53. CYCLE.[121]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

54. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

55. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[120] At the canonization of a saint, the Devil was heard by attorney, in the shape of objections to the act. Jean Paul, with a slight variation of the sense of the old title, hints a converse process in Roquairol's case, making the better angel show cause why sentence of damnation should not be absolutely pronounced against him.—Tr.