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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2), by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2)
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Charles T. Brooks
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2011 [eBook #35664]
+[Most recently updated: November 22, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TITAN: A ROMANCE V. 1 (OF 2) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+TITAN:
+
+A ROMANCE.
+
+FROM THE GERMAN OF
+
+_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER._
+
+TRANSLATED BY
+
+CHARLES T. BROOKS.
+
+IN TWO VOLUMES.
+
+VOL. I.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+BOSTON:
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
+1864.
+
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by
+
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
+
+in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+THIRD EDITION.
+
+
+_UNIVERSITY PRESS:_
+WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,
+_CAMBRIDGE._
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+The "Titan" is Jean Paul's longest--and the author meant it, and held
+it, to be his greatest and best--romance; and his public (including Mr.
+Carlyle) seems, on the whole, to have sustained his opinion. He was ten
+years about it, and his other works, written in the interval, were
+preparatory and tributary to this.
+
+As to the _general_ meaning of the title there can hardly, on the whole,
+be any doubt. It does _not_ refer, as the division into Jubilees and
+Cycles might, to be sure, suggest to one on first approaching it, to the
+titanic scale and scope of the work, but to the titanic violence against
+which it is aimed.
+
+It seems, indeed, from a letter of the author's, that he thought at
+first of calling it "Anti-Titan." The only question in regard to the
+_application_ of the title seems to be, whether the champion of truth
+and justice against the moral Titans in this case was meant to be
+understood as represented by the hero of the story, with his friends,
+resisting the iniquity which moved earth and hell to ruin him, or
+whether the book itself is the Anti-Titan, and an age of extravagance
+the Titan.
+
+A French critic says of the "Titan":--
+
+"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological _résumé_, a satire, an elegy,
+a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization
+in the eighteenth century.
+
+"How is it to end, this civilization which exaggerates alike
+intellectual and industrial power at the expense of the life of the
+soul,--wholly factitious, theatrical,--intoxicating, consuming itself
+with pleasure, seeking everywhere new enjoyments,--exploring all the
+secrets of nature, without being able to penetrate the first causes, the
+secrets of God,--what will be the fate of these generations
+supersaturated with romances, dramas, journals, with science, ambition,
+with vehement aspirations after the unknown and impossible?...
+
+"In augmenting the sum of its desires, will it augment the sum of its
+happiness? Is it not going to increase immensely its capacity of
+suffering?
+
+"Will it not be the giant that scales heaven--
+
+"And that falls crushed to death?
+
+"TITAN!"
+
+In giving his romance the title of "Titan," says the same writer, "it is
+not Albano de Cesara the author has in view, but his antipode, Captain
+Roquairol,--that romantic being, that insatiable lover of pleasure, that
+anticipated Byron, that scaler of heaven,--who, after having piled
+mountain upon mountain to attain his object, ends in finding himself
+buried under the ruins....
+
+"Even while at work upon 'Hesperus,' he had formed the resolution of
+placing a pure man, great and noble, by the side of a reprobate, and of
+surrounding them both with a multitude of beings corresponding to them.
+He wished to concentrate in a single work all the ideas of high
+philosophy which he had disseminated in his other creations, and to show
+them followed by their natural consequences. So strong a mind could not
+stop there: he resolved to show the absurdity of exaggeration, whether
+in good or in evil, in virtue or in vice.
+
+"Hence those reproductions of the same types, those satellites
+gravitating around their respective planets; in fine, those parodies of
+the principal personages of the drama.
+
+"By the side of the coldness and the vast plans of Don Gaspard de
+Cesara, we have the no less dangerous intrigues, though upon a less
+elevated scale, of the Minister von Froulay; by the side of the
+ventriloquist Uncle, the lying Roquairol; the Princess Isabelle is
+opposed to Linda de Romeiro, the aerial Liana to her physical
+counterpart, the Princess Idoine; the comic vulgarity of Dr. Sphex
+contrasts with the more elevated buffoonery of Schoppe; and if we have
+Bouverot, we have also Dion, that Greek so elegant and so noble, happy
+mixture of the antique and the modern, that artist so sensible and so
+true....
+
+"The history of Albano, opposed to Roquairol, is the history, taken from
+his tenderest childhood to the epoch of his greatest development, of a
+being who, as the strictest consequence of a quite special education,
+goes through life, wounding himself with all its griefs, drinking at the
+source of all its lawful pleasures; suffering with nobleness, tasting of
+happiness, but only the purest kind; exposed every instant to see
+himself drawn away by fallacious principles, and nevertheless moving on
+with a steady step towards the end which his reason has marked out for
+him; sacrificing to the fulfilment of his duties all the delights that a
+debauched court can offer a young man entering into the world. While all
+the personages who gravitate around him, and who represent each a
+different aberration from the fundamental principle of the work, fall
+successively at his side, victims of the natural consequences of their
+passions, he, strengthening himself by every fall of which he is
+witness, ends by attaining the loftiest position which the ambition of
+man can desire,--a position which he could not have expected, and for
+which, consequently, he had not been able to make the sacrifices that,
+in the course of the work, he does not cease to achieve."
+
+The author whom we have thus copiously quoted alludes to Jean Paul's
+having had the idea of "Titan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us
+of a Philistine disparagement of the "Titan," that so many of the
+characters of the other work reappear here under new names. There are
+some critics who ought to object to the full moon, that she is only the
+same old moon that we had, in her first quarter or half, several nights
+ago. However, as we have not yet had "Hesperus" in English, nor are
+likely to for some time, this kind of objection will not trouble English
+readers of "Titan."
+
+Jean Paul has been justly praised for his success in drawing and shading
+female characters. Our French critic says: "Richter has the rare merit
+of placing on the stage in the same work six female personages, who have
+not a shadow of resemblance to each other, and who, from the moment of
+their appearance on the scene to that of their quitting it, never
+deviate a single minute from the character the author has given them."
+
+The fate of his Titanide, Linda, created a loud remonstrance in Germany;
+and one can hardly, indeed, help feeling as if poetic justice had been a
+little caricatured, at least, in Richter's disposal of that half
+strong-headed and half headstrong woman. Painful, however, as her end
+is, the Translator could not listen an instant to the suggestion of
+omitting a line of the scenes in which that terrible tragedy is brought
+to a close.
+
+When the "Titan" first appeared, complaint was made by some that there
+was too much of drollery, by others that there was not enough; some
+found too much sentimentality, others too much philosophy; the
+Translator has found it full, if not of that brevity which is the soul
+of _wit_ (not, however, of humor), yet of that variety which is the
+spice of life.
+
+The Translator (or Transplanter, for he aspires to the title) of this
+huge production, in his solicitude to preserve the true German aroma of
+its native earth, may have brought away some part of the soil, and even
+stones, clinging to the roots (_stones of offence_ they may prove to
+many, stones of stumbling to many more). He can only say, that if he had
+made Jean Paul always talk in ordinary, conventional, straightforward,
+instantly intelligible prose, the reader would not have had _Jean Paul
+the Only_.
+
+And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of
+metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd
+digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that
+characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a
+broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in
+this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost
+tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose _heart_ (to use
+the homely phrase) is ever _in the right place_.
+
+It has seemed necessary to give a few notes, and only a few. Properly to
+furnish such a work with annotations would require Jean Paul's own
+voluminous un-commonplace-books of all out-of-the-way knowledge, and
+that _Dictionary to Jean Paul_ which one of his countrymen began, but
+unfortunately carried only through one of his works, the work on
+Education, _Levana_.
+
+The Translator desires emphatically to express his obligations to his
+friend, Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and to _his_ friend, the
+accomplished scholar, Mr. Knorr, to whose kind and patient care whatever
+of accuracy or felicity there may be in his version of the first Jubilee
+is largely due; also, to Rev. Dr. Hedge, and all the friends who have
+helped him with suggestion and encouragement in this large and difficult
+undertaking, he makes his warmest acknowledgments;--and he closes by
+commending the Titan to all lovers of the humanities, confident (in the
+words of Mrs. Lee, in her Life of Jean Paul) that "the more it is read,
+the more it will be acknowledged a work of exalted genius, pure
+morality, and perennial beauty."
+
+                            C. T. B.
+    NEWPORT, R. I.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+THE FOUR LOVELY AND NOBLE SISTERS ON THE THRONE.[1]
+
+_THE DREAM OF TRUTH._
+
+
+Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia once looked down into the
+clear-obscure of earth, and, weary of the ever-bright but cold Olympus,
+yearned to enter in beneath the clouds of our world, where the Soul
+loves more because it suffers more, and where it is sadder but more
+warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, with which Polyhymnia passes
+invisibly up and down the low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our
+hearts; and they mourned that their throne stood so far from the sighs
+of the helpless.
+
+Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and to clothe themselves
+in our mortal form. They came down from Olympus; Love and little loves
+and genii flew playfully after them, and our nightingales fluttered to
+meet them out of the bosom of May.
+
+But, as they touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of
+light, and cast no shadows, then the earnest Queen of gods and men,
+Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and said: "The immortal becomes mortal
+upon the earth, and every spirit becomes a human being!"
+
+So they became human beings and sisters, and were called _Louisa_,
+_Charlotte_, _Theresa_, _Frederica_; the little loves and genii
+transformed themselves into their children, and flew into their maternal
+arms, and the motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love in
+a great embrace. And when the white banner of the blooming spring
+fluttered abroad, and more human thrones stood before them,--and when,
+blissfully softened by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon
+each other and their happy children, and were speechless for love and
+bliss,--then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by over them, and
+recognize them, and gave them the tones wherewith the heart expresses
+and awakens love and joy.
+
+And the dream was ended and fulfilled; it had, as is always the case,
+shaped itself after waking reality. Therefore, be it consecrated to the
+four fair and noble sisters, and let all which is like it in _Titan_ be
+so consecrated too!
+
+                               JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The Titan was published during the years 1800-1803. The four
+sisters were the four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, viz.
+the Duchess of Hildburghausen, the Princess von Solms, the
+Princess of Thun and Taxis, and the Louisa who afterward became
+Queen of Prussia, and was so in the Liberation War.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+FIRST JUBILEE.
+                                                               PAGE
+
+PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--THE
+PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE
+EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF
+BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE
+TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE
+FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING
+OF FANCY                                                          1
+
+
+SECOND JUBILEE.
+
+THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE
+FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A
+STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING
+CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE TORTURE
+SOUPÉ.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD, BUT
+WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION                                 70
+
+
+THIRD JUBILEE.
+
+METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR
+PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN
+OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.                           110
+
+
+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                                   128
+
+
+FIFTH JUBILEE.
+
+GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER
+OF THE KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE
+DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD
+AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY
+PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION
+FOR TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE            161
+
+
+SIXTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE TEN PERSECUTIONS OF THE READER.--LIANA'S EASTERN
+ROOM.--DISPUTATION UPON PATIENCE.--THE PICTURESQUE CURE         197
+
+
+SEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF
+POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL
+"MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON
+BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE                215
+
+
+EIGHTH JUBILEE.
+
+LE PETIT LEVER OF DR. SPHEX.--PATH TO
+LILAR.--WOODLAND-BRIDGE.--THE MORNING IN
+ARCADIA.--CHARITON.--LIANA'S LETTER AND PSALM OF
+GRATITUDE.--SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A GARDEN.--THE
+FLUTE-DELL.--CONCERNING THE REALITY OF THE IDEAL                238
+
+
+NINTH JUBILEE.
+
+PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER
+TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF
+ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN
+THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE
+CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN                                268
+
+
+TENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF
+FRIENDSHIP                                                      310
+
+
+ELEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES      334
+
+
+TWELFTH JUBILEE.
+
+FROULAY'S BIRTHDAY AND PROJECTS.--EXTRA-LEAF.--RABETTE.--THE
+HARMONICA.--NIGHT.--THE PIOUS FATHER.--THE WONDROUS
+STAIRWAY.--THE APPARITION                                       351
+
+
+THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE
+PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TÊTE-À-TÊTE.--THE
+RIDE TO BLUMENBÃœHL                                              384
+
+
+FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO AND LIANA                                                405
+
+
+FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+MAN AND WOMAN                                                   432
+
+
+SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE SORROWS OF A DAUGHTER                                       481
+
+
+
+
+TITAN.
+
+FIRST JUBILEE.
+
+     PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--THE
+     PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE
+     EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF
+     BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE
+     TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE
+     FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING
+     OF FANCY.
+
+
+1. CYCLE.
+
+On a fine spring evening, the young Spanish Count Cesara came, with his
+companions, Schoppe and Dian, to Sesto, in order the next morning to
+cross over to the Borromæan island, Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore. The
+proudly blooming youth glowed with the excitement of travelling, and
+with thoughts of the coming morrow, when he should see the isle, that
+gayly decorated throne of Spring, and on it a man who had been promised
+him for twenty years. This twofold glow exalted my picturesque hero to
+the form of an angry god of the Muses. His beauty made a more triumphal
+entry into Italian eyes than into the narrow Northern ones from the
+midst of which he had come; in Milan many had wished he were of marble,
+and stood with elder gods of stone, either in the Farnese Palace or in
+the Clementine Museum, or in the Villa of Albani; nay, had not the
+Bishop of Novara, with his sword at his side, a few hours before, asked
+Schoppe (riding behind) who he was? And had not the latter, with a droll
+squaring of the wrinkle-circle round his lips, made this copious answer
+(by way of enlightening his spiritual lordship): "It's my Telemachus,
+and I am the Mentor. I am the milling-machine and the die which coins
+him,--the wolf's tooth and flattening mill which polishes him down,--the
+man, in short, that regulates him"?
+
+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.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Scale.--TR.
+
+[3] This statue, thirty-five ells high, on a pedestal of
+twenty-five ells, in whose head twelve men can find room, stands
+near Arona, and is exactly of a height with Isola Bella, which
+stands over against it, and which rises on ten gardens or
+terraces built one upon another.--_Keysler's Travels, &c._, Vol.
+I.
+
+[4] The old Kremnitz ducats have the infant Jesus on the right
+arm; but the new and _lighter_ ones on the left.
+
+[5] Franklin advised the preserving and corking up of vessels
+from which all the liquor had been drunk, in order thereby to
+keep the ship afloat.
+
+[6] The horse, in the funeral procession of a prince, that comes
+last, and is decked out gayly for the successor of the
+deceased.--TR.
+
+[7] Gray-league (Grau-bünden), the Swiss Canton of the
+Grisons.--TR.
+
+[8] Pictures by Peter Molyn, who, on account of his fine storms,
+was called only Tempesta.
+
+[9] The Pasquino is notoriously mutilated.--Delia Porta was a
+great restorer of old statues.
+
+[10] I. e. to be pressed between two wooden cylinders and a
+metallic one.
+
+[11] This pill consists of Antimonia Regia, and by reason of its
+hardness may be swallowed over and over again with the same
+effect each time; only a little wine is sprinkled on it before
+each repetition of the experiment.
+
+[12] _Tirare di primavere_, the people call it; and Peter Schoppe
+translated it grandly enough, _Electrical pistol-firing of
+spring_.
+
+[13] Quotation-marks.--TR.
+
+[14] A good Wouwermann means, in painters' language, a
+well-executed horse, the sight of which has an influence on the
+beauty of the future colt.
+
+[15] This name is given to the quantum which is withheld from the
+associate judges of the Supreme Court when they have not worked
+enough.
+
+[16] The Ipecacuanha belongs to the Violet species.
+
+[17] Of the order of St. Paul, or _memento mori_, which died in
+France in the seventeenth century. The above address is its usual
+greeting.
+
+[18] The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the
+power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the
+earth.
+
+[19] According to the account of some astronomers, that the sun,
+when eclipsed, has sometimes shone through an opening of the
+moon, Ulloa, e. g., assures us that he once witnessed.
+
+[20] In Calabria (1785) a thousand and four earthquakes happened
+in the space of three fourths of a year.--_Münter's Travels, &c._
+
+
+
+
+_INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMME_
+
+TO TITAN.
+
+
+Before I dedicated Titan to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor and Feudal
+Provost of Flachsenfingen, Mr. Von Hafenreffer, I first requested
+permission from him in the following terms:--
+
+"Since you have assisted far more in this history than the Russian Court
+did in Voltaire's Genesis-History of Peter the Great, you cannot confer
+any handsomer favor upon a heart longing to thank you, than the
+permission to offer and dedicate to you, as to a Jew's God, what you
+have created."
+
+But he wrote me back on the spot:--
+
+     "For the same reason, you might still better, in imitation
+     of Sonnenfels, dedicate the work to yourself, and, in a more
+     just sense than others, combine in one person author and
+     patron. I beg you then (were it only on Mr. Von **'s and
+     Mrs. Von **'s account) to leave me out of the play, and
+     confine yourself to the most indispensable notices, which
+     you may be pleased to give the public, of the very
+     mechanical interest which I have in your beautiful work; but
+     for the gods' sake, hic hæc hoc hujus huic hunc hanc hoc hoc
+     hac hoc.
+
+                                        "VON HAFENREFFER."
+
+
+The Latin line is a cipher, and shall remain dark to the public.
+What the same public has to demand in the way of Introductory
+Programme consists of four explanations of title, and one of
+fact.
+
+The first nominal explanation, which relates to the _Jubilee Period_, I
+get from the founder of the Period, the Rector Franke, who explains it
+to be an Era or space of time, invented by him, of one hundred and
+fifty-two Cycles, each of which contains in itself its good forty-nine
+tropical Lunar-Solar years. The word _Jubilee_ is prefixed by the Rector
+for this reason, that in every seventh year a lesser, and in every seven
+times seventh, or forty-ninth, a greater, Jubilee-, Intercalary-,
+Indulgence-, Sabbath-, or Trumpet-year occurred, in which one lived
+without debts, without sowing and laboring, and without slavery. I make
+a sufficiently happy application, as it seems to me, of this title,
+Jubilee, to my historical chapters, which conduct the business-man and
+the business-woman round and round in an easy cycle or circle full of
+free Sabbath-, Indulgence-, Trumpet-, and Jubilee-hours, in which both
+have neither to sow nor to pay, but only to reap and to rest; for I am
+the only one who, like the bowed and crooked-up drudge of a ploughman,
+stand at my writing-table, and see sowing-machines, and debts of honor,
+and manacles, before and on me. The seven thousand four hundred and
+forty-eight tropical Lunar-Solar years which one of Franke's Jubilee
+periods includes are also found with me, but only dramatically, because
+in every chapter just that number of ideas--and ideas are, indeed, the
+long and cubic measure of time--will be presented by me to the reader,
+till the short time has become as long to him as the chapter required.
+
+A Cycle, which is the subject of my second nominal definition, needs by
+this time no definition at all.
+
+The third nominal definition has to describe the _obligato-leaves_,
+which I edit in loose sheets in every Jubilee period. The
+obligato-leaves admit absolutely none but pure contemporaneous facts,
+less immediately connected with my hero, concerning persons, however,
+the more immediately connected with him; in the obligato-leaves,
+moreover, not the smallest satirical extravasate of digression, no, not
+of the size of a blister, is perceptible; but the happy reader journeys
+on with his dear ones, free and wide awake, right through the ample
+court-residence and riding-ground and landscape of a whole, long volume,
+amidst purely historical figures, surrounded on all sides by busy
+mining-companies and Jews'-congregations, advancing columns on the
+march, mounted hordes, and companies of strolling players,--and his eye
+cannot be satisfied with seeing.
+
+But when the Tome is ended, then begins--this is the last nominal
+definition--a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no
+narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long
+bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I
+name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private
+gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my _honey-moons_,
+because I make less honey therein than I eat, busily employed, not as a
+working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb.
+Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily
+distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the
+undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked
+myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity
+to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the
+readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'Horen,'
+Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a
+wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened?
+
+As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the
+_contrat-social_ among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a
+crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound
+than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under
+date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always
+stick to the subject-matter,--which is the history,--because otherwise
+people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this,
+that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty
+volumes, or even a longer one,--as in this, for instance,--thinks or
+laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in
+the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,--which sentence
+has been already executed on me more than once.
+
+Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in
+the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and
+digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as
+the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present
+reduced to a prescriptive right and confirmed into a servitude, the
+reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of
+Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but
+honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in
+former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and
+begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,--as I
+do here,--have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a
+matter of course, not only the _tribute_ as _alms_, but also the _don
+gratuit_ as _quarterly assessment_. So does not merely the cultivated
+Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the
+traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.
+
+I come now to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor, Von Hafenreffer, who is
+the subject of my promised _exposé of fact_.
+
+It must have been formerly learned from the 45th Dog-Post-Day, who
+governs Flachsenfingen, namely, my revered father. This striking
+promotion of mine was, at the bottom, more a step than a spring; for I
+was, previously, no less than a Jurist, consequently the germ or bud of
+an embryo Doctor _utriusque_, and consequently a nobleman, since in the
+Doctor the whole spawn and yolk of the Knight lies; therefore the
+former, as well as the latter, when anything chances by, lives upon his
+saddle or stirrup, although less in a robber's castle than in a robber's
+chamber; I have, therefore, since the preferment, changed less myself
+than my castle of residence;--the paternal seat in Flachsenfingen is at
+present my own.
+
+I care not now to eat my sugar-cake at court with sin,--although one
+earns sugar-cake and manna more comfortably than ship-bread,--but I
+represent, in order to make a profit upon my adventure, the whole
+Flachsenfingen Department of Foreign Affairs at home here in the castle,
+together with the requisite deciphering chancery. This, then, is what we
+shall do: we have a Procurator in Vienna, two Residents in five Imperial
+cities, a Secretary of the Comitia in Ratisbon under the
+Cross-Bench,[21] three Chancery-clerks of the circle, and an
+Envoyé-Plenipotentiary at a well-known and considerable court not far
+from Hohenfliess, who is no other than the aforementioned Mr. Feudal
+Provost Von Hafenreffer. To the latter my father has even advanced a
+complete silver-service, which we lend him, till he shall have received
+his recall, because it is for our own interest that a Flachsenfingen
+ambassador should, while abroad, do extraordinary honor, by his
+extravagance, to the princely hat or coronet of Flachsenfingen.
+
+Now it is no joke to stand on such a post as this of mine; the whole
+legation-writing-and-reading company write to me under frank, the
+_chiffre banal_ and the _chiffre déchiffrant_ are in my hands, and I
+understand, as it seems to me, the whole mess. It is unutterable, all
+that I thus learn: it could not be read by men nor drawn by horses, if I
+were disposed to hatch, biographically, and feed and reel off the whole
+silk-worm seed of novels, which the corps of ambassadors send me every
+post-day in closely-sealed packages. Yes (to use another metaphor), the
+biographical timber which my float-inspection launches for me from up
+above,--now into the Elbe, now into the Saale, now into the
+Danube,--stands already so high before me in the ship-yard, that I could
+not use it up, supposing I drove on the æsthetical building of my
+biographical fools'-ships, masquerade-balls, and enchanted castles, day
+and night, year out and year in, and never danced, nor rode, nor spoke,
+nor sneezed again in my life....
+
+Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against
+many another spawn, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man
+should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from
+himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and
+hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my
+legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports,
+would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean
+cloister-passages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now,
+for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent
+women of the world, veimers[22] ministers of justice, as well as jesters
+pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the
+Pointeurs.[23]
+
+I come back to my ambassador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned
+distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies
+me--without neglecting other duties--from month to month with as many
+personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his
+legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;--the smallest trifles
+are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different
+way of thinking from that of other ambassadors, who in their reports
+make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance
+into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every _cul de sac_,
+servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his
+opera-glass of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's
+virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a
+hand-and-horse service of good luck, no one of us can wonder,--that is,
+I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,--with
+such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,--with
+such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,--in
+short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, or
+Montgolfiers,[24]--it cannot of course be anything but just what is
+expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain
+height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which
+will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much)
+on the Sun, on Uranus and Sirius, and for which even the lucky
+quill-scraper who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints
+the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself,
+and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy _tooth_ of
+time,--especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by
+the tooth-saw of the critical file,--shall be able to make any
+impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of
+humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but
+unhappily every nature holds itself,--as Dr. Crusius does the
+world,--not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.
+
+The present _Titan_ enjoys, besides, the further advantage that I at
+this moment inhabit and grace the paternal court, and accordingly, as
+draughtsman, have certain sins near and bright before my eyes in a
+position most favorable for observation, of which at least Vanity,
+Libertinism, and Idleness will stay and sit for their likeness; for fate
+has sowed these mushrooms and mosses as high as possible among the upper
+classes, because in the lower and broader they would have spread too
+much, and sucked them dry,--which seems to be the pattern of that same
+foresight by which ships always have their assafœtida which they
+bring from Persia hanging overhead on the mast, in order that its stench
+may not contaminate the freight on deck. Moreover, I have up here in the
+court all the new fashions already around me for my observation and
+contempt, before they have been, down below there, only traduced, not to
+say commended,--e. g. the fine fashion of the Parisians, that women
+shall by a slight tuck in their dress show their calves, which they do
+in Paris, in order to let it be seen that they are not gentlemen, who,
+as is well known, walk on wooden legs,--this fashion will to-morrow or
+day after to-morrow (for it has arrived on an individual lady) be
+certainly introduced. But the females of Flachsenfingen imitate this
+fashion on quite another ground,--for gentlemen among us have no
+defect,--and that is, as a way of proving that they are human beings,
+and not apes (to say nothing less), since, according to Camper and
+others, man alone has calves. The same proof was adduced ten years ago,
+only on higher grounds. For since, according to Haller, man is
+distinguished from monkey in no other respect than by the possession of
+a posterior, the female officers of the crown, the dressing-maids,
+sought as much as possible to magnify in the persons of their mistresses
+this characteristic of their sex by art,--by the so-called _cul de
+Paris_; and, with such a penultimate of the ultimate, it became then a
+jest and an amusement to distinguish at a distance of two hundred paces
+a woman of the world from her female ape,--a thing which now many who
+know their Buffon by heart will venture to do, when they are no nearer
+to her than too near.
+
+Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I maintain in several
+of the German cities;--my honored father pays for them;--in most places
+one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as
+many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much
+like perspective-glasses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that
+is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author,
+from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household
+operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles
+distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that
+a staid, quiet man, whom nobody knows but his barber, and whose course
+of life is like a dark, unfrequented _cul de sac_, but whom one of my
+envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror,
+which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all,
+into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,--the case may
+occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up
+to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there
+smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair,
+buttons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three
+hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of _Indian_ plants
+which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter.
+
+People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the
+people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no ambassadors
+near me.
+
+But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but
+from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into
+cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out.
+No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery,
+and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge, has seemed thus far
+to avert the discovery of the _true_ names of my histories, and, indeed,
+with such success, that of all the manuscripts which have hitherto been
+despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject,
+not one has smelt the mouse,--and truly fortunate for the world; for so
+soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first
+volumes of Titan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic
+chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.
+
+Nothing is to be inferred from the names which I use, for I press into
+the service God-parents for my heroes in the most singular ways. Have I
+not, e. g., often of an evening, during the marching and countermarching
+of the German armies, who made their crusades to the holy sepulchre of
+freedom, gone up and down through the lanes of the camp, with my
+writing-tablets in my hands, and caught and entered the names of the
+privates,--which, just before bedtime, were called out aloud, like the
+names of saints,--just as they fell, in order to distribute them again
+among my biographical people? And has not merit been promoted thereby,
+and many a common soldier risen to be a nobleman fit for table and
+tournament, and have not provost-marshals been raised to ministers of
+justice, and red-cloaks to _patribus purpuratis_? And did ever a cock
+crow in all the army after this corps of observation slinking round
+mobilized on two legs?
+
+For authors who wish at the same time to narrate and disguise true
+anecdotes, I am, perhaps, on the whole, a model and file-leader. I have
+studied and imitated longer than other historical inquirers those little
+innocent stretching and wrenching processes which can make a history
+unrecognizable to the very hero of the same, and I fancy I know how one
+is to make good biographies of princes, protocols of high traitors,
+legends of saints, and auto-biographies; no stronger touches decide the
+matter than those slight ones, by which Peter of Cortona (or Beretino)
+in the presence of Ferdinand of Tuscany transformed a weeping child into
+a laughing one, and the reverse.
+
+Voltaire demands more than once, as he always does,--for he gave
+mankind, like an army, every order of march three times, and repeated
+himself and everything else most indefatigably,--that the historian
+shall arrange his history after the law-table of the drama, to a
+dramatic focal point. It is, however, one of the first dramatic rules
+which Lessing, Aristotle, and the Greek models give us, that the
+dramatic poet must lend to every historical circumstance which he treats
+all that is favorable to the poetic illusion, as well as keep clear of
+everything opposite, and that he must never sacrifice beauty to truth,
+but the reverse. Voltaire gave, as is well known, not only the easy
+rule, but the hard model also; and this great theatre poet of the
+world's theatre, in his _benefit_ dramas of Peter and Charles, never
+stuck to the truth where he was sure he could attain sooner to illusion.
+And that is properly the genuine romantic history corresponding to the
+historical romance. It is not for me, but for others,--namely, the
+Provost and the Secretaries of Legation,--to decide how far I have
+treated a true history illusorily. It is a misfortune that the true
+history of my hero can hardly ever see the light; otherwise the justice
+might be done me that connoisseurs would confront my poetical deviations
+with the truth, and thereafter give each of us more easily his own, as
+well the truth as myself. But this reward is what all royal
+historiographers and scandalous chroniclers must resign _nolens volens_,
+because the true history never appears in conjunction with their works.
+
+But in the composition of a history an author must also keep a sharp
+look-out upon this point, that it shall not only hit and betray no real
+persons, but also no false ones, and in fact nobody at all. Before I, e.
+g., choose a name for a bad prince, I must look through the genealogical
+index of all governing and governed families, in order not to use a name
+which some person or other already bears; thus, in Otaheite, even the
+words which sound like the name of the king are abolished after his
+coronation, and supplied by others. Now, as I was formerly acquainted
+with no living courts at all, I was not in a situation, when preparing
+the battle-pieces and night-pieces which I painted of the Cabals, the
+Egoism, and the Libertinism of biographical courts, to succeed in
+skilfully avoiding every resemblance to real ones; yes, for such an
+idiot as I, it was a miserable help, even, to be often laying
+Machiavelli open before me, in order, with the assistance of the French
+history, by painting from the two, to turn off the edge of the
+application at least upon countries in which no Frenchman or Italian
+ever had the influence that is generally attributed to both of them upon
+other Germans; just as Herder, in opposition to those naturalists who
+derive certain misshapen tribes of men from a half-parentage of apes,
+makes the very good remark that most of the resemblances to apes--the
+retreating skull of the Calmucks, the prominent ears of the Pevas, the
+slender hands in Carolina--appear just in those countries where there
+are no apes at all. Formerly, then, as was said, striking unlikenesses I
+could not succeed in hitting; now, on the contrary, every court around
+which my legation-flotilla coasts is well known to me, and therefore
+secure from accidental resemblances, particularly every one which I
+describe,--that of Flachsenfingen, that of Hohenfliess, &c. The
+theatrical mask which I have on in my works is not the mask of the Greek
+comedian, which was embossed after the face of the individual
+satirized,[25] but the mask of Nero, which, when he acted a goddess on
+the stage, looked like his mistress,[26] and when he acted a god, like
+himself.
