which is precious to us. Could his smitten heart refrain from saying to him how sharply Death, the hard, solid, insoluble, with its glacier-air, sweeps through the warm scenes of life, and leaves behind it all over which it breathes stiff and snow-white? Could he help thinking of the cold young sister, whose voice now awaited him in Tartarus? And as Schoppe, with his puppet-parody, came to him, and he pointed out to him the street, and the latter said: "Bon! Friend Death sits[Pg 298] on his game-wagon, and glances quietly up, as if the friend would say, 'Bon! only dance on; I make my return trip, and carry you too to your place and spot,'"—how close must it have been to him under his sultry visor! At this second the pale mask came, with others, to the window; he opened his glowing face for coolness; a hasty draught of wine, and still more his fancy, showed him the world in burning surfaces; the mask surveyed him closely, with a dark, uncertain glow of the eye, which he at last could no longer bear, because it might as well have been kindled by hatred as by love, just as the spots on the sun seem now like abysses and now like mountains.

Eleven o'clock had gone by; he suddenly disappeared from the hot looks and the crushing throng, and betook himself on his way to the heart without a breast.

While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks (mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand, &c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be murdered than shamed before his father.

How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars, stood erect before thee!—Beneath[Pg 299] the heavens there is no terror, only under the earth!—Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and butterflies. In the distance fiery prongs grew out of the earth and moved along;—it was the hearse with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey (probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro.

He passed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward Elysium,—a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were continually seizing and vanishing.

Impetuously Albano ran down a stairway darkened with hangings, and came upon an old battle-field,—a gloomy waste with a black wall, of which the monotony was broken only by white gypsum heads, which stood in the earth as if they were on the point of sinking or of resurrection; a tower full of blind gates and blind windows stood in the midst, and the solitary clock talked with itself therein, and, with its iron rod swaying to and fro, seemed fain to divide the wave of time, which ever tended to run together again: it struck three quarters to twelve, and deep in the wood the echo murmured as if in sleep, and softly spake once more to fleeting man of fleeting time. The road ran in an eternal circle round about the churchyard wall, without coming to a gate. Alban must,[Pg 300] according to his information, seek a spot in the wall where it roared and reeled under him.

At last he stepped upon a stone which sank with him; then a section of the wall fell down; and a tangled wood, full of clumps of trees, whose stems twined together into bush-work, intercepted every beam of the moon. As he looked round him under the gate, there hung over the shadowy stairway a pale head like a bust of the murder-field, and passed down without a body, and the bloodless dead seemed to awake and run after it;—the cold hellstone[116] of horror contracted his heart: he stood: the death's-head hovered immovable over the last step!

All at once his heart sucked in warm blood again; he turned toward the misshapen wood with drawn sword, because he was bearing along his life in his hand near armed Death. He followed in the darkness of the moss-green towers the roar of the subterranean flood and the rocking of the ground. Unfortunately he looked round again, and there stood the death's-head behind him still, but high in the air on the trunk of a giant. The extreme of horror always drove him with compressed eyes full upon a phantom; he called twice through the echoing wood, "Who's there?" But when, at this moment, a second head seemed all at once to stand beside the first, then his hand clove, frozen, to the ice-cold key of the gate of the world of the dead, and he tore it away bleeding.

He fled, and plunged through thicker and thicker twigs, till at last he came out into an open garden and into the splendor of the moon; here, ah here, when he saw the holy, immortal heavens and the rich stars in the north gleaming again, which never rise nor set, the pole-star and Friederich's-Ehre,[117] the Bear and the Serpent,[Pg 301] and Charles's Wain and Cassiopæa, which looked down upon him mildly, as if with the bright winking eyes of eternal spirits, then his spirit asked itself, "Who can lay hands on me? I am a spirit among spirits"; and the courage of immortality beat again in his warm breast.

But what a singular garden! Great and little flowerless beds, full of yew, rue, and rosemary, divided it among them; a circle of weeping birches drooped like a funeral train around the mute spot; under the garden murmured the buried brook, and in the middle stood a white altar, near which lay a man.

Albano was strengthened by the appearance of the common dress and the mechanic's bundle on which the sleeper rested; he stepped quite close to him, and read the golden inscription of the altar: "Take my last offering, all-gracious one!" The heart of the Prince must here be mouldering in the altar.

Ah, after these rigid scenes, it soothed his soul even to tears to find here human words and a human sleep, and the remembrance of God; but as he looked with emotion at the sleeper, suddenly that sister's voice which he had heard on Isola Bella said softly in his ear, "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." "Ah, good God!" he cried, and turned round; and there was nothing on either side of him, and he held himself up by the corner of the altar. "I give thee Linda de Romeiro," it said again; frightfully the thought seized him, that the hovering death's-head might be speaking near him, and he shook the sound sleeper, who woke not, and shook and called still more violently, when the voice spake for a third time.

