When History leads a n.o.ble youth to the plains of Marathon, and up to the Capitol, he would fain have at his side a friend,--a comrade,--a brother-in-arms, but no more than this,--no sister-in-arms; for a heroine injures a hero greatly. Into the energetic youth friendship enters earlier than love: the former appears, like the lark, in the early spring of life, and goes not away till late autumn; the latter comes and flees, like the quail, with the warm season. Albano already heard this lark warbling, invisible, in the air: he found a friend, not in Blumenbuhl, not in the Linden-city, not in any place, but in his own bosom; and the name of that friend was--Roquairol.
The case was this: For people like myself, country life is the honey wherein they take the pill of city life. Falterle, on the contrary, could not worry down the bitter country life without the silvering-over of city life: thrice every week he ran over to Pest.i.tz, either into the boxes of the amateur-theatre as dramaturgist, or on the stage itself as actor. Now, on every such occasion, he took his little part-book out into the village with him, and there, relying on this rehearsal of the play, studied his part independently of those of his colleagues; just as, to this day, every state-servant commits his to memory without a glance at those of his fellow-performers: hence every one of us consists of only one faculty, and, as in the Russian hunting-music, knows how to fife only one tone, and must throw his strength into the pauses. Into these fragments of theatricals, then, borrowed from Falterle, Albano entered with a rapture which his master soon sought to increase by exchanging for these limited sectors of the globe the whole dramatic world.
The Viennite had long since eulogized before him the suicidal mad-cap Roquairol as a genius in learning,--and himself as particularly such in teaching; and now he adduced the proof of it from the great parts which the mad-cap always played so well. For the rest, it was not his fault that he did not exceedingly disparage the Minister"s son, whom he envied, not only for his theatrical, but for his erotic achievements.
For the inventively rich Roquairol had with that shot at himself in his thirteenth year saluted and won the whole female s.e.x, and made himself, out of a sacrificial victim, priest of sacrifices, and manager of the amateuress-theatre, attached to the amateur-theatre; whereas the shy, stupid Falterle, with his still-born fancy, could never bring a charmer to any other step than the pas retrograde in a minuet, or to anything more than a setting of the fingers, when he wanted to get himself set in her heart. But the vain man cannot deny others any praise which is also his own.
How must all this have won our friend"s admiration for a youth whom he saw pa.s.s through his soul now as Charles Moor, now as Hamlet, as Clavigo, as Egmont! As regards the notorious masquerade-shot described in a former Jubilee period, our so inexperienced Hercules, dazzled as he was by the naked dagger of Cato, must have accredited that shot to such a kindred Heraclide, as one of his twelve tragical labors. The fee-court-provost Hafenreffer even tells me, Albano once disputed with the Vienna gentleman, who had long since let himself down from a schoolmaster to a schoolmate, about the finest ways of dying, and, in opposition to the tender Falterle, who declared _himself_ in favor of the sleeping-potion, declared himself on Roquairol"s side, even with the stronger addition: "He should like best of all to stand on the top of a tower and draw the lightning on his head!" In this latter article he shows the high feeling of the ancients, who held death by lightning to be no d.a.m.nation, but a deification; but might not physical causes also have had something to do with it, for his elbows and his hair often flashed out, in the dark, electric fire, and more than once a holy circle streamed out round his head even in the cradle? The Provost is strong for this view of the matter.
Albano, at last, could find no way to cool his fiery heart but by taking paper and writing to the invisible friend, and giving it in charge to the gentleman from Vienna. Falterle, who was complaisance itself--and withal untruth itself, too--in spite of his aversion to Roquairol, took the letters with him, and was _heartily glad to do it_ ("I am quite at home at the Minister"s," said he); but never delivered a single one of them, since he had as little influence in the proud Froulay-palace as with the son himself, and so he merely brought back with him every time a new and valid reason why Roquairol had not been able to answer: he was either too very busy, or in the sick-chair, or in company,--but every letter _had delighted him_; and our unsuspecting youth firmly believed it all, and kept on writing and hoping. It would have been handsomely done of the Legation"s-counsellor, had he only, that is to say, if he could, been so obliging as to hand over to me Albano"s palm-leaves of a loving heart; not for the archives of this book, but merely for my doc.u.ments relating to the case, for the catalogue of petals, which I for my own private use am st.i.tching and gluing together, of Albano"s flowering-time.