+
+Enough! This digressive introductory programme has been somewhat long,
+but the Jubilee-period was so, too: the longer the St. John's day of a
+country, the longer its St. Thomas's night. And now let us dance along
+together into the book,--into this free ball of the world,--I first as
+leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me; so
+that, amidst the sounding baptismal and funeral bells in the Chinese
+house of this world-building,--welcomed by the singing-school of the
+muses,--serenaded from on high by the guitar of Phœbus,--we may dance
+gayly from Tome to Tome, from Cycle to Cycle, from one digression to
+another, from one dash to another,--till either the work comes to an
+end, or the workman, or everybody!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] _Querbank_,--Bench for Protestant Bishops in the Germanic
+Diet.
+
+[22] _Veimer_,--old Westphalian judges.
+
+[23] Tellers in faro-banks.
+
+[24] The inventor of the balloon.--TR.
+
+[25] Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie, etc. de Dubois, Tom. I.
+Sect. 42.
+
+[26] Sueton. Nero.
+
+
+
+
+SECOND JUBILEE.
+
+     THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE
+     FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A
+     STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING
+     CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE
+     TORTURE-SOUPÉ.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD,
+     BUT WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION.
+
+
+10. CYCLE.
+
+In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful
+prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the
+full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cluster and the olive often
+ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan
+(Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all
+things which belong to May--in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May
+butter--he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood
+itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a
+princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of
+counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that
+mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent
+clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and
+fencing-schools, all anticipation of the coming riddles and conflicts of
+his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with his heart full of the
+glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms
+no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double
+conquest.
+
+The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke
+around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in
+full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he
+revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook
+their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;--the
+Librarian sought a _physical_ solution of the acoustic and optical
+illusion; the Lector sought a _political_ one: he could not at all
+comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially
+meant by it all.
+
+This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was
+directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he
+could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar.
+"Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I
+should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I
+would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit
+and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during
+the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too
+few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve
+in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls
+curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain
+beats gladly a free heart.
+
+At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and
+nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they
+approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and
+now the Principality of _Hohenfliess_ lay only one principality distant
+from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the
+first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been
+merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is
+known to geographical readers, _Haarhaar_. The Lector told the
+Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the
+two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much
+because they were _diplomatic_ relatives--although it is true that,
+among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than
+brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old
+folks among the Brandenburghers--as because they were really relatives,
+and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were
+disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two
+courts,--which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,--with all their
+heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him,
+namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the
+principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last
+hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to
+wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the
+land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned
+advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political
+mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told
+for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so
+generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial
+estate of Hohenfliess--its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and
+breed of horses--in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the
+highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great
+intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to
+population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of
+Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not
+even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the
+shepherd's-flute; not of the _energies_ and _matrimonial prospects_ of
+others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must
+ruin!"
+
+As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an
+excursion to Blumenbühl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a
+look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his
+cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the
+city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which
+besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the
+conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness
+of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at
+his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short,
+that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of
+Blumenbühl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the
+world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high
+life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy
+and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.
+
+It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee,
+because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go
+to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however,
+to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates
+against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they
+stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the
+church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned
+round, the tower of Blumenbühl below them to the east; from the one and
+from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his
+future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village,
+and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which
+gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days.
+He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life,
+and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the
+Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.
+
+But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red
+shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy
+day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood,
+when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod,
+over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with
+him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and
+become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so
+sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.
+
+
+11. CYCLE.
+
+It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day--and likewise on the
+birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not
+received the title yet--that this same director--that was to be--had
+his chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pestitz, and see the
+Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the _flail_ of the
+state, by way of experiment, into a _drill-plough_. He was a brisk,
+bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill
+to others, and to whom nothing made time pass heavily but pastime. "In
+the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it,
+for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist
+in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an
+Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,--little as there was in
+it,--and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.
+
+But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to
+the reader?
+
+Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had
+chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to
+mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted
+with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has
+generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only _inborn_ not _acquired_
+sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not
+to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclopædia of
+all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say,
+the rector of the place,--named Wehmeier, better known by the title of
+Band-box-master,--after schooling the village youth for the usual number
+of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest _Struve's spare hours_, his
+_Otia_ and _Noctes Hagianæ_, in teaching Albano, and driving into the
+mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy--impelled by internal
+streams--alphabetic pins,--so as to make it the barrel of a
+speech-organ. Of course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something
+heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the
+language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a
+hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of
+counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither
+note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering
+pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the
+Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself
+so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So,
+also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it
+were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary,
+sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery
+of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent
+its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often
+in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed
+of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from
+quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which
+would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests,
+only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating _aura
+seminalis_ to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider,
+you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the
+thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the
+flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups,
+instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,--and who
+grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the
+dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the
+vine-dressers, with your hoeing and your dunging and your clipping. O,
+can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe
+organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all,
+alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt
+ourselves to the perception of her beauty,--can you ever, in any way,
+make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had
+they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with
+their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence
+it is that your _élèves_ so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in
+spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow
+and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.
+
+Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards
+him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and
+made the mark ["with care"] with which merchants commend valuable boxes
+of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery
+child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had
+confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the
+centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without
+hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own
+off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at
+evening before the new teacher from the city.
+
+Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all
+that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark
+and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the
+creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those
+king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in
+reference to her companion, may be compared with Luke, and mine with
+Matthew.[28] Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family
+feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great
+good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which
+installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid
+up against this day as a birthday christening present.
+
+But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano
+stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting
+out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house;
+for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him
+than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to
+Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at
+least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will,
+however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister,
+Rabette, that annoying _foster_) said, without thinking, No, although
+she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn
+little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will
+and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,--then
+the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and
+pleaded for him, without knowing why,--then Albina protested at least he
+should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,--then he
+marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the
+female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition,
+gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the
+presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.
+
+
+12. CYCLE.
+
+Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules
+strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed
+them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years.
+Exultingly did his new and old Adam--they flew side by side--flap their
+wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring
+ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a
+journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the
+butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned
+herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a
+shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a
+shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the
+upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party
+and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted
+and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their
+dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for
+the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and
+although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and
+earnings,--because an honest man like him finds always in the body
+politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the
+stone _drapery_ remains,--nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and
+feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was
+just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.
+
+The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I
+offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the
+herdsman's mountain fortification, and received from the soldier's wife
+the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all
+eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the
+wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry
+chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the
+windows and looked in beckoning,--when Albano beheld, under the window
+toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on
+which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun
+shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,--when at the western window
+he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the
+Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,--when he
+placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!"
+then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must
+needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.
+
+The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat.
+The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden
+full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the
+cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to
+sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet
+ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who,
+blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she
+dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano
+stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley,
+and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish
+longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself
+away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself free and
+passive into the broad ether!--and so plashing up and down in the cool,
+all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and
+unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,--or to sweep
+after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured
+assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn
+between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to
+little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the
+peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun,
+and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into
+his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at
+last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter,
+intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red
+clouds!...
+
+Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones?
+Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the
+slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,--just as
+if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low
+earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its
+chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the
+horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through
+the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the
+presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the
+chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness,
+and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it
+must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the
+body the body also can lift up the soul.
+
+The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade
+along with the brook, which was running away into the pale-green birch
+thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown
+him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,[29] and he loved to go
+with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would
+itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook,
+deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out
+through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He
+could not accomplish it,--the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the
+brook broader,--the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high
+overhead;--but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic
+polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus,
+for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so
+agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as
+the longest; but the day after either was fatal.[30]
+
+At last, after the progress of some hours in time and space, he heard,
+beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of
+the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by
+two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent
+to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called
+out on all sides of him, but in a cry;--it was his private patron saint,
+the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his
+account at the foot of the mountain.
+
+He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with
+a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch
+of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of
+passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant
+lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the
+landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white,
+glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,--when
+he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town--views of which hung in
+the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the
+mountains--distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates
+for him were closed,--and when, indeed, everything seemed flying
+westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the
+grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away
+over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the
+oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned
+Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great
+fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero
+the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the
+subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood--ah yes, every
+age--often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every
+other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's.
+Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of
+consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye
+turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than
+they show or we imagine.
+
+Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved
+tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner,
+and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the
+bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,--and the thought that
+this was the birthday of his foster-father,--and his inexpressible love
+for his afflicted mother, upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when
+he was alone,--and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to
+weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the
+Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his
+seeking mother.
+
+He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind
+Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly
+through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a
+fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons
+from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her
+arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young
+gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and
+from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.
+
+Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep
+only their promises, but never a threat,--resembling the forest-officers
+of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws,
+impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to
+one hundred kreutzers.[31] They, however, like Solon, who gave out his
+laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the
+proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.
+
+
+13. CYCLE.
+
+I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a
+grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute
+among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself, were I
+not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying
+back of the table dinner-service.
+
+Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and
+phosphorescing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the
+blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the
+morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender
+emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,--even as
+at evening we remember the morning,--and the forms of Nature drew nearer
+to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present
+offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is
+the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With
+what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the
+eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the
+screaming of the cocks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper
+and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again
+on the shore of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the
+valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead
+in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy
+lamb-clouds!
+
+Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes
+and groping too far into the garden,--besides, the blind girl did not
+see,--holding his arms open before him so as not to run against
+anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up,
+he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside,
+stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one,
+holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"--and as she, with a
+modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down
+on her bowed head with sweet emotion.
+
+Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money
+and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by
+him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,--from whose
+ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically
+possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give
+them back,--she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound
+off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But
+the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an _inner_, finer band, and the
+blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so
+overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of
+Dresden into her apron, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one
+on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came
+trudging up the Pestitz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly,
+to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of
+exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a
+magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind
+eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink
+herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and
+would rather please herself in the glass than others out of it. The
+merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought
+up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a
+piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into
+short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair
+down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon,
+and a very serviceable leather queue of Würzburg fabric into the
+bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,--so was Lea with
+hope,--the Jew said he must pack up,--besides, the hair-queue which he
+had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the
+first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every
+morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the
+poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French Insigné, and
+buckled on the Würzburg sheath.
+
+And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise
+of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very
+pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue
+actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living
+scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-god,
+to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.
+
+By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real
+wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had
+her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of
+pure _monkery_ and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape,
+and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires
+of Pestitz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not
+now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor
+any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....
+
+But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the
+shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's
+wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious
+lady,--for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the
+male support of _Titan_, firmly planted by some farmers' boys--to whom,
+moreover, Albina has intrusted the _remarche-règlement_ of hastening his
+return--on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of
+the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying
+horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the
+arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could
+not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his
+picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and
+coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half
+as much as the last bird.
+
+I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff
+dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous
+Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green
+Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine
+figure!
+
+The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at
+the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the
+Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned
+bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.
+
+
+14. CYCLE.
+
+Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form
+and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil
+lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy
+shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of
+a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every
+minute his _élève_ fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments,
+like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus; "and this too,
+now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far
+along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore
+scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the
+sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a
+lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of
+the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the
+master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a
+real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God!
+Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of
+bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there
+better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting--like
+a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge--that
+children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are,
+and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of
+village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet,
+in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble
+chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly
+bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be
+outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years
+old,--supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.
+
+When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and
+the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor
+had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the
+locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps.
+The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the
+Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in
+the way of his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a
+forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The
+soldier's wife wrung her hands,--the servants arranged themselves for
+the taking down from the cross,--the poor little fellow, in a fever,
+drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose
+and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole."
+He would have done it--and put an untimely end to his life and my
+Titan--merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal
+insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the
+chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide
+and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet
+proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at
+that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the
+key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably
+exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an
+Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;--ah,
+Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler,
+end in a discord?--and, secondly, because he had there a
+singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant
+house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as
+spectator of this _début_. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round
+before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his
+pockets;--the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated
+Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard,
+and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another
+has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in
+his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The Band-box master was best off;
+for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of
+agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his
+consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.
+
+Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with
+him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its
+finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and
+the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and
+highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes
+from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and
+from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides
+turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and
+sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and
+energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to
+behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the
+ground below.
+
+Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had
+it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it,
+from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as
+if they could eat him,"--as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He
+voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted
+him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the
+work-shop,--and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned,
+controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's
+harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's
+mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his
+staving through a window, and firing, from the port-hole, a few of the
+most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.
+
+By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and
+boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came
+slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth
+of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down
+along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line
+of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of
+a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the
+Würzburg queue like a tail-feather.
+
+Wehmeier stared at the _cauda prehensilis_ (the ring-tail), and by his
+attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as
+much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of
+his--Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day
+with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten,
+home.
+
+
+15. CYCLE.
+
+The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of
+her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous
+spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might
+transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,--yes, as a
+sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had
+packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the
+cabinet of the dining-room,--and for Albano Albina had already contrived
+an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the _vocation_ of
+the Province. Ah, but what did the lady get from it all but flames,
+which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in
+his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the
+sprinkling of the magister?
+
+Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband
+for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in
+the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as
+ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness,
+because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,--then step by step she
+took back the right,--but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as
+nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their
+mouths,--and at last said he should just give the child up to her.
+
+But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the
+Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in
+reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast
+in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened
+evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own,
+and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a
+teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him--though he himself
+dared and did too much--to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback,
+or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not
+just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose
+educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter
+condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner,
+and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?
+
+Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his
+defiant way to the father's study, and therefore to the court-martial
+punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from
+behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him
+down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning,
+tied on the _vena cava_ of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up
+to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited
+him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical
+mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and
+hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and
+impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally
+she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"
+
+He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated,
+into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant.
+Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice
+of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its
+unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the
+table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad
+habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation
+with wine.
+
+In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by
+their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time
+had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the
+violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a
+low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world
+that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to
+be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of
+the dulcimer let his musical hammer fall on the stringed floor.
+Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the
+whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and
+waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the
+cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs,
+ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their
+leather aprons and _culs de Paris_, to take themselves off instantly.
+
+Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her
+sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew
+he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she
+represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present
+child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in
+which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the
+absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying
+and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his
+waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person
+before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he
+had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle,
+who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would
+certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man
+the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned
+into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul
+in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to
+drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing,
+convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones.
+After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal
+evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon himself by his rides and
+his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on
+every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely,
+herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony
+throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day
+think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.
+
+Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had
+been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed
+upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained
+cold and hard,--for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point,
+the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just
+before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue,
+which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in
+the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Würzburg appendage off over his head.
+Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment,
+with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and
+say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in
+future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified
+tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned
+immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with
+too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all
+torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him,
+"and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly
+done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him,
+but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she
+had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair
+as an act of obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children
+in high life.
+
+Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his
+long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping
+before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and
+thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off,
+the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing
+more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay
+thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and
+while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes
+himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with
+his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly
+and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then
+will the old man read the _Decretum_ over again still more slowly, so as
+almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with
+indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it,
+make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness
+and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him
+thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy
+downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry
+cheeks,--then will he look a pretty long time after his departing
+darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over
+the address of the diploma at his will.
+
+Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?
+
+
+16. CYCLE.
+
+Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above
+the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of
+discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf
+of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he
+shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and
+if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary
+partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he
+would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in
+his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.
+
+Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her
+his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna,
+he said not, as usual, _nolo episcopari_; he did not say he was hemmed
+round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that
+perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of
+fortune,--instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more
+common to brides,--he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told
+Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked
+what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the
+Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and
+Rabette, and all.
+
+But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through
+Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the
+arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the
+greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as
+entertaining _acteur_ of the table, he had so much to do with
+conversing, _savoir vivre_, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in
+proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he
+was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers,
+chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting
+them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard
+fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's
+pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the
+feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague,
+and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume
+to himself the magnificent _winter crop_ in Alban's sowed field as his
+own _summer crop_. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all
+the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the
+aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]
+
+With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own
+hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a
+three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his
+entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some
+time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir,"
+replied coldly and gravely the _paradeur_ of a Falterle by the side of
+our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well
+at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to
+scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a
+cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."
+
+What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two
+brothers-in-office!--the master of accomplishments with the motley
+scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow
+outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the
+waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a
+roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him,
+and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of
+candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle
+had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and
+every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were
+the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master
+wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former
+in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,--the one flapping up like
+a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with
+the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial
+root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his
+green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A
+magnificent set-off, I repeat!
+
+The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led
+forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But
+now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his
+napkin open first,--which became now, as it were, introductory programme
+and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "_Posément,
+Monsieur_," said he to the novice, "_il est messéant de déplier la
+serviette avant que les autres aient déplié les leurs_." After some
+minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one _à la
+Brittanière_, with rings. "_Il est mésseant, Monsieur_," said
+the master of accomplishments, "_de souffler sa soupe_." The
+Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from
+the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short,
+frightened into a dead calm.
+
+When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on
+the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced
+veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed
+more inwardly than outwardly.
+
+After the bomb, came in a pike _au four_, to which, as is well known,
+the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly
+give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher
+what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "_Pardonnez,
+Monsieur_," said his rival gourmand, "_c'est du brochet au four, mon
+cher Compte; mais il est mésseant de demander le nom de quelque mets
+qu'il soit,--on feint de le savoir_."
+
+It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced
+through the Magister's marrow and bone; the _instruments of passion_
+which lay in the cut-off head of the pike _au four_, as in an armory,
+continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he
+thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them,
+and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as
+he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs
+despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he
+was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with
+the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine,
+and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed him most
+lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him
+the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official
+brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and
+the pike _au four_, and could not help laughing up there on his planet,
+to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of
+brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken
+pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out
+of him every day as that other fellow raked in.
+
+We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this
+lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably
+delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a
+diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all
+diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and
+more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,--at
+which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the
+little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,--until at least with one word he
+had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's
+concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company
+how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for
+any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry
+soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer
+punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but
+quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he
+had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son;
+but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense
+for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like
+vines and bees. Besides, deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of
+their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have
+satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by _opera
+supererogationis_ in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than
+win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g.
+Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest
+achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a
+geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried
+on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith
+they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not
+this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself
+a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being
+children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin
+bow?
+
+But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very
+friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the
+magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but
+with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble
+Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard,
+clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the
+ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the
+life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the _frère terrible_, wherewith they
+kept him under,--but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his
+crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling;
+however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.
+
+Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all
+corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a
+favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as
+himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old,
+speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano
+has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of
+Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not
+yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which
+made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes,
+cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the
+circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on
+amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour
+making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets
+there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite
+our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider,
+ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle
+said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody,
+because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I,"
+that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he
+harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly,
+not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only
+honey (i. e. a little praise).
+
+"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he
+had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer
+shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister
+sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much
+for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with
+the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow;
+and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat
+cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went
+slowly out.
+
+The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his
+Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom
+he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement
+was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the
+last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high
+things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the
+close, drowsy cradle of childhood,--he had sprung at once out of the
+warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,--he
+saw the _toga virilis_ hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and
+said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"
+
+Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too
+easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation,
+resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of
+the fig-tree seeming _fruits_ sprout forth, which are only the fleshy
+rinds of the _blossoms_!
+
+And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and
+exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,--just now
+must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his
+bosom,--he determined to pass through the coming years as through a
+white colonnade of monumental pillars,--already a mere Alumnus from the
+city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic
+author,--and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely
+accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father?
+Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and
+the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of his inner world into a sweltry
+mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,--rush
+into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again
+without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a
+night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered
+at the little pilgrim without a hat.
+
+But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party.
+This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching
+the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.
+
+The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of
+Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and
+enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins,
+wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but
+African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When
+the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common
+boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous
+system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed
+his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by
+chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and
+the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round
+by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer
+both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste--because
+she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on
+the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that
+stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping
+hands--demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta
+haughtily turned upon him her splendid back, covered with ringlets;
+beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came
+back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he
+stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill
+himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a
+little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk
+with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the
+fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the
+whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled
+the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,--so that
+nothing more can be hung on that,--and grazed the side of his head. She
+instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down,
+bleeding, and was carried home.
+
+This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted
+up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her
+quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and
+the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy
+without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of
+anxiety, out through the village. A good genius--the yard-dog,
+Melak--had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the
+fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather
+that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who
+oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves,
+should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted
+reasons,--namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy,
+whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed,
+could not give him a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog
+right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees
+except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these
+inversions,--during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and
+seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and
+every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,--he was found by his
+innocent mother.
+
+"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in
+the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he
+had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a
+vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his
+overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in
+tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but
+merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the
+anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's
+situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then
+so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably
+Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied
+through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately,
+strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards
+Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender
+emotion.
+
+When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a
+little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his
+defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his
+countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling
+threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun.
+He placed himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept
+his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a
+double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered
+fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,--the sign of
+the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.
+
+Verily, I have often formed the wish--and afterwards made a picture out
+of it--that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world,
+because no love moves us so deeply as _returning_ love. It must touch
+Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely
+asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,[34] they will
+tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer
+element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the
+distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain
+Immortals when they behold us under the violent _tempests_ of life
+arrayed against each other on the _battle-field_ of enmity, under double
+blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that
+nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[27] I have already said that he was brought up there, under the
+Provincial Director, _Von Wehrfritz_.
+
+[28] With this Evangelist, as is well known, an angel is
+associated.
+
+[29] Compass.
+
+[30] Odious, or tabooed.--TR.
+
+[31] To a German President of Finance, Vol. I. p. 296.
+
+[32] For Boyle found in his experiments that ranunculi, mints,
+&c., which he suffered to grow large in the water, developed the
+usual aromatic virtues.
+
+[33] Some would rather hear this word than _breeches_.
+
+[34] The female Valisneria lies rolled up under the water, out of
+which it lifts its bud, to bloom in the open air; the male then
+loosens itself from the too short stalk and swims to her with its
+dry blossom-dust.
+
+
+
+
+THIRD JUBILEE.
+
+     METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR
+     PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN
+     OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.
+
+
+17. CYCLE.
+
+If we open the two school-rooms, we shall see the Band-box-master, in
+the forenoon, sitting and brooding upon the two-yolked eggs of the
+_élève_, and the accomplishing master, in the afternoon, just as the
+cock-pigeon guards the nest the former part of the day, and the female
+the latter.
+
+Now Wehmeier, as well as his competitor, was fain to take possession of
+his pupil with wholly new instructions; but what were new to him were
+new to himself. Like most of the older schoolmasters, he knew--of
+astronomy, except the little that was found in the book of Joshua, and
+of physics, except the few errors which existed in his rather-forgotten
+than torn-up manuscript books, and of philosophy, except that of
+Gottsched, which required, however, a riper pupil, and of other real
+sciences--strictly speaking, nothing, except a little history. If
+ever--in the literary Sahara, to which the tormenting screw of
+school-lessons, without end, and the beggar's or cripple's wagon of a
+life without pay, that had been turned rather into dross than into ore,
+had exiled him--new methods of teaching or new discoveries came to his
+ears (they never came to his eyes), he noted, at the moment, that they
+were his own, only with a shade of variation; and he concealed from no
+one the plagiarism. I heartily beg, however, all silken and powdered and
+curly-haired Princes' instructors, blame not too sorely my poor
+Wehmeier, so deeply overlaid with the heavy, thick strata of fate, for
+his subterranean optics and his crookedness of posture, but reckon his
+eight children and his eight school-hours and his approaching fifties in
+his life's grotto of Antiparos, and then decide whether the man can,
+under these circumstances, come out again into light?
+
+But yet of history he knew, as was said, something; and this he seized
+upon as pedagogical lucky-bone and Fortunatus's wishing-cap. Had he not
+already, in that epical, picturesque style of paraphrase,--whereby he
+could relate the smallest market-town history in such an interesting and
+fictitious way, (for whence will a good story-teller draw the thousand
+lesser but necessary touches but from his head?)--lectured out to his
+Albano Hübner's Biblical History, in a manner extremely touching? And
+which wept most during the delivery, teacher or scholar?
+
+Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike
+into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in
+the world,--the history of countries. But only the British and the
+French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the
+earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg
+princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat
+for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history,
+on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer, most
+disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in
+Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in
+Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?
+
+The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses
+in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according
+to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the
+22d October,[35] hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's
+and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the
+29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to
+the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is
+compelled to listen to the case.
+
+This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange.
+He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the
+rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us
+more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the
+heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives
+from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace
+for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works
+of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against
+every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning,
+walk along several times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen,
+ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within,
+although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,--the
+biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,--not the shadowy world of
+states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy
+family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with
+which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher,
+as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds
+of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and
+descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the
+whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that
+blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could
+he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality?
+Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the
+Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato
+and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was
+cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the
+eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard
+nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible
+effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so,
+from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting
+which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,--hair, moss,
+roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,--was hidden by
+the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like
+the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full
+of broken inscriptions.
+
+
+18. CYCLE.
+
+The reader is now curious about the afternoon, when the _élève_ is sent
+into the polishing-mill of the Viennite, in order to know what sort of a
+polishing he gets there. It cannot but make him still more curious, when
+I repeat that Wehmeier, who, like other literati, resembled the elephant
+in clumsiness and sagacity, found nothing more agreeable to think
+of--and, therefore, to describe--in ancient history, than a great man,
+who had on little, as, for instance, Diogenes, or went barefoot, like
+Cato, or unshaven, like the philosophers; nay, he hit the very
+Mittel-Mark, and drew out for himself Frederick the Second's clothes,
+whereby he gained as much as Mr. Pagé in Paris, and carried _his_
+shirts, like the noble Saladin's, and with similar proclamations, on
+poles for show, and sketched, as a second _Scheiner_, the best map we
+have of the sun-spots of snuff on Frederick. Then he took these naked,
+rough colossi, and piled them together into one scale, and threw into
+the other the light, wainscoted figures, like Falterle and the nice
+Nuremberg Kinder-gärten of modern courts, and besought the scholar to
+take notice which way the swaying tongue of the balance would
+incline....
+
+I am not wholly on thy side here, Magister, since vigorous youths too
+easily, without any prompting, tear in pieces the thin plate of the
+ceremonial law, and often the platers, the head masters of ceremonies,
+into the bargain. For weaklings, the method is good.
+
+Now, when Albano came to the accomplishing master, he could but faintly,
+on account of the loud resonance of the previous lesson,--for children
+of a certain depth, like buildings of a certain size, give an
+_echo_,--apprehend what Falterle commanded; and only when he remained
+some days without the historical sensation was he more widely open to
+the lesser instructions, as gilded things cannot be silvered over till
+the gold is worn off. The misfortune was, too, that he had to go through
+his task-dances in the very next room to the study of the Director, who
+was there occupied with his own. It often happened that Wehrfritz, when
+Alban was as _distrait_ and inattentive in the Anglaise as a partner in
+love, would cry out, while he was dictating in there, "In the name of
+the three devils, chassez!" Quite as many cases might one reckon in
+which, when the music-master, like a bass-drum, with everlasting
+exhortations glided away through adagio into piano, the man had to call
+out in there, with the strongest imaginable fortissimo, "Pianissimo,
+Satan! pianissimo!" Sometimes he was obliged to rise from his labors,
+when, in the fencing-lesson, all admonitions to "quart!" availed
+nothing, and open the door, and, grim with fury, say to him of Vienna,
+"For God's sake, sir, don't be a hare! Prick his leather soundly, if he
+doesn't mind!" Whereupon the courtly fencing-master would only gently
+encourage him to "quart thrust."
+
+Nevertheless, he learned much. In such early years one cannot rise above
+the finery nor the fine arts of a Falterle, who, besides, was reinforced
+with the magical advantage of having shone and taught in the forbidden
+metropolis. Only the loud stride and the boots were not to be taken from
+the pupil; but the shoulders soon grew horizontal, and the head
+perpendicular; and the oscillating fingers, together with the restless
+body, were steadied with Stahl's eye-holder. In general, men with a
+_liberal_ soul in a finely-built body have already, without Falterle's
+espalier-wall and scissors, an agreeable shape and stature. Moreover,
+he felt toward the neat, friendly Falterle that holy _first love for
+men_ wherewith a child's heart twines round all inmates of his home and
+village; and simply for this reason, that a lady could wind the Viennite
+about her ring-finger,--yes, inside of the gold ring itself,--and
+because he spoke and lied about the Knight of the Golden Fleece as about
+a king, and because he was the most agreeable creature that ever trod
+the earth.
+
+As I mean in my biographies to teach tolerance and even-handed justice
+toward all characters, I must here lead the way with a pattern of
+toleration, by remarking of Falterle, that his poor, thin soul had not
+the power to develop itself under the stone table of the laws of
+etiquette, and under the wooden yoke of an imposing station. To whom did
+the poor devil ever do any harm? Not even to ladies, for whom indeed he
+was always laboring before the looking-glass, like a copperplate
+engraver, upon his dear self, but only, like other sculptors, by this
+artistic work, to display pure beauties, not to mislead them. The
+sea-water of his life--for he is neither a millionnaire, nor even the
+greatest _savant_ of the age, although he has read about among many
+circulating libraries--is sweetened by the water of beauty, wherein he
+hourly bathes. He swills and gormandizes scarcely at all. If he curses
+and swears, he does it in foreign languages, as the Papist makes his
+prayers, and flatters very few except himself.
+
+The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate vain persons much too
+violently; for such persons, after all, are more diseased in the head
+than in the will. I can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader,
+whether he ever, even when he was going about with an uncommonly vain
+feeling, remembers to have detected any deep qualms of conscience or
+discords in himself, which, however, were never wanting, when he lied
+very much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such occasions,
+experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking of his inner man in the
+cradle of state. Hence a vain man is as hard to cure as a gambler; but
+for this further reason,--most sins are occasional sermons and
+occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to
+the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word,
+cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness
+against himself, any more than he can play ninepins or fight a duel with
+himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter-Fair or
+New-Year's Day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal,
+margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life; many
+never at all,--for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost. On the
+contrary, one can praise and crown himself inwardly day and night,
+summer and winter, in every place,--in the pulpit, in the Prater, in the
+general's tent, on the back seat of a sleigh, in the princely chair, in
+any part of Germany,--for instance, in Weimar. What! and must one let
+this perennial balsam-plant, which continually perfumes the inner man,
+be plucked up or lopped off?
+
+
+19. CYCLE.