"What?" said the drowsy man, "directly! What will he?—you?" and raised himself reluctantly and with a yawn; but at the sight of the naked sword fell down[Pg 302] on his knees, and said: "Mercy! I will, indeed, give up all!"

"Zesara!" a cry came from the wood,—"Zesara, where art thou?" and he heard his own voice; but now he boldly called back, "At the altar!" A black form rushed out, with a white mask in hand, and hesitated in the moonlight before the armed one. Then at length Albano recognized the brother of Liana, for whom he had so long panted; he flung his sword behind him, and ran to meet him. Roquairol stood before him mute, pale, and with a sublime repose on his countenance. Albano continued to stand near him, and said with emotion, "Hast thou been seeking me, Charles?" Roquairol nodded silently, and had tears in his eyes, and opened his arms. Ah, then could the blissful man, with all the flames and tears of love fall upon the long-loved soul, and he kept saying incessantly, "Now we have each other! now we have each other!" And more and more passionately he embraced him, as the pillar of his future, and melted into tears, because now, indeed, the buried love of so many years and so many choked up fountains of the poor heart could at once gush forth. Roquairol, trembling, only clasped him to himself gently with one arm, and said, but without passion, "I am a dying man, and that is my face," holding forth the yellow death-mask; "but I have my Albano, and will die on his bosom."

Wildly they twined around each other; the sap of life, Love, ran through them with a creative power; the ground over the rolling, subterranean flood shook more violently; and the starry heaven, with the white, magic breath of its trembling stars, floated around the magic glow.

Ah ye happy ones![Pg 303]

Some men are born fast friends; their first finding of each other is only a second, and they then, like those who have been long parted, bring to each other not only a future, but a past also;—this latter our happy ones demanded of one another impatiently. Roquairol answered Alban's question, How he came hither, in a fiery manner: "He had been following him this whole evening,—he had gazed at him at the window during the funeral pomp with such a painful longing, and had almost been constrained to fly and embrace him,—he had already, but a moment ago, stood close by him, and at his question, 'Who's there?' immediately taken off his mask." Now did Albano's fallen arm strike again tensely through the thin magic-lantern show of ghostly fear, as he now learned that the two-headed giant had grown entirely out of an optically-magnifying, mistaken notion of the distance of a form which was so near, and the death's-head had forfeited its body on the stairway only by the dark curtains and its black dress; even the hard spirit-scene at the altar seemed to him now less insuperable through the rich gain of living love.

Roquairol asked him what woe or joy had driven him hither at midnight to a Moravian churchyard, and whither he had sent the man with the sword. Albano did not know that Moravians reposed here; and, moreover, he had not observed that the sword, probably from fear of its being used, had been stolen. He answered, "My dead sister was fain to speak with me at the altar; and she has spoken"; but he feared to say more of this. Then Roquairol's countenance suddenly changed; he stared at him, and demanded confirmation and explanation; during[Pg 304] this he looked into the air as if he would draw faces from it by his looks, and said monotonously, fixing his eyes, however, on Albano the while, "Dead one, dead one, speak again!" But only the death-flood went on speaking under them, and nothing more. But he threw himself before the altar on his knees, and said in measured tone, and yet with trembling lips: "Fly open, spirit-gate, and show thy transparent world. I fear not you, the transparent ones; I become one of you, when you appear, and walk with you, and become an apparition myself." "O my good one, forbear," Albano entreated, not only from piety, but from love also; for an accident, a night-bird shooting over, might, indeed, kill them by horror: this horror stood, too, not far from them; for on the illuminated side of the weeping birches stepped out a white, majestic old form. But when Roquairol, frantic with wine and fancy, reached out the dying mask into the air, and said, turning toward the grave of the heart, "Take this face, if thou hast none, old man, and look at me from behind it!" Alban seized him; the white form stepped back with bowed head and folded arms into the branches; the round tower on the battle-field struck the hour, and the dreamy region, murmuring, struck a response.

"Come to my warm heart, thou passionate soul. O that I were permitted to receive thee on my very birthday, at my very birth-hour!" This sound melted at once the ever-changing man, and he hung upon him with wet eyes of joy, and said: "And to keep me even till our dying hours! O look not upon me, thou unchangeable, because I appear so wavering and broken; in the waves of life man breaks and crinkles as the staff flickers in the water, but the essential being stands nevertheless firm as the staff. I will follow thee into other parts of Tartarus; but still relate the history."[Pg 305]

To give this history amounted to opening a sanctum sanctorum of the inner man, or even a coffin to the light of day; but do you believe that Albano bethought himself a minute? or would you yourselves? We are all better, franker, warmer friends than we know and show; only let the right spirit meet you,—such a one as thirsting Love ever demands,—pure, large, clear, and tender and warm,—and you give him everything, and love him without measure, because he is without fault. Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the rainy season;—hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained, was a stream with waterfalls.