20. CYCLE.
Our Zesara, on entering into the years when the song of poets and nightingales flows more deeply into the softened soul, became suddenly another being. He grew stiller and wilder at once, more tender and more impetuous, as, for instance, he once flew in the highest rage to the help of a dog yelping under the blows of the cudgel. Heaven and earth, which hitherto in his bosom, as in the Egyptian system, had run into each other, that is to say, the ideal and the real, worked themselves free from each other, and Heaven ascended and receded, pure and high and brilliant,--upon the inner world rose a sun and upon the outer a moon, but the two worlds and hemispheres attracted each other and made one whole,--his step became slower, his bright eye dreamy, his athlete-gymnastics less frequent,--he could not now help loving all human beings more warmly, and feeling them more near to him; and often with closed eyes he fell trembling upon the neck of his foster-mother, or out in the open air bade his foster-father, at his starting on his journeys, a more lonely and heartfelt farewell.
And now before such clear and sharp eyes the Isis-veil of Nature became transparent, and a living G.o.ddess looked down into his heart with features full of soul. Ah, as if he had found his mother, so did he now find Nature,--now for the first time he knew what spring was, and the moon, and the ruddy dawn, and the starry night.... Ah, we have all once known it, we have all once been tinged with the morning-redness of life!... O, why do we not regard all _first_ stirrings of human emotion as holy, as firstlings for the altar of G.o.d? There is truly nothing purer and warmer than our first friendship, our first love, our first striving after truths, our first feeling for Nature: like Adam, we are made mortals out of immortals; like Egyptians, we are governed earlier by G.o.ds than by men; and the ideal foreruns the reality, as, with some trees, the tender _blossoms_ antic.i.p.ate the broad, rough _leaves_, in order that the latter may not set before the dusting and fructifying of the former.
When, as often happened, Albano came home from his inner and outer roamings, at once intoxicated and thirsty,--with senses at the same time _shut_ and _sharpened_, but dreaming like sleepers who feel the more painfully the putting out of the light,--at such times of course it needed only a few cold drops of cold words to make the hot, flowing soul, upon the contact of the strange, cold bodies, scatter in zigzag and globules; whereas a warm mould would have rounded the fluid ma.s.s into the loveliest form.
Circ.u.mstances being such, of course no one will wonder at what I am presently to report. The dancing-, music-, and fencing-master, who boasted little of his steps, touches, and thrusts, but so much the more of his (Imperial Diet-) Literature,--for he had the new names of the months, the orthography of Klopstock, and the Latin characters in German letters sooner in _his_ letters than any one of us,--would fain show the house of Wehrfritz that he understood a little more of literature and knew a thing or two better than other Viennites (the more so since he read absolutely nothing, not even political newspapers and novels, because he preferred real, living men); he therefore never came into the house without two pockets full of romance and verse for Rabette and Albano. He was encouraged in this by his endless officiousness, and his emulous race-running with his colleague Wehmeier in education, and the interest which he took in the youth now growing so silent, whom he wished to help out of the sweet _dreams_ which the _ruby_[36] of his glittering young life inspired with the exegetic _dream-books_, the works of the poets. The revolution which had taken place in the youth, who now mowed away whole romantic glades of Everdingen, and plucked whole poetical flower-borders of Huysum, I have now neither time nor wish even so much as tolerably to portray, on account of the above-promised wondrous circ.u.mstance; suffice it, that Albano, so situated,--the heaven of the poetic art open before him, the promised land of Romance spread out before his eyes,--resembled a planet, a.s.sailed by several whizzing comets, and blazing up with them into a common conflagration.
