Albano and Liana.

64. CYCLE.

On Sunday he moved to the thunder-house in Lilar. The Lector kept himself up with the hope that the Count would very soon tread down the flower-parterre of the new enjoyment as flat and dead as a cross-way. It was a fine morning, all sprinkled with dew; a fresh wind blew from Lilar over the blooming grain; and the sun burned alone in a cool heaven. Over the BlumenbÜhl road a swarm of people were plodding onward, and no one went long alone; on the Eastern heights he saw his friend Charles, with bowed crest, dashing to meet the sun.

The breezes of Lilar came flying to welcome him with a breath of orange-fragrance, and blew away the ashes which rested on the glowing altar-coals of that first magnificent Sunday. He went down the bridge, and Pollux, early in his finery, came driving a ruffled turkey-cock to meet him. A S[oe]ur Servante of old Spener had been already for an hour cooking at Chariton's, merely to see him go by. The latter ran, festally decked, out of the house, which opened itself gayly with all its windows to the whole heavens, to meet him, and, in the confusion of her joy, broke out with the main matter first, namely, that everything was ready and beautiful up there in the little house, and whether he would have his dinner up there. She would fain, in the midst of the conversation, pull Pollux out of the Count's fingers, but he let him swing up for a kiss, and won thereby every heart, even the old one behind the kitchen fire.

While he marched off toward his little house through the western triumphal arch, he felt, with indescribable strength and sweetness, that the lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of gods, temples, and bliss,—and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals stalk through and strip with their talons.

His blooming path ran at length into the descending and ascending stairway, which he had passed with Spener; single streaks of day burned themselves into the moist ground and painted the scattered twigs fiery and golden. In the mystic bower, where the dead Prince had stalked along before him in the by-cavern, he found no such cavern, but only an empty niche. He stepped out above, as out of the haunch of the earth. His little house lay on the crooked back of the mountain ridge. Down below reposed around him those elephants of the earth, the hills, and Lilar gloriously swelling in blossoms, and he looked from his windows into the camp of the giants of Nature.

Meanwhile he could not now stay on the window-sill, nor near the inspiring Æolian harp, nor in the eye-prison of books; through streams and woods and over mountains fresh nature longed to sweep. That he did.

There are sometimes between the every-day days of life—when the rainbow of Nature appears to us only broken up, and as a misshapen, motley mass on the horizon—certain creation-days, when she rounds and contracts herself into a fair form, nay, when she becomes alive, and speaks to us like a soul. To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years often pass away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow fuller and fuller to meet him;—without wind, a landscape was to him a stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;—and now the wind rolled the solid land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances. Majestically swam through the blue the silvery islands, the clouds, and on the earth shadows stalked like giants over streams and mountains; in the valley sparkled the Rosana, and rolled into the oak grove. He went down into the warm vale; the flowery pastures foamed and their seed played in its cloud-fleece ere the earth caught it; the swan spread voluptuously his long wing; pairs of doves were pecking each other for love; and everywhere lay beds and twigs full of hot maternal bosoms and eggs. Like a glorious blue bouquet, the neck of the reposing peacock played off its dissolving colors in the high grasses. He stepped under the oaks, which with knotty arms seized hold upon heaven, and with knotty roots the earth. The Rosana talked alone with the murmuring wood, and ate away, foaming, at the rocky crags and at the decaying shore;—night and evening and day chased each other in the mystic grove. He stepped into the stream, and went out with it before a warm, busy plain full of villages, and out from them came the Sabbath sounds, and out of the grain-fields larks arose, and on the mountains human foot-paths crept upward,—the trees lifted themselves up as living things, and the distant men seemed to be fast-rooted, and became only little shoots on the low bark of the enormous tree of life.

The soul of the youth was cast into the holy fire; like asbestos-paper, he drew it out quenched and blank; it was to him as if he knew nothing, as if he were one thought; and here the feeling came upon him in a wonderfully new manner, that is the world, thou art on the world;—he was one being with it,—all was one life, clouds and men and trees. He felt himself grasped by innumerable polypus-arms, and swallowed up at the same time with them, and yet running on in the infinite heart.