+
+All these occupations and thorns were to Albano right good, sharp
+earthquake-conductors, since in his bosom already more subterranean
+storm-matter circulated than is needed to burst the thin wall of a man's
+chest. Now he began to get on deeper and deeper into the wild
+thunder-months of life. The longing to see Don Zesara caught new warmth
+from the Roman history, which lifted up on high before him Caesar's
+colossal image, and wrote under it, "Zesara." The veiled Linden-city was
+carried over by his fancy and set upon seven hills, and exalted to a
+Rome. A post-horn rang through his innermost being, like a Swiss Ranz
+des Vaches, which builds out into the ether all summits of our wishes in
+long and shining mountain-chains; and it blew for him the signal of a
+tent-striking, and all cities of the earth lay with open gates and with
+broad highways round about him. And when, at this period, on a cool,
+clear summer morning, he marched along metrically by the side of a
+regiment on its way to Pestitz, so long as he could hear the sound of
+the drums and fifes, then did his soul celebrate a Handel's Alexander's
+Feast; the past became audible,--the rattling of the triumphal cars, the
+movement of the Spartan bands and their flutes, and the clear trumpet of
+Fame,--and, as if at the sound of the last trumpets, his soul arose
+among none but glorified dead on the unbolted earth, and, with them,
+still marched onward.
+
+When History leads a noble 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 Blumenbühl, 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 Pestitz, 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 sex, 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 pass 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 damnation, 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
+documents relating to the case, for the catalogue of petals, which I for
+my own private use am stitching 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 Goddess 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 God? 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 gods than by men; and the ideal foreruns the reality, as, with some
+trees, the tender _blossoms_ anticipate 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 mass
+into the loveliest form.
+
+Circumstances 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 circumstance; 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,
+assailed 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 passing, 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 passions 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 grass 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 space 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 cursèd one; and the young men of those cities, again, on their
+part, take passage 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 Passion-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 goddess,--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
+butterfly,--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 glass 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 peacocks, 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 Pestitz; 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, fag-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 sanctity 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 Uranus, 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 passionate expression, for which, in his own name,
+before so many stoic classical heroes, he could not for shame muster up
+the courage. But in this way the classics could not touch him.
+
+The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass
+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,
+godlike 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 gods 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 butterfly
+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 gods 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 space, 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 passed, 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 snatches 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-assured
+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 Pestitz, 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 Pestitz 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.
+The magic circles of the mount rose ever smaller and smaller out of the
+leaves into the blossoms,--two naked children, among myrtles, had twined
+their arms caressingly about each other's bent head,--they were statues
+of Cupid and Psyche,--rosy night-butterflies were licking, with their
+short tongues, the honey-dew from the leaves, and the glowworms, like
+sparks struck off from the glow of evening, went trailing like gold
+threads around the rose-bushes; he climbed amid summits and roots behind
+the aromatic balustrade toward heaven; but the little spiral alley
+running round with him hung before the stars purple night-violets, and
+hid the deep gardens with orange summits; at length he sprang from the
+highest round of his Jacob's-ladder, with all his senses, out into an
+uncovered, living heaven; a light hill-top, only fringed with variegated
+flower-cups, received and cradled him under the stars, and a white altar
+gleamed brightly beside him in the moonlight.
+
+But gaze down, fiery man, with thy fresh heart, full of youth, on the
+magnificent, immeasurable, enchanted Lilar! A second twilight-world,
+such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out
+before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine
+walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon
+lingers now only on the groves and triumphal gates, and on the
+silver-dust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all
+waters and vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm
+of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like
+Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands
+of our present world,--wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage,
+and all is one lovely, magic confusion. What mean those high, open doors
+or arches, and the pierced groves and the ruddy splendor behind them,
+and a white child sleeping among orange-lilies and gold-flowers, from
+whose cups delicate flames trickle,[43] as if angels had flown too near
+over them? The lightnings reveal swans, sleeping on the waves under
+clouds drunk with light, and their flaming trains blaze like gold after
+them in among the thick trees,[44] as goldfishes turn their burning
+backs out of the water,--and even around thy summit, Albano, the great
+eyes of the sunflowers turn on thee their fiery looks, as if kindled by
+the sparks of the glowworms.
+
+"And in this kingdom of light," thought Albano, trembling, "the still
+angel of my future hides himself and glorifies it, when he appears. O
+where dwellest thou, good Liana? In that white temple? or in the arbor
+between the rose-fields? or up there in the green Arcadian
+summer-house?" If love makes even pangs to be pleasures, and exalts the
+shadowy sphere of the earth into a starry sphere, O what an enchantment
+will it lend to delight! Albano could not possibly, in this outer and
+inner splendor, think of Liana as sick; he represented to himself just
+now only the blissful future, and with a yearning embrace knelt down at
+the altar; he looked toward the glittering garden, and pictured to
+himself how it would be when he should one day tread with _her_ every
+island of this Eden,--when holy Nature should lay his and her hands in
+one another upon these altar-steps,--when he should sketch to her on the
+way the Hesperia of life, the pastoral land of first love, and then its
+holy exultation and its sweet tears, and how he should not then be able
+to look round into the eyes of that most tender heart, because he should
+already know that they were overflowing with bliss. Just then he saw, in
+the moonshine above the triumphal arches, two illuminated forms move
+like spirits; but his glowing soul went on with its painting, and he
+imagined to himself how, when the nightingales trilled in this Eden, he
+should look up to her and say, in a delirium of love, "O Liana, I bore
+thee long ago in my heart,--once upon that mountain, when thou wast
+sick."...
+
+This startled him, and he came to himself; he was indeed on the
+mountain,--but he had forgotten the sickness. Now, kneeling, he threw
+his arms around the cold stone, and prayed for her whom he so loved, and
+who, also, surely had prayed here; and his head sank, weeping and
+darkened, upon the altar. He heard human steps approaching down below on
+the winding hill, and, with trembling joy, he thought it might be his
+father; but he boldly remained on his knees. At last there stepped in
+across the flowery border a tall, bent old man, like the noble bishop of
+Spangenberg; his calm countenance smiled full of eternal love, and no
+pains appeared upon it, and it seemed to fear none. The old man, in mute
+gladness, pressed the youth's hands together as a sign that he should
+pray on, knelt down beside him, and that ecstasy to which frequent
+prayer transfigures one spread its saintly radiance over that form full
+of years. Singular was this union and this silence. The fragment of the
+moon, which was all that yet jutted above the earth, burned darklier,
+and at last went down; then the old man rose, and, with that easiness of
+transition which comes from being habituated to devotion, put questions
+about Albano's name and residence; after the answer, he merely said,
+"Pray on thy way to God, the all-gracious,--and go to sleep before the
+storm comes, my son!"
+
+Never can that voice and form pass away out of Albano's heart; the soul
+of the old man peered, like the sun in an annular eclipse, shining, full
+circle, out over the dark body, which strove to hide it with its
+earth-mould. Deeply struck, to the very roots of his nerves, Albano
+rose, and the broadening flashes of the lightning showed him now, down
+below near the enchanted garden, a second dark, entangled, horrible one,
+a sort of Tartarus to the Elysium. He departed with singular and
+conflicting emotions,--the future, and the beings therein, appeared to
+him, on his way, to stand very near, and already to run to and fro like
+theatre lights behind the transparent curtain,--and he longed for some
+weighty enterprise as a refreshment for his inflamed heart; but he had
+to rest his head, full of this heath-fire, on the pillow, and the high
+thunder, like a god of the night, mingled with its first claps in his
+dreams.
+
+
+24. CYCLE.
+
+THE unknown old man lingered many days in Albano's soul, and would not
+stir. In fact, the channel of his life now needed a bend, to break the
+stress of the stream. Fate can educate men like him only by a change of
+circumstances, just as it can weak ones only by a continuance of the
+same. For if it went on much longer in this way, and the chandelier in
+his temple should, by inner earthquakes, be thrown into ever increasing
+vibrations, the consequence would be, at last, that no candle could any
+longer burn therein. What Imperial-Diet-grievances did not Wehrfritz and
+Hafenreffer already jointly present on the subject, when the shipmaster
+Blanchard, in Blumenbühl, went up with his aerostatic soap-bubbles, and
+Zesara could hardly, by almost the absolute despotism of the Director,
+be kept back from embarking! And how divine a thing does he not imagine
+it would be, not only to hurl down to the earth its iron rings and
+arrest warrants, and soar away, perpendicularly, above all its
+market-rubbish and boundary-trees and Hercules'-pillars, and sweep
+around it as a constellation, but also to hover above the magic Lilar
+and the hermetically-sealed Linden-city with devouring eyes, and to lift
+a whole, full, heavy world to his thirsty heart, by the handle of a
+single look!
+
+But fate broke the fall of this swift stream. Namely, as good luck would
+have it, the Blumenbühl church had this long time been daily threatening
+to tumble down,--and I was wishing the Whitsuntide lightning had gone in
+there, and had made ears and legs for the building committee,--when by
+still greater good luck the old Prince was taken sick. Now in the church
+was the hereditary sepulchre of the Prince, which could not conveniently
+serve, on the other hand, as the hereditary sepulchre of the church.
+
+About this time it must needs happen that the old Princess, with the
+Minister Froulay, passed through the village. The two had long since
+commissioned themselves as Imperial vicars, business-agents, and
+sceptre bearers of the State, because the feeble old gentleman had been
+glad to give up the amusements and burdens, the glitter and weight of
+the crown, and admit those two feudal guardians into the hereditary
+office of the sceptre. In short, the age of the church, together with
+that of the princely couple, decided the building of a new roofing and
+covering for the vault.
+
+The Provincial-Director was one of the inspecting committee, and invited
+the distinguished company to his house; among whom, the Provincial
+architect, Dian, and the Counsellor of Art, Fraischdörfer, as artists,
+and the little princess as naturalist, are particularly to be noticed.
+
+The poor dancing-master got wind of the procession through a telescope,
+just as he was stretching his feet, full of _pas_, into a warm
+foot-bath. It will not gratify anybody, that the Vienna gentleman had
+but one thing in common with the old Magister,--what the Devil shares
+with the horse, namely, the foot, which measured its good foot and a
+half, Paris measure, and that, therefore, his double root, in the narrow
+forcing-pots of shoes, shot out into a fruit-bearing, knotty-stock, full
+of inoculating eyes, i. e. corns. To-day he would have cut these gordian
+knots in a foot-bath; but, as it was, he must, on occasion of such a
+visit,--although he had never stretched them,--put on his tightest
+children's shoes, for effect. Thus are men often caught with too tight
+shoes, as monkeys are with too heavy ones.
+
+Albano, on the contrary, stood in buskins. In general, every one who
+simply came from Pestitz, had, in his eyes, consecrated holy earth on
+his soles; and here he looked with the loving reverence of a village
+youth upon a somewhat oldish, but red-cheeked and tall-built princess,
+whose chin was bent up by time, and whose friendly face--perhaps, by way
+of hiding the many wrinkles--was buried deep in a whole bush of
+millinery. She kept this head moving to and fro with a smiling
+comparison, as of brother and sister, between him and Rabette; for
+mothers always look, in mothers, for the children first. He should have
+further known that he had before him a friend of Liana in the
+frizzle-headed _little_ princess, who, although already of his age, yet
+with a friendly liveliness, which can never be subscribed to by the
+court-marshalship, looked up at all, and even took Rabette by the hand,
+and drew from her an indescribably good-natured and stiff smile. The
+formidable one of the party was to him the Minister, a man full of
+strong parts, both of body and soul, full of furious, murderous
+passions, only that they lay bound with flowery chains, and with respect
+to whom, although his hard face was written over only out of courtliness
+with the twelve friendly signs of the zodiac of love, it would not be
+specially apparent how one could be father and guide to the weak-nerved
+Liana, when the iron parts, of which man carries more in his blood than
+any other animal, had settled, not as in the case of Götz of
+Berlichingen, into his hand, but into his brow and heart.
+
+I give merely a flying glance at the only member of the company who was
+intolerable to Albano,--the art-counsellor, Fraischdörfer, who had
+thrown off his face, like the drapery of the ancients, into folds of
+simple and noble greatness. This man, I must explain, had wanted for
+many years to have our bashful little hero sit to him, even to the very
+pit of his stomach, in order to represent, whether in a crayon likeness
+or a medallion I know not, his face, and the broad, high, Plato-like
+breast shining out from his shirt-frills. But the bashful child played
+about himself with his hands and feet so lustily, that nothing could
+possibly be caught and copied except the naked face without the
+pedestal, the thorax. Before me, on the contrary, dear academy, must
+thou now for years keep thyself on the model-stand, like a stylite, and
+expose to my drawing-pen thy head and thy breast, together with its
+cubic contents, not to mention the groupings at all.
+
+He had, perhaps, to thank his noble form for it, that the beautifully
+built, straight-nosed, and magnificently slender Dian--with his raven
+hair and black, eagle eye, who in every pliant motion showed a higher
+freedom of carriage than is gained in ball-rooms and court-saloons--came
+up to him warmly, and, with very few glances, saw to the green bottom of
+the deep but clear sea of the young man, and discerned the pearl-banks
+there. Albano, with his too loud, vehement voice,--with his respectful
+but sharply-moving eyes,--with his rooted posture,--expressed an
+agreeable mixture of inward culture and ascendency with external rustic
+modesty and mildness, like a tulip-tree not as yet cut up for a
+tulip-bed,--a rural hermitage and log-house with golden furniture. He
+had the faults of youth in its recluseness; but men and winter radishes
+must be sowed _far apart_, in order that they may grow _large_: men and
+trees that stand near together have, it is true, a more slender and
+tapering trunk, but no power to brave the tempest, nor such a rich crown
+and branching as those that stand free. With the most unembarrassed
+heartiness, the architect disclosed to the glowing youth, "They should
+from this time forth see each other every week, since he was to come
+daily to oversee the building of the church."
+
+The whole Wehrfritz household is now peeping out after the majestic
+procession, even to the last disappearing chariot-wheel, and is, of
+course, eager to say three words upon the lavender-water of joy that
+leaves such a fragrance behind it, which the procession had sprinkled
+into all corners and upon all pieces of furniture. From the Master of
+exercises--who, with the compression-machines on his feet, stood only so
+far as the excrescences in Purgatory, but from there up to the crown of
+his head in heaven (because the affable Princess had remembered very
+well his five positions)--even to the modest Rabette, the eulogist of
+her victorious rival,--and even to Albina, who was agreeably impressed
+with such warm, motherly love in a Fürstinn toward the Princess,--and
+even to the Director, who looked back with pleasure on the nobly
+sustained blade- and anchor-proof of his foster-son and the universal
+probity of this converted portion of the great world, because the man
+never observed that Princes and Ministers, just as they have in their
+wardrobes mountain- and mining-habits, so also carry about in their
+dressing-chamber Directorate-dresses, furred gowns of justice,
+consistorial sheep-skins, and women's opera-dresses;--from all these,
+even to the Director, the glad echo swelled, to die away in Zesara with
+an alarm-cannon. His ambition took arms; his liberty-tree shot forth
+into blossoms; the standards of his youthful wishes were consecrated and
+flung to the breeze of heaven; and on the myrtle crown he covered a
+heavy helm with a glittering, high-waving, plumed crest....
+
+The following Cycle is composed merely for the purpose of showing how
+all this is to be taken.
+
+
+25. CYCLE.
+
+It is also my opinion that the antiphonious double choir of the two
+educational colleagues, Wehmeier and Falterle, had hitherto trained our
+Norman, as well as two similar gymnasiarchs, Governess England and
+domestic French instructress France, have actually educated the
+charity-school-girl Germany according to the best school-books, so that
+now we, in our turn, are in a condition to school the Poles, and, with
+the ferule, from the desk of our princely schools, to kantschu them down
+as much as is necessary.
+
+But now too much had waked up in Albano. He felt overswelling energies
+which found no teacher. His father, roving round through Italy, seemed
+to be neglecting him. That seat of the muses, Pestitz,--which now had
+_one_ more muse added to its number,--seemed to be unjustly barred
+against him. Often he knew not how to stay away. Fancy, heart, blood,
+and ambition were at boiling heat. In such a case, as in every
+fermenting cask, nothing is more dangerous than an empty space, whether
+from a want of knowledge or of occupation.
+
+_Dian filled up the cask._
+
+He came each week from the city, as if he had to arrange the hammer-work
+of the church, according to plans, as well as the building of its walls.
+A youth who sees his first Greek cannot, at the outset, rightly believe
+it at all; he takes him for a classic glorification,--a printed sheet
+out of Plutarch. And if his heart burns like that of my hero, and if his
+Greek is of Spartan descent, like Dian,--namely, an unconquered
+_Mainotte_, who has been brought up in the classic double choir of the
+æsthetic singing-schools in Atiniah (Athens) and Rome,--then is it
+natural that the inspired youth should stand every day in the dust-and
+rubbish-clouds of the falling church-walls, and wait to see his
+commander come forth from behind the cloudy pillar.
+
+Dian accompanied his beloved in his walks, often read half the night
+with him, and took him with him on the architectural journeys which he
+had constantly to make into the country. He introduced him with inspired
+reverence into the holy world of Homer and of Sophocles, and went with
+him among the loftier beings of this twin Prometheus, those nobly
+formed, completely developed men, yet unperverted by a partial
+provincial culture, who, like Solomon, had a time for everything
+human,--for laughing, weeping, eating, fearing, and hoping,--and who
+shunned merely rude immoderateness; who sacrificed on the altars of all
+gods, but on that of Nemesis first of all. And Dian, whose inner man was
+a whole, from which no member is torn away, no one swollen, and all
+fully grown, himself went round with his darling as such a Greek of
+Homer and Sophocles. While Wehmeier and the foster-parents were always
+running after him with a pulpit and a pew, at every passionate
+expression of anger, or desire, or exultation, he, on the contrary, with
+fair, liberal freedom, made room for him to unfold himself to his full
+breadth and height. He respected in the youth the St. Elmo's or St.
+Helena's fire, as he did frost in an old man: the heart of vigorous men,
+he thought, must, like a porcelain vase, in the beginning, be turned too
+large and too wide; in the furnace of the world it would soon enough
+shrink up to a proper size. I too require of youth, at first,
+intolerance, then, after some years, tolerance,--that as the stony, sour
+fruit of a strong young heart, this as the soft winter-fruit of an older
+head.
+
+But while the Architect drew with him, and with him examined casts of
+the antiques and works of art, he at the same time made manifest most
+beautifully to the youth his love for the artistical _sign of the
+Balance_ in man (who ought to be his own work of art), and his aversion
+to every paroxysm, which breaks the outward beauty as well as the inward
+into folds and wrinkles, and his desire to regulate his form and his
+heart after the lofty pattern of repose on the antiques.
+
+The Architect, as artists often do, and the Swiss still oftener,
+preserved European culture and rural _naïveté_ and simplicity side by
+side, like his beloved profession, wherein, more than in other arts,
+beauty and surveying reason border upon each other; he therefore at
+first let Albano look in and listen at the window of the philosophical
+lecture-hall from without, standing in the open air. He led him, not
+into the stone-quarry, lime-pit, and timber-yard of metaphysics, but
+directly into the ready-made, beautiful oratory, formed of the materials
+thence collected, otherwise called Natural Theology. He did not let him
+forge and solder ring after ring of any iron chain of reasoning, but
+showed such a one to him as a deep-reaching well-chain, whereby Truth,
+sitting at the bottom, is to be drawn up; or as a chain hanging from
+heaven, whereby the lower gods (the philosophers) are to draw Jupiter
+down. In short, the _skeleton_ and _muscle-preparation_ of metaphysics
+he concealed in the _God-man_ of religion. And so it should be (in the
+beginning); grammar is learned from language more easily than the latter
+from the former; criticism from works of art, the skeleton from the
+body, more easily than the reverse; although we always do reverse it.
+Unfortunate is it for the youth of our day, that they are obliged to
+shake the drops and the insects from the tree of knowledge, before the
+fruit.
+
+And now he boldly threw open to him all the chamber-doors of the
+philosophical schools, i. e. the three heavens; for in this youthful
+season one still takes the wick of every learned light of the world for
+asbestos, as Brahmins dress themselves in asbestos; and the masses of
+ice around the poles of our spiritual world represent, at this early
+age, like the actual ones in the visible world, cities and temples on
+azure-blue columns.
+
+Now when Albano had read himself to the flaming point upon some great
+idea or other, as Immortality or Deity, he had then to write upon it;
+because the Architect believed, and I too, that in the educational world
+nothing goes beyond writing,--not even reading and speaking; and that a
+man may read thirty years with less improvement than he would gain by
+writing a half. It is just in this way that we authors mount to such
+heights; hence it is that even the worst of us, if we hold out, become
+somewhat, at last, and write ourselves up from Schilda to Abdera, and
+from there away up to Grub Street.
+
+But what a glowing hour then came on for our darling! What are all
+Chinese lantern-festivals to the high festival for which an inflamed
+youth lights up all the chambers of his brain, and in this illumination
+throws out his first essays?
+
+In the forepart, and on the very threshold of the essay perhaps, Albano
+still crept along step by step, and made use merely of his head; but as
+he got further on, and his heart quivered with wings, and like a comet
+he must needs sweep along before only shimmering constellations of great
+truths, could he then restrain himself from imitating the rosy-red
+Flamingo, who, in his passage towards the sun, seems to paint himself
+into a flying brand, and to clothe himself in wings of fire? When at
+length he reached the practical application, verily every one was like
+the others; in each he formed and sowed an Arcadia full of human angels,
+who in three minutes could cross over on a Charon's pontoon thrown in
+for the purpose, and land in the Elysium which floated so near: in every
+one of these practical applications all men were saints, all saints
+beatified; all mornings blossoms, and all evenings fruit; Liana
+perfectly well, and he not far from it--her lover;--all nations ascended
+more easily the noonday heights; and he upon his own, like men upon
+mountains, saw everything good nearer to him. Ah! the whole boggy
+present, full of stumps and blood-suckers, had he kicked aside, and was
+now encircled only with floating green worlds, full of pastures, which
+the sun-ball of his head had projected into the ether.
+
+Blissful, blissful time! thou hast long since gone by! O, the years in
+which man reads and makes his first poems and systems, when the spirit
+creates and blesses its first worlds, and when, full of fresh
+morning-thoughts, it sees the first constellations of truth come up
+bringing an eternal splendor, and stand ever before the longing heart,
+which has enjoyed them, and to which time, by and by, offers only
+astronomical newspapers and refraction-tables on the morning-stars, only
+antiquated truths and rejuvenated lies! O, then was man, like a fresh,
+thirsty child, suckled and reared with the milk of wisdom; at a later
+period he is only cured with it, as a withered, sceptical, hectic
+patient! But thou canst, indeed, never come back again, glorious season
+of _first love_ for the truth, and these sighs can only give me a
+warmer remembrance of thee; and if thou ever shouldst return, it
+certainly could not be down here in the low mine-shaft of life, where
+our morning splendor consists of the little flames that play upon the
+quartz crystals, and our sun is a mine-lamp,--no; but it may happen
+then, when death reveals us, and tears away from over the heads of the
+pale-yellow workmen the coffin-lid of the mine-shaft, and we now again
+stand as first men on a new, full earth, and under a fresh, immeasurable
+heaven!
+
+Into this golden age of his heart fell also his acquaintance with
+Rousseau and Shakespeare, of whom the former exalted him above his
+century, and the latter above this life. I will not say here how
+Shakespeare ruled, sovereign, in his heart,--not through the breathing
+of living characters, but by lifting him up out of the loud kingdom of
+earth into the silent realm of infinity. When one dips his head at night
+under water, there is an awful stillness round about him; into a similar
+supernatural stillness of the under-world does Shakespeare introduce us.
+
+What many schoolmasters may blame in Dian is this, that he gave the
+youth all books indiscriminately, without any exact course of reading.
+But Alban asked, in later years: "Is such a course anything but folly?
+Is it possible? For does Fate ever arrange the appearance of new books,
+or systems, or teachers, or outward circumstances, or conversations, so
+according to paragraphs, that one needs nothing more than to transcribe
+all that passes upon the memory, and he shall have the order into the
+bargain? Does not every head need and make its own? And does more depend
+on the order in which the meats follow each other, or on the digestion
+of them?"
+
+
+26. CYCLE.
+
+While Dian was causing a nobler temple to go up in the heavens than the
+stone one in the village, the Princess, whose _castrum doloris_ this was
+to be, died; they had, therefore, to deposit her remains for a time in
+the accommodations of a Pestitz church. This changed one or two thousand
+things. The Crown-prince of Hohenfliess, Luigi, must now, will he nill
+he, come back from Italy, to the princely chair, in which the old man,
+bent up with years, had, for a long time, diminutive and speechless,
+been rather lying than sitting,--although the Minister standing behind
+the princely arm-chair took off his figure and voice in a sufficiently
+lively manner. Don Gaspard, who had not listened to any of the previous
+letters of Albano, now despatched to him the following orders, which
+rushed like fiery wine through his veins: "On my way back from Italy we
+meet, in thy birthplace, _Isola Bella_. Thou wilt be sent for." Even
+readers who have not had a week's practice in folding and sealing
+letters of a diplomatic corps, will easily observe that the Knight of
+the Fleece is thinking to bring his son acquainted with the young
+prince, and to establish and insure their first Pestitz connections.
+
+But I beg the world now to measure the Paradise of a man, who after so
+long seafaring at last sees the long shores of the new world stretch out
+into the ocean. Was not life at this moment open to him in a hundred
+directions? Laurel-wreaths, ivy-wreaths, flower-wreaths, myrtle-wreaths,
+wheat-garlands,--all these crowns overhung the great gate of Pestitz and
+its house-doors. Thou brother, thou sister, (I mean Roquairol and
+Liana,) what a full, yearning soul was marching to meet you! and what a
+dreaming and innocent one! Homer and Sophocles, and the ancient history
+and Dian, and Rousseau, that magus of youth,--and Shakespeare and the
+British weeklies (wherein a higher and more human poesy speaks than in
+their abstract poems),--all these had left behind in the happy youth an
+everlasting light, an unparalleled purity, wings for every Mount Tabor,
+and the fairest but most difficult wishes. He resembled, not the urbane
+French, who, like ponds, reflect the hue of the nearest bank, but those
+loftier men, who, like the sea, wear the color of the boundless heavens.
+
+In fact, now was the ripest, best point of time for his change. Through
+Dian and his journeys, even Albano's _exterior_ man had been trained to
+grace in fashionable saloons. Men, like bullets, go farthest when they
+are smoothest; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond-points
+enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is wounded, and even uncommon
+worth is an uncommon fault,--as _high_ towers, for that very reason,
+appear _bent over_. Zesara learned, even outside the circle of country
+youngsters, a readiness of ideas and words, which formerly stood at his
+service only in a state of enthusiasm; for wit, generally a foe of the
+latter, was with him merely a servant and child thereof. He did not,
+like witty sucklings, coquette with all ideas, but he was either beset
+by them or not touched at all; hence came that silent, slow,
+unostentatious ripening of his power; he resembled mountains of a
+gradual ascent, which always yield more booty than those which rise
+abruptly. With great trees, the seed is smaller and in spring the
+blossoms later than in the case of small bushes.
+
+The time ere Gaspard's messenger came to take him away was to the
+detained youth an eternity, and the village a prison; it shrivelled up
+to the household-buildings of a convent. The hidden plan of his life,
+written, however, by encaustic into his brain, was, as with all such
+young men, this, to be and do nothing more than--everything; that is to
+say, to bless, to glorify, and to enlighten at once himself and a
+country,--to be a Frederick II. upon the throne; in other words, a
+storm-cloud, which should contain thunders of excommunication for the
+sinner, electrical light for the deaf, blind, and lame, showers for the
+insects, and warm drops for thirsty flowers, hail for enemies, an
+attraction for everything, for leaves and dust, and a rainbow for the
+end. Now, as he could not succeed Frederick II., he proposes to be
+hereafter minister at least,--especially as Wehrfritz made so much out
+of this by-sceptre,--this offshoot and chip of the mother sceptre,--and
+in his spare hours a great poet and philosopher withal.
+
+I shall be delighted, Count, if thou shouldst become a second Frederick,
+the second and only; my book will profit by it and I myself mould my
+future thereby as a rare historiographer, compounded of Zenophon,
+Curtius, and Voltaire!
+
+
+27. CYCLE.
+
+Zesara will never forget the spring evening, on which he saw a passenger
+in a greatcoat,--a little limping and covered with brown
+travelling-paint, to which his white eyeballs formed a shining
+contrast,--wade across the shallow brook beside the high bridge, and
+how, further, the passenger took with him a watch-man's cane which the
+then Lieutenant of the Beggar's Police had just leaned against his
+house-door, a vicarious fellow-laborer, and handed the said cane, on his
+way, to a cripple, with the words: "Old man, I have nothing by me
+smaller than the stick. If anybody asks you about it, just tell them you
+are keeping guard in the village against the confounded beggar tribe,
+but have not eyes enough." At the same time our pilgrim reached out to a
+rector's little son, who needed it for about three minutes, his
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+It was of course our old Librarian by title, Schoppe, whom Don Gaspard
+had despatched with the note of invitation for Isola Bella. Albano's
+delight was so great, that only some days later did the youth mistake
+the odd humorist, whereas the latter soon correctly weighed the light,
+ardent, still wildling. Did it not fare still worse with the old
+Provincial Director, who, merely because he rated the _body_ politic of
+the Empire as high as if he were the installed _soul_ therein, upon
+Schoppe's sallies against the constitution, came out in a patriotic
+fury: "Sir," said he, in an excited manner, "even if there were a flaw
+anywhere, still a true German would be bound to maintain a profound
+silence on the subject, unless he can help the matter, especially in
+such cursed times."
+
+The finest of all was, that, at Luigi's request, the Architect had to
+set out at the same time, for the purpose of fetching casts of antiques
+from Rome.
+
+And now march on, that soon ye may come back again, and we may at last
+for once fairly enter Pestitz! It may well be expected that thou, good
+child (I should rather say, wild-bee), wilt take thy flight from the
+rural honey-tree into the glass beehive of the city, with deeper pangs
+than thou hadst imagined beforehand,--has not even the old foster-father
+gone off on his journey without saying his farewell, only to escape
+thine?--and, as to thy good mother, it seems to her as if one of the
+angry Parcæ were tearing a son from her breast, as if his tender
+love-bond, woven only of childish familiarity, would not stretch out
+into the far future,--and thy sister locks herself up in the attic, her
+rustic heart raging with fiery torments, and cannot say anything to
+thee, nor give thee anything, but a letter-case previously and privately
+worked by her with the silken circumscription: "Remember us!" and even
+on thy laurel-seeking head will the triumphal arch or rainbow of
+leave-taking, when thou passest under it, fling down heavy, heavy drops,
+(ah, they will continue to hang longer on the eyes that look after
+thee!) thy honest old teacher Wehmeier will pour out upon thee the last
+stream of his words and tears, and say, and thy tender heart will not
+smile at it: "He is a worn out, old fellow, and has now nothing before
+him but the hole (the grave); thou, on the contrary, art a fresh, young
+blood, full of languages and antiquities and magnificent, god-given
+talents,--of course he shall not live to see thee make a famous man, but
+his children well may; and these poor worms,--thou must one day adopt
+them, young master!"