But what further? The Vienna master--this I must still premise--was a vain fool (at least in matters of humility, for example, his pigmy feet, his literature, his success with women), and particularly loved, by familiar pictures of great ones and ladies, to have inferred his confederation with the originals. The poor devil was, to be sure, poor, and believed, with many other authors, that he--unlike Solomon, who prayed for wisdom and received gold--had inversely had the misfortune while supplicating for the latter to receive only the former. In short, on such grounds as these he would have been very glad, let it be observed in pa.s.sing, to know that the belief prevailed in the house of Wehrfritz that he stood on very good terms with his former pupil, the Minister"s daughter,--_Liana_, I think it was, if I read Hafenreffer"s handwriting correctly,--and that he quite often saw her, and spoke with her mother. Add to this, that there was not one word of truth in the whole: through the temple in which Liana was there was no door-way for him. But so much the less could he let the Director get ahead of him, who often saw her, and always praised her more warmly at home, merely for the sake of scolding the rude innocence of Rabette, who had never been educated by anybody. The Vienna master wished also, of course, to draw the Count--to whom he only showed the coasts of Roquairol"s isle of friendship afar off, but no point for landing--cunningly away from the brother through the sister (he had found it impossible longer to deceive and hold him back); for why did he paint it out before him at such length, how poisonously, some years before, the night-and death-chill brought on by that parting shot of a brother whom she too devotedly loved had fallen upon those tender, white leaves of her heart?
Quite often would he, during a meal, hang up broad merit-tables, countersigned by Wehrfritz, of Liana"s progress in music and painting, in order, seemingly, to stimulate his pupil on the harpsichord and in drawing to greater achievements. For if it was not for appearance" sake, why did he paste up such very long altar-pieces of Liana"s charms before Rabette, that impartial one, who, vying only with parsons" daughters, and not with those of ministers, heard almost as gladly the praise of _city_ beauties as we do of _Homer"s_, and in whose presence only a windy fool, that would fain hold himself upright in the saddle before women by singing the praises of other women, could intone such eulogies as his were of Liana? Verily, before such a resigned and unenvious soul as Rabette,--especially as her complexion and hands and hair were none of the softest, at least harder than Falterle"s,--I would not for any prize-medal in the world have undertaken, as he however did, to bring near, in high colors, the happy results with which the Minister, in order to bring over Liana"s uncommonly youthful beauty, by proper training, into her present years, had done his best by means of delicate and almost meagre fare, by tight lacing, by shutting up his orangery, whose window he seldom lifted off from this flower of a milder clime,--still less would I have cared to be able to describe, like him, how she had thereby become a tender creature of pastil-dust, which the gusts of fate and the monsoons of climate could almost blow to pieces,--and that she actually could only wash herself with spirits of soap, and only with the softest linen dry herself without pain, and could not pluck three gooseberries without making her finger bleed.
The shallow Viennite, who, if he spied a man of rank standing up on the cupola of a mountain, could never take off his hat before him, down in the marsh, without saying, in a low tone, at the same time, "Your most profoundly obedient servant!" and who spoke of distinguished people, at the farthest, only in familiar or satirical tones (to show his connection), but never in earnest criticism, was, of course, as became him, not the man to call old Froulay a stiff, sharp gravestone, under which two such tender flowers as his lady with the ivy (Liana) twining round her, crooked and crowded, had to wind their way out into light.
Mr. Von Hafenreffer, to his honor,--in respect that he is a Legation"s-Counsellor and Fee-Court-Provost,--makes here the quite different but more feeling observation, that the hard strata of such connections as those through which Liana"s life-rill must needs filter and force its way, make it purer and clearer, just as all hard strata are filtering-stones of water,--and all her charms become, indeed, through her father"s tyranny, torments, but also all her torments become, through her own patience, charms....
