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 G.o.d 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 Cyropaedia."
4. CYCLE.
Zesara had tasted only three gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sion 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-b.u.t.terflies 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 h.e.l.l,--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 demiG.o.d,--although a demiG.o.d 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-b.u.t.terflies, 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 circ.u.mscription, "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 circ.u.mscription, "Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frere." 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 gla.s.s and the waxen impression of a coffin-key. The eye-gla.s.s 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-gla.s.s 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 grat.i.tude 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_ (Pest.i.tz) 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 pa.s.sed 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 surpa.s.sed, 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 n.o.ble." The corrosive sublimate of his irony consisted here, not in his p.r.o.nouncing "n.o.ble" with an accented, ironical tone, but in his p.r.o.nouncing 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 Linnaeus 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 _G.o.d_ into _bread_,--for the best bread-studies or bread-carts,--for the making of a _carriere_,--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-gla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.dlike 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 Borromaean 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 ant.i.theses.
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 n.o.ble suitors, never seek isolated beauty, without connected advantage. A beauty which we cannot also roast, sell at auction, wear, or marry, pa.s.ses with us only for just what it is worth; beauty is with us (I hope) never anything else but selvage and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 Inst.i.tute 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-G.o.ds 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 l.u.s.tre, 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 bal.u.s.trade 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 n.o.bler Aphrodite, revealed down to her bosom, from out the deepest waves. But in a few seconds the G.o.ddess 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 ma.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e,--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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.r.s.enical 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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....