+
+Thou pure soul, on every familiar house, on every dear garden and valley
+will sorrow, indeed, sharpen her clasp-knife, and tear open therewith
+softly gushing wounds in thy glowing, tender heart. What do I say? even
+from thy friendly morning- and evening-heights, the nunnery-gratings of
+thy holiest hopes, and from Liana herself, thou wilt seem to be stealing
+away.
+
+But cast thy weeping eyes over the broad, blue Italy, and dry them in
+the spring breezes. Life begins,--the signals for the martial exercises
+and tournaments of manly youth are given, and, in the midst of the
+Olympic battle-games, thou wilt hear the music of neighboring concert-
+and dancing-halls magnificently pealing around thee.
+
+What phantasies are these I am playing here? What! is it not more than
+too well known to all of us, that he has been gone this long time, ever
+since the very first Jubilee-period,--yes, and come back again, and has
+already, ever since the second--and we are now counting the fourth--been
+sitting in company with the Librarian and the Lector, on horseback,
+before Pestitz, unable to get in, on account of the barricade of
+the----
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] In Catania, the veil of St. Agatha is the only antidote to
+Etna.
+
+[39] Allusion to the torches, before which the Colosseum and the
+Antiques and the glaciers, which are both, are seen magically
+gleaming.
+
+[40] As the Queen of Heaven, Juno is always, by the ancients,
+clothed in a blue veil.--_Hagedorn on Painting._
+
+[41] An old machine that fires many shots at once.
+
+[42] In Italy the stars look not silvery, but golden.
+
+[43] In a tempestuous atmosphere, little flames are emitted by
+orange-lilies, gold-flowers, sunflowers, Indian pinks, &c.
+
+[44] Probably on fluttering gold plates after the birds.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTH JUBILEE?
+
+GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER OF THE
+KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL
+GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY
+PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION FOR
+TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE.
+
+
+28. CYCLE.
+
+When he came to the fork of the road, of which the right prong points to
+Lilar, Albano, with a somewhat heavy heart, spurred his horse across,
+and flew up the hill, till the bright city, like an illuminated St.
+Peter's dome, blazed far and wide in this spring night of his fancies.
+It lay, like a giant, with its shoulders (the upper city) resting on the
+heights, and stretched its other half (the lower city) down into the
+valley. It was noon, and not a cloud in heaven; at noonday a city stands
+before you in full, white disk, whereas a village does not, until
+evening, come out of its first quarter into full light. It was well
+fortified, not by Rimpler or Vauban, but by a blooming palisade of
+lindens. The long wall of the palaces of the mountain-city gleamed from
+above a welcome to our Albano, and the statues, on their Italian roofs,
+directed themselves towards him as way-guides and criers of joy; over
+all the palaces ran the iron framework of the lightning-rods, like a
+throne-scaffolding of the thunder, with golden sceptre-points; down
+along the side of the mountain lay camped the lower city, by the side of
+the stream between shady avenues, with its gay façades towards the
+streets, and its white back turned toward Nature; carpenters were
+hammering away like a forge on the green-sward among the peeled trunks
+of trees, and the children were clattering round with the birch-bark;
+cloth-makers were stretching out green cloths like bird-nets in the sun;
+from the distance came white-covered carriers'-wagons jogging along the
+country-road, and by the sides of the way shorn sheep were grazing under
+the warm shadow of the rich, bright linden-blossoms,--and over all these
+groups the noonday chime of bells from the dear, familiar towers (those
+relics and light-houses that gleamed out of the dusk of his earlier
+days), floated like one all-embracing and animating soul, and called
+together the friendly throngs of people.
+
+Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the
+open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who
+knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be
+standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be
+unravelled,--where all household gods and household fates of his nearest
+future lie hid,--where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of
+Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching
+close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in
+the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of
+light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner
+mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of
+the best.
+
+Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have
+happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were
+singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the
+passers below, and a building-orator,[45] on the ridgepole of a new
+house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his
+own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding;
+yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation
+of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the
+Muses,[46] who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery
+eye to find his Roquairol,--after all this, when we reach his future
+residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.
+
+It came from the Land-physicus[47] Sphex, his future landlord, who is to
+resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his
+cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper
+city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are
+domiciled the students and the _city_. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex
+was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat
+upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's
+drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his
+drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had
+turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he
+soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but
+during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"
+
+The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the
+house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to
+stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly,
+"Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor
+of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a
+picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the
+dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his
+rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on
+the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his
+foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had
+been sent after him,--fair reflections from the still land of youth,
+left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only
+concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be
+planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the
+goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the
+clare-obscure, made the forms of youth--many of them armed, many
+crowned, a troop of fates and graces--beset his heart, which had
+hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft
+and languid _for three minutes_; verily, to a youth, especially this
+one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring
+volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer,
+are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the
+physical.
+
+Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared
+his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired
+the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation
+to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son,
+who, with two others, named Boerhave and Galen, had hitherto been
+acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind
+a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some
+connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days
+he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?"
+asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked
+anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears,
+and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.
+
+The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary,
+prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old
+prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful
+event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz,
+and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with
+lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son,
+and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people
+had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the
+prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had
+his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death,
+postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving
+sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the
+case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his
+white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that
+time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether
+a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much
+silk in a period of such political embezzlement. "But," replied
+Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs,
+like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still
+they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is
+generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no
+easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and
+corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal
+death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal
+graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children,
+the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new
+inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies,
+we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it
+does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal
+Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means,
+to announce."
+
+Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while,
+brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open,
+with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover;
+but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like
+a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was
+his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his
+head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the
+impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury
+to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to
+conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a
+flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner
+twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook
+his head still more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from
+the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap
+almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from
+this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other
+of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the
+intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to
+conceal.
+
+At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the
+tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the
+events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of
+the letter!
+
+
+29. CYCLE.
+
+When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was
+already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with
+three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and
+three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress,
+and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the
+pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well,
+and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti:
+"The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the
+less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which
+live on _fruits_, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there
+sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on
+_leaves_,--for instance, the leaf-lice,--cleave together nest-wise."
+Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart
+the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation
+and season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it.
+Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common,
+but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of
+bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of
+love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call
+starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too
+near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance
+of bodies.
+
+The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream
+through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with
+whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had
+already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures
+upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a
+treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the
+anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting
+the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly,
+simple, flabby man, named _Malt_, he had a year since, when certain
+symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on
+condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead.
+Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse
+daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a
+horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he
+allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor
+passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.
+
+As to the drum, the corpse is obliged--since he is full as hard of
+hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the
+very reason that he never hears one--to carry that round, strapped to
+him, because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his
+employer and prosector has to censure in him.[49] The Doctor now began
+to scold at him down below--Schoppe stood listening at the window--in
+the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of
+blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under
+your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose
+away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you
+have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can,
+and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in
+this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if
+they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks
+clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret
+of thy trouble with me,--there is no real blessing upon our grease,--and
+one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father,
+verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."
+
+
+30. CYCLE.
+
+The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs,
+when translated, thus:--
+
+"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a
+letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence
+of thy sister's asphyxias; it was written on Good Friday, and looked
+forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the
+event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of
+the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes
+some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain.
+I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful,
+armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the _jongleur_ fast; but
+bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in
+Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old
+Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!
+
+                                  "G. DE C."
+
+"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion,
+and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was
+denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see
+each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and
+smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand
+so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the
+melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and
+decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had
+carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that
+she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood
+contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What
+destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that
+voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and
+boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals.
+"Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not, however, in this
+case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed
+terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced
+for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the
+most beloved.
+
+In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their
+household arrangements,--which, however, had never yet been able to
+efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of
+the Linden-city,--the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary
+prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day
+copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him
+there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the
+world a bill of fare _raisonné_ of all the show-dishes in the gallery;
+but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over
+whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame
+would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly
+covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban,
+in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of
+his mother's,[50] and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had
+no one been there.
+
+But the Princess Julienne was there, whom he (as we all do) still
+recognized right well as a Blumenbühl acquaintance, as she also did him.
+She was truly full of youthful charms, but one did not find these out
+till one had been for two days violently in love with her; that made her
+every minute afterward prettier, as in fact love is rather the father
+than the son of the goddess of grace, and his quiver the best casket of
+jewels and the richest toilet-box, and his bandage the best _mouchoir
+de Venus_ and beauty-patch that I know.
+
+She was just sketching the gypsum-cast of a noble old head, which seemed
+to the Count as if it must have been drawn from the antique-cabinet of
+his memory, and toward which his swelling heart flowed out right
+lovingly; but he could not recall the original. At last Julienne, in
+despite of etiquette, said, looking up most kindly, "Ah, dear Augusti,
+my father lies dead in Lilar." The word Lilar suddenly colored, in
+Albano, the pale image of recollection,--perfectly like this white bust
+had the old man in the moonshine looked, who, in that poetical
+summer-night, pressed Zesara's hands together on the mountain for
+prayer, and said, "Go home to sleep, dear son, ere the storm comes." Now
+another would have inquired after the name of the bust, and then, and
+not till then, have disclosed the nocturnal history; but the Count, in
+his warmth, did merely the latter, after waiting a short time for the
+conversation to run out. Augusti, when Albano began the history--to
+_him_ a foreign one--of his acquaintance with the original, was on
+thorns to interrupt him; but Julienne gave him a nod, to let him go on,
+and the youth true-heartedly communicated to the sympathizing soul the
+beautiful meeting, with a tenderness of emotion and fire, both of which
+increased when her eyes flowed over into her smiles. "It was my
+father,--that is his cast," said Julienne, weeping and glad. Albano,
+after his manner, clasped his hands together, with a sigh, before the
+bust, and said, "Thou noble, heartily-beloved form!" and his large eye
+gleamed with love and sorrow.
+
+The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and
+she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life
+is truly only a longer _punishment of bearing arms_ (as, according to
+the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are
+true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is
+there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female
+pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,--but
+the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the
+eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve
+times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and
+others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count
+(while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more
+brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more
+childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not
+possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut
+himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at
+Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever,
+and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),--and how she
+and Fräulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the
+half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion
+to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber
+of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved;
+how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever
+slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every
+hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as
+one going to bed.
+
+We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again,
+like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the
+grave; and when, like flowers sleeping at evening, they become
+_undistinguishable_, and grow all alike, even before death makes them
+so.
+
+The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these
+funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation
+by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana.
+But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this
+friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in
+which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her
+bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of
+blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to
+portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.
+
+The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other
+through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other
+without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as
+the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but
+they loved each other intensely,--with eyes, lips, and hearts,--like two
+good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made
+it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same
+with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily
+imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once
+painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano,
+as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For
+Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates
+to the highest heavens in his innermost being!
+
+Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself
+without the fee-provost Hafenreffer), have been able to observe
+anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in
+his face, and rapidity of utterance.
+
+
+31. CYCLE.
+
+Into the midst of these delineations and enjoyments the successor, or
+rather the _afterwinter_ of the cold old man, Luigi, suddenly entered.
+With a flat, carved work of spongy face, on which nothing expressed
+itself but the everlasting discontent of life-prodigals, and with a
+little full-grown miniver[51] on his head (as forerunner of the
+wisdom-teeth), and with the unfruitful superfetation of a voluminous
+belly, he came up to Albano with the greatest courtliness, in which a
+flat frostiness towards all men stood prominent. He immediately began to
+dust about him with the bran of empty, rapid, disconnected questions,
+and was constantly in a hurry; for he suffered almost more ennui than he
+caused; as in general, there is no one with whom life drags so
+disagreeably as with him who tries to make it shorter. Luigi had run
+over the earth as quickly as through a powdering room, and had, as in
+such a room, become decently gray; the milk-vessels of his outer and
+inner man had, because they were to be converted into cream-pots and
+custard-cups, for that very reason, perverted themselves into
+poison-cups and goblets of sorrow. As often as I pass along before a
+painted prince's-suite in a corridor, I always fall upon my old project,
+and say, with entire conviction: "Could we only contrive for once, like
+the Spartans and all the older nations, to get a regent to the throne in
+a _healthy_ state, then we should have a _good_ one into the bargain,
+and all would go well. But I know these are no times for such a thing.
+It is a sin, that only at torture do surgeons and physicians assist, not
+at joy, to point out nicely the degree of pleasure as they do of the
+rack, and to indicate the innocent conditions."
+
+Albano, a stranger in the company and in the eyes of this class of men,
+looked upon the gulf between himself and Luigi as much less deep than it
+was; it was merely annoying and uncomfortable to him, as it is to
+certain people, when, without their knowledge, a cat is in the chamber.
+The progress of moral enervation and refinement will yet so cleanse and
+equalize all our exteriors,--and according to the same law, indeed, by
+which _physical weakness_ throws back the _eruptions of the skin_ and
+drives them into the _nobler_ parts,--that verily an angel and a satan
+will come at last to be distinguishable in nothing except in the heart.
+Alban had already brought with him from Wehrfritz, whom he always heard
+contending for the right of the province against the prince, an aversion
+to his successor; so much the more easily flamed up in him a moral
+indignation, when Luigi turned toward the pictures and drew aside the
+curtains or aprons from several of the most indecent, in order, not
+without taste and knowledge, to appraise their artistic worth. A copied
+Venus of Titian, lying upon a white cloth, was only the forerunner.
+Although the innocent hereditary prince made his _voyage pittoresque_
+through this gallery with the artistical coldness of a gallery inspector
+and anatomist, and sought more to show than to enrich his knowledge,
+still the inexperienced youth took it all up with a deaf and blind
+passionateness, which I know not how to vindicate in any way, not even
+by the presence of the princess, and so much the less, because in the
+first place she busily divided her soul only between the gypsum-bust
+and its copy, and because, secondly, in our day, ladies' watches and
+fans (if they are tasty) have pictures on them which Albano would want
+other fans to hide. The two flames of wrath and shame overspread his
+face with a glowing reflection; but his awkward honesty of scorn
+contrasted with the ease of the Lector, who with his cold tone, quite as
+precise as it was light, preserved independence and protected purity.
+"They please me not, one of them," he said, with severity: "I would give
+them all away for a single storm of Tempesta's." Luigi smiled at his
+scholar-like eye and feeling. When they stepped into the second
+picture-chamber, Albano heard the Princess going away. As this apartment
+threatened him with still more rent veils of the _un_holiest, he took
+his leave without special ceremony, and went back without the Lector,
+who had to-day to give a reading.
+
+Never did Schoppe grasp his throbbing hand more heartily than this time;
+the aspect of an abashed young man is almost fairer (especially rarer)
+than that of an abashed virgin; the former appears more tender and
+feminine, as the latter appears more strong and manly, by a mixture of
+the indignation of virtue. Schoppe, who, like Pope, Swift, Boileau,
+forced into combination a sacred reverence for the sex with cynicism of
+dress and language, emptied the greatest vials of wrath upon all
+libertinage, and fell like a satirical Bellona upon the best free
+people; this time, however, he rather took them under his protection,
+and said, "The whole tribe love the blush of shame in others decidedly,
+and defend it more willingly than shamelessness, just as (and on the
+same kind of grounds) blind persons prefer the _scarlet_ color. One may
+liken them to _toads_, who set the costly toad-stone (their heart) on
+no other cloth as they do upon a _red_ one."
+
+The Lector--who with all his purity and correctness would, nevertheless,
+without hesitation, have helped a Scarron write his ode on the seat of a
+duchess--when he would treat the matter of the Count's flight, was at a
+loss what to make of it, when the latter sprinkled him with some
+rose-vinegar, and said, "The bad man's father is lying on the board, and
+one lies before his own iron brow: O, the bad man!" Certainly the
+physical and moral nearness of the two fair female hearts, and his love
+for them, had done most to excite the Count against Luigi's artistic
+cynicism. The Lector merely replied, "He would hear the same at the
+Minister's and everywhere; and his false delicacy would very soon
+surrender." "Do the saints," inquired Schoppe, "dwell only _upon_ the
+palaces and not _in_ them?" For Froulay's bore upon its platform a whole
+row of stone apostles; and on one corner stood a statue of Mary, which
+was to be seen from Sphex's house among nothing but roofs.
+
+Youthful Zesara! how does this marble Madonna chase the blood-waves
+through thy face, as if she were the sister of thy fairer one, or her
+tutelar and household goddess! But he took care not to hasten his
+entrance into this _Lararium_ of his soul, namely, the delivery of his
+father's letter of introduction, by a single whisper, for fear of
+suspicion; so many missteps does the good man make in the very gentile
+fore-court of love; how shall he stand in the fore-court of the women,
+or get a footing in the dim Holy of Holies?
+
+
+32. CYCLE.
+
+The Court now caused to be made known in writing (it could not speak for
+sorrow) that the dead Nestor had departed this life. I set aside here
+the lamentation of the city, together with the rejoicing of the same
+over the new perspective. The Land-physicus Sphex had to eviscerate the
+Regent like a mighty beast,--whereas we subjects are served up with all
+our viscera, like snipes and ground-sparrows, on the table of the worms.
+At evening, there reposed the pale one on his bed of state,--the
+princely hat and the whole electrical apparatus of the throne-thunder
+lay quite as still and cold beside him on a Tabouret; he had the
+suitable torches and corpse-watchers around him. These Swiss-guards of
+the dead (the sound of the word rings through me, and I at this moment
+see Liberty lying on her bed of state in the Alps, and the Swiss
+guarding her) consist, as is well known, of two regency-counsellors, two
+counsellors of the exchequer, and so on. One of the
+exchequer-counsellors was Captain Roquairol. It can be only touched upon
+here, in the way of interpolation, how this youth, who of financial
+matters understood little more than a treasury-counsellor in ----h,[52]
+arose, nevertheless, to be a counsellor in war-matters there,--namely,
+against his own will, through old Froulay, who (in himself no very
+sentimental gentleman) was always reviving and retouching the youthful
+remembrances of the old Prince, because, in this tender mood, one could
+get from him by begging what one would. How odious and low! so can a
+poor prince have not a smile, not a tear, not a happy thought, out of
+which some court-mendicant, who sees it, will not make a door-handle to
+open something for himself, or a dagger-handle to inflict a wound; not a
+sound can he utter which some forester and bugle-master of the chase
+shall not pervert to the purpose of a mouth-piece and tally-ho.
+
+Julienne, at nine o'clock in the evening, visited the only heart which,
+in the whole court, beat like hers and for hers,--her good Liana. The
+latter gladly offered her forehead to her commencing sick-headache, and
+sought only to feel and to still another's pain. The friends, who,
+before strangers' eyes, only displayed pleasantry, and before each other
+only a tender, enthusiastic seriousness, sank more and more deeply into
+this mood before the severe and religious lady of the Minister, who
+never found in Julienne so much soul as in the soft hour after weeping,
+as stock-gilliflowers begin to scent the air when they are sprinkled.
+Not the struggle, but the flight of pain, beautifies the person; hence
+the countenance of the dead is transfigured, because the agonies have
+cooled away. The maidens stood enthusiastically together at the window,
+the waxing moonlight of their fancy was made full moonlight by that of
+the outer world; they formed the nun's-plan to live together, and go in
+and out together for life. Often it seemed to them, in this still hour
+of emotion (and the thought made them shudder), as if the murmuring
+wings of departed souls swept by over them (it was only a couple of
+flies, who, with feet and wings, had caught a few tones on the harp of
+the Minister's lady); and Julienne thought most bitterly of her dead
+father in Lilar.
+
+At last she begged the sister of her soul to ride with her this night to
+Lilar, and to share and assuage the last and deepest woe of an orphan.
+She did it willingly; but the "yes" was hard to extort from the
+Minister's lady. I see the gentle forms step, from their long embrace in
+the carriage, out into the mourning chamber at Lilar,--Julienne, the
+smaller of the two, with quivering eyes and changing color; Liana, more
+pale with megrim and mourning, and milder and taller than her companion,
+having completed her growth in her twelfth year.[53]
+
+Like supernatural beings the two maidens beamed upon Roquairol's soul,
+already burning in every corner. A single tear-drop had power to bring
+into this calcining oven boiling and desolation. Already this whole
+evening had he been glancing at the old man with fearful shudderings at
+the childish end of that faded spirit, which once had been as fiery as
+his own now was; and the longer he looked, so much the thicker
+smoke-clouds floated from the open crater of the grave over into his
+green-blooming life, and he heard therein a thundering, and he saw
+therein an iron hand glowing and threatening to grasp at human hearts.
+
+Amidst these grim dreams, which illuminated every inner stain of his
+being, and which sternly threatened him that a day would come, when, in
+his volcano too, there would remain nothing fruitful but the--ashes, the
+mournful maidens entered, who, on their way, had wept only over the face
+that had grown _cold_, and now wept still more heavily over the form
+that had grown _beautiful_; for the hand of death had effaced from it
+the lines of the last years,--the prominent chin, the fire-mounds of the
+passions, and so many pains underscored with wrinkles, and had, as it
+were, painted upon the earthly tabernacle the reflection of that fresh,
+still morning light which now invested the disrobed soul. But upon
+Julienne a black taffeta-plaster on the eyebrows, which had been left
+behind by a blow,--this sign of wounds made a more violent impression
+than all signs of healing: she observed only the tears, but not the
+words of Liana. "O, how beautifully he rests there!" "But why does he
+rest?" said her brother, with that voice, murmuring from his innermost
+being, which she recognized as coming from the amateur-stage; and
+grasped her hand with agitation, because he and she loved each other
+fervently, and his lava broke now through the thin crust: "for this
+reason,--because the heart is cut out of his breast, because the wheel
+is broken at the cistern, because the fire-wheel of rapture, the
+fountain-wheel of tears, moves therein no more!"
+
+This cruel allusion to the opening of the body wrought terribly on the
+sick Liana. She must needs avert her eyes from the covered breast,
+because the anguish cramped the breath in her lungs; and yet the wild
+man, desolating others as well as himself, who had hitherto been silent
+by the side of the stiff corpse-guard, went on with redoubled crushing:
+"Feel'st thou how painfully this cricket-ball of fate, this Ixion's
+wheel of the wishes, rolls within us? Only the breast without a heart is
+calm."
+
+At once Liana took a longer and more intense look at the corpse; an
+ice-cold edge, as if of death's scythe, cut through her burning
+brain,--the funeral torches (it seemed to her) burned dimmer and
+dimmer,--then she saw in the corner of the chamber a dark cloud playing
+and growing up;--then the cloud began to fly, and, full of gushing
+night, rushed over her eyes,--then the thick night struck deep roots
+into her wounded eyes, and the affrighted soul could only say, "Ah,
+brother, I am blind!"
+
+Only hard man, but no woman, will be able to conceive that an æsthetic
+pleasure at the murderous tragedy found its way into Roquairol's
+frightful anguish. Julienne left the dead, and her old sorrow, and, with
+the new one, flung herself around her neck, and moaned: "O my Liana, my
+Liana! Seest thou not yet? Do look up at me!" The distracted and
+distracting brother led on the sister, upon whose pale cheeks only
+single drops fell like hard, cold water, with the sharp question: "Does
+no destroying angel, with red wings, whiz through thy night; hurls he no
+yellow vipers at thy heart, and no sword-fish into thy network of
+nerves, in order that they may be entangled therein, and whet their
+saw-teeth in the wounds? I am happy in my pain; such thistles scratch us
+up,[54] according to good moralists, and smooth us down too. Thou
+anguish-stricken blind one, what say'st thou,--have I made thee truly
+miserable again?" "Madman!" said Julienne, "let her alone: thou art
+destroying her." "O, he is not to blame for that," said Liana; "the
+headache long since made it misty to my eyes."
+
+The friends took their departure in double darkness, and therein will I
+leave it with all its agonies. Then Liana begged her maiden to say
+nothing of it to her mother so little time before sleep, since it might,
+perhaps, go away in the night. But in vain; the Minister's lady was
+accustomed to close her day on the bosom and lips of her daughter. The
+latter now came in, led along, and sought her mother's heart with a
+groping, sidelong motion, and, in this beloved neighborhood, could no
+longer refrain from a softer weeping; then, indeed, all was betrayed and
+confessed. The mother first sent for the Doctor before she, with wet
+eyes and with her gentle arms around her, heard her afflicted daughter's
+story. Sphex came, examined the eyes and pulse, and made no more of it
+than a nervous prostration.
+
+The Minister, who had everywhere in the house leading-hounds with
+fine--ears, came in, upon being informed; and while Sphex stood by, he
+made, except long strides, nothing but this little note, "_Voyez,
+Madame, comme votre le Cain[55] joue son rôle à merveille_."
+
+As soon as Sphex had gone out, Froulay let loose several
+billion-pounders and hand-grenades upon his lady. "Such," he observed,
+"are the consequences of your visionary scheme of education (to be sure
+his own, in respect to his son, had not turned out specially well). Why
+did you let the sick ninny go?" He would himself have still more gladly
+allowed it from courtly views; but men love to blame the faults which
+they have been saved the trouble of committing; in general, like
+head-cooks, they had rather apply the knife to the _white_- than to the
+_dark_-feathered fowl. "_Vous aimez, ce me semble, à anticiper le sort
+de cette reveuse un peu avant qu'il soit decidé de nôtre._"[56] Her
+silence only made him the more bitter. "_O, ce sied si bien à votre art
+cosmétique que de rendre aveugle et de l'être, le dieu de l'amour s'y
+prête de modèle._" Wounded by this extreme severity,--especially as the
+Minister himself had chosen and commanded this very _cosmetic_ education
+of Liana, against the maternal wishes, to gratify his political
+ones,--the mother had to go and hide and dry her wet eyes in her
+daughter's bosom. Married men and the latest literati regard themselves
+as flints, whose power of giving _light_ is reckoned according to their
+_sharp corners_. Our forefathers ascribed to a diamond belt the power to
+kindle love between spouses. I also still find in jewels this power;
+only this stone (which appertains to the flint species) leaves one,
+after the marriage-compact, as cold and hard as it is itself. Probably
+Froulay's marriage-bond was one of such precious stone.
+
+But the lady only said, "Dear Minister, leave we that! only spare you
+the sick one." "_Voilà précisement ce qui fût votre affaire_," said he,
+laughing scornfully. In vain did Liana eloquently and touchingly pour
+out to him her mistaken yet moving convictions, (aimed at the wall,
+however,) and plead for her brother, which everlasting advocacy of all
+sorts of people (which proved too much) was her only failing;--all in
+vain, for his sympathy with an afflicted one consisted in nothing but
+fury against the tormentors, and his love toward Liana showed itself
+only in hatred of the same. "Peace, fool! But _Monsieur le Cain_ comes
+not into my house, madam, till further orders!" Out of forbearance, I
+say nothing further to the old conjugal bully than go--to the devil, or
+at least to bed.
+
+
+33. CYCLE.
+
+The German public may still remember the _obligato-sheets_ promised in
+the Introductory Programme, and ask me what has become of them. The
+foregoing Cycle was the first, most excellent Public; but see through
+the matter, how it is with obligato-sheets, and that perhaps as much
+history lies therein as in any one Cycle, however it may be called.
+
+The Count had not yet learned anything of Liana's misfortune, when he,
+with the others, went down to the dinner of the Doctor, who to-day was
+very hospitable. They found him seized with a most violent fit of
+laughter, his hands thrust into his sides, and his eyes bent over two
+little ointment vessels on the table. He stood up, and was quite
+serious. The fact was, he found in Reil's Archives of Physiology, that,
+according to Fourcroy and Vauquelin, tears dye violet-juice green, and
+therefore contain alkali. In order to prove the proposition and the
+tears, he had thrown himself into a chair, and laughed in right hearty
+earnest, so as afterward to cry and get a drop or two for the
+brine-gauge of the proposition; he would gladly have wrought himself
+into another kind of emotion, but he understood his own nature, and knew
+that nothing could be got out of it so,--not a drop.
+
+He left the guests alone a moment,--the lady was not yet to be
+seen,--Malt sat on an ottoman,--the children had satirical looks,--in
+short, Impudence dwelt in this house as in her temple. Ridicule had no
+effect upon the old man, and he only countermanded what displeased
+himself, not what displeased others.
+
+At length the rosy-cheeked wife of the physician flourished into the
+apartment,--as preparatory course or preamble of the dinner,--with three
+or four _esprits_ or _feathers in her cap_,--with a dapple
+neck-apron,--in a red ball-dress, from which waltzing had taken out the
+color in which she had rouged,--and with a perforated fancy-fan. If I
+wished, I could be interested in her; for, touching these _esprits_
+(since the _esprit_, like the brain in Embrya, often sets itself upon
+the brain-pan, and there suns itself), she thought women and partridges
+were best served up at table with feathers on their heads; touching the
+fan, she meant to have it understood she had just come from a morning
+call (whereby she very clearly implied that ladies could no more go
+through the streets without their fan-stick than joiners without their
+rule); touching the rest, she knew the guest was a Count. Accordingly,
+it appears that she belongs to the honorables, who (for the most part),
+like rattlesnakes, are never better to be enjoyed than when one has
+previously put the head out of the way; but that we have still time
+enough to believe, when we come to understand her better.
+
+The beautiful Zesara was for her blind, deaf, dumb, destitute of smell,
+taste, feeling; but there are many women whom one cannot, with the
+greatest pains and tediousness, displease; Schoppe could do it more
+easily. Sphex, for his own personal predilections, made more out of a
+cell of fat in Malt than out of the whole cellular texture of a lady,
+even of his own; like all business people, he held women to be veritable
+_angels_, whom God had sent for the ministration of the saints (the
+business men).
+
+The dinner course began. Augusti, a delicate eater, enjoyed much, and
+took not only to the fine service, but to the torn napkins; the like of
+which he had often had in his lap at court, because there, in morals and
+in linen, rents are preferred to plasters. Soon, as usual, came forth
+even the outposts and first skirmishes of miserable dishes, the common
+prophets and forerunners of the best tit-bits, although at a hundred
+tables I have cursed them, that they did not, like good monthly
+magazines, give the best pieces first, and the most meagre last. The
+Doctor had already said to the three boys,--"Galen, Boerhave, Van
+Swieten, what is the polite way of sitting?" and the three physicians
+had already shoved three right hands between the waistcoat buttons, and
+three left hands into the waistcoat pockets, and sat waiting, "bolt
+upright" when good chap-sager was brought in for the dessert. Sphex
+partly expressed pleasure in cheese, partly a horror of it, just as he
+found it in the way of his shop-business. He remarked, on one hand, how
+joiners, in their glue-pot, had no better glue than what stood here
+before them,--it had just that binding quality in a man,--yet he would
+rather, for his own individual self, with Dr. Junker, apply it
+externally, like arsenic; but he also confessed, on the other hand, that
+the chap-sager for the Lector was poison. "I would pledge myself for
+it," said he, "that you, if one could examine you, would be found
+hectic! the long fingers and the long neck speak in my favor, and
+particularly are white teeth, according to Camper, a bad sign. Persons,
+on the contrary, who have a set of teeth like my lady there may feel
+safe."