But, good Zesara, supposing now thou art compelled, daily, to hear all this,--and supposing the master of accomplishments forgets not to depict, besides, how she has never grieved him with a disobedient look, or a tardiness, how cheerfully she always brought him the paper-marks of the lessons, and, at the end, her schooling-money or an invitation,--and how carefully, mildly, and courteously she behaved toward her servants, and how one must have thought her heart could not be warmer than her very philanthropy made it, if one had not seen her still more ardent filial affection for her mother;--good Zesara, I say, what if thou hearest all this in addition to thy romances, and that, too, of the sister of thy Roquairol; for every one, if it is only half practicable, loves to spin himself into one chrysalis with the sister of his friend,--and beside all this, of a maiden in the consecrated Linden-city, about which Don Gaspard, as the old Prussians[37] did about their sacred groves, draws additional mystic curtains; and, what is harder than all, just after the turning-point of thy seventeenth year, Zesara, when the monsoons and spring winds of the pa.s.sions already sweep over the waves of the blood! For, of course, at an earlier period, in the midst of the learned club of so many linguists,--i. e. books of linguists, of eclectics, upper-rabbins,--of ten wise men from the East and from Greece, and, by reason of the uncommonly dazzling _Epictetus"-lamps_ which the said Decemvirate of wise men had lighted at the day-star of the wise ones,--at such a time, I say, it was hardly to be expected of thee that love"s little Turin-lantern, which he kept as yet unopened in his pocket, should strike thy eye very strongly! But now, my dear, now, I say! Truly, nowhere could any of us find less fault, if we are uncommonly attentive to it, with what he does in the 21st Cycle, than in this 20th.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] The preceding fine October days, as well as the Dog-holidays and April, and, in short, the rest of the previous part of the year, were created on the above-mentioned 22d October, and the said day itself also, after their time. I thus easily shift the inquiry about all that earlier period. For if any one dates the world differently, e. g. from the 20th March, as Lipsius and the Fathers did, still he must fall in with my after-creation of the forepart of the year, when I thrust home upon him with his own previous question.
[36] It used to be believed that a ruby gave pleasant dreams.
[37] Arnold"s Ecclesiastical History of Prussia, Vol. I.
FOURTH JUBILEE.
HIGH STYLE OF LOVE.--THE GOTHA POCKET-ALMANAC.--DREAMS ON THE TOWER.--THE SACRAMENT AND THE THUNDER-STORM.--THE NIGHT-JOURNEY INTO ELYSIUM.--NEW ACTORS AND STAGES, AND THE ULTIMATUM OF THE SCHOOL-YEARS.
21. CYCLE.
How many blessed Adams of sixteen and a half years will be at this moment enjoying their siesta in the gra.s.s of Paradise, and seeing their future bosom-companion created out of the materials of their own hearts!
But they seek her not, like the first Adam, close beside them on the building-spot, but at a good distance from their own couch, because distance of s.p.a.ce lends as much enchantment to the view as distance of time. Accordingly, every youth seats himself in the mail-coach with the full persuasion that in the cities for which he is booked quite different and more divine Madonnas stand at the doors of the houses than in his cursed one; and the young men of those cities, again, on their part, take pa.s.sage in the arriving stage-coach, and go riding hopefully into his.
Ah, this sounds far too rude and harsh for all that I have in my mind, and it is to me as if I were offering the reader, instead of the living, floating rose-fragrance, only the stiff, hard, thick, porcelain-rose!