Charles led him into the so-called catacomb, while he listened to the ghost-story of Isola Bella, which, however, from having been exhausted by the former, he heard with diminished fear. A dreary, charred vale, full of sunken shafts, basked gray in the moonshine; out of the wood crept forth the death-flood below their feet, and leaped down a stony stairway into the catacombs. The two followed it on another that ran by its side. The entrance bore as frontispiece an old dial-plate, of which the lightning had once struck away the hour one. "One?" said Albano; "singular!—just our coming hour!"

How adventurously does the catacomb now wind onward! The long death-flood murmurs obscurely far in through the darkness, and glimmers at times under the silvery stream which the moonlight sends in through the shaft-openings; immovable creatures—horses, dogs, birds—stand[Pg 306] drinking on the dark bank, that is to say, their stuffed skins; small gravestones, worn smooth by time, with a few names and limbs, are the pavement; on a brighter niche we read that a nun was immured here; in another stands the petrified skeleton of a miner, who was buried alive, with gilded ribs and thighs; in scattered spots were black paper hearts of men shot by the arquebuse, and heaped-up nosegays of poor sinners; the rod which had whipped a forgiven penitent to death, a glass bust with a phosphorus point in the water, chrisom-cloths[118] and other children's clothes and playthings, and a dwarf skeleton.

As the explanatory words of Roquairol, whose life-path always ran down into vaults and out over graves, beat out life more and more thin and transparent before him, Zesara, after his manner, at once shaking his head, heaving forward his breast, stamping in the sand, and cursing (which he easily did in terror and in strong emotion), broke out with the words: "By the Devil! thou crushest my breast and thine own. It is not so! Are we not together? Have I not thy warm, living hand? Burns not within us the fire of immortality? Burnt-out coals are these bones, and nothing more; and the heavenly flame which has consumed them has again seized upon other fuel, and blazes on. O," he added, as if comforted, and stepped into the brook and looked through the opening of the shaft up to the rich moon, which streamed down from heaven, and his great eyes filled with splendor,—"O, there is a heaven and an immortality; we remain not in the dark hole of life; we, too, sweep through the ether like thee, thou shining world!"

[Pg 307]

"Ah, thou glorious one," said Charles, whose soul consisted of souls, "I will now bring thee to a more cheerful place." They had hardly gone eight steps, when it darkened behind them, and a sword, flung in overhead, came perpendicularly down, and struck with its point in the sand under the waves. "O thou infernal devil up there!" cried the infuriate Roquairol; but Albano was softened at the thought of the iron virgin[119] of the death-hour, who had folded her sharp arms together so near him. They clasped each other more warmly, and went silent and sad towards a low music and a grave-mound. They seated themselves upon it opposite an avenue which formed a right angle with the tormenting catacomb, lined with green moss, and of which crumbled sparks of rotten wood pointed out the extent. It lost itself in an open gate, and a prospect of Elysium, of which only the white summits of some silver-poplars were distinguishable, and in the distance was seen the spring redness of midnight blooming in the heavens, and two stars twinkling overhead. The gate, however, was grated, and guarded by a skeleton with an Æolian harp in his hand, which seemed to strike upon it the thin minor tones which the draught of wind just now wafted into the cavern.

"Here," said Charles, at the beautiful spot, and made more curious by the deadly fling of Albano's sword, "finish your narrative of to-day!" Albano reported to him candidly the word which the sister's voice had spoken: "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." In the tumult of his inner being he thought not of the anecdote, that she was the very one for whom Charles when a boy had proposed to die. "Romeiro?" he started up. "Be still! She? O thou mocking executioner, Fate! Why she, and to-day?[Pg 308] Ah, Albano, for her I early braved death," he continued, weeping, and sank upon his breast, "and that is what has made my heart so bad, because I have lost her. Do thou only take her, for thou art a pure spirit; the glorious shape which appeared to thee on the sea, so she looks, or now still fairer. Ah, Albano!" This noble youth trembled at the complicated plot, and at the destiny, and said: "No, no, thou dear Charles, thou thinkest falsely about everything."

Suddenly it was as if all the constellations rang, and a melodious spirit-choir thronged in through the gate. Albano was startled. "Nothing; let be," said Charles. "It is not the skeleton; the pious father is walking in the flute-dell, and is just drawing out his flutes, because he prays. But how sayest thou, I think falsely of everything?" "How?" repeated Albano, and could not, in the magic circle of these echoes, which all-powerfully brought back to him that Sunday morning, either think or speak. For did not the silver-poplars wave to and fro against the stars, and rosy clouds lie couched about the heavens, and did not the whole Elysium pass openly by with the sounds which had floated through it, with the tears which had besprinkled it, and with the dreams which no heart forgets, and with the holy form which eternally abides in his breast? And now he held so fast the hand of her brother; so near was he to love and friendship, those two foci in the ellipse of life's pathway; impetuously he embraced the brother, with the words: "By Heaven, I say to thee, she whom thou hast just named concerns me not, and never will."