+
+Augusti smiled, and merely asked the Doctor's lady, at what time one
+could best gain access to the Minister.
+
+Such poisonous reflections, as well as cats'-dinners,[57] he gave out,
+not from satirical malice, but from mere indifference to others, whom,
+like an honest man, he never suffered in the least to sway him in his
+actions. With the liberty-cap of the doctor's hat on his head, he
+received, from his medical indispensableness, so many academic freedoms,
+that he, between his four house-walls, ate and acted not more freely
+than between the showy, bristling pale-work of the court. Did he ever
+there--I ask that--let a drop of sweet wine pass his lips without
+previously drawing out an Ephraimite, which did not itself outlive the
+probation-day, and hanging it in the glass, merely to prove before the
+court whether the Ephraimite therein did not grow black? And if the
+silver did so, was there not as good as a demonstration of the wine
+being oversmoked, and could not the physician have _applied_ the whole
+right neatly, court, sweetness, blackening, poisoning, and oversmoking,
+if he had been the man to do it?
+
+The Lector's accidentally inquiring about the time of seeing the
+Minister was what Albano had to thank for saving him from first learning
+the painful misfortune in the house of the Minister, or in the presence
+of the blind girl herself. "You can," answered Sara, the Doctoress,
+"also despatch the servant; he will subscribe for you all; I, however,
+pity none as I do the daughter." Now broke loose a storm of questions
+about the unknown accident. "It is so," began the physician, sulkily;
+but soon (because he saw in some eyes water for his mill, and because he
+sought to roll off all medical blame from himself upon Captain
+Roquairol) he set himself as well as he could to pathetic detail, and
+lied almost like a sentimentalist. With an unobserved hint to the
+_affected_ lady, he pushed an empty dish towards her as a lachrymatory,
+in order that nothing might be lost. From the eclipsed eyes of the
+vainly struggling youth, this first woe of his life snatched some great
+drops. "May recovery be possible?" asked Augusti, exceedingly troubled,
+on account of his connection with the family.
+
+"Certainly; it is a mere affection of the nerves," replied Schoppe,
+briskly, "and nothing more." Whytt relates, that a lady who had too much
+acid in her stomach (in the _heart_ it were still worse) saw everything
+in a _cloud_, as girls do at the approach of sick-headache. Sphex, who
+had lied only for the sake of pathos and alkali, and who was vexed that
+the Librarian should have been of his private opinion, answered just as
+if the latter had not spoken at all. "The highest degree of consumption,
+Mr. Lector, often winds up with blindness, and it were well, in this
+case, to prescribe for both. Meanwhile I am acquainted with a certain
+periodical nervous blindness. I had the case in a lady[58] whom I
+brought out of it merely by blood-letting, smoke of burnt coffee, and
+the evening fog from the water; this we are now trying again in the case
+of our nervous patient. A dutiful physician will, however, always wish
+the devil would take mother and brother."
+
+In other words, the return of Liana's periodical malady almost
+distracted him. Offences against his honor, his love, his sympathy,
+never wrought the Physicus into a heat; through all such he kept on his
+glazed frost surtout; but disturbances of his cures heated him even to
+the degree of flying to pieces; and so are we all a kind of
+Prince-Rupert's-drops, which can bear the hammer and never break, till
+one just breaks off the little thread point, and they fly into a
+thousand splinters; with Achilles, it was the heel, with Sphex, the
+medical D.'s ring-finger, with me, the writing-finger. The Doctor now
+shook out the contents of his heart, as some call their gall-bladder; he
+swore by all the devils he had done more for her than any and every
+physician,--he had, however, already foreseen that such a stupid
+education--merely to look well and pray and read and sing--would prove a
+cursed poor economy,--he had often longed to break the harmonica-bells
+and tambour-needles,[59]--he had often called the attention of the
+mother, with sufficient distinctness and without indulgence, to Liana's
+so-called charms, and to her sensibility, her bright redness of cheeks,
+and velvet-soft skin; but had seemed to himself, by so doing, almost to
+gratify more than to distress her. The only thing that delighted him
+was, that the maiden had, some years before, caught a deadly sickness
+from the first holy sacrament, from which he had tried to keep her away,
+because he had already experienced, in the case of a fourth patient, the
+most melancholy consequences from this holy act.
+
+To the astonishment of every one my Count took part against all with
+Roquairol. Ah, thy first spring-storms were even now whirling round
+imprisoned in thy bosom, without a friendly hand to give them an outlet,
+and thou wouldst cover thy bloody grief! And wast thou not seeking a
+spirit full of flames, and eyes full of flames for thine own, and
+wouldst thou not rather have entered into brotherhood with a thundering
+hell-god than with an insipid pietistical saint, forever gnawing like a
+moth? Sharply he asks the Doctor, "What have you done with the Prince's
+heart?" "I have it not," said Sphex, startled; "it lies in
+_Tartarus_,[60] although it would have been more profitable to science
+had one been permitted to put it among one's preparations; it was large
+and very singular." He was thinking how often--when he could--he had, as
+an augur, during the dissection, secretly slipped aside one or another
+important member--as a princely or a cavalier-robber, _à la
+minutta_--for his study,--a honey-bag which he gladly cut out for
+himself with his anatomical honey-knife.
+
+"Has the young lady, then, an unhappy passion, or anything of the sort?"
+inquired Schoppe. "More than one," said Sphex; "cripples, idiots, young
+orphans, blind Methusalems,--all these passions she has. Sports and
+young gentlemen, I often say to the old lady, would be better for her
+health."
+
+But on this point, in the requirement of cheerfulness, I give in to him.
+Joy is the only universal tincture which I would prepare; it works
+uniformly as _antispasmodicum_, as _glutinans_ and _astringens_. The oil
+of gladness serves as ointment for _burns_ and _chills_ at once. Spring,
+for example, is a spring-medicine; a country-party, an oyster-medicine;
+a recreation at the watering-places is, in itself, a glass of _bitters_;
+a ball is a _motion_; a carnival, a _course_[61] of medicine;--and hence
+the seat of the _blest_ is at the same time the seat of the _immortals_.
+
+"Yes, he had finally," the Doctor concluded,--"as they were people of
+rank,--prescribed a dose of _pride_ (of the meadows), which manifests
+all the officinal healing powers of joy; taken in a stronger dose, it
+works fully as well as enjoyment itself, enlivens the pulse, steels the
+fibres, opens the pores, and chases the blood through the long venous
+labyrinth.[62] In the case of his weakly lady, such as they saw her
+there, he had used, he said, this medicament long ago by dresses and a
+doctor's rank, and had helped her to her legs thereby. But he would
+rather cure sixty common women than one distinguished one,--and he
+should regret, as family physician, merely his receipts and medical
+opinions, in case, as he certainly believed, the fair Liana should go
+hence."
+
+The first question which Albano, who never missed anything that was
+said, put to Augusti on the way back from the Doctor's, was, What the
+Doctor's wife meant by the subscribing servant? He explained it. There
+is, namely, in Pestitz, as in Leipsic, an observance, that when a man
+dies or falls into any other misfortune, his family place a blank sheet
+of paper, with pen and ink, in the entrance-hall, in order that persons,
+who take and show a nearer interest, may send a lackey thither, to set
+their names on the paper as well as he knows how; this merchant-like
+indorsement of the nearer interest, this descending representative
+system by means of servants, who are generally, now-a-days, the
+telegraphs of our hearts, sweetens and alleviates for both cities great
+sorrow and sympathy through pen and ink.
+
+"What! is that it? O God!" said Alban, and grew unusually indignant, as
+if people were forcing servants upon him as chrysographs and
+business-agents of his feelings. "O ye egotistical jugglers! through the
+pen of scribbling lackeys do ye pour yourselves out? Lector, I would
+condole with Satan himself more warmly than thus!"
+
+Why is this veiled spirit so lively and loud? Ah, everything had moved
+him. Not merely lamentation over poor Liana, persecuted by all the
+nightly arrows of destiny, entered like iron into his open heart, but
+also amazement at the gloomy intermingling of fate with his young life.
+Roquairol's ever-recurring expression, "_Breast without a heart_,"
+sounded to him as if it must be familiar; at last the converse of the
+expression came to his thoughts, the word of the Sphinx on the island,
+"_Heart without a breast_." So, then, even this riddle was solved, and
+the place fixed, when he was to hear, contrary to every expectation, the
+prophecy of the loved one; but how incomprehensible,--incomprehensible!
+
+"O yes! Liana she is called, and no God shall change the name," said his
+innermost soul. For in earlier years even the most vigorous youth
+prefers, in maidens, interesting delicacy of health and a tender fulness
+of feeling and a moisture of the eye,--just as, in general, at Albano's
+age, one values the flood (later the ebb) of the eyes too highly,
+although, too often, like an over-rich inundation, they wash away the
+seed-corns of the best resolutions;--whereas, at a later period,
+(because he proposes to himself marriage and housekeeping,) he looks out
+rather for bright and sharp than after moist eyes, and for cold and
+healthy blood.
+
+As Albano, for the most part, drew down the fire from his internal
+clouds on the discharging chains of the harpsichord strings,--seldomer
+into the Hippocrene of poetry,--so did he now unconsciously make out of
+his inner _charivari_ a passage on the harpsichord. I transpose his
+fantasy into my fancy in the following manner. On the softest
+minor-tones the blindness, with its long pains, passed by, and in the
+whispering-gallery of music he heard all the soft sighs of Liana
+repeated aloud. Then harder minor-tones led him down into Tartarus, to
+the grave and heart of the friendly old man who had once prayed with
+him, and then, in this spirit-hour, fell softly, like a dew-drop from
+heaven, the sound, Liana! With a thunder-clap of ecstasy he fell into
+the major-key, and asked himself, "This delicate, pure soul could fate
+promise to thy imperfect heart?" And when he answered himself, that she
+would perhaps love him, because she could not see him,--for first love
+is not vain; and when he saw her led by her gigantic brother, and when
+he thought of the high friendship which he would give and require of
+_him_; then did his fingers run over the keys in an exalting war-music,
+and the heavenly hours sounded before him, which he should enjoy, when
+his two eternal dreams should pass over livingly out of night into day,
+and when brother and sister should furnish at once, to his so youthful
+heart, a loved one and a friend. Here his inner and outer storms softly
+died away, and the evenly-balanced _temperament_ of the instrument
+became that of the player....
+
+But a soul like his is more easily appeased with sorrow than with joy.
+As if the reality had already arrived, he pressed on still further;
+indescribably fair and unearthly, he saw Liana's image trembling in her
+cup of sorrow; for the crown of thorns easily ennobles a head to a
+Christ's head, and the blood of an undeserved wound is a redness on the
+cheek of the inner man, and the soul which has suffered too much is
+easily loved too much. The tender Liana appeared to him as already spun
+into the funeral veil for the Flora of the second world, as the tender
+limbs of the bee-nymph lie transparently folded over the little
+breast,--the white form of snow, which had once, in his dream, melted
+away on his heart, opened the bright little cloud again, and looked,
+blind and weeping, upon the earth, and said, "Albano, I shall die before
+I have seen thee."--"And even if thou shouldst never see me," said the
+dying heart in his breast, "yet will I still love thee. And even if thou
+shouldst soon pass away, Liana, still I gladly choose sorrow, and walk
+faithfully with thee till thou art in heaven."... Heaven and hell had
+both at once drawn aside their curtains before him,--only a few notes,
+and those the same as before, and only the highest, and that only
+interruptedly and faintly, could he any longer strike; and at last his
+hands sank down, and he began to weep, but without too severe pangs,--as
+the storm which has unburdened itself of its lightnings and thunders
+stands now over the earth only as a soft, diffused rain.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[45] One who dedicated a new house (somewhat as we name a ship).
+The _glass fire-bucket_ which _quenched the inner conflagration_
+was probably the wine-glass or beer-tumbler.--TR.
+
+[46] Collegians.--TR.
+
+[47] Provincial Physician.--TR.
+
+[48] According to Camper, hectic patients have very white and
+fair teeth.
+
+[49] Derham (in his Physico-Theology, 1750) observes that the
+deaf hear best under a noise; e. g. one hard of hearing, under
+the sound of bells; a deaf housewife, under the drumming of the
+house-servant. Hence when princes and ministers, who for the most
+part hear badly, are passing through the country, kettle-drums
+are beat and cannon fired, so that they can hear the people more
+easily.
+
+[50] In whose wall the lady with the souvenir sits.
+
+[51] A kind of gray fur.--TR.
+
+[52] Baireuth.--TR.
+
+[53] This precocious completion of growth I have observed in many
+distinguished women, just as if these Psyches should resemble
+butterflies, which do not grow after coming out of the chrysalis
+state.
+
+[54] Cloth is roughened with thistles, i.e. scratched up, in
+order to the better shearing of it afterwards.
+
+[55] A distinguished actor of tragedy.
+
+[56] He means here their divorce, which was only deferred by the
+mutual wish to keep Liana.
+
+[57] Poor dinners, just as cat-silver is an inferior metal.--TR.
+
+[58] A weak-nerved lady (I know not whether it is the same) who
+had much religion, fancy, and suffering, became, as she tells me,
+blind in the same way, and was cured in the same way.
+
+[59] The eternal pricking of the sensitive finger-nerves by
+knitting, tambour, and other needles, perhaps as much as the
+touching of the harmonica-bells, makes one, by stimulating, weak
+in the nerves.
+
+[60] Tartarus is the melancholy part of Lilar.
+
+[61] Kursus--corso.--TR.
+
+[62] Pride of the meadows quickens the circulation of the blood
+even to frenzy. This whole observation on the pharmaceutic value
+of pride of the meadows is taken from Tissot's "Traité sur les
+Nerfs."
+
+
+
+
+SIXTH JUBILEE.
+
+     THE TEN PERSECUTIONS OF THE READER.--LIANA'S EASTERN
+     ROOM.--DISPUTATION UPON PATIENCE.--THE PICTURESQUE CURE.
+
+
+34. CYCLE.
+
+Postulates--apothegms--philosophems--Erasmian adages--observations of
+Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Lavater, do I in one week invent in countless
+numbers, more than I can in six months get rid of by bringing them into
+my biographical _petits soupés_ as episode-dishes. Thus does the
+lottery-mintage of my _unprinted_ manuscripts swell higher and higher
+every day, the more extracts and winnings I deal out to my reader
+therefrom in print. In this way I creep out of the world without having,
+while in it, said anything. Lavater takes a more rational course; he
+lets the whole lottery-wheel, filled with treasures, under the title of
+manuscripts (just as we, inversely, despatch manuscripts to the
+publishers by mail under the title of printed matter) circulate even
+among the _literati_.
+
+But why shall I not do the same, and let at least one or two lymphatic
+veins of my water-treasure leap up and run out? I limit myself to ten
+persecutions of the reader,--calling my ten aphorisms thus, merely
+because I imagine the readers to be martyrs of their opinions, and
+myself the Regent who converts them by force. The following aphorism, if
+one reckons the foregoing as the first persecution, is, I hope, the
+
+
+_SECOND._
+
+Nothing sifts and winnows our preferences and partialities better than
+an imitation of the same by others. For a genius there are no sharper
+polishing-machines and grinding-disks at hand than his apes. If,
+further, every one of us could see running along beside him a duplicate
+of himself, a complete Archimimus[63] and repeater in complimenting,
+taking off the hat, dancing, speaking, scolding, bragging, &c.; by
+Heaven! such an exact repeating-work of our discords would make quite
+other people out of me and other people than we are at present. The
+first and least step which we should take toward reflection and virtue
+would be this, that we should find our bodily methodology, e. g. our
+walk, dress, dialect, our oaths, looks, favorite dishes, &c., no better
+than those of all others, but just the same. Princes have the good
+fortune that all courtiers around them station themselves as faithful
+supernumerary copyists and pier-mirrors of _their_ selves, and propose
+to improve them by this Helot-mimicry. But they seldom attain their good
+end, because the Prince,--and that were also to be feared of me and the
+reader,--like the principle of _non-distinguendum_, does not believe in
+any real twins, but imagines that in morals, as in catoptrics, every
+mirror and mock rainbow shows everything _inverted_.
+
+
+_THIRD._
+
+It is easier and handier for men to flatter than to praise.
+
+
+_FOURTH._
+
+In the centuries before us humanity appears to us to be growing up; in
+those which come after us, to be fading away; in our own, to burst forth
+in glorious bloom: thus do the clouds, only when in our zenith, seem to
+move straight forward, those in front of us come up from the horizon,
+the others behind us sail downward with fore-shortened forms.
+
+
+_FIFTH._
+
+What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes then
+cease.[64]
+
+
+_SIXTH._
+
+The old age of women is sadder and more solitary than that of men;
+spare, therefore, in them their years, their sorrows, and their sex! In
+fact, life often resembles the trap-tree with its spines directed
+upward, on which the bear easily clambers up to the honey-bait, but from
+which he can slide down again only under severe stings.
+
+
+_SEVENTH._
+
+Have compassion on Poverty, but a hundred times more on Impoverishment!
+Only the former, not the latter, makes nations and individuals better.
+
+
+_EIGHTH._
+
+Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's.
+
+
+_NINTH._
+
+When two persons, in suddenly turning a corner, knock their heads
+together, each begins anxiously to apologize, and thinks only the other
+feels the pain and that he himself has all the blame. (Only I excuse
+myself without any embarrassment, for the very reason that I know, by my
+persecutions, how the other party thinks.) Would to God we did not
+invert this in the case of moral offences!
+
+
+_LAST PERSECUTION OF THE READER._
+
+Deluded and darkened man, living on from the mourning veil to the
+corpse-veil, thinks there is no further evil beyond that which he has
+immediately to overcome; and forgets that after the victory the new
+situation brings a new struggle. Hence, as before swift ships there
+swims a hill of water and a corresponding billowy abyss glides along
+close behind, so always before us is there a mountain, which we hope to
+climb, and behind us still a deep valley out of which we seem to have
+ascended.
+
+Thus does the reader vainly hope now, after having stood out ten
+persecutions, to ride into the haven of the story, and there to
+lead a peaceable life, free from the troubled one of my
+characters; but can any spiritual or worldly arm, then, protect
+him against scattered similes,--against hemispherical
+headaches,--whimsies,--reviews,--curtain-lectures,--rainy
+months,--or in fact honey-moons, which come in at the end of
+every volume?--
+
+Now for our History! In the evening Albano and Augusti went with the
+paternal letter of credit to the Minister's. The frostiness and pride of
+that individual the Lector endeavored, on their way, to varnish over by
+praising his laboriousness and discernment. With a knocking at his heart
+the Count seized the door-knocker to the heaven- or hell-gate of his
+future destiny. In the antechamber--that higher servant's apartment and
+_Limbus infantum et patrum_--there were still people enough, for
+Froulay regarded an antechamber as a stage, which must never be empty,
+and on which, as in the Jewish temple, according to the Rabbins, for
+those who kneel and pray, it is never too close. The Minister's lady was
+not present as a patient here, merely because she was looking after one
+of her own elsewhere. The Minister also was not here,--because he made
+few ceremonies, and only demanded uncommonly many,--but in his
+working-cabinet; he had heretofore had his head under the warm
+throne-canopy and taken a deep bite into the forbidden apple of the
+Empire, therefore he willingly made a sacrifice (not _to_ others, but
+_of_ others), and let himself, as a saintly statue, be hung round with
+votive limbs, without having to bestir his own, and, like St. Franciscus
+at Oporto, with letters of thanks and petitions which he never opens.
+
+Froulay came, and was--as ever, _aside_ from business--as courteous as a
+Persian. For Augusti was his home friend,--i. e. the Minister's lady was
+_his_ home-friend,--and Albano was not a good person to run against;
+because one had occasion for his foster-father in the votes of the
+Province, and because the youth by a peculiar and proper pride of his
+own commanded men. There is a certain noble pride through which merits
+shine brighter than through modesty. Froulay had not the most
+comfortable part before him; for the Court of Haarhaar was as
+disaffected toward the Knight of the Fleece, as he was toward it;[65]
+but Haarhaar was to be without doubt (according to all Italian
+_surgical_ reports) and in a few years (according to all _nosological_
+ones) the heir of his inheritance and throne. Now the bad thing about it
+was, that the Minister, who, like a good Christian, looked mainly to the
+future, had to creep along between the German Herr von Bouverot, on the
+one hand, who was secretly a creature of Haarhaar, and the demands of
+the present moment, on the other.
+
+He received the Count, I said, in an uncommonly obliging manner, as well
+as the Lector, and disclosed to the two that he must present to them his
+lady, who desired their acquaintance. He sent word to her, but, without
+waiting an answer, conducted them both into her apartment. Now was it to
+the youth as if the heavy door of a still and holy temple turned on its
+hinges. Even I too, at this moment, during their passage through the
+rooms, share so in his foolishness that I fall into full as great
+anxiety, as if I went in behind them. When we entered the eastern room,
+which was extended out at pleasure by picturesque paper-tapestry into a
+latticed arbor of woodbine, there sat merely the Minister's lady, who
+received us pleasantly, with firm and cold reserve in look and tone. Her
+severely closed and faintly-marked lips mutely spoke a seriousness which
+is the gift of a good heart, and a stillness which is the ornament of
+beauty,--as many wings, only when they are folded, shower down
+peacocks'-eyes,--and her eye gleamed with the good-will of reason; but
+the eyelids had been, by stern years, drawn deeply in, with a sickly
+expression, over the mild sight. Ah, as oftentimes between newly-married
+people a dividing sword was laid, so did Froulay grind daily at a
+three-edged one which separated him and her! Singularly did the impure
+roil on his face contrast with the aftersummer serenity on hers,
+although before witnesses, as it seemed, he took away the irony from his
+courteousness towards her, and kept hatred, as others do love, only for
+solitude.
+
+Fortunately this nut-tree, which threw an unwholesome, frosty nut-shadow
+on the whole flowerage of love and poetry, soon transplanted itself back
+again among more congenial guests. The Minister's lady, after the first
+expressions of courtesy, directed herself more to the Lector, whose
+correct, civilian's measure accorded entirely with her religious one;
+especially as only he could ask and condole with her about Liana. She
+replied, that this room of Liana's had been left exactly as it was the
+evening the blindness came on, in order that, when she recovered, it
+might remain for her a pleasant remembrancer, or a mournful one for
+others, if she did not. O, deeply moved Albano, if every absence
+glorifies, how much more must it do so with so many traces of the
+beloved object's presence! I confess, except a loved one, I know of
+nothing lovelier than her sitting-room in her absence.
+
+On Liana's work-table lay a sketched outline of a Christ's head near the
+open Messiah,--a folded walking-veil, together with the green
+walking-fan, with inscribed wishes of female friends,--some cut-out
+envelopes,--the gossiping letter of one of Froulay's tenants,--a whole
+lacquerwork sheep-fold, with wagon, stalls, and house, with whose
+Lilliputian Arcadia she had proposed to please Dian's children,[66]--a
+plucked leaf from the thinning album of a female friend, which she had
+trimmed with an India-ink flower border and then planted full of fair
+wishes, of which fate had robbed her own life. Ah, beautiful heart, how
+fondly would I sketch and hand round something like a tabular view of
+all the little mosaic of thy lightsome past, had the fee-provost entered
+more intimately into these matters! But what moves me and the Count more
+deeply is a framed embroidery, on which her needle, like an
+ingrafting-knife, had, on that dark day, ingrafted a rose with two buds,
+and which wanted nothing more but the thorns. O, _these_ had destiny
+only too fully developed on thy roses of joy, and then pressed them so
+deeply through thy breast even to the heart!
+
+At no hour of his life was Albano's love so tender and holy as at this,
+or his sympathy so fervent. Fortunately, the Minister's lady was all the
+time looking out of the window into the garden, and did not perceive his
+emotion. At last she went on to point out Liana's harmonica, which stood
+near; then was his heart too full and visible; he started with the hasty
+words, _he had never yet heard one_, and stepped before it. Ah, he was
+fain to touch something whereon her finger had so often rested. He laid
+his hand, as upon a sacred thing, on those prayer-bells which had so
+often trembled under hers for pious thoughts; but they gave him no
+answer, till the Lector, a connoisseur in the A B C as in the technology
+of all arts, gave him in three words the indispensable instructions. Now
+did he drink into his soul, full of sighs and struggles, the first
+tri-clang, the first plaintive syllables of that mother-tongue of the
+pining breast,--ah, of those _mutes'-bells_ which the inner man shakes
+in his hand, because he has no tongue! and his veins beat wildly like
+wings which wafted him up from the ground, and bore him to a higher
+prospect than that which opens into the last joy or the last agony. For
+in strong men great pains and joys become overlooking heights of the
+whole road of life.
+
+I know not whether many readers will believe the fault _possible_, which
+he now _actually_ committed. The Minister's wife, in the course
+of conversation, had very naturally--_apropos_ of Liana and
+Roquairol--fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary
+to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be
+broken in childhood or the heart in old age. Ah, she and her daughter
+themselves knelt, indeed, full of patience, before fate, whether loading
+or armed; although the mother's was a pious patience, which looked more
+to Heaven than to the wound, Liana's a loving patience, which resigns
+itself to new sorrows as to old sicknesses, as a queen does on
+coronation-day to the pains and friction of her heavy jewelry, and like
+a child that sweetly sleeps away and more sweetly dreams away his scars.
+But Zesara, who like a wolf fled the very clanking of a chain, and new,
+exasperated, against everything of the kind, from the light carcanets
+and chains of knighthood even to the heavy harbor-chains which obstruct
+the passage of youth out into the laboring sea, could not restrain
+himself, especially with that heart of his so full of emotions, from
+saying, in too great warmth: "Man must defend himself; sooner would I,
+in a free struggle, empty all my veins on the stirring battle-field than
+shed one drop from them bound to the rack."--"Patience," said the
+Minister's lady, who was full of it, "contends and conquers also, only
+in the heart."--"Dear Count," said Augusti, alluding not merely to
+Arria,[67] "the women must always say to the men, 'It does not hurt!'"
+
+I have not till now had an opportunity to make known this fault of
+Albano, that he never spoke his opinion more freely and strongly than
+just then when he had reason to fear losing one or two heavens of his
+life by the stake; in cases of less danger he could be more yielding.
+Although, therefore, he observed that the Minister's lady was painfully
+reminded thereby of the muscular, but also hard-grasping, hand of her
+wild son,--or much rather _for the very reason_ that he observed it, and
+because he proposed to be armor-bearer to this future friend,--he stuck
+to his opinion, threw all instruments for breaking in the young manly
+will out of the school-rooms into the street, and said, in his strongly
+relieved style: "The Goths preferred never to send their children to
+school, in order that they might remain lions. Even if maidens must be
+soaked in milk a day before planting them out in the civil world, boys,
+however, must be stuck, like apricots, with the stony shell in the
+earth, because they will soon enough throw off and forsake the stone by
+their rooting and growth."--The Lector, with his fine openness,--a
+crystal vase with golden edge,--remarked, with a gentle reprimand of
+Alban's impetuosity, that at least the way in which they had severally
+adduced their proofs was one of those very proofs themselves; and women
+needed and showed more patience with persons, and we more with things.
+
+The Minister's wife, who imagined herself listening more to her son than
+to his friend, was silent, and stepped nearer to the window. Amid these
+war-troubles the evening had wheeled her resplendent moon up over the
+eastern mountains, and the streams of her light flowed in at this
+moment, from all quarters, through the whole garden that lay stretched
+out before the eastern room, and lay in its broad alleys and
+flower-circles, when all at once a little round house appeared through
+upshooting water-jets, kindled into triumphal arches by the moon-light,
+and stood, even to its Italian trellised roof, all in a blaze. With soft
+emotion, the Minister's lady said: "On that water-house stands my Liana;
+she is trying the evaporation of the fountain; the physician promises
+himself much therefrom. And Providence grant it!"
+
+But the agitated Zesara, with all his sharp eyes, could not, however, in
+the full dazzling light of the level moon, and behind the quivering
+nunnery-grate of confined silver-or lymphatic-veins, individualize
+anything at this moment from the glimmering Eden, except an
+undistinguishable, still, white form. But it was enough for a weeping
+and burning heart. "Thou angel of my youthful dreams," thought he, "may
+it be thou! I greet thee with a thousand woes and joys. Ah! can there
+then be sorrows in thee, thou heavenly soul!" And it came over him, that
+if she were here in the room, with her afflicted and enchanting form,
+she would melt his whole being with sympathy, and he could now have cast
+off the embrace of the brother, by whose hand fate had closed her soft
+eyes in that long dream.
+
+The stifling air of the most painful sympathy caused him to look away,
+and turn round, and fasten on the open Messiah those eyes whose drops he
+would not show; but the recollection that he was repeating her last
+reading-pleasure made them fall only hotter and thicker. Suddenly
+something darkening, which fluttered down before the window like a
+falling raven, directed his look again to Liana, over whom stood a fully
+illuminated little cloud, as if it were a risen or descending saintly
+halo. Immortals seemed to dwell thereupon as on Ossian's clouds,
+awaiting their sister; and when she at length moved and slowly sank down
+into the water-house, seemed it not then as if her garment of flesh
+were passing into the earth, and her peaceful spirit into the cloud?
+
+Here Augusti, as the mother had to follow the returning invalid into the
+sick-chamber, gave him the hint for departure, which he took willingly;
+his love contented itself for the present with solitude, and with the
+hope of another meeting. Young love and young birds need, in the
+beginning, only to be _warmed_ by _covering_, and not till later to be
+_nourished_.
+
+But a paraclete or comforter whispered softly in the ear of the youth's
+heart as they departed: to-morrow thou wilt see her only a few steps
+from thee in the garden! And that is very easily brought about; he has
+only, at evening-twilight to-morrow, when the evening-walker makes use
+of her eye-medicine, to repair to the alley, and from among the leaves
+look freely up into the magic countenance, and then drink in the whole
+doctrine of felicity in one paragraph, one passage, breath, moment;--but
+what a prospect!
+
+The Count begged the Lector not to sit long with the busy Minister. When
+they found him again, he hardly--behind a pile of public
+documents--remembered, after considerable (perhaps counterfeited)
+thought, that they had been there, and deeply regretted that they were
+going away. Ah, the comforter is whispering all the evening and all
+night,--To-morrow, Albano!
+
+
+35. CYCLE.
+
+As the juggling night threw our Albano from one side and vision to the
+other,--for not the near past but the near future wearies us with
+rehearsals of our waking acts, with dreams,--how glad he was, in the
+morning, that his fairest future had not yet gone by. Two very
+Eulenspiegelish wishes often lodge in man: I often form the wish with my
+whole heart, that some real joy of mine, e. g. a master-work, a
+pleasure-journey, &c., might yet at last have an end; and, secondly, the
+wish above referred to, that one or another pleasure might stay away a
+little longer.