Albano, I will uncover and unclose thy silent, thickly-curtained heart, so that we all may see therein the saintly image of Liana, the ascending Raphael"s-Mary, but, like the pictures of the saints in Pa.s.sion-week, hanging behind the veil, which thou liftest with trembling to adore it, when thou openest thy books of devotion,--the Romances,--and when thou findest therein the prayers which belong to thy saint. Even _I_ find it hard not to do like thee and the ancients, and make a mystery of the name of thy guardian G.o.ddess,--concerning inner spiritual apparitions (for outer ones are bodily apparitions) the seer is glad to be silent nine days long;--and with thy blind belief in Liana"s virtuous character being a thousand times higher than thine is, and with thy holy sense of honor, which watches over another"s, it is, of course, a riddle to thee how others, for instance the Vienna master or Wehrfritz, without the least blushing, can talk so loudly and fondly of her, when thou thyself hardly darest before others to--dream of her much. Truly, Albano is a good creature! Further, how such a light Psyche as Liana, so crystallized into solid ether, somewhat like the risen Christ, can at all eat carps and pick the bones out,--or stir the stack of salad in the blue dish with the long, wooden, miniature pitch-forks,--or how it can be that she weighs half a pound more in the sedan than a blue b.u.t.terfly,--or how she can laugh loud (but that, however, she never did, my friend);--all this, and in general the whole petty service of this incarnate earthly life, was, to the winged youth, a riddle and a real impossibility, or at least the reality thereof was a sort of _fixed-star occultation_; why shall I suppress that he would have been far less astonished at a pair of angel"s footsteps stamped into Italian rocks, than at a pair of Liana"s in the ground, and that he would have given for any one single trace or relic of her--I mention only a thread-spool or a tambour-flower--nothing less than whole cords of the wood of the holy cross, together with casks of the holy nails, and several apostolic wardrobes, together with the holy duplicate-bodies into the bargain.
So have I often longingly wished I could have only a pound of earth from the moon, or as much as a horn of sun-dust from the sun, before me on my table and in my hands. So do most of us authors of consequence hover before a reader out of our own country in like manner as fine, ethereal images, of whom it is hard to comprehend how they can eat a slice of bacon, or drink a gla.s.s of March beer, or wear a pair of boots; it seems as if people would collapse when they read anything about Lessing"s razor, Shakespeare"s English saddle, Rousseau"s bear-skin cap, Psalmist David"s navel, Homer"s sleeve, Gellert"s queue-tie, Ramler"s night-cap, and the bald-pate under mine, though that is not of much more consequence.
The old Provincial Director, seeing that a maiden in no way gains so much with a youth as by praises which his parents bestow upon her, made some considerable contributions toward the canonization of Liana, by frequently weighing against her the rustic Rabette, who laughed just as he did, and insinuating a contrast between his indulgent wife and the strict Minister"s lady: he then took occasion to set forth in detail after what strict rules of pure composition this counterpointist (the Minister"s lady) harmoniously arranged the melodious tones of Liana, and particularly how she discountenanced all rudeness and laughter. Female souls are peac.o.c.ks, whose jewelled plumage must be sheltered in nice and whitened apartments, whereas ours remain clean in duck-coops. Albano pictured to himself mother and daughter in the double forms in which the painters give us angels, namely, the intelligent, strict mother, as one who hides in a long cloud, with only her _head_ visible, and Liana as a glorified child that, with its tender wings, flutters about a white cloud.
How he longed for something, though it were only a fallen, faded rose of--silk from Pest.i.tz; and yet he could not for shame ask the Vienna teacher for anything except at the very last, after long thinking, though with a betraying glow, for one--lesson-mark; "for he had never yet seen one," he said. Falterle had one at this moment in his pocket,--the number 15, Liana"s former age, was written upon it;--she might have written the number possibly;--still it was something. Ah, could he not more willingly have beset the Director for some romances out of the portable-library of the Minister"s lady, in which the daughter must certainly have read, yes, and might well even have forgotten some notes of her reading? He actually did it; but Wehrfritz condemned and cursed in the beginning all romances as poisoned letters; then he forgot over five times to ask for any;--and finally he brought with him a novel of Madam Genlis, together with a Gotha pocket-almanac.
These books of the blest--in comparison with which my own works and the Alexandrine Library and the blue library are only miserable _remittenda_--had all the stamps of women"s books; for they all contained some ornament or other of female heads, namely, a thimbleful of hair-powder as they do, f.a.g-ends of silk-ribbon as they do, for demarcation-lines and memoranda of readings,--and just the same fragrance (which Semler also praises in the books of alchemy), and which they seemed to have borrowed from the blossoms of Paradise. Ah, happy reader of the fairest book (I mean the Count), canst thou ask more?