"But, Albano, thou dost not surely know her yet?" said Charles, pursuing his inquiries, perhaps, too hardly; for the noble youth beside him was too bashful and too[Pg 309] steadfast to unlock the sanctuary of wishes to the kinsman of his loved one; to a stranger he could have done it much more easily. "O torment me not," he answered sensitively; but he added more softly, "Believe me, I pray you believe me, this first time, my good brother!" Charles yielded full as seldom as he; and although swallowing the inquisitive tone, and speaking in a right loving one, nevertheless said this: "By my bliss, I'll do it, and with joy; a heart must have been heartily loved and divinely blessed which can renounce such a one." Ah, does Albano, then, know that! He only leaned silently, with his fiery cheek full of roses, on Liana's brother, shunning scrutiny for shame; but when the expiring calls of the flute-dell gathered together like sighs in his breast, and reminded him too often how that Sunday morning closed, how Liana stole away, and how he looked after her with dim, wet eyes from the altar; then, although his heart did not break, his eye broke into tears, and he wept violently, but silently, on his first friend.

Then, with mute souls, they turned homeward, and looked thoughtfully toward the long, vanishing ways of the future; and when they parted, they well felt that they loved each other right heartily, that is, right bitterly.

On the morrow the pious father lay prostrate under a shock which was more blissful than mournful; for he said he had in the night seen his friend, the deceased Prince, walking, clad in white, through Tartarus.

[Pg 310]

Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with islands and ships; he had his whole breast full of friendship and youth, and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had rebounded[Pg 311] from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul and his whole life—(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into his heart); all models of friendship among the ancients he was fain to copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.

When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,—which was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of night,—and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery smoke-column of an Ætna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who, after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life, comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any moment play again the give-away game with the human form.

Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course, a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies[Pg 312] the Hippocratic face of the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the glasshouse of a run-down hour-glass, and the washing-and the writing-table stood open, on which latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like butterflies on the window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet there, much less a Cycle.

Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was still something noble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an imitator of what he eulogized.

As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the warm air of friendship and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was a second Russia, which harbors all climates,[Pg 313] from France even to Nova Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who pronounced everything correctly.—Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften instead of Juchten, Fünfzig instead of Füfzig, and Barbieren (the r in which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),—Roquairol was a free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pestitz representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano, rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.[Pg 314]

But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;—friendship has its deceptions as well as love;—and often, when he had long looked upon this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon his wavering soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the noble one move him even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came—the momentous day for both—when he did it. How could he ever have resisted Fancy, when he only resisted by and through Fancy? I do him half injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.

Roquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the higher youth of our times are so early and richly overhung with the roses of joy that, like the inhabitants of spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by put under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose-sirup and bathe themselves in rose-oil,[122] until nothing more is left them thereof for a stimulus except the thorns, so are most of them—and often the very same ones—stuffed full in the beginning, by their philanthropic teachers, with the fruits of knowledge, so that they come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, then the cider and perry thereof, until at last they ruin themselves with the brandy made of that. Now if, in addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy that makes their life[Pg 315] a naphtha-soil, out of which every step draws fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences are thrown, and the consumption become still greater. For these burnt-out prodigals of life there is then no new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no old one entire and fresh; a dried-up future, full of arrogance, disgust with life, unbelief and contradiction, lies round about them. Only the wing of fancy still continues to quiver on their corpse.

Poor Charles! Thou didst still more! Not merely truths, but feelings also, he anticipated. All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to which Love and Friendship and Nature exalt the heart, all these he went through in poems earlier than in life, as play-actor and theatre-poet earlier than as man, earlier on the sunny side of fancy than on the stormy side of reality; hence, when they at last appeared, living, in his breast, he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill them, and stuff them well for the refrigeratory of future remembrance. The unhappy love for Linda de Romeiro, which, at a later period, would perhaps have steeled him, opened thus early all the veins of his heart, and bathed it warmly in its own blood; he plunged into good and bad dissipations and amours, and afterward represented on paper or on the stage everything that he repented or blessed; and every representation made him grow more and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun by ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy sensibilities; but they were simply a new luxury, a tonic, at best; and precisely in proportion to their height did the road run down the more abruptly into the slough of the unholiest ones. As in the dramatic poet angelically pure and filthy scenes stand in conjunction and close succession,[Pg 316] so in his life; he foddered, as in Surinam, his hogs with pine-apples; like the elder giants, he had soaring wings and creeping snakes'-feet.[123]

Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings. But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors, which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full of these eagles. They love you not, though they think so; because, like the blest in Mahomet's paradise, instead of their lost arms of love, they have only wings of fancy. They are like great streams, warm only along the shore, and in the middle cold.

Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran through the alternation between ether and slime more and more rapidly, till he mixed them both. His blossoms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the Ideal, which, however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start with horror, but believe it,—he sometimes plunged on purpose into sins and torments, in order, down there, by the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into himself more deeply the oath of reformation; somewhat as the physicians, Darwin and Sydenham, assert that strengthening remedies[Pg 317] (Peruvian bark, steel, opium) work more powerfully when weakening ones (bleeding, emetics, &c.) have been previously prescribed.

External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,[124] &c. But the lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more vain and bold.

So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,—hunting like an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart, whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth assimilated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the true language of passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and indispensable—hearts and joys and truths—melted down and floated about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of the tuning-hammer, and not of the tuning-fork, of the finest morality; and, in the[Pg 318] midst of the roar of passion, standing in the bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his madness, and gives warning of it.

Only one good angel had not flown with the rest,—Friendship. His so often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but friendship it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto loved as a friend,—so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace!

In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men—and he—are like the fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to Albano, when the whole girandole[125] of his faculties and feelings burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of flasks.

But do you know the medicine of example, the healing power of admiration, and of that soul-strengthener, reverence? "It is shameful of me," said Roquairol, "when he is so credulous and open and honest. No, I will deceive the whole world, only not his soul!" Such natures would fain make good their devastation[Pg 319] of humanity by being true to one. Humanity is a constellation, in which one star often describes half the figure.

From this hour forth, his resolution of the heartiest confession and atonement stood fixed; and Alban, before whom life had not yet run down into a jelly of corruption, but was capable of being analyzed as a sound and well-defined organism, and who did not, like Charles, complain that nothing would take right hold of him, but everything played round him like air,—he it was who was to bring back youth to his sick wishes, and with the help of the pure youth's unwavering perceptions and the danger of losing his friendship, Roquairol proposed forcing himself to keep with him the word of fruit-bearing repentance, which to himself he had too often broken.

Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.

Once Albano came early in the forenoon to the Captain, when the latter was usually, according to his own expression, "a fag-end of a yesterday's candle stuck on thorns"; but to-day he stood working away blusteringly at the piano-forte and writing-desk by turns; and, like a dried-up infusorial animal, was already, even at this early hour, the same old, busy creature, because wine enough had been poured upon him, that is to say, a good deal. Full of rapture, he ran to meet the welcome friend. Albano brought him from Falterle the childish leaves of love—for the Master of Exercises had not had the heart to throw them into the fire—which he had written from Blumenbühl to the unknown heart. Charles would have been moved on the[Pg 320] subject almost to tears, had he not already been so before the arrival. The Count had to stay there all day, and neglect everything; it was his first day of irregularity; it was comic to see how the otherwise unfettered youth, subservient, however, to a long habit of daily exertions, struggled against the short calm, in which he should sail no ship, as against a sin.

Meanwhile, it was heavenly; the low-lying day of childhood, which once clothed him with wings, when the house was full of guests, and he, wherever he wanted to be, came up again above the horizon; the conversation played and made gifts with everything which exalts and enriches us; all his faculties were unchained and in ecstatic dance. Men of genius have as many festal days as others do working days, and hence it is that they can hardly endure a trivial and commonplace[126] intercalary-day, and especially on such days of youth! When Charles conjured before him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe, Klinger, Schiller, and life saw itself colossally represented in the poetic magnifying-mirror, then did all the sleeping giants of his inner world rise up; his father came and his future, even his friend stood forth there as in new relief, out of that shining, fantastic time of childhood, when he had dreamed of him beforehand in these characters; and in the internal procession of heroes, even the cloud that floated through the heavens and the guard-troop marching away across the market were incorporated. His friend appeared to him far greater than he was, because, like all youths, he still believed of actors and poets, that, like miners, they always received into their bodies[Pg 321] the metals in which they labored. How often they both said, in that favorite metaphor of the young man, "Life is a dream," and only became thereby more glad and wide-awake! The old man says it differently. And the dark gate of death, to which Charles so loved to lead the way, became before the youth's eye a glass door, behind which lay the bright, golden age of the belated heart in immeasurable meadows.

Maidens, I own,—as their conversations are more fragmentary, matter-of-fact, and less intoxicating,—instead of such an Eden-park, go for a spruce Dutch garden, well trimmed with crab's-shears and lady-scissors, which is furnished them every day in the afternoon by the black hour, which serves up to them on the coffee- or tea-table, the small black-board[127] of some evil reports, a couple of new shawls sitting by, a well-bred man who passes by with a will or marriage certificate, and finally the hope of the domestic report. Come back to our young men!

Towards evening the Captain received a red billet. "Very well!" said he to the woman who brought it, and nodded. "You'll get nothing out of that, madam," said he, turning toward Albano. "Brother, guard only against married women. Just snap once, for a joke, at one of their red beauty-patches; instantly they dart their fish-hooks into your nape.[128] Seven of these hooks, such as you see here, have made a lodgement in mine alone." The innocent child Albano! He took it for something morally great to assert at once the friendship of seven married ladies, and would gladly have been in Charles's case; he could not see the mischief of it,—that these[Pg 322] female friends, like the Romans, love to clip the wings of victory (namely, of ourselves), so that the Divinity may not fly any farther.

