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. 46. CYCLE.R Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of reality into his web,—namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend. 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 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 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 Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer "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 "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 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 47. CYCLE.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 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 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? 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! "To Charles. "Stranger! At this hour, when, in the dead sea and through our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of men and their bridge-posts appear to us broken, a true heart puts a question to thee frankly, and let thine answer it willingly and in truth! "Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee, stranger, and hast thou thy friend? Do thy wishes and nerves and days grow together with his, like the four cedars on Lebanon, which can bear nothing around them "Stranger: if thou hast had no friend, hast thou deserved one? When spring kindled into life, and opened all her honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the hundred gates of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bitterly looked up and begged of God a heart for thine? O when, at evening, the sun went down like a mountain, and his flames departed from the earth, and now only his red breath floated upward to the silvery stars, hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of friendship which sank together on battle-fields, like stars of one constellation, stealing forth through the bloody clouds out of the old world, like giants; and didst thou think of this,—how imperishably they loved each other, and thou, like me, wast alone? And, solitary one, when night—that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid climes, toils and travels—reveals her cold suns above thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, and immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feelest, upon the cold earth, that thy heart beats against no breast but only thine own,—O beloved! weepest thou then, and most bitterly? "Charles, often have I reckoned up, on my birthday, the increasing years,—the feathers in the broad wing of "Ah, it is not the gay, variegated shore that flies by, but man and his stream: forever bloom the seasons in the gardens up and down along the shore; only we sweep by once for all before the garden, and never return. "But our friend goes too. O, if thou at this hour of death's juggleries art contemplating the pale Prince, with the images of youth on his breast, and thinking of the gray friend who secretly bewails him in Tartarus, then will thy heart dissolve, and in soft, warm flames run round through thy bosom, and softly say: 'I will love, and then die, and then love—O Almighty, show me the soul which longs and languishes like mine!' "If thou say'st that, if thou art thus, then come to my heart: I am as thou. Grasp my hand, and hold it till it withers. I have seen thy form to-day, and on it the marks of life's wounds: hasten to me; I will bleed and struggle at thy side. I have long and early sought and loved thee. Like two streams will we mingle and grow, and bear our burdens, and dry up together. Like silver in the furnace, we will run together with glowing light, and all slags shall lie cast out around the pure shimmering metal. Laugh not, then, any longer so grimly, to think what ignes-fatui men are; like ignes-fatui we burn and fly away in the rainy storm of time. And then, when time is gone by, we find each other again, and it will be again in the spring. "Albano de Cesara." 48. CYCLE.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:— "I am as thou. On ascension-evening I will seek thee among the masks. "Charles." 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 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 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. 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, 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 "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. 49. CYCLE.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, 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 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 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 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 50. CYCLE.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 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 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 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, 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 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. 51. CYCLE.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 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, 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 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, 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 "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! 52. CYCLE.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 "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." 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 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!" "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 "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? 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 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. FOOTNOTES: |