By all means; and he found more, too, namely, in the latter end of the Gotha pocket-almanac, on the two blank parchment-leaves, the words, "Concert for the Poor, the 21st February," and "Play for the Poor, the 1st Nov." I have often, in my chase after mysteries, beaten out, on these leaves, the weightiest ones from the bush. "Yes, that is my pupil"s hand," said Falterle; "she and her mother seldom let such an opportunity slip, because the Minister does not allow them otherwise to give much to the poor." Do not detain me here about the beauty of her handwriting,--besides one writes better on parchment and slate than on paper, and a literary lady, exactly unlike a literary man in this, has more calligraphy than illiterate ones,--but let me hasten on to the working of these _incunabula_ of Liana, whose Dominical characters diffuse over a loving man nothing but bright, inner Sundays of the soul, and whose leaves resemble in sanct.i.ty the Epistles which, in the Middle Ages, fell from heaven upon the earth. Now, for the first time, was it to him as if the flying angel, whose shadow hitherto had only glided over the earth, folded up his pinions, and held his downward course in the track of the shadow, not far from the spot where Albano stands. He learned the Gotha pocket-almanac by heart.
As he believed Liana to be much tenderer and better than he, and as she appeared to his fancy like Hesper, who, among all the planets, moves around the sun with the least eccentricity, and he to himself like the distant Ura.n.u.s, who does so with the greatest; and since he could not, without a blaze of shame on his cheek, think of falling behind the daughter and mother in moral polish, he became at once (no man knew why) more gentle, mild, compliant, attentive to his person, obedient to the Vienna teacher,--for Liana had been so too,--and his whole Vesuvius[38]
was kept under by the veil of a saint. The North American adores the form which appears to him in dreams, as his guardian spirit. O, does not even thus, to the youth, a fair dream often become his genius?
22. CYCLE.
A Whitsuntide, such as I am now about to describe, Albano, excepting in the Acts of the Apostles, one can hardly find anywhere else than in thine!
He had, hitherto, often listened to Liana"s invalid-history with the deafness of a vigorous, fire-proof youth, when, on one occasion, the Director brought word home, that the pious lady of the Minister would let her daughter partake the sacrament on the first Whitsuntide holiday, because she was apprehensive death regarded such a creature as a strawberry, which must be plucked before the sun had shone upon it. Ah, Albano saw death at this moment groping about, and with his stony heel treading on the pale red berry and crushing it. And then this Philomela without a tongue, because she had hitherto been compelled to be dumb, had, like a Procne, sent him only the pictured history of her heavy existence, and only the leaves of parchment! All loving emotions, like plants, shoot up the most rapidly in the tempestuous atmosphere of life.
Albano felt at once a wide, deep woe, and a tormenting fever-warmth in his heart, eaten hollow as it was by death. In his musical and poetic phantasyings on his Oesterlein"s-harpsichord, the dreamed tones of Liana"s voice and the weeping music of the harmonica, which she could play, and which he had never heard, strangely mingled, like her swan-song, with his harmonies. But this was not enough; he even wrote, secretly, a Tragedy, (thou good soul!) wherein he, with wet eyes, intrusted all his tenderest and bitterest feelings to _another"s_ lips,--but he only kindled them fearfully, while he expressed them.
Every one can remark that he proposed in this way to escape that babbler and spy, accident; but not every one observes--something quite original in the case; in _another"s_ name, he might, he thought, venture to give his deep pain a more pa.s.sionate expression, for which, in his own name, before so many stoic cla.s.sical heroes, he could not for shame muster up the courage. But in this way the cla.s.sics could not touch him.