In a blissful bewilderment he arrived at his dwelling, from which little Pollux came rolling down the mountain to meet him, and call him to dinner. In the little house the very thought of his heart was expressed by the Æolian harp at the open window. While the child was thundering away with his little fist on the harpsichord, and the birds joyfully screamed in out of the trees, the soul of the world swept exulting and sighing through the Æolian strings, now lawlessly and now regularly, playing with the storms and they with it; and Albano seemed to hear the streams of life rushing between their shores, the countries of the earth,—and through flower-veins and oak-veins, and through hearts,—around the earth, bearing clouds on their bosom,—and the stream, which thunders through eternity, a Divine hand was pouring out under the veil.

Albano came, with the innocent boy dancing before him, to the still smiling mother. Even here, between the four walls, the sails continued to propel him which the great morning had swelled. Nothing surprised him, nothing seemed to him common, nothing remote; the wave and the drop in the endless sea of life flowed away in indivisible union with the streams and whirlpools which it bore onward. Before Chariton he stood like a shining god, and she would gladly have veiled either him or herself. Never was humanity individualized in purer forms, crippled by no alloy of provincialism or nationality, than in this circle of joy, wherein childhood, womanhood, and manhood, twined with flowers, met and softly clasped each other.

Chariton spoke constantly of Liana, out of love, not merely for the absent one, but also for the one who stood near; for, although she looked with those open eyes, which seem more to image quietly than to behold, more to let in than to draw in, still she was, like children, virgins, country people, and savages, at once open-heartedly true and keen. She had easily detected Albano's love, because everything is easier to disguise from women,—even hatred, than its opposite. She praised Liana infinitely, particularly her incomparable kindness; and "her lord had said, few men had so much heart as she, for she had often been, without any fear, whole nights with her in Tartarus." Certainly, neither was this explicable to the Count. The marvellous is the aureole of a beloved head; a sun, softened down to a human countenance, takes less powerful hold than a beloved countenance glorified into a sun-image.

More and more heartily delighted at his delight, she offered to lead him into Liana's chamber. A simple little chamber,—under a green twilight of glimmering vine foliage, some books of FÉnelon and Herder, old flowers still in their water-glasses, little Chinese dishes, Julienne's portrait, and another of a deceased youthful friend, whose name was Caroline, an unstained writing-stand, with English-pressed paper,—was what he found. The holy spring hours of the virgin passed by before him, dropping dew like sunny clouds.

He happened to touch a penknife, when Chariton brought quills to be cut, "because," she said, "they had so much trouble on this score since her master had gone away." For a woman can more easily drive any pen—even the epic and Kantian—than make one; and here, as in several other cases, the stronger sex must lend the weaker a hand.

Albano wished to see, also, the working-chamber of his teacher; but this she decidedly—although an hour's eating together had not given her any new courage—refused, because her master had forbidden it. He begged once more; but she smiled more and more painfully, and adhered to her gentle no.

He now dreamed away the murmur of the morning in the magic garden, on whose waters and paths the moonshine and reflection of memory played. Out of the nine million square miles of common earth, how do certain poetical lands stand out to a poetical heart! On the mountain with the altar, where he once saw her disappear down below, the afternoon chime of BlumenbÜhl came wafted to him with the fanning of a freer ether; and his childhood's life, and the present scenes yonder, and Liana, gave him a tender heart, and he surveyed, with dimmer eyes, the transfigured land.

At evening came happy church-goers from BlumenbÜhl, and praised the consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all, overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,—the constellations over BlumenbÜhl shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.

65. CYCLE.

Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and shepherd-boys had not, like the grass, shot up taller during his absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much prolonged to his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.

In the castle how profusely was his heart covered with hearts, and the youngest love drowned by the old, from the easily weeping mother, Albina, even to the hand-extending old servants, who, on his account, stirred more briskly their petrified limbs! He found all his loves—Liana excepted—in Wehrfritz's study,[172] because he loved "young folk" and discourse, and always insisted that they should set out the breakfast on his table of papers, which, he said, was as good as a breakfast-table with varnished scrap-pictures that nobody saw. Albano tormented himself with the fear that the Minister's lady had been the church-robber of a very goddess, and carried Liana back yesterday,—till the Captain hastily explained the non-appearance. The good soul had had yesterday to atone for the commotion of her sympathizing heart with sick-headache. Her loved teacher, Spener, with his sublime soul-stillness,—those eyes, which wept no more over the earth, buried with the princely pair,—standing with his head under the cold polar star of eternity, so that now, like the pole, it no longer saw any stars rise or set,—calmly, and with hands apostolically folded in one another, speaking so all-persuasively upon the sorrow and the great end of this pale life, pressing, with his inspired speech, men's hearts to the verge of tearful emotion, and yet with exalted tenderness drawing them back from extreme grief, that so only the heart may weep without the eye,—and then the consecration of the coupled coffins and of the church,—O, in the delicate Liana these emotions could not surely fail to grow into sorrows, and all that her teacher buried in silence was in her spoken aloud. In addition to this, she had not taken the usual medicine of keeping still, but had disguised all her pangs behind active joy, so as to give her departing mother no pains, although herself far too great ones.