On a fine day, nothing is so fine as its sunset. The Count proposed to ride out into the evening twilight, and on the hill to look at the sun. They trotted through the streets; Charles pulled off his great cocked-up hat, now before a fine nose, now before a great pair of eyes, now before transparent forelocks. They flew into the Linden avenue, which was festally decked with a motley wain-scoting of female street-sitters.[129] A tall woman, with piercing, fiery eyes, in a red shawl and yellow dress, strode through the female flower-bed, towering like the flower-goddess: it was the authoress of the red note; she was, however, more attentive to the beautiful Count than to her friend. On all walls and trees bloomed the rose-espalier of the evening redness. They blustered up the white road toward Blumenbühl; on both sides the gold-green sea of spring heaved its living waves; a feathered world went rowing about therein, and the birds dove down deep among the flowers; behind the friends blazed the sun, and before them lay the heights of Blumenbühl, all rosy-red. Having reached the eminence, they turned their horses toward the sun, which reposed behind the cupolas and smoke-columns of the proudly burning city, in distant, bright gardens. In wondrous nearness lay the illuminated earth round about them, and Albano could see the white statues on Liana's roof blush like life under the blooming clouds. He drove his horse close to his companion's, to lay his hand on Charles's shoulder; and thus they beheld in silence how the lovely sun laid down his golden cloud-crown, and, with the fluttering foliage-breath[Pg 323] around his hot brow, descended into the sea. And when it grew dusky on the earth, and a glow lighted up the heavens, and Albano leaned across and drew his friend over to his burning heart, then rose the evening-chime in Blumenbühl. "And down below there," said Charles, with soft voice, and turned thither, "lies thy peaceful Blumenbühl, like a still churchyard of thy childhood's days. How happy are children, Albano,—ah, how happy are children!" "Are not we so?" answered he, with tears of joy. "Charles, how often have I stood on high places, in evenings like this, and fervently stretched out my childish hands after thee and after the world. Now indeed I have it all. Truly, thou art not right." But he, sick with the murmur and ringing-in-his-ears of long past times, remained deaf to the word, and said, "Only our cradle-songs, only those cradle-songs, sounding back on the memory, soothe the soul to slumber, when it has wept itself hot."

More silently and slowly they rode back. Albano bore a new world of love and bliss in his bosom; and the youth,—not yet a debtor to the past, but a guest of the present,—sweetly unbent by the long Jubilee of the day, sank into clear-obscure dreams, like a towering bird of prey hanging silent on pinions open with ecstasy.

"We will stay all night at Ratto's," said Charles, when they reached the city.

They alighted down in Ratto's Italian Cellar. The house seemed to the Count at first, after the contemplation of broad nature, like a fragment of rock rolled upon it,—although every story, indeed, groans under[Pg 324] architectural burdens,—but the heavy feeling of subterranean confinement[130] soon forgot itself, and singular was the sound that came down into the Italian vault of the rattling of carriages overhead. The Captain bespoke a punch royal. If he goes on so in his good fire-regulation, and always has a full cask at home as extinguishing-apparatus, and his hose-pipes well proved, then my book cannot be touched by the objection, that, as in Grandison, too much tea is consumed; more likely is it that too much strong drink will be absorbed.

Schoppe was sitting in the Italian souterrain. He loved not the Captain, because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings." Charles paid him back his dislike; the hottest waves of his enthusiasm immediately bristled up in ice-peaks before the Titular Librarian's face. Only not to-day! He drank so amply of king's-punch,—whereof a couple of glasses might have burnt through all the heads of Briareus or of the Lernean serpent,—that he then said everything, even pious things. "By heavens!" said he, healing himself in this Bethesda-pool by—drawing from it, "since it is all fiddle-faddle about this growing better, one should obfuscate himself[131] with a shot, in order that the baited spirit may once for all go free from its wounds and sins." "From sins?" said Schoppe; "lice and tape-worms of the better sort will by all means emigrate from my territory, when I grow cold; but the worst of them my inner man will certainly carry up with it. By the[Pg 325] hangman! who tells you, then, that this whole churchyard of poor sinners here below shall at once march home as an invisible church full of martyrs and Socrateses, and every Bedlam come out a high-light lodge? I was thinking to-day of the next world, when I saw a woman in the market with five little pigs, every one of which she would fain drive before her with a string tied to its leg, but which shot off from her and from each other like wisps of electric light; now, said I, we, with our few faculties and wishes, which this cultivating age sets out in quintuplo, fare already as pitifully as the woman with her drove; but when we get ten or more new farrows by the rope, as the second world, like an America, must surely bring new objects and wishes, how will the Ephorus[132] manage his office there? I prepare myself to expect there greater indescribable distresses, feudal crimes and oppositions." But Roquairol was in his red blaze; he exalted himself far above Schoppe and above himself, and denied immortality plumply, by way of parodying Schoppe. "An individual man," said he, "could hardly, on his own account alone, believe in immortality; but when he sees the masses, he has pity, and holds it worth the while, and believes the second world is a monte testaceo of human potsherds. Man cannot come nearer to God and the Devil hereafter than he does already here; like a tavern-sign, his reverse is painted just like his obverse. But we need the fictitious future for a present; when we hover ever so still above our slime, we yet are continually flapping, like carps lying still, with poetic fins and wings. Hence we must needs dress up the future paradise so gloriously that only gods shall fit into it, but, just as in princes' gardens, no dogs. Mere trumpery! We[Pg 326] cut out for ourselves glorified bodies, which resemble soldiers'-coats; pockets and buttonholes are wanting; what pleasure can they hold, then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano, what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even freaks of humor.