The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this gla.s.s bell much greater yet; namely, to such a degree, that he touchingly begged his foster-parents to let him on the first Whitsuntide holiday go to the--Holy Sacrament. The dilapidated state of the village church, wherein it could hardly be partaken a year longer, must needs speak as strongly in his favor, as the dilapidated state of Liana"s health did in hers. Always will there remain in our poor human souls, separated from each other by bodies and wildernesses, the longing to be at least doing the same thing at the same time with one another, at one and the same hour to look up at the moon, or (as Addison relates) to send our prayers above it; and thus is thy wish, Albano, a human, a tender one, to kneel at the same hour with thy invisible Liana, at the steps of the altar, and then to rise fiery and commanding after the coronation of the inner man! He had in the still country built up the altar of religion high and firm in his soul, as all men of lofty fancy do: on mountains are always seen temples and chapels.
But I must never accompany him into the Whitsuntide church before ascending with him the church-tower. Could anything be conceived more delicious, than when, at this period, on fair Sundays, so soon as there was nothing but the heavy sun swimming through the wide heavens, he climbed to the belfry of the tower, and, covered with the murmuring waves of the chime, looked out all alone over the earth below, and upon the western boundary hills of the beloved city? When presently the storm of sound swept and confounded all together, and when the jewel-sparkling of the ponds, and the flowery pleasure-tent of the frolicking spring, and the red castles on the white roads, and the scattered trains of church-going people slowly winding along between the dark-green corn-fields, and the stream girdling round the rich pastures and the blue mountains, those smoking altars of morning sacrifices, and the whole extended splendor of the visible creation poured into his soul with a glimmering overflow, and all appeared to him as a dim dream-landscape--O then arose his inner colosseum full of silent, G.o.dlike forms of spiritual antiques, and the torch-gleam of Fancy[39]
glanced round upon them like the play of a moving magic life,--and there he saw among the G.o.ds a _friend_ and a _loved_ one reposing, and he glowed and trembled.... Then the bells died away with a heavy groan, and became dumb,--he stepped back from the bright spring into the dark tower,--he fastened his eye only on the empty, blue night before him, into which the distant earth sent up nothing save sometimes a b.u.t.terfly blown out of its course, a swallow cruising by, or a pigeon hovering overhead,--the blue veil of Ether[40] fluttered in a thousand folds over veiled G.o.ds in the distance,--O then, then the cheated heart could not but exclaim, in its loneliness, Ah! where shall I find--where, in the wide regions of s.p.a.ce, in this short life--the souls which I love eternally and so profoundly? Ah, thou dear one! what is more painfully and longer sought, then, than a heart? When man stands before the sea and on mountains, and before pyramids and ruins, and in the presence of misfortune, and feels himself exalted, then does he stretch out his arms after the great _Friendship_. And when music, and moonlight, and spring and spring tears softly move him, then his heart dissolves, and he wants _Love_. And he who has never sought either is a thousand times poorer than he who has lost both.
Let us now step into the Whitsuntide church, where the deep stream of his fancy, for the first time in his life, overflowed, and carried his heart far away, and sounded on with it in a new channel: a physical storm had swollen this stream. Early in the forenoon, the dark powder-house of a storm-cloud stood mute near the hot sun, and was glowing with his beams; and only occasionally, during divine service, some distant, strange cloud let fall a clap on the fire-drum: but when Albano stepped before the altar with exalted, glorified emotions, and when he ventured only to mask his love for Liana in an inward prayer for her, and in a picture of her to-day"s devotion, and of her pale form in the dark bride-attire of piety, and when he softly felt as if his purified, sanctified soul were now more worthy of that lovely one,--just then, the tempest, with all its playing war-machines and revolving cannons,[41] marched over from the Linden-city, and pa.s.sed, armed and hot, right over the church. Albano, however, in the consciousness of a holy inspiration, felt no fear; but so soon as he heard the distant rumbling of the falling avalanche, he thought only of Liana, and of its striking the Linden-city church; and now, when over his head the sun kindled with his hot looks the powder-tower of the storm-cloud, and made it fly into a thousand flashes and claps, then did that partiality for the death by lightning which had been nourished in him by the ancients drive the terrible supposition into his heart, that Liana was now dead and lost to him in the glory of transfigured holiness. O then, must he indeed also believe that now the wing of the lightning s.n.a.t.c.hes him above the clouds. And when long flashes blazed about the saint and the angels of the altar, and when the trembling voices of the singers, growing louder, and the tolling of the familiar bells, mingled with the crashing thunder, and he caught, amid the deafening din, a high, fine organ-tone, which he took for one of the tones of that unheard harmonica,--then did he mount, deified, upon the triumphal and thunder-car by the side of his Liana; the theatre-curtain of life and the stage burned away from under him; and they soared away, linked together and radiant, far through the cool, pure ether!...