Into the midst of this explanation she herself entered pleasantly, in a white morning-dress, with a nosegay of Chinese roses,—a little pale and tired,—looking up with a dreamy softness,—her voice somewhat low,—the roses on her cheeks closed into buds,—and, like a child, smiling upon every heart;—thou angel of heaven! who may dare to love and reward thee? She beheld the lofty youth;—all the lilies of her still face were, contrary to her wont, baptized into a heavenly morning-red of joy, and a tender purple lingered upon them.

She asked him, with an open manner, why he had not come yesterday to the festivities, and disclosed, as a matter of moment, that they would all to-day visit the pious father, for whom she had been tying her dwarf-roses. He took gladly the fourth voice in the concert of the pleasure-party. What a magnificent hanging garden, with its loveliest flowers and prospects, is built out into the evening-hours! How many happy ones a single roof covers!

The ingenuous Rabette, more brisk and busy for her still gladness, was, unweariedly, Liana's sick-nurse and Roquairol's lion-keeper and maÎtresse de plaisirs, who made every one of the mother's ground-plans of pleasure broader by a half, and her whole being was so happy! Ah, her poor innocent heart had not yet, indeed, been loved by any one, and therefore it glows, with the fresh energies of the first love, so brightly and truly before a mighty one which seems to come down to it with a blessing, like a loving god, drawing after it a whole heaven! Roquairol saw how bewitchingly a busy activity shook aside in the play-room of her character and her occupations the heavily hanging foliage, which in the visiting parlor darkly overspread her real worth; she was even made more lovely by the darker, neat house-dress, since he by his preaching had sent back every white drapery of her brunette person into the wardrobe. She would not obey her mother in this matter, till he had demanded it. Nay, he had yesterday brought her to the point of really wearing about with her the watch which the proud Minister's lady had presented her, though she blushed like fire at the unwonted ornament. Meanwhile he proposed to take with her, as it were, a true serpentine flowery way to the altar of his love's loud Yes,—the silent one he was saying all the time;—he knew she would get in at once so soon as he rode forth with the conch-chariot of Venus, to which he had tackled a dove and a hawk.

How gloriously the forenoon flew away on golden wing-shells and on transparent wings! The beloved Albano was introduced into all the changes of the house; the finest was in his study-chamber, which Rabette had transformed into her toilet-chamber, sewing-room, and study, and which again, since yesterday, had become guest-chamber and library to Liana. How gladly did he step to the western window, where he had so often caused his invisible father and the beloved one to appear, in an unearthly manner, in the crystal mirror of his fancy! On the panes were many L's and R's drawn by his boyish hand. Liana asked what the R's meant; "Roquairol," said he, for she did not inquire after the L. With infinite sweetness did the thought flow around his heart, that his beloved was indeed to live through some blooming days in the dreamy cell of his first fresh life. Liana showed him with childlike joy how she shared everything, that is, the chamber, fairly with Rabette, in her double housekeeping and chum-ship, and how she made her very hostess her guest.

I have often admired with envy the fine, light, nomadic life of maidens in their Arcadian life-segments; easily do these doves of passage flutter into a strange family, and sew and laugh and visit there, with the daughter of the house, one or two months, and one takes the ingrafted shoot for a family twig; on the other hand, we house-pigeons are inhabitive and hard to transplant, and generally, after a few days, journey back again. Since we, as more brittle material, less easily melt in with the family ore; since we do not weave our work into that of others so easily as maidens do theirs,—because carriages full of working-tools must follow after us,—and since we need much and contrive much;—from all this our claim to a passport is very well deduced, without the least detriment to our characters.