At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux. He put on his cravat,—he had been sitting there à la Hamlet,—and said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused, still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps.

In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring, overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven! drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing with them.

Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting through. He was now, after the analogy of the fire-eaters, a fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer: "Redeem the time, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life all you can: that is time. To this end the best shops of the times, the apothecaries', require[Pg 327] that a man, after punch royal, shall go to bed and sweat immoderately."

Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,—when the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in Derbyshire-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,—when from the Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the proudest (only not the tenderest one),—and when, like Adam in the state of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,—then did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic, credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking naïve and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.

"Come out o' doors,—out o' doors!" said Charles; and that had long been Albano's wish. It struck one, as they saw, on the narrow cellar-stairs, the stars of the spring heaven overhead glistening down through the entrance of the shaft. How freshly flowed the inhaled night over the hot lips! How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How was the fiery eye of Albano refreshed and expanded by the giant masses of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the transparent mantle of night! Zephyrs, the butterflies of day, fluttered already about[Pg 328] their dear flowers, and sucked from the blossoms, and brought in incense for the morning; a sleep-drunken lark soared occasionally into the still heavens with a loud day in her throat; over the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the purple pennons of Aurora, as she sailed toward morning. With an exalting power the thought seized the youth, that this very minute was measuring millions of little and long lives, and the walk of the sap-caterpillar and the flight of the sun, and that this very same time was being lived through by the worm and God, from worlds to worlds, through the universe. "O God!" he exclaimed, "how glorious it is to exist!"

Charles merely clung, with the drooping, heavy feathers of the night-bird, to the cheerful constellations around him. "Happy for thee," said he, "that thou canst be thus, and that the sphinx in thy bosom still sleeps. Thou knowest not what I am about to do. I knew a wretch who could portray her right well. In the cavern of man's breast, said he, lies a monster on its four claws, with upturned Madonna's face, and looks round smiling, for a time, and so does man too. Suddenly it springs up, buries its claws into the breast, rends it with lion's-tail and hard wings, and roots and rushes and roars, and everywhere blood runs down the torn cavern of the breast. All at once it stretches itself out again, bloody, and smiles away again with the fair Madonna's face. O, he looked all bloodless, the wretch! because the beast so fed upon him and thirstily lapped at his heart."

"Horrible!" said Albano; "and yet I do not quite understand thee." The moon at this moment lifted herself up, together with a flock of clouds that lay darkly[Pg 329] camped along her sides, and she drew a storm-wind after her, which drove them among the stars. Charles went on more wildly: "In the beginning, the wretch found it as yet good: he had as yet sound pains and pleasures, real sins and virtues; but as the monster smiled and tore faster and faster, and he continued to alternate more and more rapidly between pleasure and pain, good and evil; and when blasphemies and obscene images crept into his prayers, and he could neither convert nor harden himself; then did he lie there, in a dreary exhaustion of bleeding, in the tepid, gray, dry mist-banks of life, and thus was dying all the time he lived.—Why weepest thou? Knowest thou that wretch?" "No," said Albano, mildly. "I am he!" "Thou? Terrible God, not thou!" "O, it is I; and though thou despisest me, thou wilt be what I ... No, my innocent one, I say it not. See, even now the sphinx rises again. O pray with me, help me, that I may not be obliged to sin,—only not be obliged! I must drink, I must debauch, I must be a hypocrite,—I am a hypocrite at this moment." Zesara saw the rigid eye, the pale, shattered face, and, in a rage of love, shook him with both arms, and stammered, with deep emotion, "By the Almighty! this is not true! thou art indeed so tender and pale and unhappy and innocent."

"Rosy-cheek," said Charles, "I seem to thee pure and bright as yonder orb; but she too, like me, casts a long shadow up toward heaven." Zesara let go of him, took a long look toward the sublime, dark Tartarus, encompassing Elysium like a funeral train, and pressed away bitter tears, which flowed at the remembrance how he had found therein his first friend, who was now melting away at his side. Just then the night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the wood-caterpillar, and Albano[Pg 330] pointed silently to the crashing tree. Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.

