1. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was Don Gaspard.

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

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

5. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

7. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

9. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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