After a half-eternity of dressing,—since, in the neighborhood of the loved one, an hour of absence lasts longer than a month when she is far off,—the maidens entered, equipped for travelling, in the black dress of brides. How charmingly the roses become Rabette, in her dark hair, and the lace edging on the white neck, and the timid flames of her pure eye, and the flitting blushes! And Liana—I speak not of this saint. Even the good old Director, when the innocent face looked upon him so childlike from beneath the white veil of India muslin, sprinkled with gold wire, which was simply thrown over her head after the manner of the nuns, could not but give his satisfaction words: "Like a nun, like an angel!" She answered: "I wanted once really to be one with a friend; but now I take the veil later than she," she added, with a wondrous tone.

She hung to-day with tender enthusiasm upon Rabette, perhaps from the weakness of ill health, perhaps from love for Albano and the parents, and perhaps because Rabette, in her love, was so good and beautiful, and because she herself was nothing but heart. She had, besides, the sacred fault of forming too enthusiastic conceptions of her female friends,—into which the nobler maidens easily fall, and which belongs less to married women,—carried to an unusual height; thus, for instance, her friend Caroline, who had met her like a heroine of romance only on the romantic playground of friendship and beautiful nature, she could not, in the beginning, without a rending away of the saintly halo, at all conceive of as having hands, which drove the needle and flat-iron, and other implements of the female field of labor.

Whoso will feel the tenderest participation in joy, let him look not at happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina—across whose face time had struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no step-motherly discord appeared—look oftener to and fro, and more benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and perturbations of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the "hypocrisy and spiritlessness[173] of the young people now-a-days," compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day assigned himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had he—(others have the devil, the deuse)—the journeyman's greeting of genius, Rascal, together with the derivatives, rascality, &c. But how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits. The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly.

The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art, by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom!

66. CYCLE.

The carriage flew through the village with the four young people. How grateful to our youth was the expanse of heaven and of earth! The portal of life—youth—was hung with flowers and lights. They rolled along at the foot of the mountain by the bird-pole, the sign-post of a boyish Arcadia, by the cradle where, in the enraptured sleep of childhood, he had stretched out his boyish arm after the high heaven; and through the birch thicket, now dwindled in his eyes to a bush, which, on that golden morning, he had found so broad and long; and by the open triumphal arch of the east, behind which the sea of the many-shaped Lilar poured the tide of its charms; and when they arrived behind the mountain-wall of the flute-dell, they sent back the carriage.

They walked on a glorious earth, under a glorious heaven. Pure and white swam the sun like a swan through the blue flood,—meadows and villages crowded up close around the distant, low mountain-ridges; a soft wind swayed the green waves of the crop to and fro all over the plain; on the hills shadows lay fast asleep under the wings of white clouds; and behind the summits of the heights the mast-trees of the Rhine ships majestically sailed away.

As Albano went along so close by the side of his beloved, the purgatory burning under his Eden fell back deeper and deeper into the earth's core; full of uneasiness and hope, he cast his fiery eye now on the summer, now on the mild vesper-star, which glimmered so near to him out of the spring ether. The good maiden seemed to-day more still, serious, and restless than usual. As they went through a little wood, open on all sides, along the ridge of a hill that ran round the flute-dell, Liana suddenly said to the Count, she heard flutes. Scarcely could he say, he heard only far-off turtle-doves, when she at once collected herself as for something wonderful, fixed her eyes on heaven, smiled, and suddenly looked round toward Albano, and grew red. Then turning to him, she said: "I will be frank; I hear at this moment music within me.[174] Forgive me to-day my weakness and tenderness; it comes from yesterday." "I—you?" said he, passionately; for he, about whom in sicknesses only burning images stormed, was inspired with veneration for a being to whom, as if from her higher world, low tones like golden sunbeams reach down in her pains, and pass veiled through the rough deep.