This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears; a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild self, and every selfish thought. Softly he laid himself on his friend's bosom, and with magical, low words, and full of humility, and without fiery images, told him his whole heart; and that it was not wicked, but only unhappy and weak, and that he ought to have been as heartily sincere towards him, who thought too well of him, as towards God; and that he swore, by the hour of death, to be such as he,—to confess to him everything, always,—to become holy through him. "Ah, I have only been loved so very little!" he concluded. And Albano, the love-intoxicated, glowing man, the good man, who knew by his own experience the sacred excesses and exaggerations of remorse, and took these confessions to be such, came back, inspired, to the old covenant with unmeasured love. "Thou art an ardent man!" said Charles; "why do men, then, always lie frozen together on each other's breasts, as on Mount Bernard,[133] with rigid eye, with stiffened arms? O why camest thou to me so late? I had been another creature. Why came she[134] so early? In the village down below there, at the narrow, lowly church-door,—there I first saw her through whom my life became a mummy.[Pg 331] Verily, I am speaking now with composure. They carried along before me, as I went out to walk, a corpse-like white youth on a bier into Tartarus: it was only a statue, but it was the emblem of my future. An evil genius said to me, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee.' She stood at the church-door, surrounded by people of the congregation, who wondered at the boldness with which she took up, in her two hands, a silver-gray, tongue-darting snake, and dandled it. Like a daring goddess, she bent her firm, smooth brow, her dark eye, and the rose-blossoms of her countenance upon the adder's head, which Nature had trodden flat, and played with it close to her breast. 'Cleopatra!' said I, although a boy. She, too, even then, understood it, looked up calmly and coldly from the snake, and gave it back, and turned round. O, on my young breast she flung the chilling, life-gnawing viper. But, truly, it is now all gone by, and I speak calmly. Only in the hours, Albano, when my bloody clothes of that night, which my sister has laid up, come before my eyes, then I suffer once more, and ask, 'Poor, well-meaning boy! wherefore didst thou then grow older?' But, as I said, it is all over now. To thee, only to thee, may a better genius say, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee!'"

But what a world of thoughts now flew at once into Albano's mind! "He continues to torment himself," thought he, "with the old jealousy about Romeiro. I will open heart to heart, and tell the good brother that it is indeed his sister I love, and that eternally." His cheeks glowed, his heart flamed, he stood, priest-like, before the altar of friendship, with the fairest offering, sincerity. "O Charles," said he, "now, perhaps, she might be otherwise disposed towards thee. My father is[Pg 332] travelling with her, and thou wilt see her." He took his hand, and went with him more quickly up to a dark group of trees, to unfold, in the shadow, his tenderly blushing soul. "Take my most precious secret," he began, "but speak not of it,—not even with me. Dost thou not guess it, my first brother? The soul that I have loved, as long as I have loved thee?"—softly, very softly he added,—"thy sister?" and sank on his lips to kiss away the first sounds.

But Charles, in the tumult of rapture and of love, like an earth at the up-coming of Spring, could not contain himself; he pressed him to himself; he let him go; he embraced him again; he wept for bliss; he shut to Albano's eyes, and said, as if he had found his sister anew, "Brother!" In vain did Albano seek to stifle, with his hand, every other syllable on his lips. He began to paint to the excited youth—who, amid the secluded and poetic book-world, had acquired a higher tenderness than the actual intercourse of society teaches—the portrait of Liana; how she did and suffered; how she watched and pleaded for him, and even impoverished herself to wipe out his debts; how she never severely blamed, but only mildly entreated him, and all that, not from artificial patience, but from genuine, ardent love; and how this, after all, made up hardly the accessories of her picture. In this purer inspiration than the foregoing evening had granted him, what crowned his bliss was, that he could love his sister, among all beings, the most intensely and the most disinterestedly, and with a love the most free from poetic luxury and caprice. Really strengthened by the feeling that he could, for once, exult with a pure and holy affection, he lifted once more in freedom his disengaged hands, hitherto, like Milo's, jammed and caught in[Pg 333] the tree of happiness and life, which he would fain have torn open; he breathed fresh, living air and courage, and the plan of his inner perfection was now gracefully rounded by new good fortune and a consciousness full of fair objects.

The moon stood high in heaven, the clouds had been driven away, and never did the morning-star rise brighter on two human beings.

[Pg 334]

Liana always beheld her brother—the creator and ruling spirit of her softest hours—with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern chamber, from which he had seen, for[Pg 335] the first time, the dear maiden, only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns! The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her, after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire, of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical, strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden; afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually at once thirteen and seventeen years old.

Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet proudly, but so affectionately, that true pair of eyes!