+
+The evening came with the greatest pleasure of all, when Zesara, like Le
+Gentil starting for the East Indies, set off for the eastern park of the
+Minister, to observe the transit of his evening star Venus; but only
+through the moon. Before the lighted windows of the palace he stopped
+among the people, and reflected, whether it were quite allowable thus to
+run into the garden; but really, had he been turned back, his thirsting
+heart would have carried him in through a whole Clerus and Diplomatic
+Congress posted before the gate. Boldly he strode along through the
+noisy palace before a barricade of tackled carriages, turned the iron
+lattice-gate, and stepped hastily into the nearest leafy avenue. Here,
+attended by a torch-dance of gleaming hopes, he went to and fro, but his
+eye was a telescope, and his ear was a hearing-trumpet. The green avenue
+wound up over the garden till it grew into another near the bath-house;
+into this he entered so as not to meet the blind one, or rather her
+attendant.
+
+But nothing came. To be sure he had not, like the moon,--as was, indeed,
+to have been expected of him,--come a half-hour too late, but in fact a
+half-hour too early. The moon, that star which leads wise men full of
+incense to the adoration, at last let fall broad, long, silver-leaves,
+like festive tapestry, into Liana's eastern room,--the Madonna on the
+palace was arrayed in the halo and nun's-veil of her rays,--the
+Minister's wife stood already at the window,--Nature played the
+larghetto[68] of an enchanted evening in deeper and deeper
+strains,--when Albano caught nothing further except a smaller one, made
+up of mere tones, which came from the bath-house, the pleasure-seat of
+all his wishes, and which, dying, would fain breathe its last with the
+spring-day. But he could not guess who played it. One might have
+inferred that it was Roquairol, merely because he afterward, as I shall
+relate, according to the April-like nature of his musical temperament,
+sprang up out of pianissimo into a too wild fortissimo. The brother,
+exiled by his father, could at least in the bath-house see and console
+his dear sister, and show her his love and his penitence; although his
+stormy repentance makes a second necessary, and at last became only a
+more pious repetition of his fault.
+
+Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every
+world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the
+sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the
+larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high
+waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art)
+dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with
+a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to
+the Selam-cipher, signify _hopes_; but really one after another was
+short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his
+perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,--he kept plucking
+away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves
+from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening
+windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was
+impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the
+bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance,
+when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo,
+and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of
+sparkling silver. Albano looked out....
+
+Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering
+water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage
+before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly
+beautiful form! As Grecian gods stand and look unearthly before the
+torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad
+glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw
+irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation
+and no effort had as yet cast a wave,--and the thin, tender,
+scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,--and the face like a perfect
+pearl, oval and white,--and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the
+May-flowers over her heart,--and the delicate grace's-proportions,
+which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,--and the ideal
+stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a
+finger upon the balustrade, as if the Psyche only floated over the
+lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,--and the large
+blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such
+inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in
+distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow!
+
+Thou too fortunate man!--to whom the only visible goddess, Beauty,
+appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her
+heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,--the past
+fades away,--the near tones seem to steal from the depth of
+distance,--the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with
+splendor the mortal breast!
+
+Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty
+heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or
+later?--and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow?
+
+For Liana--into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle
+through--was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its
+own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she
+thought a linden-top concealed it;--and this uncertain inclination so
+suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick
+pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and
+pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why
+from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away?
+And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her
+companion, and--O God! she knows not where they stand."
+
+But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely
+on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon
+the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor
+of the next life.
+
+A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the
+distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with
+single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana,
+and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so
+that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked down, and Albano started
+back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face,
+upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink,
+tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling
+tones of the brother and of the nightingale,--the eyelids quivered
+oftener over the gleaming eyes,--and at last the gleam became a quiet
+tear,--it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which
+the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs,
+though unwounded, weep.
+
+There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always
+begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment,
+in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir
+itself,--that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink
+of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,--kneel
+before her,--tell her thy whole heart;--what though thou then art lost
+forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!--and then cool
+and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he
+thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah!
+before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good
+spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be
+silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."
+
+Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall,
+and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As
+he passed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half
+latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure
+Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a shining
+lily[69] from the next world, which, to herself, is a sign that she is
+soon to pass thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling
+the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest
+veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe
+them.
+
+Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last
+had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and
+then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now shines
+to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O,
+at some future time after yet many years, when this _glowing_
+rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and
+magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it,
+glimmer after thee as a _white_ rose-parterre of memory!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[63] The title of a man, among the Romans, who walked behind the
+corpse and acted out the looks and character which the deceased
+had when living.--_Pers._, Sat. 3.
+
+[64] As Solomon says, "Desire shall fail."--TR.
+
+[65] It had formerly refused to give the Spanish knight the hand
+of the Princess; but I have had the promise of satisfactory
+documents on this weighty article.
+
+[66] Dian's family reside at Lilar.
+
+[67] Roman Arria, who stabbed herself to show her Poetus how to
+die.--TR.
+
+[68] A movement in music a little more than two degrees quicker
+than adagio.--TR.
+
+[69] It used to be believed that a lily lying in the
+singing-seats signified the death of the person to whom it
+belonged.
+
+
+
+
+SEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF
+     POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL
+     "MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON
+     BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE.
+
+
+36. CYCLE.
+
+If the Feudal-Provost Von Hafenreffer had no existence except as a
+creature of my fancy, I should certainly proceed with my history, and
+tell the world, as matter of fact (and the whole romance-writing set
+would go to the death upon it[70]), that Albano was sitting there the
+next morning, blind and deaf, behind the broad bandage which the
+bandage-maker Cupid had bound before his eyes,--that he had not been
+able to count more than _five_, except at evening, when he cast up the
+strokes of the clock, in order, afterward, to run in a magic circle
+round the Froulay water-house, like one who sets out to _charm the fire_
+which glides snake-like after him,--that he had, through those two
+blow-holes[71] wherewith sentimental whales blubber right out in
+bookstores, spouted out considerable streams,--for the rest, had never
+looked at another book (except some leaves in the book of Nature), nor
+at another human being (except a blind man),--"and to this my surgeon's
+certificate of erotic wound-fevers (I would say at the conclusion of my
+lies) Nature manifestly sets her privy seal."
+
+That she does not, says Hafenreffer; these are nothing but confounded
+lies; the case is quite otherwise, thus:--
+
+Zesara never stole a second time into Froulay's garden; a proud blush of
+shame darted over him at the very thought of the painful blush with
+which he should come in contact, for the first time, with a mistrustful
+or inquiring eye.
+
+But in this wise the dear soul remained hid from him until her recovery,
+as the May-month did from her; and he silently tormented himself with
+reckonings up of her sufferings and doubts of her cure. He was ashamed
+to be taking any pleasure during her period of sadness, and forbade
+himself the enjoyment of spring and the visiting of Lilar: ah! he knew
+too, full well, that the loving spring and Lilar, where she had received
+so many joys and the last wound, would make his heart too ungovernable
+and too full.
+
+His thirst for knowledge and worth, his pride, which bade him stand in a
+glorious light with his father and his two friends, impelled him onward
+in his career. With all his native fire he threw himself upon
+jurisprudence, and took no longer any other walks than between the
+lecture-room and his study-chamber. To this zeal he was driven by a
+characteristic passion for completeness; everything imperfect was to him
+almost a physical horror; he was shocked at defective collections,
+broken sets of monthly magazines, lawsuits left to sleep, libraries,
+because he could never read them out, people who died as aspirants for
+office, or in the midst of building-plans, or without a rounded system
+of thought, or as journeymen clothiers' boys or shoemakers' apprentices,
+and even Augusti's flute-playing, which he only took up _by the way_. It
+was the same energy which made him hold the bridle of Psyche's winged
+horse tight, and stick the rowel of the spur into him; even when a child
+he had experimented on this kind of force, in the holding of his breath,
+or in the painful pressure of a sore spot,--and, by Heaven! he now,
+figuratively, did both again. There dwelt in him a mighty will, which
+merely said to the serving-company of impulses, Let it be! Such a will
+is not stoicism, which rules merely over internal _malefactors_, or
+_knaves_, or _prisoners of war_, or _children_, but it is that genially
+energetic spirit, which conditions and binds the healthy _savages_ of
+our bosoms, and which says more royally to itself, than the Spanish
+regent to others, I, the king!
+
+Ah, of course (how could his warm soul do otherwise?) he often stood, at
+midnight, before the breezy window, and looked tearfully at the white
+Madonna of the ministerial palace, silvered by the pure moon. Yes, in
+the daytime, he often sketched in his souvenir (it happened to be a
+fountain and a form behind it, nothing more), or he read in the Messiah
+(naturally going on with the canto which he had already begun at the
+house of the Minister's lady), or he informed himself about nervous
+maladies, (was he, perhaps, with all his studying, guarded against
+them?) or he let the fire of his fingers run over the strings,--nay, he
+would have plucked nothing but roses, although with thorns, had this
+been their blooming season.
+
+And this sighing, stifled soul must shut itself up! O, he began already
+to fear every key of the harpsichord would become a stylus, the
+instrument itself a box of letters, and all actions treacherously
+legible words. For he must keep silent. The first young love, like that
+of business people (those of the Electorate of Saxony excepted), needs
+no instruments of speech, at most only a portable inkstand and pen. Only
+worldly people, who repeat their declarations of love quite as often as
+the players, are in a situation--and on similar grounds--to publish
+them, just as the players do. But in the holier season of life the image
+of the most beloved soul is hung, not in the parlor and antechamber, but
+in the dim, silent oratory: only with loved ones do we speak of loved
+ones. Ah, it was with reluctance that he even heard others speak of his
+saint; and he often stole (with the altar of incense in his bosom) out
+of the room where people were carrying round for her a censer more full
+of coal-smoke than of frankincense.
+
+
+37. CYCLE.
+
+They were expecting every day in Pestitz the return of the German
+gentleman M. de Bouverot, who had been in Haarhaar, putting the last
+retouching hand to the almost sketched marriage contract between Luigi
+and a Haarhaar princess, Isabella. Augusti was not partial to him, and
+even said Bouverot had no _honnêteté_;[72] and related the following,
+but with the soft irony of a man of the world:
+
+Some years before, Bouverot had been sent by the court of Haarhaar[73]
+to the Pope at Rome, in relation to certain canonical difficulties;
+just at the time when Luigi also made the princely procession to Rome,
+together with his Romish indictions.[74] Now Haarhaar, which in truth
+already went _chapeau-bas_ with the princely hat of Hohenfliess, and had
+every possible officinal prospect of wearing it, would not, for this
+very reason, present the appearance of looking with cold eyes on the
+extinction of the race of Hohenfliess, the more, as the very male
+support of the line, Luigi, even in his first years, was not a hero of
+any great nervous significance. Nay, it must needs be a matter of some
+consequence to the court of Haarhaar that the good thin autumn-flowerage
+should return, if possible, _otherwise_ than it went out; and even on
+such grounds it privily instructed the German gentleman to
+rule and watch over all his pleasures and pains as _maître de
+plaisirs_,--especially with _maîtresses de plaisirs_,--in such a manner
+as to give perfect satisfaction in this respect. Meanwhile, if our
+princely abiturient[75] had started pure as a fœtus, unhappily he was
+brought back ground down to a _punctum saliens_, especially as, by
+sundry caprioles and other leaps through the hoop of pleasure, he was
+spoiled for the leap into the knight's saddle. It may be possible that
+the German gentleman was too sanguine in his expectations of the
+rejuvenescence of the Prince; yes, he may have imitated the
+youth-restoring, wondrous essence of the Marquis d'Aymar,[76] whereby an
+innocent old lady, who anointed herself with the elixir more than her
+years required, was, through the excessive renovation, reduced to a
+little child. In short, by this crusade under the Knight of the Cross,
+Bouverot, the princely seat of Hohenfliess--as is often the consequence
+of crusades--will be left open at the proper time, and Haarhaar will
+seat itself thereon.
+
+I confess reluctantly that Albano, in the beginning,--because, with all
+his sharp-sightedness, his purity was quite as great,--comprehended the
+fact only confusedly; but when he did get the idea, it was to him
+_pharmaceutic_ manna, as it was to Schoppe _Israelitish_. "The Knight of
+the Cross," said the latter, "beareth not his cross in vain,--it does
+him quite as much service as one daubed on the houses in Italy does to
+them: not a soul may do on either of them what even in Rome may be done
+before every antechamber."
+
+Not long after that our three friends were going out into the street
+just at the hour when the noisy carriages rolled along to tea and play,
+when a litter was carried by before them with the seat _backward_,
+whereupon, however, a man was sitting. "Holy Father!" cried Schoppe, "in
+there sits, bodily, Cephisio, from Rome, who must sometime or other give
+me a sound drubbing."--"Softly, softly!" said Augusti, "that is the
+German gentleman; Cephisio is his Arcadian name."[77]--"Well, I rejoice
+so much the more that I once in my life had a hearty, downright set-to
+with the red-nose," said he, turning round and accompanying the litter,
+with his arms thrust under it, for almost ten paces, in order to get a
+better view of the caged bird, before the latter snatched-to the
+curtains. Albano caught a glimpse within the litter, as it passed
+swiftly along, only of a sharp eye drawn like a dagger, and a
+red-glowing nose-bud.
+
+Schoppe came back and related the transactions in Rome. He said,
+against all mortal sinners, blood-guilty men, and imps of iniquity he
+bore no such bitter and grim wrath as against professional bankers,
+_croupiers_,[78] and _Grecs_; if he had a canker-worm-iron wherewith he
+might scrape away this vermin from the earth, or a cochineal-mill
+wherewith he might grind them to powder, he would do it most cordially.
+"O heavens!" he then broke out, "had I in fact my foot just stretched
+out over the curling, coiling worm-stalk (and though that foot had the
+gout in it), I would gladly dash it down upon them, and tread out the
+vile filth." But what he could, he did. Being his own travelling
+servant, and a decoy-spider, darting to and fro through all Europe, he
+had full often the pleasure of getting these faro-leaf-caterpillars and
+leaf-sappers under his thumb,--of becoming their pretended
+associate,--learning their tactics,--and then rolling some fire-wheel or
+other into their hissing snakes'-hole. I am not intimately instructed
+whether it is known in Leipsic who the ringleader was that, a short time
+since, at the fair, played a mock-police with mimic-constables, and
+broke up a bank;--at least the bankers were altogether out on the
+subject, because they were expecting the real police the next day, and
+were begging for some indulgences and _il_legal-benefits; but I am in a
+condition here to name the thief-catcher: it was Schoppe. The spoils he
+applied mostly to the purpose of running new mines under the
+faro-tables.
+
+With Cephisio he had played his cards otherwise. He stepped up before
+his bank, and looked on for some minutes, and at last presented a card
+with a shield-louis-d'or. It won, and he showed behind the card a long
+roll of louis. Bouverot would not pay this roll. "He had not seen
+anything," he said. "What is your _croupier_ sitting there for, then?"
+said Schoppe, and pronounced them swindlers, if they did not pay. To
+escape greater damage, they paid him his winnings. He took the money
+coldly, and departed, with these words to the Pointeurs: "Gentlemen, I
+assure you, you are playing here with finished cheats; but they have
+paid me only because I knew them." Amidst the increasing stiffness and
+paleness of the partners he turned, and slowly, with his
+broad-shouldered, compact figure, and his knotty cudgel, walked away
+unscathed.
+
+Augusti wished from his heart--for the persecution's sake--that Bouverot
+might not know the Librarian again. They found at home an invitation
+from the Minister to tea and supper. "The poor daughter!" said Augusti;
+"for the sake of this Bouverot, the half-blind one must go to-morrow to
+the table." Meanwhile, our youth will then surely see her again at last,
+and only a spring-day separates him from the dearest object! If Augusti
+is right, then my observation fits in here, that a good sound villain is
+always the motive-pike which sets the still, quaker-like carp-tribe in
+the pond to swimming; the hidden pock-matter, which brings cold children
+at once to life.
+
+
+38. CYCLE.
+
+Liana's eyes healed, but only slowly: Nature would not lead her at once
+out of her sombre prison into the sun; she could now, like the
+philosophers, just recognize light rather than forms. Nevertheless, the
+Minister issued cabinet orders that she should day after to-morrow play
+on the harmonica, appear at the _souper_, and even make the salad, and
+thereby mask her blindness. He sometimes commanded impossible things, in
+order to meet with as much disobedience as his anger needed for the
+purpose of venting itself in punishment. Certain people keep themselves
+all day long full of vexation beforehand for some coming event or other,
+like urinal phosphate, which always boils under the microscope, or
+forges, wherein every day fire breaks out.
+
+The Minister's lady pronounced her soft, firm, No. About the harmonica
+she said she had asked the Doctor, in his name, who had strictly
+forbidden it; and the rest was an impossibility. Here he could already,
+he felt so like it, be angry at several things, especially at the asking
+of the Doctor, which, however, had not yet taken place; he grew mad
+enough, and swore he should act according to _his own_ principles, and
+devil a bit did he care for _other_ people's.
+
+This _principle_ was in the present case the German gentleman. That is
+to say, the above-mentioned anecdote--Bouverot's guardianship of the
+hereditary Prince on his travels, or the design of the thing--had at
+both courts come to be the common talk in assemblies and at tables, and
+was hidden only from the Prince Luigi; for on thrones, there are almost
+no mysteries to any one excepting him (hardly his wife) who sits
+thereupon, as in whispering-galleries the people in distant corners hear
+everything aloud, only not he who stands in the middle. The German
+gentleman was, therefore, in the Hohenfliess system, the important
+port-vein and pulmonary artery wherewith even Froulay would water
+himself. The latter is obliged throughout to serve the present and the
+future, or two masters, of whom the one of Haarhaar might very soon be
+his.
+
+Bouverot was attached not merely to Froulay the minister, but to Froulay
+the father; a man like him, who causes to be sent after him from Italy a
+whole cabinet of Art, and whose acquaintance with the arts has so long
+knit together even him and the Prince, must know how to prize a Madonna
+of such carnation as Liana, and of the Romish school, and, what is more,
+who, detached from the canvas, moved as a full, breathing rose. As to
+marrying the rose, that he could not propose to himself, because he was
+a German Herr.
+
+He had not seen her since his Italian tour,--nor had the Count
+either,--to both the Minister wished to show her as a round pearl of
+special whiteness and figure. Froulay had--which after all happens
+oftener than we imagine--quite as much vanity as pride; the latter to
+repel blame, the former to court praise. But I should have now to write
+a tournament-chronicle to tell posterity the half of all his raging and
+racing and lance-thrusts, in a fight wherein he served under the banners
+of enmity, vanity, and avarice. He was no more to be hunted to death
+than a wolf. All weapons were alike to him, and he was ever taking
+sharper and more poisonous ones. In the old _judicial_ duels between man
+and wife, the man stood commonly up to his stomach in a pit, in order to
+bring his strength down to a level with the woman's, and she struck at
+him with a stone tied up in a veil; but in the _matrimonial_ duels the
+man seems to stand in the free air and the woman in the earth, and she
+often has only the _veil_ without the stone.
+
+In this combat there stepped between the two a shining peace-angel who
+caught the wounds, namely, Liana. The daughter, who had an enthusiastic
+love for her mother, and the womanly reverence for the stronger sex
+toward her father, and who suffered so endlessly under their strifes,
+fell upon her mother's neck and begged her to allow her what her father
+demanded; she would certainly do everything so as not to excite
+observation; she would take the greatest pains and practise herself
+specially beforehand,--ah, he would otherwise only be still more unkind
+to her poor brother,--this discord, merely on her account, was so
+painful to her, and perhaps more injurious than playing on the
+harmonica.
+
+"My child, thou knowest," said the mother, for now she _had_ asked,
+"what the physician said yesterday against the harmonica; the rest is at
+thine own risk!" Liana kissed her joyfully. She must needs be led to her
+father, that she might make known to him aloud the gladness of her
+obedience. "I thank you, and be hanged," said he, softly; "it is simply
+your cursed duty." She left him with her joy dissipated to atoms, but
+without any great pangs; she was already accustomed to this.
+
+
+39. CYCLE.
+
+The Lector, while they were yet on their way to the Minister's, begged
+Albano to moderate the fire of his assertions and his pantomimes. He
+made known to him only so much of the family-jar as was necessary, in
+order that he might not, by a mistaken idea of her restoration, throw
+Liana into embarrassment. As they entered the card-room, everything was
+already in full blaze.
+
+As, at this time, no one is presented to him, I must do it; they are
+disciples (at least _twelfth_ disciples) of the Minister.
+
+And first, I introduce to thee the holy President of Justice, Von
+Landrok, a good apothecary's-balance of Themis, which weighs out
+scruples, and wherein no false weights lie; but what is quite as bad,
+much smut, rubbish, and rust. Those at the ombre-table near by are the
+lords and ladies of Vey, Flöl, and Kob, sleek, fine souls, like minerals
+in cabinets, polished off on the show-side, but on the concealed base
+still jagged and scratching.
+
+Go with me to the entrance of the next apartment; here I have to present
+to thee the young but fat canon Von Meiler, who, in order to line and
+stuff out and pad his inner man with a thick, warm, outer one, needs to
+fleece no more peasants yearly than the number of linden-trees the
+Russian peels for his bark-shoes, namely, one hundred and fifty.
+
+The apartment into which thou art looking I present to thee as a
+fly-glass full of courtiers, who, in order to enter into the _kingdom of
+heaven_, have become not merely _children_, but in fact _embryons_ of
+four weeks, who, as is well known, look like flies; if Swift desires of
+his servants nothing more than the _shutting-to_ of the doors, these
+wish nothing of their employer and bread-provider but the _leaving-open_
+of the same.
+
+I have the honor to set before thee yonder--it is he who is not
+playing--the holy Church-Counsellor, Schäpe, who would fain be chief
+chaplain to the court; a soft scoundrel, who soaks and softens the
+seed-corns of the divine and human word, like melon-seed (they are
+thereby to spring up sooner in the heart), so long in sugared wine, that
+they rot in it; a spiritual lord who never in his life _offered_ any
+other prayers than the two which he always refuses, the _fourth_ and
+_fifth_.[79]
+
+But the Lector will soon name to thee, at the window, every one of the
+lords and dames, coldly, gently, and without pantomime. At present the
+Minister himself conducts thee to a gentleman, one of the players, with
+a cross on, who drinks water with saltpetre, and is continually licking
+his dry mouth; it is _Bouverot_,--he is just rising in thy presence;
+examine the cold, but impudent and cutting, sharply-ground eye, whose
+corners resemble a pair of open tinman's-shears, or a trap set,--the red
+nose, and the hard, lipless mouth, whose reddish crab's-claw, worn off
+by whetting, pinches together,--the cocked-up chin, and the whole
+stocky, firm figure. Albano does not surprise him; he has already seen
+all men, and he inquires about no one.
+
+The Minister refreshed the youth, whose inner being was one snarl, with
+the promise that at supper he would present to him his daughter. He
+offered him a game; but Alban replied, with a too youthful accent, he
+never played.
+
+He could now roam round through the lanes of the card-tables, and survey
+whatever he wished. In such a case one posts himself, if there is no one
+of the company whom he can endure, exactly before or beside the face he
+detests the most, in order inwardly to lash himself into vexation at
+every word and every feature of the countenance. Albano might have had
+many visages in his eye which were, at least in a small degree,
+intolerable, and by which he might have stationed himself;--nay, no
+sufficient reasons could have been assigned why he should not have given
+his whole attention to a certain chaffy, dried up paste-eel, a weakling
+full of impertinence, who was observing through an eye-glass the card
+constellations as they came up, while Albano could extend the feelers
+of his optic nerves even to the spots on the cards in the second
+apartment;--there would, indeed, have been no reasons, had not the
+German gentleman been there; before him he must place himself; of him he
+knew the most and the worst; he stood in distant connection with
+Schoppe, even with Liana. Furies! in the neighborhood of certain faces
+the pinions of the soul crumple up and mew themselves as swans' and
+pigeons' feathers are crushed before eagles' quills; it was as
+uncomfortable and close for all the innocent feelings in such a roomy
+breast as Albano's, as it is to a flock of pigeons into whose cote some
+one has thrown the tail of a polecat.
+
+I cannot disguise the fact, he muttered and growled inwardly at all the
+man did and had,--whether it was his having fingers whose points were
+finely shaved for the faro-game, and whose nails had been somewhat
+peeled off by an altogether worse game of _hazard_ yet,--or his looking
+occasionally through the hair of his eyebrows,--or (only once) squashing
+a fly by a sudden snapping to of his lips like a fly-trap,--or his
+uttering now a line of German and now of French, which I expect of good
+circles, whereas only low people never bring out a German word, except a
+few, such as _Lansquenet_,[80] _canif_ (kneif), _birambrot_ (bier am
+brod), excepted. Suffice it, he thought always of Schoppe's fine
+expression: "There are men and times at which and with whom nothing
+could be more refreshing to an honest man than--to give them a sound
+drubbing." Duelling is quite as good, thought the Count.
+
+However, Schoppe must here be justified by an authority. Namely, the
+author himself, otherwise such a soft, warm swan-skin, could never stand
+behind card-table-chairs without becoming a complete game-cock, and
+spreading out his scratching, bristly wing the wider the longer he idly
+looked on; the reason is this, that in general one finds only those
+people more and more tolerable and better upon acquaintance, with whom
+one pursues and purposes the same kind of objects.
+
+Albano wished heartily he had his brother-in-arms Schoppe with him now;
+he went often, it is true, to Augusti to vent himself; but _he_ always
+sought to pacify him; yes, by keeping himself constantly engaged with
+the church-counsellor, he cut off from him the opportunity of betraying
+his youthful, inexperienced soul to listeners. Moreover, the Lector
+chose afterward for half an hour--what familiar friends often do in the
+absence of familiar female friends--the latter (namely, absence).
+
+The Count stood some time behind Bouverot's seat, and looked into a
+Chinese mirror, japanned on the inside with grotesque figures, and
+changed his position constantly, till he brought Cephisio's face to
+appear therein right beside a painted dragon, just by way of
+comparison;--all this went on, interrupted, however, by constantly
+increasing heart-beatings for Liana, when the servants opened the doors
+to the supper-hall; and now his heart thumped even to pain, and his
+form, already so blooming with youth, hung all full of the roses of
+happy and modest confusion.
+
+
+40. CYCLE.
+
+With beating heart and burning cheek he made his way into the midst of
+the motley promenading throng with some old lady or other, who, in her
+vanity, misunderstood him, and at once hung on his arm like a
+spring-bracelet, and who got nothing from him but--answers. With flying
+and piercing glances he stepped into the bright hall, which seemed as if
+it were made of crystallized light, and into the sea of heads. He was
+just making some answer when he caught, in the tumult behind him, the
+low words, "I certainly hear my brother,"--and immediately the still
+lower refutation, "It is my Count." He turned round; between the Lector
+and her mother stood the dear Liana, a modest, timid, pale-red angel, in
+a black silk dress, over which ran only the glittering spring-frost of a
+silver chain, and with a light ribbon in her blond hair. The mother
+presented her to him, and the tender cheek bloomed more redly,--for she
+had, indeed, confounded the similar voices of the guest and the
+brother,--and she cast down those beautiful eyes which could see
+nothing. Ah, Albano, how violently thy heart trembles now that the past
+has become present, the moonlit night a spring morning; and this still
+form, now so near thee, works far more mightily than in any dream! She
+was too holy in his sight for him to have been able to utter a lie
+before her about the apparent recovery; he preferred silence;--and thus
+the warmest friend of her life came to her the first time only veiled
+and dumb.
+
+The Lector soon led her away to her seat under the second lustre;
+opposite her sat her mother (probably, for this reason, that the good,
+unconscious daughter, who surely could not always be letting her eyelids
+fall, might raise them with friendliness and propriety towards a beloved
+being); the German gentleman, as an acquaintance, seated himself,
+without further ceremony, on her right, Augusti on her left,--Zesara, as
+Count, came far up above beside the highest lady.
+
+Deuse take it! that is, unfortunately, so often my own case! I assert
+the upper seat of honor,--and observe, a mile below me, the daughter,
+but, like a myops, only half of her, and can bring about nothing the
+whole evening. Do pray transpose me without any scruples down beside
+her,--you have to deal with nothing more than a puffed-up man,--why, on
+earth, as in the heavens, must, then, the largest planets be placed
+exactly the farthest from their sun?
+
+I now draw my readers to the Minister's table, not to show them the
+ministerial pomp ingrafted upon avarice, or his dance of honor hemmed in
+between the parallel lines of etiquette, or even his family arms, which
+were carried round on every chafing-dish and salt-cellar, and with the
+ice and mustard,--enough for us to know the ubiquity of the insignia
+upon his flower-pots, shirts, bed-clothes, dog's cravats, and all his
+thoughts; but the reader shall just now look only at my hero.
+
+He is very prominent. Upon such a new-comer, people, in a
+residence-city, have already, before he has fairly given the driver his
+drinking-money, got all possible light of nature and revelation;
+nineteen of the company were fastened upon him as his moral odometers.
+The boldness of his nature and his rank made up with him for worldly
+tact, which was missed nowhere except in this, that he never took sides
+except in the very strongest manner, and always ran off into general and
+cosmopolitan observations. But see, I pray you!--O, I wish Liana could
+see it,--how the rosy glow and the fresh green of his healthiness shines
+among the yellow sicklings of the age, out of whom, as from ships on the
+African coast of youth, all the pitch that held them together had run
+out,--and how the cheek-redness of spiritual health, a tender,
+ever-returning suffusion (from anxiety about Liana) graces him, whereas
+most of the world's people at the table seem, like cotton wool, to take
+all colors more easily than _red_!
+
+He looked and listened, against the salvation-laws of visiting, too much
+to Liana. She ate, under the heightened redness of a fear of mistaking,
+only sparingly, but without embarrassment; the Lector, with easy hand,
+barred up against her the smallest road to error. What astonished him
+was, that she covered such a sensitive and easily weeping heart with
+such an unembarrassed cheerfulness of countenance and conversation.
+Young man! _that_ is, with the most delicate maidens, free from pangs of
+love, no covering and disguise, but an enjoying of the moment and
+habitual courtesy! She retained so considerately (what she had probably
+learned beforehand) the relative rank of the familiar voices, that she
+never directed her answer to the wrong place. She, however, looked often
+to her mother with full eyes, and smiled then still more serenely, not,
+however, for the purpose of deceiving, but from real, hearty love.