But Liana, as if for the sake of turning aside his enthusiasm, came upon the subject of her friend Caroline, and told how she always hovered before her on such days, and especially on this walk. "In the beginning I sought her out," said Liana, "because she resembled my Linda. She was my instructress, although she was only a few weeks older than I. Her pure, severe, unflinching character, and her readiness to sacrifice herself cheerfully and in silence, made her even, if I may say so, worthy of veneration in the eyes of her mother. She was never seen to weep, tender as she was, for she wished to keep her mother always cheerful. We were going to take the veil in company, for the sake of being always together; I should not live to become old, she said, and I must spend my short life happily and without anxiety; but also in preparation for the next. Ah, she herself went up before me! Night-watching by the sick-bed of her mother, and sorrow for her death, took her away. She received the holy supper, for which we were preparing ourselves together, only on her death-bed. Then did the angel give me this veil, in which I am some time to follow her. O good, good Caroline!" She wept unconcealedly, and pressed, with emotion, Albano's hand. "O, I should not have begun about this! There comes already our friend; we will be right cheerful!"

They had now passed through a high wood of under-brush, which teasingly disclosed and hid by turns the landscapes that glided around them, and had come near to the spire which looks in upon the flute-dell, and near which lay a solitary church and Spener's dwelling, and in the plain below the open village. Spener came to meet his pupil—after the manner of old men—unconcerned about the others; and a young roe ran after him. A beautiful spot! Little white peacocks; turtle-doves at large; a city of bees in the midst of their bee-flora,—all bespoke the tranquil old man, whom the earth serves and honors, and who, indifferent towards it, lives only in God. He came—disappointing one's expectation of an ecclesiastical gravity—with a light playfulness upon the gay train, and laid his finger in benediction on the forehead of Liana, who seemed to be his granddaughter, as it were, a second tree-blossom in the late autumn of life. In a daughterly way, she placed the bunch of dwarf-roses in his bosom, and took very careful notice whether it pleased him. She smiled quite serenely, and all her tears seemed fanned away; but she resembled the rain-sprinkled tree, when the sun laughs out again,—the least agitation flings the old rain from the still leaves.

The old man was delighted with the sympathy of the young people, and remained with them upon the blooming and resounding eminence, which sat enthroned between a wide landscape and the richly laden mountain-ridge, running away into Elysium. Since, as with one who ascends in a balloon, the tones of earth did not reach him from so great a distance as its forms, they let him talk more than listen, as one spares old people.

He spoke soon of that in which his heart lived and breathed, but in a singular, half-theological, half-French, Wolfian, and poetic speech. One ought, of many a mystic's poetry and philosophy to give, instead of verbal, real translations, in order that it may be seen how the pure gold of truth glows under all wrappages. Spener says, in my translation: "He had formerly, before he found the right way, tormented himself in every human friendship and love. He had, when he was fervently loved, said to himself, that he could surely never so regard or love himself; and even so the beloved being could not truly so think of itself, as the loving one did, and though it were ever so perfect or so full of self-love. If every one looked upon others as upon himself, there could be no ardent love. But all love demands an object of infinite worth, and dies of every inexplicable and clearly recognized failure; it projects its objects out of all and above all, and requires a reciprocal love without limits, without any selfishness, without division, without pause, without end. Such an object is verily the divine being, but not fleeting, sinful, changeable man. Therefore must the lovesick heart sink into the Giver himself of this and of all love, into the fulness of all that is good and beautiful, into the disinterested, unlimited, universal Love, and dissolve and revive therein, blest in the alternation of contraction and expansion. Then it looks back upon the world and finds everywhere God and his reflection: the worlds are his deeds; every pious man is a word, a look, of the All-loving; for love to God is the Divine thing, and the heart yearns for him in every heart."

"But," said Albano, whose fresh, energetic life rebelled against all mystical annihilation, "how, then, does God love us?" "As a father loves his child, not because it is the best child, but because it needs him."[175] "And whence," he further inquired, "comes, then, the evil in man, and whence sorrow?" "From the Devil," said the old man, and pictured out uninterruptedly, with transfigured joy, the heaven of his heart,—how it was always surrounded with the all-beloved, all-loving One, how it never desired any good fortune or any gifts from him at all (which one did not wish even in earthly love), but only a higher and higher love towards himself, and how, while the evening mists of old age were gathering thicker and thicker around his senses, his heart felt itself, in the darkness of life, embraced more and more closely by the invisible arms. "I shall soon be with God!" said he, with a radiance of love on that countenance of his, chilled with life, and breaking in under the weight of years. One could have borne to see him die. So stands Mont Blanc before the rising moon; night veils his feet and his breast, but the light summit hangs high in the dark heaven as a star among the stars.

