41. CYCLE.

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 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 He heard further, that her brother, since the murder of her eyes, had withdrawn entirely from the city, in which he would not again appear except on a so-called festive-steed at the Prince's funeral;—and around this Eden, or rather around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 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?

42. CYCLE.

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 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 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.

43. CYCLE.

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? 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 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 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, 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 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.

43^a. CYCLE.

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 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!

"Poem of Thanks.

"'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 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 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.

44. CYCLE.

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 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; 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 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 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 hand, upon her foe, to bear her mightily through the deep, cold hell-floods of life;—that would have illuminated his existence.

45. CYCLE.

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 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 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.

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, 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 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 Ph[oe]nix-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 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, 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!

[82] They have a whole room for winter quarters, of which in summer the windows are merely thrown open.