+
+Touching her salad, the best and most fit to be a prince's table-guest
+among my female readers, who had seen her mix it, would have taken
+several fork-loads thereof. Uncommonly charming was it, when, growing
+more earnest and red, she drew off her glove before the blue, celestial
+hemisphere of glass; with white hands and supple arms, without a silken
+fold, worked away in the green, between the blue of the glass and the
+black of the silk; considerately felt for the vinegar-and oil-castors,
+and poured out as much as her practice (and the deciphered advice of the
+Lector,--at least so it seems to me) directed. By heavens! the dressing
+is, in this case, the salad; and the vain Minister, who had no
+understanding of pictures, had a great eye for things that would make
+good pictures.
+
+The mother seemed scarcely to look at the leaf-mixing. To the Count, the
+Minister's lady seemed to-day to have only good-breeding and no pious
+strictness; but he did not yet sufficiently know those polished women,
+who have refinement without wit, sensibility without fire, clearness
+without coldness; who borrow of the snail his feelers, his softness, his
+coolness, and his dumb gait, and who demand and deserve more confidence
+than they obtain.
+
+At this moment came in Cephisio, like an angel among three men in the
+fiery furnace, but a dark angel. To the Count, his contiguity of seat,
+and every word he addressed to Liana, was already a crucifixion,--only
+to pass with a look from her to him was an agony, little different from
+that which I should have, if I had spent a day at Dresden in the antique
+Olympus of ancient gods, and then, on going out, should fall into a
+refectory full of swollen monks, or into a naturalist's cabinet full of
+stuffed malefactors' skins and bottled embryo-spiders. However he was
+pacified--in my opinion, only deceived--by one thing, that the German
+gentleman did not blaze away in lyrics beside her, was neither in heaven
+nor out of his head, but in his head, and quite composed and very
+polite. There are no pigeons, Count,--ask the farmers,--which the hawks
+oftener pounce upon than the _glossy white_ ones!
+
+The German gentleman now produced a snuff-box, with a neat picture of
+Lilar, and asked Liana how it pleased her; he liked the sentimentality
+of it particularly.
+
+The Lector was terrified, leaned forward toward the box-piece, and threw
+out a few opinions beforehand which should guide the half-blind one in
+forming her own; but after she had passed it two or three times
+obliquely against the lights and near before her eyes, she was able to
+express an original opinion herself, that the child illuminated by the
+half-sunken sun, who is drawn aloft by a flower-chain under the
+triumphal arch, was, to her feelings, "so very lovely." Here--and I have
+observed the same case in a half-blind lady of powerful fancy and
+receptive sense of art--the effort and the artistic sense, or the
+spiritual eye, came to meet the bodily half-way. The box, as well as its
+snuff, was presented farther on, and came down along to the Counsellor
+of Arts, Fraischdörfer, upon whom the new Prince's love of the arts and
+the favorite's knowledge in them now placed new crowns; he found fault
+with nothing but the white of the blossoms. "Spring," said he, "is, by
+reason of its wearisome whiteness, a mere monochrome; I have visited
+Lilar only in autumn." "There is the nightingale's song, too, which we
+of course cannot paint, but yet we can hear it," said Liana, cheerfully;
+he was her teacher, and now, in the technology of painting, even her
+father's. Over all her acquisitions and inner fruits and blossoms the
+rose of silence had been painted; to that her tyrannical father had
+entirely accustomed her, and especially before men, in whom she always
+revered copied fathers.
+
+When the landscape came to Albano, and he held before him in miniature
+that spring night when Lilar and the noble old man appeared to him so
+enchantingly,--and as he touched what the dear soul had handled,--and
+now in his own soul all accordant strings trembled,--just then the Devil
+struck again a dissonant chord of the seventh:--
+
+"The Prince, gracious sir," said the Minister to the German gentleman,
+"was yesterday buried in private; only eight days hence we have the
+public interment. We are obliged to hasten, because the suspension of
+the court-mourning lasts until the inauguration, on _ascension-day_, is
+gone by." I am too much excited to express myself upon the eternal
+master of ceremonies, Froulay, who would have raised a lantern-tax in
+the sun, and bridge-toll before park-bridges and asses'-bridges; but
+Albano, dazzled by so many side-lights and glancing rays,--reminded of
+Liana's sorrow over the old man, of his birthday, of the heart without a
+breast, and of the madness of the world,--was not in a condition,
+however much he had intended appearing in gentleness and lambs' clothes
+before Froulay, to keep the latter on; but he must needs (and louder
+than he meant), in opposition to his next neighbor, the Church
+Counsellor, Schäpe, with too great youthful exasperation (not lessened
+by the eager listening of Liana for the brotherly voice) declare himself
+against many things,--against the everlasting dead sham-life of
+men,--against the ceremonial haughtiness of a soulless form,--against
+this starving on love merely from making false shows of it;--ah, his
+whole heart burned on his lip!
+
+The honest Schäpe, whom I just now called a scoundrel, took, with
+several expressions of countenance, Albano's part. But I do not by any
+means, friend Albano!--thou hast yet to learn for the first time that
+men, in respect to ceremonies, modes, and laws, like a flock of sheep,
+will, in a body, provided the bell-wether can only be got to leap over a
+pole, continue to leap carefully over the same place when the pole has
+been taken away;--and the most and highest leaps, in the state, are
+those we make without the pole. But a youth would be an ordinary one who
+should love civil life very early, however certain it is that he and we
+all judge too bitterly the faults of every office which we do not
+ourselves hold.
+
+The company listened in silence, and, out of politeness, only inwardly
+admired; on Liana fell a tender seriousness.
+
+They rose,--the closeness vanished,--so did his zeal;--but, whether it
+came from the speaking, or the contemplation of the loved object, or
+from a youthful over-leaping of the hedges of visiting-propriety,--(it
+arose not, however, from want of manners),--the fact is not to be denied
+(and I do my best, too, to give it exactly) that the Count left the poor
+old lady who had been escorted in by him,--Hafenreffer himself knows not
+her name,--left her standing, and, I believe unconsciously, took Liana
+under his escort. Ah, her! What shall I say of the magic nearness of the
+dreamed-of soul,--of the light resting of her hand, felt only by the arm
+of the inner man, not of the outer,--of the shortness of the heavenly
+way, which should have been at least as long as Frederick Street?
+Verily, he himself said nothing,--he thought merely of the abominable
+Inhibitorial-room, where their separation must take place,--he trembled
+at every effort to speak. "You have, perhaps," said Liana, lightly and
+openly, who loved to hear the friendly voice, especially after the warm
+discourse, "already visited our Lilar?"--"Truly not; but have you?" he
+said, too much confused. "My mother and I have made it our favorite home
+every spring."
+
+Now were they in the parting-chamber. Alas! there and thus he stood with
+her, who saw nothing, for some seconds immovable, and looked straight
+before him, wanting to say something, till he was aroused by her mother,
+who was eagerly seeking, for her affection, which the whole evening had
+been nourishing, a sequestered hour on her daughter's heart,--and so all
+was over, for both vanished like apparitions.
+
+But Alban was as a man who is deserted by a glorious dream, and who all
+the morning is so inwardly blest, but remembers the dream no more. And
+yet, stands not Lilar open to him, and will he not surely see it, so
+soon as ever Liana can see it too?
+
+Never was he more gentle. The attentive Lector, in this warm, fruitful
+seed-time, threw in some good seed. He said, as they looked out together
+into the moonlit night, Albano had this evening hardly brought forward
+anything but thorny and exaggerated truths, which only imbitter, but do
+not enlighten. At another time the Count would have asked him whether he
+should have carried himself like Froulay and Bouverot, who, with all
+possible tolerance, presented theses and antitheses to each other, like
+an academical respondent and opponent, who previously prepare in concert
+logical wounds and plasters of equal length;--but to-day he was very
+kindly disposed towards him. Augusti had so delicately and
+affectionately cared for mother and daughter,--he had, without
+blackening or whitewashing, said much good, but nothing hastily, and his
+expositions had been calmly listened to: he had neither flattered nor
+offended. Albano, therefore, replied, softly: "But it is surely better
+to imbitter, dear Augusti, than to put to sleep. And to whom shall I
+then say the truth but to those who have it not nor any faith in it?
+Surely not to others." "One can speak any truth," said he, "but one
+cannot reckon as truth every mode and mood in which he speaks it."
+
+"Ah!" said Albano, and looked up; beneath the starry heaven stood the
+marble Madonna of the palace, like a patron saint, softly
+illuminated,--and he thought of her sister,[81]--and of Lilar,--and of
+spring,--and of many dreams,--and how full his heart was of eternal
+love, and that he had as yet no friend and no loved one.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[70] Lit. "Let themselves be struck dead thereupon," i. e. lay
+their life that it was so. We have a vulgarism: "I'll be shot if
+it's not so."--TR.
+
+[71] _Blase-löcher_, mouth-pieces.--TR.
+
+[72] _Honnêteté_ entirely excludes, in the higher classes,
+murder; _dés honnêteté_, lying, &c., except in a _certain_
+degree.
+
+[73] This court is Catholic, but the country Lutheran; and to
+this latter confession that of Hohenfliess also subscribes.
+
+[74] Or convocations every fifteen years.--TR.
+
+[75] A departing graduate.--TR.
+
+[76] See Count Lamberg's Day-book of a Man of the World.
+
+[77] Whoever goes to the Academy of the Arcadians, takes an
+Arcadian name.
+
+[78] One who watches the card and takes up the money at the
+bank.--TR.
+
+[79] Give us our daily bread, and forgive us our debts.--[? TR.]
+
+[80] Lanzknecht.--TR.
+
+[81] Liana.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+EIGHTH JUBILEE.
+
+     LE PETIT LEVER OF DR. SPHEX.--PATH TO
+     LILAR.--WOODLAND-BRIDGE.--THE MORNING IN
+     ARCADIA.--CHARITON.--LIANA'S LETTER AND PSALM OF
+     GRATITUDE.--SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A GARDEN.--THE
+     FLUTE-DELL.--CONCERNING THE REALITY OF THE IDEAL.
+
+
+41. CYCLE.
+
+I Sat up all last night till towards morning,--for I cannot suffer any
+strange _déchiffreur_ in the case,--in order to cipher out the Jubilee
+to the very last word, so enchained was I by its charms; I hope,
+however, as the mere thin leaf-skeleton from Hafenreffer's hand has
+already done so much, that now, when I run through its veins with
+sap-colors and glossy green, the leaf will do absolute miracles.
+
+With the Count it had been troubled weather since last evening. For the
+patient, modest form which he had seen shone, like the purpose of a
+great deed, before all the images of his soul; and in his dreams, and
+before he sank to slumber, her gentle voice became the Philomela of a
+spring-night. Withal, he heard them continually talking about her,
+especially the Doctor, who every morning announced further progress of
+the ocular cure, and at last placed Liana's setting out for Lilar nearer
+and nearer. To hear of a loved one, however, even the most indifferent
+thing, is far mightier than to think of her. He heard further, that her
+brother, since the murder of her eyes, had withdrawn entirely from the
+city, in which he would not again appear except on a so-called
+festive-steed at the Prince's funeral;--and around this Eden, or rather
+around its creatress, so high a garden-wall had been run, and he went
+round the wall and found no gate.
+
+I know nothing more odious than this; but in what residence-city is it
+otherwise? If I ever wrote a Romance (of which there is no probability),
+one thing I affirm openly, there is nothing which I would so sedulously
+shun as a residence-city, and a heroine in it saintly enough for a
+canoness. For the conjunction of the upper planets is more easily
+brought about than that of the upper class of lovers. Does _he_ wish to
+speak alone with _her_ at Court or at tea or in her family, there stands
+the Court, the tea-party, the family close by;--will he meet her in the
+park, she rides, like the Chinese couriers, double, because we give a
+consciousness to maidens, as nature gives all important organs,
+duplicate, just as we give good wine double bottom;--will he meet her at
+least accidentally in the street, then there stalks along behind her (if
+the street lies in Dresden), a sour servant as her plague-vinegar,
+soul-keeper, _curator sexus_, _chevalier d'honneur_, genius of Socrates,
+contradictor, and Pestilentiary. In the country, on the other hand, the
+parson's daughter takes a run (that is all), because the evening is so
+heavenly, about the fields of the parsonage, and the candidate needs do
+nothing more than put on his boots. Really, among people of rank, the
+mantle of (erotic) love seems in the beginning to be a Dr. Faust's
+mantle, which swears to soar over everything, whereas it merely covers
+over everything; only, at last, there stands a Schreckhorn, a Mount
+Pilate, and a Jungfrau, before one's nose.
+
+Blessed hero! On Friday came the Lector, and reported, that on Monday
+the illustrious deceased--namely, his empty coffin--is to be buried, and
+Roquairol rides the festive-steed,--and Liana is almost well, for she
+goes with the Minister's lady to-morrow to Lilar, in all probability to
+escape some sad black-bordered notes of condolence,--and, on the
+following ascension-day comes the consecration and masquerade....
+
+Blessed hero! I repeat. For hitherto what hast thou possessed of the
+blooming vale of Tempe, except the barren heights whereon thou stood'st
+looking down into the enchantment?
+
+
+42. CYCLE.
+
+On the May-Saturday-evening, at 7 o'clock, every vapor disappeared from
+the sky, and the brightly departing sun went to meet a glorious Sunday.
+Albano, who then, at length, meant to visit the unseen Lilar, was, on
+the evening before, as sacredly happy as if he were celebrating
+confession eve before the first holy supper;--his sleep was one constant
+ecstasy and awaking, and in every dream a mimic Sunday morning rose, and
+the future became the dark prelude of the present.
+
+Early on Sunday he was about to sally forth, when he had to pass by the
+half-glass door of the Doctor. "Sir Count, one moment!" cried he. When
+he entered, the Doctor said, "Directly, dear Sir Count!" and went on
+with what he was about. To the painters, who, in future centuries, will
+draw from me as they have hitherto from Homer, I present the following
+group of the Doctor as a treasure; he lay on his left side; Galen was
+smoothing down his father's back with a little scratch-brush, while
+Boerhave stood near him with a broad comb, and kept dragging that
+instrument perpendicularly (not obliquely) through the hair. He always
+said he knew nothing that cheered him up so, and was such a good
+aperient, as brush and comb. Before the bed stood Van Swieten in a thick
+fur, which the correctioner had to wear when the weather was warm and
+his behavior bad, in order that he might, thus arrayed, be laughed at,
+as well as half roasted.
+
+Two girls stood waiting there in full Sunday gala, and were thinking of
+going out into the country to see a parson's daughter, and to the
+village church; these he first mauled, limb by limb, with the hammer of
+the law. He loved to make his children antipodes of Romish defendants,
+who appear in rags and tatters, and so he set them in the pillory, all
+ruffled and tasselled, especially before strangers. The Count had
+already this long time, on the red children's account, been standing
+with his face turned toward the open window; he could not, however,
+refrain from saying, in Latin, "Were he his child, he would long ago
+have made way with himself; he knew nothing more degrading than to be
+scolded in finery." "It takes so much the deeper hold," said Sphex, in
+German, and fired only these few farewell shots after the girls: "You
+are a pair of geese, and will do nothing in church but just cackle about
+your rags and tags; why don't you mind the parson? He is an ass, but he
+preaches well enough for you she-asses; in the evening do you tell me
+every word of the sermon."
+
+"Here is a laxative drink, Sir Count, which, as you are going to Lilar,
+I beg you to give the Architect's lady for her little toads; but don't
+take it ill!" By the deuse! that is what precisely those people most
+frequently say, who, themselves, never take anything ill. The
+Count,--who at another time would have contemptuously turned his back
+upon him,--now blushing and silent before the preserver of his Liana,
+put it into his pocket, because, too, it was for the children of his
+beloved Dian, to whose spouse he wished to bear greetings and news.
+
+
+43. CYCLE.
+
+Lilar is not, like so many princely gardens, a torn-out leaf
+of a Hirschfeld,--a dead landscape-figurant and mimic- and
+miniature-park,--one of those show-dishes which are now served up and
+sketched at every court, of ruins, wildernesses, and woodland-cottages,
+but Lilar is the _lusus naturæ_ and bucolic poem of the romantic and
+sometimes juggling fancy of the old Prince. We shall soon enter in a
+body behind our hero, but only into _Elysium_. _Tartarus_ is something
+entirely different, and the second part of Lilar. This separation of the
+contrasts I praise even more than all. I have long wanted to go into a
+better garden than the common chameleonic ones are, where one hands you
+China and Italy, summer-house and charnel-house, hermitage and palace,
+poverty and riches (as in the cities and hearts of the proprietors), all
+on one dish, and where day and night, without an aurora, without a
+mezzotinto, are placed side by side. Lilar, on the contrary,--where the
+Elysium justifies its happy name by connected pleasure-tents and
+pleasure-groves, as the Tartarus does its gloomy one, by lonesome,
+veiled horrors,--_that_ is drawn right out of my heart.
+
+But where is our youth now going with his dreams? He is yet on the
+romantic road that leads into Lilar, properly the first garden-walk of
+the same. He strolled along an embowered road, which gently rose over
+hills, with open orchards, and into yellow-blooming grounds, and which,
+like the Rhine, now forced its way through green, ivy-clad rocks, and
+now opened its flying, smiling shores behind the twigs. Now the white
+benches under jessamine bushes and the white country-seats became more
+frequent; he drew nearer, and the nightingales and canary-birds[82] of
+Lilar came roving along, like birds announcing land. The morning blew
+fresh through the spring, and the indented foliage yet held fast its
+light, ethereal drops. A carrier lay sleeping on his rack-wagon, which
+the beasts, browsing right and left, safely drew along the smooth road.
+Albano heard, in the Sunday stillness, not the war-cry of oppressive
+labor, but the peace-bells of the towers: in the morning chime the
+future speaks, as in evening chimes the past; and at this golden age of
+the day there stood, also, a golden age in his fresh bosom.
+
+Now the fork-tailed chimney-swallows began to quiver with their purple
+breasts over the heavenly blue of the wild germanders, announcing the
+approach of our dwellings as well as their own; when his road seemed
+about to pass through an old, open, ruined castle, overhung with rich,
+thick leaves, like scales, at whose entrance, or egress, a red arm,
+pointing aside with the white inscription, "Way out of Tartarus into
+Elysium," stretched out toward a neighboring thicket.
+
+His heart rose within him at this double nearness of such opposite days.
+With long steps he pressed on toward the Elysian wood, which seemed to
+be cut off from him by a broad ditch. But he soon came out of the
+bush-work before a green bridge, which flung its arch like a giant
+serpent across the ditch, not, however, on the earth, but among the
+summits of the trees. It bore him in through a blooming wilderness of
+oaks, firs, silver-poplars, fruit-trees, and lindens. Then it brought
+him out into the open country, and now Lilar, from the east, flung, over
+the wide-extending spikes of grain, the splendor of a high golden ball
+to meet him. The bridge sank gently with him again into fragrant,
+glimmering broom, and beneath and beside him sang and fluttered
+canary-birds, thrushes, finches, and nightingales, while the well-fed
+brood slept under the covert of the bridge. At last, after passing an
+arched avenue, it came up again to the light, and now he saw the
+blooming mountain cupola with the white altar, whereon he had knelt on a
+night of his youth; and farther to the south behind him, the veil and
+dividing-wall of Tartarus, a high-reared wood; and as he stepped onward,
+Elysium opened upon him more broadly,--a lane of small houses with
+Italian roofs full of little trees, smiled joyfully and familiarly upon
+the sight out of the green world-map of dells, groves, paths, lakes; and
+in the east five triumphal gates opened passages into a wide-extending
+plain, waving on like a green-glistening sea, and in the west five
+others stood opposite to them with opened lands and mountains.
+
+As Albano passed down along the slowly-descending sweep of the bridge,
+there came forth into view, now blazing fountains, now red beds, now new
+gardens enfolded in the great one, and every step created the Eden anew.
+Full of awe he stepped out, as upon a hallowed soil, on the consecrated
+earth of the old Prince and the _pious father_[83] and Dian and Liana;
+his wild course was arrested, and entangled, as if by an earthquake; the
+pure paradise seemed made merely for Liana's pure soul; and now for the
+first time a timid question about the propriety of his hasty journey,
+and the loving fear of meeting for the first time her healed eye, made
+his happy bosom grow uneasy.
+
+But how festal, how living, is all around him! On the waters which gleam
+through the groves swans are gliding; the pheasant stalks away into the
+bushes, deer peep curiously behind him out of the wood through which he
+has come, and white and black pigeons run busily under the gates, and on
+the western hills hang bleating sheep by the side of reposing lambs;
+even the breast of the turtle-dove in some hidden valley trembles with
+the _languido_ of love. He strode through a long, high-bushed
+rose-field, that seemed a settlement and plantation of hedge-sparrows
+and nightingales, which hopped out of the bushes on the growing
+grass-banks, and ran out in vain after little worms; and the lark sailed
+away on high over this second world, made for the more innocent of God's
+creatures, and sank behind the gates into the grain-fields.
+
+Intoxicate thyself more and more, good youth, and link thy flowers into
+a chain as closely as the boy toward whom thou art hastening. For,
+overhead, on the Italian roof, before whose balustrade-breastwork
+silver-poplars, girdled about with broad vine-leaves, played, and which,
+in the spring-night, he had taken for a bower in roses, stood a
+blooming boy bent forward, who was letting down a chain of marigolds,
+and kept fastening on new rings to the too short green cable. "My name
+is Pollux," he answered briskly to Alban's soft question, "but my sister
+is named Helena,[84] but my little brother is named Echion." "And thy
+father?" "He is not here now, he is away off there in Rome; just go in
+to mother Chariton, I am coming immediately." On what fairer day, in
+what fairer place, with what fairer hearts could he come into the holy
+family of the beloved Dian, than on this morning, and with this mood?
+
+He went into the bright, laughing house, which was full of windows and
+green Venetian blinds. When he entered into the spring-room he found
+Chariton, a young, slender woman, looking almost like a girl of
+seventeen,[85] with the little Echion at her breast, defending herself
+against the sickly and excitable Helena, who, standing in a chair under
+the window, kept swinging in a many-leaved sling of a vine-branch, and
+trying to girdle and blind therewith the eyes of her mother. With
+charming confusion, wishing at once to rise, with her left hand to
+remove the leafy fetters without tearing, and to cover up the suckling
+more closely, she stepped forward, inclining her head, to meet the
+beautiful youth, with childlike friendliness and warmth, but with
+infinite shyness, not on account of the rank indicated by his dress, but
+because he was a man, and looked so noble, even like her Greek. He told
+her, with an enchanting love, which, perhaps, she had never seen so
+magnificently pictured, on his strong countenance, his name, and the
+gratitude which his heart kept in store for her husband, and the news
+and greetings which he had brought from him. How the innocent fire
+blazed out of the dark eyes of the timid creature! "Was then my lord,"
+so she called her husband, "very well and happy?" And so she began now,
+unembarrassed as a child, a long examination all about her husband.
+
+Pollux came dancing in with his long chain. Alban playfully took out the
+Doctor's medicine from his pocket, and said, "This is what you are to
+take." "Must I drink it right down, mother?" said the hero. Here she
+inquired quite as naively after the detailed prescriptions of the
+Doctor, until the little suckling at her breast rebelled, and drove her
+into a by-room to sit over the cradle. She excused herself, and said the
+little one must go to sleep, because she was going to walk with Liana,
+for whom she was looking every minute.
+
+Children love powerful faces. Alban was at once the favorite of children
+and dogs, only he could never act with the little jumping troop, on the
+childish playground, when grown spectators were in the boxes.
+
+"I can do a good many things!" said Pollux. "And I can read, sir!"
+rejoined Helena to her brother. "But then only in German; but I can read
+Latin letters splendidly, you!" replied the little man to her, and ran
+round through the room after readings and specimens; but in vain. "Man,
+wait a little!" said he, and ran up-stairs into Liana's chamber, and
+brought one of Liana's letters.
+
+
+43a. CYCLE.
+
+Albano knew not that Liana had the upper--so bloomingly shaded--chamber
+reserved for her own private use, wherein she frequently--especially
+when her mother remained behind in the city--drew, wrote, and read. The
+childlike Chariton, inspired with the love-draught of friendship, did
+not know at all how she could possibly so much as show her warmth of
+kindness to the fair, affectionate friend: ah, what was a chamber? Now
+into this always open room came the children, whom Liana sometimes heard
+read; and thus was Pollux able on the present occasion to fetch out of
+the solitary room the sheet which she had written this morning.
+
+While Albano, during the errand, sat so alone in the keeping-room of the
+far-off friend of his youth, near _his_ still, pale daughter, who looked
+now at him and now at a toy sheep-fold, as well known to him as Liana's
+eastern chamber, when the morning breeze swept in the glorious hum
+through the cool window, especially when, in the light cut-work of the
+floor the Chinese shadows of the vine and poplar foliage crinkled into
+each other, and when, at length, Chariton began to sing the suckling to
+sleep with a quicker, louder lullaby, which sounded to him like her
+echoing sigh after the fair land of her youth; then was his full heart,
+which had been already so stirred by all the events of the morning,
+wondrously moved, and--especially by the flickering sham-fight of the
+shadows--almost to tears; and the child looked up more and more
+meaningly into his face.
+
+Then came Pollux back with his two quarto leaves, and now set himself at
+once to his lesson. The very first page composed the melody to Alban's
+inner songs; but he could neither guess the authoress nor the date of
+the letter, except further along, by a desultory sort of reading to and
+fro. The leaves belonged to previous ones; not so much as a grain of
+writing-sand evinced their recent birth (for Liana was too courtly to
+use any); further, all the names were disguised; that is to say,
+Julienne, to whom they were directed, had unfortunately in Argenson's
+_bureau de décachetage_, where she resided, i.e. at court, demanded them
+in cipher, and she accordingly took the name of Elisa; Roquairol was
+called Charles, and Liana her little Linda. Linda, as will be well
+remembered, is the baptismal name of the young Countess of Romeiro, with
+whom the Princess on the day of that (for Roquairol) so bloody
+masquerade had established an eternal heart- and letter-alliance; Liana,
+to whose pure, poetic eyes every noble woman became a blessed saint and
+heroine, the opaque jewel a bright, pure, transparent one, loved the
+high Countess as if with the heart of her brother and her female friend
+at once, and the gentle soul named herself, unconscious of her worth,
+only the little Linda of her Elisa.
+
+Nor did Albano recognize the delicate running-hand; Julienne loved the
+French language even to its letters, but Liana's resembled not the
+scrawled Gallic protocols, but the neatly-rounded handwriting of the
+English.
+
+Here is her leaf at last. O thou lovely being! how long have I thirsted
+for the first sounds of thy refreshing soul!
+
+
+                                          "Sunday Morning.
+
+     "... But to-day, Elisa, I am so profoundly happy, and the
+     evening-mist is transformed to an aurora in heaven. I ought
+     not to give thee yesterday's work at all. I was too much
+     troubled. But might not my dear mother, who had come hither
+     merely for my sake, become thereby still sicker, whatever
+     appearances of tolerable health she might, for that very
+     reason, assume with me? And then came thy form, beloved one,
+     and all thy sorrow and the painful neighborhood,[86] and our
+     last evening here. O how reproachfully did all that pass
+     before my heavy heart! So, as we stopped before the house of
+     dear Chariton, and she kissed my mother's hand with tears of
+     joy; then was I so weak that I too turned aside and shed
+     tears, but other tears,--I wept for the rejoicing one
+     herself, who indeed could not know whether at that hour her
+     precious friend in Rome might not be sick or dying.
+
+     "But now the dark, gray mist is wholly blown away from the
+     flower-garden of thy little Linda, and all the blossoms of
+     life shine in their pure, high colors before her. After
+     midnight my mother's headache passed almost entirely away,
+     and she was still sleeping so sweetly this morning. O, what
+     were my feelings then! Soon after five o'clock I went down
+     into the garden and shrunk back at the splendor which burned
+     in the dew and between the leaves; the sun was just looking
+     in under the triumphal gates,--all the lakes sparkled in a
+     broad fire,--a gleaming haze floated like a saintly halo
+     around the edge of the earth which the heaven touched,--and
+     a high waving and singing streamed through the splendor of
+     morn.
+
+     "And into this unlocked world I had come back restored and
+     so happy. I wanted continually to cry out: 'I have thee
+     again, thou bright sun! and you, ye lovely flowers! and ye
+     proud mountains, ye have not changed! and ye are green
+     again, and, like me, renewed, ye sweet scented trees!' I
+     floated, as if transfigured, in an endless felicity, Elisa,
+     weak, but light and free; I had, so it seemed to me, put off
+     this burdensome clay under the earth and kept only the
+     beating heart, and in my enraptured bosom warm
+     tear-fountains gushed down, as if over flowers, and covered
+     them with brightness.
+
+     "'Ah, God!' said I, trembling at the very greatness of my
+     joy, 'was it then a mere sleep, that immovable repose of
+     mother?' and I must needs (smile on!) before I went further,
+     go up to her again. I crept breathless to the bedside, bent
+     listeningly over her, and my good mother opened slowly her
+     still gently dozing eyes, looked upon me languidly but
+     affectionately, and closed them again without stirring, and
+     gave me only her dear hand.
+
+     "Now could I right blissfully return to my garden; I bore,
+     however, a morning-greeting to the ever-cheerful Chariton,
+     and told her that I might be found on the broad way to the
+     _altar_,[87] if I should be wanted for anything. Ah, Elisa,
+     what feelings then were mine! And why had I not thee by the
+     hand, and why could not my distressed Charles see that his
+     sister was so happy? As, after a warm rain, the evening-red
+     and the liquid sunlight run from all the gold-green hills,
+     so stood a quivering splendor over my whole inner being and
+     over my past, and everywhere lay bright tears of joy. A
+     sweet gnawing consumed away my heart as if to death, and all
+     was so near to me and so dear! I could have answered the
+     whispering aspen and thanked the spring-breezes which fanned
+     so coolingly my hot eye! The sun had laid itself with a
+     motherly warmth on my heart, and brooded over us all,--the
+     cold flower, the naked young bird, the stiff butterfly, and
+     every creature. Ah, such should man be too, thought I; and I
+     took the sandy path, and spared the life of the poor little
+     blade of grass and the flower that peeped so lovingly, which
+     truly breathe and wake like us. I drove not away the thirsty
+     white butterflies and pigeons which stood beside each other
+     and bent down from the moist turf to drink. O, I could have
+     stroked the waves ... this creation is truly so precious and
+     from God's hand, and every the smallest-shaped heart has
+     surely its blood and a longing, and into every little
+     eye-point under the leaf the whole sun and a little spring
+     enter and abide!
+
+     "I leaned, a little exhausted, under the first triumphal
+     arch, ere I ascended to the altar, and looked out into the
+     glimmering landscape full of villages and orchards and
+     hills; and the glistening dew, and the ringing of the
+     village-bells, and the chime of the herd-bells, and the
+     floating of the birds over all, filled me with peace and
+     light. Yes, in such peace and seclusion and serenity will I
+     spend my fleeting life, thought I: does not the little
+     Sad-cloak persuade me, who, before my eyes, with his wings
+     torn by autumn, nevertheless flutters again around his
+     flowers; and does not the night-butterfly admonish me, who
+     clings, chilled, to the hard statue, and cannot soar to the
+     blossoms of day? Therefore will I never stir from my mother;
+     only let the precious Elisa stay with us as long as her
+     Linda lives, and call her noble friend soon,[88] that I may
+     see and heartily love her!