Liana, like a daughter, had not let her eye nor her hand go from him, and had languishingly drunk in every sound; her brother had heard him with more pleasure than Albano, but merely for the sake of remodelling more clearly and fully the mystic Hero into the mimic Mount Athos of his representation, and Rabette had contemplated him as in a church among believing by-thoughts.

He withdrew now without ceremony to take care of his animals, which he loved, as he did everything involuntary, for instance, children, as coming at first hand from God. "Everything is divine," he said, "and nothing earthly but what is immoral." He could not bear to smoke bees with brimstone, let flowers dry up with thirst in the pot-cage, or see an overdriven wounded horse, and he passed by a butcher's stall not without shuddering limbs.

"Shall we," said friend Charles, "take in the glorious evening on the magnificent mountain road, and see thy thunder-house, and cast down every cup of sorrow into the vales below?" Through what a magic neighborhood did they now pass along the sloping ridge of the thunder-house! On the right, as it were, the occident of nature; on the left, the orient; before them Lilar, glittering in the faerie of evening,—lying in the arms of the glancing Rosana,—golden grain behind silver-poplars, and overhead a heaven filled with a life-intoxicated, tumultuous creation,—and the sun-god stalking away over his evening-world, and stooping a little under the midnight to raise his golden head in the east. Albano went forth, holding Liana's holy hand. "O how beautiful is all!" said he. "How the fluttering world-map rustles and murmurs with long streams and woods,—how the eastern mountains bask in steadfast repose,—how the groves climb the hills, with glowing stems! One could plunge down into the smoking vales and into the cold, glistening waves. Ah, Liana, how beautiful is all!" "And God is on the earth," said she. "And in thee!" said he, and thought of the word of the old man, that love seeks God, and that he dwells in the heart which we esteem.

Now came rolling toward him the great waves which the Æolian-harp dashed out in the thunder-house; and his genius flew by before him with the words, "Tell her there thy whole heart!"

Before the little tabernacle of yesterday's dreams his stormy heart was dissolved; and the sun and the earth reeled before his passionate tears. As he entered with her into the rosy splendor of the evening sun that filled the apartment, and into the spirit-like din of tones discoursing with one another alone, he seized Liana's hands and pressed them wildly to his breast, and sank down before her speechless and dazzled; flames and tears suffused his eyes and his cheeks,—the whirlwind of tones blew into his blazing soul,—the mild angel of innocence bowed herself, weeping and trembling, toward the burning sun-god, and a sharp pain twined itself like a pale serpent through the roses of the mild countenance,—and Albano stammered: "Liana, I love thee!"

Then the serpent turned round and clasped and covered the sweet rosy form. "O good Albano! thou art unhappy, but I am innocent!" She stepped back with dignity, and quickly drew down the white veil over her face, and said, beside herself, "Wouldst thou love the dead? This is my corpse-veil; the coming year it will lie upon this face." "That is not true," said Albano. "Caroline, answer him!" said she, and stared at the burning sun as if looking for a higher apparition. Frightful moment! as during an earthquake the sea heaves and the air rests in fearful stillness, so was his lip dumb beside the veiled one, and his whole heart was a storm. On the strings swept by a sighing world of spirits, and the last ended with a sharp scream. The beauty of the earth was distorted before him, and in the evening clouds broad fiery banners were planted; and the sun's eye shut-to in blood.

All at once Liana folded her hands as if in prayer, and smiled and blushed; then she raised the veil from her divine eyes, and the transfigured one, tinged with the rosy reflection, looked on him tenderly,—and cast her eye down,—and raised it again,—and again let it sink,—and the veil fell again before her, and she said, in a low tone, "I will love thee, good Albano, if I do not make thee miserable." "I will die with thee!" said he. "What then?"—And now let a holy cloud veil the sun-god, who moves flaming through the midst of his stars!

His solitude and Liana's solution of so many wonders were suspended by the entrance of Rabette and Charles, who both seemed more touched than blessed,—she by the comforting nearness of the loved one, he by the singular situation and the subduing evening; for after certain beings a storm follows, and they must, against their will, make the steps that they take more rapid.