But the twelfth hour banished these spiritual apparitions and the tempest; Albano stepped out into a bluer, cooler, breezier sky,--and the glistening sun looked down with a friendly smile on the affrighted earth, whose bright tears still quivered in all her flower-eyes. And now when in the afternoon Albano heard of the peaceful march of the thunder through Liana"s city, then by his faith in her newly-a.s.sured life, and by the soft dead-gold of resting fancy, and by the holy stillness of the regenerated bosom, and by the increased fervor of his love, there grew up out of all regions of his soul an evening-red, magic Arcadia,--and never did a man enter upon a fairer one.
23. CYCLE.
IT arises not merely from my courtesy towards a reading posterity, my dear Zesara, but also from a real courtesy toward thee, that I so faithfully transcribe all acts in this pastoral of thy life; in thy later days these melodious ones shall echo in thy ears refreshingly out of my book, and in the evening, after thy labors, thou wilt read nothing more gladly than my labors here.
The following night deserves its Cycle. Soon after Whitsuntide he was tormented with weekly medical notes upon a new malady of poor Liana, which had begun, just as if he had guessed right, on Sacrament-day. He heard that she was living or suffering in _Lilar_, the pleasure- and residence-garden of the old Prince, in company with her brother, of whose silence the Vienna master had just got up to his thousand and first reason. Now, around Lilar, although not far from Pest.i.tz, his father had drawn no chains of prohibition. Liana"s night-lamp might, perhaps, glimmer a welcome, or at all events her harmonica sound one,--yes, her brother might haply be still walking round in the garden,--the June night was, besides, serene and magnificent. Ah, in short, he started.
It was late and still; far out of the sleeping village, of which all the lights were extinguished, he could still catch the flute-pieces of the clock in the castle upon the Pest.i.tz mountain. It was a quickener to him, that his road lay for some distance along the Linden-city causeway.
He fixed his eyes steadily on the western mountains, where the stars seemed to fall to _her_ like white blossoms. Up on the distant height, the Hercules" cross-way, the right arm ran downward and wound along through groves and meadows to the blooming Lilar.
March on, drunk with joy, full of young, light images, through the Italian night, which glimmers and breathes its fragrance around thee, and which, as over Hesperia, not far from the warm moon, hangs out a golden evening-star[42] in the blue west, as if over the dwelling of the beloved soul! To thee and thy young eyes the stars as yet only shed down hopes, no remembrances; thou hast in thy hand a plucked, stiff apple-twig, full of _red_ buds, which, like unhappy beings, become too _pale_ when they bloom out; but thou makest not, as yet, any such applications thereof as we do.
Now he stood glowing and trembling in a dell before Lilar, which, however, a singular round wood, of walks lined with trees, still hid from his view. The wood grew up in the middle to a blooming mount, which was embosomed and encircled so curiously with broad sunflowers, festoons of cherries, and glancing silver-poplars and rose-trees, that it seemed, by the picturesque _ignes-fatui_ of the moon, to be a single, enormous kettle-tree, full of fruits and blossoms. Albano was fain to ascend its summit, and be, as it were, on the observatory of the heaven, or Lilar, spread out below; he found at last in the wood an open alley.
The foliage, with its spiral alleys, wound him round into a deeper and deeper night, through which not the moon, but only the heat lightnings, could break, with which the warm, cloudless heavens were overcharged.