When Albano, with the peace-angel of his life, with the beloved one, who, in the midst of the rush of her feelings, heard, nevertheless, the voice of her female friend, walked forth again once more alone upon the rocky causeway between fragrant vales of Tempe in the glimmering world, he felt as if he had struggled through his life like an eagle through a storm-cloud, and as if the black tempest were running far away below his wings, and the whole starry heaven burned bright above his head. Liana, with maidenly nobleness and firmness, gave him, before he had put a question, the answer: "I must now tell you a mystery, which I have hidden from every one, and even from my mother, because it would have disquieted her. I spoke just now of my never-to-be-forgotten Caroline. On the day of my sacrament, which I had wished to take with her, I went back by night from my teacher to my mother, and in fact through the singular, long cavern, wherein one seems to descend, when one is in reality going upward. My maid went before with the lantern. In the romantic arbor, where a concave mirror stands, I turn round toward the full moon which was streaming in, from a dread of the wild mirror, which distorts people too horribly. Suddenly I hear a heavenly concert, such as I often heard again afterward in sicknesses,—I think of my blessed friend,—and gaze, full of longing, into the moon. Then I saw her opposite to me, beaming with innumerable rays: in her fair eyes was a tender look, but yet something dissolving; the tender mouth, almost the only living feature, resembled a red, but transparent fruit, and all her hues seemed to be nothing but light. Yet only in the blue eye and red mouth did the angel seem like Caroline. I could sketch her, if one could paint with light. I became dangerously sick; then she appeared to me oftener, and refreshed me with inexpressibly sweet tones,—they were not properly words,—whereupon I always sank into a soft sleep, as into a sweet death. Once I asked her—more with inner words—whether I should, then, soon come to her into the realm of light. She answered, I should not die just now, but somewhat later; and she named very clearly the coming year, and the very day, which I have, however, forgotten.... O dear Albano! forgive me only a few words! I soon recovered, and mourned over the slow, lingering passage of time...."

"No," Albano interrupted her, for his feelings were striking against each other like swords, "I revere, but I hate her dangerous phantom. Fancy and sickness are the parents of the air-born, destroying angel, who flies scorching, like a dumb heat-lightning, over all the blossoms of youth!"

She answered, with emotion, "O thou good, pure spirit! thou hast never distressed me, thou hast ever comforted, guided, made me happy and holy,—a phantom is it, Albano? It even preserves me against all phantoms of terror, against all ghostly fear, because it is always about me. Why, if it is only a phantom, does it never appear to me in my dreams?[176] Why comes it not when I will? But it comes only in weighty cases; then I consult and obey it very willingly. It has already to-day, Albano," she added, in a lower and fainter tone, "twice appeared to me on the way, when I heard the inner music, and previously in the thunder-house, when the sun went down, and has affectionately answered me."

"And what says it, heavenly one?" asked Albano, innocently. "I saw it only on the way, and asked no question," replied the childlike one, blushing; and here, all at once, her holy soul stood unconsciously without a veil before him; for she had, in the thunder-house, received from the invisible Caroline the yes to her love; because that being was her own creation, and this a suggestion of her own. Yes indeed, heavenly one! thou standest before the mirror with the virgin's veil over thy form, and when thy image softly raises its own, thou fanciest thyself still covered!

No word can express Albano's veneration for such a sanctified heart, which dreamed into such distinctness glorified beings; whose golden flowers only grew the higher over the thought of death, as earthly ones do in churchyards over the reality; which, simultaneously with his own, invisible hands had drawn into two similar dreams;[177] to which one was ashamed to give common truths for its holy errors. "Thou art from heaven," he said, inspired, and his joy became the pearl melted in the eye which quenches the thirst of the human heart; "therefore thou wouldst go back thither!" "O, I consecrate to thee, my friend," said she, smilingly weeping, and pressed his hand to her pure heart, "the whole little life which I have, every hour to the last, and I will, meanwhile, prepare thee for everything which God sends."

Before they entered the cottage of the pious father, Albano seized his friend's hand, and the sisters joined each other. The friends went forward for a time in silence; Charles looked upon Albano, and found the peace of blessedness upon his face. When the latter saw how Liana pressed her overfraught heart to her sister's, then were sincerity and joy too strong in him, and he fell without a word upon the heart of the dear brother of the eternal bride, and let him silently guess all from his tears of bliss. O, he might have guessed it, to be sure, from the bridal look of love which his sister more seldom removed from his friend, and from the heartiness wherewith she drew Rabette to her heart; just as if they two would soon be related to each other, as if her brother himself would soon speak more sweetly, since he for some time had no longer called her the little Linda; and consecrated her thereon for the heart of her brother. Not before the pious father did the enraptured look hold itself much in abeyance, which Albano, standing as if under the gate of eternity, cast into the heavens, gleaming like worlds one behind another; he was still and tender, and in his heart dwelt all hearts. O love one heart purely and warmly, then thou lovest all hearts after it, and the heart in its heaven sees like the journeying sun, from the dew-drop even to the ocean, nothing but mirrors which it warms and fills.

But in Roquairol started up immediately, when he saw the heavenly bliss so near, the mutinous spirit of his past, and struck with a bloody epilepsy the limbs of the inner man: those immortal sighings after an ever-flying peace again tormented him; his transgressions and errors, and even the hours when he innocently suffered, were painfully reckoned up before him; and then he spoke, (and stirred every heart, but most of all poor Rabette's, which he pressed against his own to warm himself, as, according to the tradition, the eagle does with the dove, after which he does not tear her to pieces,)—nobly he spoke then of life's wilderness, and of fate, which burns out man, like Vesuvius, into a crater, and then again sows cool meadows therein, and fills it again with fire; and of the only blessedness of this hollow life, love, and of the injury inflicted, when fate with its winds sways and rubs a flower[178] to and fro, and thereby cuts through the green skin against the earth.

But while he thus spoke, he looked on the glowing Rabette, and would fain by these warmings burst open, as it were by force, the fast-closed flower-bud of his love, and spread its leaves out under the sun. O the bewildered and yearning one was surely not yet quite happy even to-day, and he wished not so much to affect others as himself.

With what blissful presentiments did they step out again before the sphinx of night, who lay smiling before them with soft, starry glances! Did they not go through a still, glimmering, subterranean world, light and free, without the heavy clogging earth on their feet, while in the wide Elysium the warm ether only flutters because invisible Psyches fan it with their wings? And out of the flute-dell the old man sends after them his tones as sweet arrows of love, in order that the swelling heart may blissfully bleed of their woundings. Albano and Liana came out upon a prospect where the broad eastern landscape, with its light-streaks of blooming poppy-fields, and its dark villages, ascended the soft mountains, where the moon awoke, and the splendor of her garment already swept like that of a spirit through heaven: here they remained standing and waiting for Luna. Albano held her hand. All the mountain-ridges of his life stood in a glowing dawn. "Liana," said he, "what innumerable springs are there at this moment up yonder on the worlds which hang in the heavens; but this is the fairest!" "Ah, life is lovely, and to-day it is too dear to me! Albano," she added, in a low voice, and her whole face became an exalted, tearless love, and the stars wove and embroidered its bridal dress, "if God calls me, then may he let me always appear to thee as Caroline does to me. O, if I could only attend thee thus through thy whole dear life, and console and warn thee, I would willingly wish for no other heaven."

But as he was about to express the fulness of his love, and the anger of his pain about the death-delusion, just then came his wild friend, who, like a Vesuvius, pouring out at once lava- and rain-streams over the credulous Rabette, had made both her heart and his own only fuller, not lighter; then Charles beheld the glorified beings and the blue horizon, where already the moon was flinging forth her glimmering light between the bristling mast-peaks and summits, and looked again into the splendor of holy love. Then could he no longer contain himself; his heart, full of agony, mounted to an eternal purpose, as if to God, and he embraced Albano and Rabette, and said: "Beloved man! beloved maiden! keep my unhappy heart!"

Rabette clung around him compassionately, as a mother around her child, and gave up to him, in hot, gushing tears, her whole soul. Albano, astonished, enfolded in his arms the love-bond; Liana was drawn to the beloved hearts by the whirlpool of bliss. Unheard the flutes sounded on, unseen waved the white banners of the stars overhead. Charles spoke frantic words of love, and wild wishes of dying for joy. Albano touched trembling Liana's flower-lip, as John kissed Christ, and the heavy milky-way bent down like a magic wand toward his golden bliss. Liana sighed: O mother, how happy are thy children! The moon had already flown up into the blue, like a white angel of peace, and glorified the great embrace; but the blest ones marked it not. Like a sounding waterfall, their rich life covered them, and they knew not that the flutes had ceased, and all the hills were shining.[179]

[172] Museum (home of the muses) is the beautiful German name for it.—Tr.