+
+     "I went up the green-shaded mountain, but with pain: joy
+     weakens me so much. Think of me, Elisa: I shall some time
+     die of a great joy or of a great, all too great woe! The
+     spiral path to the altar was painted with the hues of the
+     blossom-dust, and overhead, not colored and stationary, but
+     shifting, burning rainbows quivered through the twigs of the
+     mountain. Why stood I to-day in a splendor such as I never
+     knew before?[89] And when the morning breeze fanned and
+     lifted me, and when I dipped myself deeper into the blue
+     heaven, then said I, 'Now thou art in Elysium.' Then it was
+     to me as if a voice said, 'This is the earthly Elysium, and
+     thou art not yet sanctified for the other.' O, how ardently
+     did I then form the purpose to disentangle myself from so
+     many faults, and especially to renounce that too hasty
+     imagination of offence, which I may indeed conceal from
+     others, but through which I nevertheless injure them. And
+     then I prayed at the altar, and thanked the Eternal
+     Goodness, and wept unconsciously; perhaps too much, but yet
+     without my eyes smarting.
+
+     "At last I wrote the poem of thanks which I append to this,
+     and which I will put into verse, if the _pious father_
+     approves.
+
+
+"POEM OF THANKS.
+
+"'Do I then gaze again with blessed eyes into thy blooming world, thou
+All-loving One, and weep again, because I am happy? Why did I then fear?
+When I went under the earth in the darkness like the dead, and caught
+only a distant sound of the loved ones and of spring above me, why was
+my feeble heart in fear that there was no more hope for life and light?
+For thou wast by me in the darkness, and didst lead me up out of the
+vault into thy spring; and around me stood thy joyous children, and the
+serene heavens, and all my smiling loved ones! O, I will now hope more
+steadfastly! Continue thou to break off from the sick plant all rank
+flowers, that the rest may more fully ripen! Thou dost indeed lead thy
+human creatures into thy heaven and to thyself over a long mountain; and
+they go through the storms of life along the mountain, only
+overshadowed, not smitten, by the clouds, and only our eye grows wet.
+But when I come to thee, when Death again throws his dark cloud over me,
+and draws me away from all that I love into the deeper cavern, and thou,
+All-gracious, settest me free once more, and bearest me into thy
+spring,--into a still fairer one than this, which is itself so
+magnificent,--will then my frail heart, near thy judgment-seat, beat as
+gladly as to-day, and will the mortal bosom dare to breathe in thy
+ethereal spring? O, make me pure in this earthly one, and let me live
+here, as if I were already walking in thy heaven!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If even you, ye friends, who have never seen her, are yet won and
+touched by the patient, pure form, which can resignedly rejoice that the
+storm-cloud has, after all, only sent down rain-drops upon it, and no
+hailstones, how must she then have agitated the deeply-moved heart of
+her friend! He felt a consecration of his whole being, just as if Virtue
+came down incarnate in this shape from heaven, to hallow him with her
+smile, and then flew back in a shining path, and he followed, inspired
+and exalted, in her track.
+
+He urged the boy instantly to carry back the leaves, in order to spare
+her and himself--as she might appear any moment--the most painful of
+surprises; yet he firmly resolved--cost what it might--to be true, and
+confess to her, this very day, what he had done.
+
+The little fellow ran up stairs and down again, remained a long time
+before the door, and came in with Liana by the hand, who was dressed in
+white, with a black veil. She looked in and around a little perplexed,
+as she with both hands pushed back the veil from her friendly face; but
+she heard Chariton's lullaby. She did not know him till he spoke; and
+then her whole beautiful being reddened like an illuminated landscape
+after an evening shower: she had the pleasure, she said, of knowing his
+father. Probably she knew the son still better by Julienne's and
+Augusti's pictures, and on more congenial sides; her sisterly heart was
+certainly moved, too, by his brotherly voice; for the charm, and even
+preferableness, of resemblance and copy is so great, that one who looks
+like even an indifferent person becomes more dear to us, like the echo
+of an empty sound, merely because, in this case as in the imitative art,
+the past and absent, shining through the fancy, become a present.
+
+The gradually lowering tone of the mother's lullaby announced the
+sinking of the infant to slumber, and at last the diminuendo died away,
+and Chariton, with glistening eyes, ran to take Liana's hand. A frank
+and serene friendship bloomed between the innocent hearts, and held them
+entwined, as the vine does the neighboring poplars. Chariton related to
+her what Albano had related, with a reliance upon her most fervent
+sympathy. Liana listened to her friend with eager attention; but that
+was quite as much as if she were looking at the historical source itself
+that was so near at hand.
+
+
+44. CYCLE.
+
+At last they began a journey through the garden. Pollux very
+reluctantly, and only after Liana's promise to draw him a horse again
+to-day, stayed behind as patron-saint of the cradle. Alban said, to the
+extreme joy of the Architect's wife, who could now show the beautiful
+man everything, that he had seen but little of Lilar yet. How
+bewitchingly the two forms, linked in friendship, walked before him side
+by side! Chariton, although a matron, yet of a Grecian slenderness,
+fluttered along as a younger sister beside the lily-form of her somewhat
+taller Liana. The former seemed, according to the classification of the
+landscape-painters, nature in motion; Liana, nature in repose. As he
+joined Liana again, by whose left hand Helena was running along,--the
+mother on the right,--he found her softly-descending profile
+indescribably touching, and around the mouth he recognized lines which
+sorrow had drawn, the scars of returning days; while the lovely maiden,
+on the sunny side of the front face, as in her easy conversation,
+manifested a free, benignant cheerfulness, which Albano, who had never
+knocked at the school-room door of any young ladies' academy, found it
+hard to reconcile with her tearful poetry. O, if the tear of woman
+passes away lightly, so flutters away still more lightly woman's smile;
+and the latter, still oftener than the former, is only appearance!
+
+He tried, from a longing of the thirsty heart, to catch the little one's
+hand, but she hung with both upon Liana's left; presently, however, she
+skipped away, and plucked three iris-flowers,--which, like her,
+resembled butterflies,--and gave one to her mother, and two to Liana,
+with the words, "Give _him_ one too!" And Liana handed it to him,
+lifting her friendly face upon him as she did so with that holy
+maiden-look which is bright and attentive, but not searching, expressive
+of childlike sympathy without giving and demanding. Nevertheless,
+several times during the day did she let those holy eyes sink down; but
+what compelled her to it was, that on Zesara's rocky face, softened
+though it was by love, there rested a physiognomical right of the
+stronger: he seemed to look upon a shy soul with a hundred eyes, and his
+two true ones blazed as warmly, although quite as purely, as the sun's
+eye in the ether.
+
+The iris-flowers have this peculiarity, that one smells them, another
+not; only to these three beings in one did the cups open themselves
+equally wide, and they rejoiced long over this community of enjoyment.
+Helena ran forward and disappeared behind a low bush; she sat on a
+child's bench by a child's table, awaiting, with a smile, the grown
+people. The good old Prince had low moss-benches, little garden-chairs,
+little table- and pot-orangeries, and the like, placed everywhere, for
+the children, about the resting-places of their elders; for he loved to
+draw these refreshing open flowers of humanity near to his heart! "One
+wishes so often," said Liana, "to live in the patriarchal time, or in
+Arcadia, or in Otaheite; children are, indeed,--do you not believe
+so?--everywhere the same, and one has already in them what only the most
+remote time and the most remote region can insure." He indeed believed
+it, and gladly; but he kept asking himself, How can such an unstained
+Aphrodite be born out of the dead sea of a court, as pure dew and rain
+arise out of the briny water of the ocean?
+
+While speaking, she occasionally drew an uncommonly graceful--how shall
+I write it--_H'm!_ after her words, which, although a grammatical
+blunder at court, betrayed an unspeakable good nature; but I describe
+it, not in order that all my fair readers may let this attractive
+interjection be heard the very next Sunday.
+
+"The same," replied Albano,--but he meant it well,--"holds of the
+animals: the swan yonder is like the one in Paradise." She took it just
+as it was meant; but the reason was the pious Father Spener, her
+teacher; for at Albano's question touching Lilar's abundance of
+beautiful and gentle creatures, she answered: "The old Lord loved these
+creatures with a real tenderness, and they could often bring him even to
+tears. The pious Father thinks so too; he says, since they do everything
+at God's behest by instinct, accordingly it seems to him, when he
+contemplates the care of the parents for their young, just as if the
+Infinitely Gracious One were doing it all himself." They ascended now a
+half-shaded bridge, over a long water-mirror hung round with quivering
+poplars, wherein Liana's emblem, namely, a swan, slept on the
+water-rings, the bent neck beautifully nestled on the back, the head
+upon the wing, and gently wafted more by the breezes than by the waves.
+"So reposes the innocent soul!" said Alban, and thought, perhaps, of
+Liana, but without the courage to confess it. "And thus it awakes!"
+Liana added with emotion, as this white magnified dove slowly raised its
+head from the wing; for she thought of her mother's waking on this very
+day.
+
+Chariton, as if all made up of salient points, was continually turning
+to Liana, and asking: "Shall we go this way? or in through there? or out
+through here? If my lord were only here! he knows all about it." She
+would gladly have led him round every fount and every flower, and looked
+into the youth's face as lovingly as into that of her friend. Liana said
+to her, on the cross way at the bridge: "I think the flute-dell yonder,
+with the gleaming gold ball, will perhaps be pleasantest, especially for
+a lover of music; and, besides, they will look for me there, when they
+bring the harp to my mother." She had promised to come back to her as
+soon as that arrived. She shunned every path toward the south, where
+Tartarus frowned behind its high curtain.
+
+Liana spoke now of the contest between painting and music, and of
+Herder's charming official report of this strife. She, although a votary
+of the pencil, gave in her vote, as was natural to the female and the
+lyric heart, entirely for tones, and Albano, although a good pianist,
+was rather for colors, "This magnificent landscape," said Albano, "is in
+fact a picture, and so is every fair human form." "Were I blind," said
+Chariton, naively, "then I should not see my lovely Liana." She replied:
+"My teacher, the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, also set painting
+above music. But to me, when I hear music, it is as if I heard _a loud
+past_ or _a loud future_. Music has something holy; unlike the other
+arts, it cannot paint anything but what is good."[90] Verily, she was
+herself a moral church-music, the angel-stop in the organ. The pure
+Albano felt, by her side, the necessity and the existence of a yet
+tenderer purity; and it seemed to him as if a man might injure, even
+unconsciously, a soul like this, whose understanding was hardly anything
+more than a finer feeling,--as window-glasses of pure transparency are
+often broken, because they appear as if they were not. He turned round
+mechanically, because he was always one step in advance, and not only
+the blooming Lilar, but also Liana's full form, shone at once and
+transfigured into his soul. To clasp her to his heart was not now his
+yearning, but to snatch this being, who had so often suffered, from
+every flame; to rush for her, sword in hand, upon her foe, to bear her
+mightily through the deep, cold hell-floods of life;--that would have
+illuminated his existence.
+
+
+45. CYCLE.
+
+They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped
+from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when
+Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with
+her into a pathless oak-grove;--she looked upon him so contentedly and
+open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of
+being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the
+words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial
+Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting
+eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's
+breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with
+the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola
+Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning
+had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears.
+Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,--but like an
+angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been
+compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain
+address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!
+
+They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion
+never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye
+was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,--into that
+resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have gone round freely,
+without sleep. Chariton--from her earnestness much more busy--had, after
+a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let
+certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the
+blooming veil, which retired as they approached;--and Albano beheld now
+the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one
+in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before
+him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the
+higher terrace,--everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs,
+from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down
+below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which
+wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and
+mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains
+placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver
+rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold
+globe beside the sun,--the last mirror of his dying evening-glance.
+"Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually
+repeating.
+
+Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered
+with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey
+the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high
+pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an
+auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height,
+behind a statue of a Muse,--for the Nine Muses beamed from the green
+Tempe,--seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My
+brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile
+with the knitting-work which she had taken from her friend, "wishes
+very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its
+holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from
+embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your _Charles_
+like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did
+not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.
+
+All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and
+out of the bowers,--more and more continually joined them,--they
+quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,--at last
+flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared
+toward heaven;--they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps,
+and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue
+spring,--and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted
+on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of
+May,--and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering
+rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.
+
+Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar
+to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her
+eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as
+the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid
+summer-night;--but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the
+sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,--certainly not against sun
+and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated
+form, played--a sublime contrast to himself--with the ringlets of the
+little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big
+tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.
+
+At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and
+asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other
+ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the
+dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more
+strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.
+
+A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the
+vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of
+raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of
+his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,--by heaven, I must
+say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with
+trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been
+in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it
+all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder
+history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept
+saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said
+Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with
+heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the
+agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely
+to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read
+anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up
+soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed
+from him.
+
+O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this
+heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou,
+this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel
+among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err, so
+hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for
+once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the
+sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and
+hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with
+the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love
+in their hearts,--if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust
+each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry
+months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the
+other,--"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life,
+before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like
+thee!"--O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!
+
+The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was
+working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters
+and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something
+violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he
+had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled
+occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and
+stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange!
+how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the
+outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he
+could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his
+father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the
+gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path,
+and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the
+heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and
+perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried along after
+them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the
+awakened strings as from an Æolian harp, and bore them onward with it;
+and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of
+swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale
+continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and
+hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his
+ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked
+over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the
+distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping.
+And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!
+
+But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the
+loved objects only _in_, and not _on_, your bosoms, am I not, like the
+Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble
+sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the _Archimime_,
+who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your
+soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead
+of a past, has only given a future,--wilt thou not one day say to me, I
+should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies,
+for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it
+not been for these Phœnix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished
+lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then
+caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me
+than with the rest of you?
+
+Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really
+live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in _memory_, or
+beforehand in _hope_, you would, therefore, rather have the present day
+without either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of
+time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of
+the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the
+middle; but as to the past and the future,--neither of which can any man
+live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our
+heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,--you
+will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in
+order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.
+
+By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so
+that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and
+then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso
+would fain translate _poetic_ dreams into waking reality[91] is more
+foolish than the North American, who realizes his _nightly_ ones: he
+proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew
+into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch,
+bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us
+one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our
+present ideals,--as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love
+here below, which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner
+becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but _then_--no, for the Then
+of the life hereafter, this little _Now_, has no voice; but if, I say,
+here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral
+life, and every dream a day,--ah, even then would desire still remain
+enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a
+higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;--in _Arcadia_ we
+should pine after _Utopia_; and on every sun we should see an
+unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should--sigh as we
+do here!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[82] They have a whole room for winter quarters, of which in
+summer the windows are merely thrown open.
+
+[83] Such was the general title of the secluded Emeritus, the
+court preacher, Spener, who resided there, and who was related to
+the noble old pious Spener, not only on the paternal side, but
+also on the spiritual.
+
+[84] They had these names as twins.
+
+[85] The grammar seems to require "a still almost maidenly
+looking woman of seventeen years," but the translator did not
+dare to think Jean Paul could have meant that, consistently with
+the ages of the three children, though, as an Oriental, Chariton
+may have married _very_ young.
+
+[86] The Tartarus with Julienne's father's heart.
+
+[87] Such is the name of that mount which Albano found in the
+well-known spring night.
+
+[88] Linda de Romeiro.
+
+[89] The reason is, that after her recovery she was still
+short-sighted, and to a short-sighted person the dew is so much
+the more brilliant.
+
+[90] This proposition, that pure music, without text, cannot
+represent anything immoral, deserves to be more investigated and
+developed by me.
+
+[91] It cannot be objected to me, that in fact the scenes of my
+book have been actually experienced, and that no one would wish
+to experience any better; for in the representation of fancy
+reality assumes new charms, charms with which every other faded
+present magically glimmers through the memory. I appeal here to
+the sensations of the very characters who figure in _Titan_,
+whether they would not in my book--in case they should ever light
+upon it--find in the pictured scenes, which, however, are their
+own, a higher enchantment, which has gone from the real, and
+which, to be sure, might produce such an effect--but altogether
+illusorily--that my characters could wish to live _their own
+life_.
+
+
+
+
+NINTH JUBILEE.
+
+     PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER
+     TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF
+     ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN
+     THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE
+     CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN.
+
+
+46. CYCLE.
+
+Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in
+the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his
+Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of
+reality into his web,--namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the
+state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend.
+
+This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely
+coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been
+made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two
+first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as
+virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its
+end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal-
+and prefiguring-burial of the illustrious deceased, the old pious Father
+Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in
+order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the run-down
+wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper
+his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without
+speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and
+evening-offering of friendship.
+
+Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to
+talk a long while,--all Pestitz societies were auxiliary funeral
+societies, and full of burial-marshals,--every scaffolding of the
+neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or
+an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary,
+rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,--the Lector had
+already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off
+winter-garb, and found it to fit,--the court-marshal had not a minute's
+rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come
+to him now before its time,--the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold
+Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely
+pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in
+heaven himself as was the illustrious deceased,--the women had risen
+from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy
+_drapery-paintresses_ a long chain of coats and of their wearers
+probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their
+husbands.
+
+Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved
+the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings,
+Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The
+mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus,
+and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon
+be ready to be stretched to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a
+half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female
+crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the
+Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into
+Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's,
+and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one
+can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it."
+"You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said
+she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the
+Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano,
+caught and stopped her.
+
+Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away
+themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away
+therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle
+and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her _lazy
+Jack_[92] of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things,
+either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a
+_clothes'-rod_ of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she
+looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done
+in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count
+had she an eye,--under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good
+physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most
+physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the
+face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.
+
+Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer the walk or
+_gang_ was a press-gang,[93] the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a
+bird-net,[94] and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to
+be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers,
+and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the
+universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your
+eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What
+interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In
+the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from
+monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make
+leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they
+drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their
+merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should
+spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to
+have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like
+the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra,
+they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she
+replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the
+mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back
+with astonishment.) "Black?--black is a travelling-color, and
+bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color;
+and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the
+Jews in Morocco,[95] shall appear in black.
+
+"Pestalozzi, madam--but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe
+turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap
+it during the procession, so as to catch something of the muffled
+funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he
+might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi
+remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress,
+posture, image-worship, superstition, and love for charlatans, approach
+daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi,
+that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy,
+and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and
+caricatures, but also this very black of joy."
+
+Among the children,--of whom the uneducated alone were not
+ill-bred,--Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most
+prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which
+they were engraving on their bread and butter; and Galen showed his
+satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have
+made Mama have!"
+
+The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she
+offered to go in, assuring her he would not let her pass till she
+surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have
+got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough.
+He continued:--
+
+"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes
+one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead
+Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the
+Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more
+than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest and a Jewish
+king[96] it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more
+than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should
+permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the
+closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,[97] he
+had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds,
+answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a _Droit d'Aubaine_,
+a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed
+clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No,
+madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by
+their dying, as Marcion[98] asserted of Christ's journey to hell, bring
+up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out
+of hell into the heaven of the new administration.
+
+"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but
+consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought
+crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a
+sale for them;--an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy
+consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his
+predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is
+not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once
+strikes the whole metropolis,--even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only
+one word more, love: I assure you there is nothing coming yet but the
+company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse,
+which might easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been
+previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order
+that the procession may have no other _pensées_ than _Anglaises_[99]....
+O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of
+equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many
+people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."
+
+But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's
+thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of
+Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became
+his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark
+chain. He praised them for opening the _bal masqué_ of the new
+administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves
+for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the
+allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything
+easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the
+Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything,
+not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with
+pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on
+the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even
+the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four
+points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he
+found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside
+down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi,
+Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once
+into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be
+led along and held up on both sides.
+
+
+47. CYCLE.
+
+In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To
+the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the
+dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells,
+opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his
+blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing
+more loudly than all--one will hardly guess what--proclaimed before him
+the partings of life,--namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the
+funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all
+earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our
+hearts,--he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable
+three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first
+act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and
+bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.
+
+As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in
+summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to
+himself in _his_ season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener
+and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for
+in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only
+in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form;
+before the tired, older man, in Gothic.
+
+Schoppe generally began with _comic_ humor, and ended with _tragic_; so
+also now did the empty mourning-chest, the crape of the horses, their
+emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German
+Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an
+eminence, to which the contemplation of a multitude of men at once
+always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and
+laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal,
+tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed
+frenzy of mankind, and his own too.
+
+Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol,
+on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides.
+A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of
+all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under
+the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in
+which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of
+passion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his
+father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory
+rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart,
+and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good
+Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How
+painfully does the noble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and
+graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is
+right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's
+hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a
+close _bonsoir_, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon
+me,--we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and
+we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and
+kicking,--and there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and
+trailing his long crape,"--in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious
+mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the
+Librarian.
+
+All at once Schoppe, out of patience with this general emotion, said:
+"What a masquerade for the sake of a mask! Rag and tag for a piece of
+rag-paper! Throw a man quietly into his hole, and call nobody to see. I
+always admire London and Paris, where they toll no alarm-bells, nor set
+the neighborhood stirring, when the undertaker carries one, who has
+fallen asleep, to bed." "No, no," said Zesara, full of capacity for
+grief, "I admire it not: to whomsoever the holy dead are of no
+consequence, to him the living are so too;--no, I will gladly let my
+heart break into one tear after another, if I can only still remember
+the dear being."
+
+O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before
+which the coffin of the coffin passed by, there stood a bronze statue of
+the old man on horseback, who saw pass by below him the unsaddled
+mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was
+stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle,
+which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the
+forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than
+any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily
+man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how
+our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as _absent_, so soon as it
+is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the
+players on the stage.
+
+But had not the gray hermit, Spener, laid upon the sunken breast of that
+deeper hermit a double youth? O, in this frosty hour of pomp and
+pageantry, counts not the faithful Julienne every tone of the funeral
+bell with the beads of her tears,--that poor daughter whom sickness has
+exempted from the ceremonials, not from pain, who now has lost her _last
+but one_, perhaps her _last_ relative, since her brother is hardly one?
+And will not Liana, in her Elysium, guess the farce of sorrow which is
+acted so near to her over behind the high trees in Tartarus? And if she
+suspects anything, O how profoundly will she mourn!
+
+All this the noble youth heard in his soul, and he thirsted hotly after
+the friendship of the heart: it was to him as if its mountain- and
+life-air floated down from eternity, and blew the grave-dust away from
+his life-path, and he saw, up yonder, the Genius place his inverted
+torch upon the cold bosom, not to extinguish the immortal life, but to
+enkindle the immortal love.
+
+He could not now do otherwise than go forth into the open air, and, amid
+the flying tones of spring and the deep, hollow murmur of the receding
+dead march, write the following words to Liana's brother, in which he
+said to him, after a youthful style, Be my friend!
+
+
+                "TO CHARLES.
+
+     "Stranger! At this hour, when, in the dead sea and through
+     our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of men and
+     their bridge-posts appear to us _broken_, a true heart puts
+     a question to thee frankly, and let thine answer it
+     willingly and in truth!
+
+     "Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee,
+     stranger, and hast thou thy friend? Do thy wishes and nerves
+     and days grow together with his, like the four cedars on
+     Lebanon, which can bear nothing around them but eagles?
+     Hast thou two hearts and four arms, and livest thou twice
+     over, as if immortal, in the battling world? Or standest
+     thou solitary and alone upon a frosty, dumb, slender,
+     glacier-point, having no human being to whom thou canst show
+     the Alps of creation, and with the heavens arching far above
+     thee and abysses yawning below? When thy birthday comes,
+     hast thou no being to shake thy hand, and look thee in the
+     eye and say, We still cleave together faster than ever?
+
+     "Stranger: if thou hast had no friend, hast thou deserved
+     one? When spring kindled into life, and opened all her
+     honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the hundred gates
+     of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bitterly looked up and
+     begged of God a heart for thine? O when, at evening, the sun
+     went down like a mountain, and his flames departed from the
+     earth, and now only his red breath floated upward to the
+     silvery stars, hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of
+     friendship which sank together on battle-fields, like stars
+     of one constellation, stealing forth through the bloody
+     clouds out of the old world, like giants; and didst thou
+     think of _this_,--how imperishably they loved each other,
+     and thou, like me, wast alone? And, solitary one, when
+     night--that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid
+     climes, _toils_ and _travels_--reveals her cold suns above
+     thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the
+     distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, and
+     immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feelest, upon
+     the cold earth, that thy heart beats against no breast but
+     only thine own,--O beloved! weepest thou then, and most
+     bitterly?
+
+     "Charles, often have I reckoned up, on my birthday, the
+     increasing years,--the feathers in the broad wing of
+     time,--and thought upon the sounding flight of youth: then I
+     stretched my hand far out after a friend, who should stick
+     by me in the Charon's skiff wherein we are born, when the
+     seasons of life's year glide by along the shore before me,
+     with their flowers and leaves and fruits, and when, on the
+     long stream, the human race shoots downward in its thousand
+     cradles and coffins.
+
+     "Ah, it is not the gay, variegated shore that flies by, but
+     man and his stream: forever bloom the seasons in the gardens
+     up and down along the shore; only _we_ sweep by once for all
+     before the garden, and never return.
+
+     "But our friend goes too. O, if thou at this hour of death's
+     juggleries art contemplating the pale Prince, with the
+     images of youth on his breast, and thinking of the gray
+     friend who secretly bewails him in Tartarus, then will thy
+     heart dissolve, and in soft, warm flames run round through
+     thy bosom, and softly say: 'I will love, and then die, and
+     then love--O Almighty, show me the soul which longs and
+     languishes like mine!'
+
+     "If thou say'st that, if thou art thus, then come to my
+     heart: I am as thou. Grasp my hand, and hold it till it
+     withers. I have seen thy form to-day, and on it the marks of
+     life's wounds: hasten to me; I will bleed and struggle at
+     thy side. I have long and early sought and loved thee. Like
+     two streams will we mingle and grow, and bear our burdens,
+     and dry up together. Like silver in the furnace, we will run
+     together with glowing light, and all slags shall lie cast
+     out around the pure shimmering metal. Laugh not, then, any
+     longer so grimly, to think what _ignes-fatui_ men are; like
+     _ignes-fatui we_ burn and fly away in the rainy storm of
+     time. And then, when time is gone by, we find each other
+     again, and it will be again in the spring.
+
+                              "ALBANO DE CESARA."
+
+
+
+
+48. CYCLE.
+
+How gloriously,--before all the beating veins of the inner man, like
+those of the outer in old age, have stiffened into gristle, and all the
+vessels have become inflexible and earthy, and the moral pulse, like the
+physical, hardly makes sixty strokes in a minute, and before the shy old
+fool, at every emotion, reserves a piece of his nature which he keeps
+cold and dry, and which is to wait for another occasion, as sprinkled
+raspberry leaves always remain dry on the rough side,--how gloriously, I
+say, before this period of espionage, does a youth, especially an
+Albano, step along his path, how freely, boldly, and exultingly! and
+seeks with equal confidence the friend and the foe, and closes with him,
+to fight either for him or against him!
+
+Let this excuse Albano's fiery letter! The next day he received from
+Roquairol this answer:--
+
+     "I am as thou. On ascension-evening I will seek thee among
+     the masks.
+
+                                 "CHARLES."
+
+
+
+The redness of mortification rushed over the Count's face at this
+artificial postponement of the acquaintance; he felt that, after such a
+tone from the heart, _he_ would have immediately, without a dead interim
+of five days, and without an _homage-day masquerade_ in a double sense,
+gone to his friend and become his. But now he swore no longer to run to
+meet him, but only to wait for him. However, the roused indignation soon
+subsided, and he began to invent fairer and fairer mitigations for the
+first leaf of the so-long-sought favorite. Charles might certainly, e.
+g. not wish to mix up the holy time of the first recognition with this
+bustle of taking the allegiance-oath,--or that first suicidal masquerade
+might have made every succeeding one an inspiring era of a new second
+life,--or he knew, perhaps, in fact, about Albano's birthday,--or,
+finally, this glowing spirit chose to run or fly on his own track.
+
+Meanwhile, his note made the Count reproach himself for his own letter,
+as if it had been a sin against his Schoppe; he held it to be a sin, in
+one friendship, to yearn after another; but thou mistakest, fair soul!
+Friendship has steps which lead up on the throne of God, through all
+spirits, even to the Infinite: only love is satiable, and, like truth,
+admits no three degrees of comparison; and a single being fills its
+heart. Moreover, Albano and Schoppe, in such a mutual metempsychosis of
+their ideas, and such a near relationship of their pride and nobility,
+held each other far more dear than they showed to each other. For, as
+Schoppe, in fact, showed nothing, one could love him in return only with
+the finger on the lip, but, perhaps, so much the more strongly. Albano
+was a burning-hot concave mirror, which has its object near, and
+represents it erect behind itself; Schoppe one which holds the object
+far off, and throws an inverted image of it into the air.
+
+On the evening before his birthday, and the day of allegiance, Albano
+stood alone at his window, and pondered his past,--for a last day is
+more solemn than a first: on the 31st of December I reckon up three
+hundred and sixty-five days and their fates; on the first of January I
+think of nothing, because, in fact, the whole future is transparent, or
+may be all out in five minutes;--while the vesper-bell pealed over the
+fast-closing twentieth year of his life, and the vesper-hour rose within
+him, he measured the _abside-line_[101] of his moral being, and looked
+up at the towering pile of the approaching morrow, which hung full
+either of spring-showers or hailstones. Never yet had he so tenderly
+surveyed the circle of his beloved beings, or glanced through the open
+doors of futurity, as at this time.
+
+But the fair hour was spoiled by Malt, who burst in with the information
+that the limping gentleman had leaped overboard. From the dormer-window
+might be seen a returning village funeral-procession, conglomerated
+around the spot on the bank where Schoppe had plunged in. With frightful
+wildness--for in Albano indignation was next-door neighbor to terror and
+pain--he dragged along with him, as he flew to the rescue, the lazy
+provincial physician, and even threatened him with hard words; for Sphex
+was going to wait for a carriage, and meanwhile represent to himself the
+possible cases of too late preparations for a rescue, and besides,
+perhaps, cherished a hope of serving up Schoppe, on the anatomical
+table, as Doctor's-feast of science.
+
+The youth ran out with him,--through corn-fields, amidst tears and
+amidst curses,--with alternate clenched fist and outspread palm, and his
+eye grew more and more dim and dizzy, and his heart hotter and hotter,
+the nearer they approached the dark circle. At last they could not only
+see the Librarian, but also hear him; in good case he turned towards
+them his curly head from among the reeds, and, occasionally, as he was
+haranguing the mourning-retinue, he flung up, in a fiery manner, his
+hairy arm above the water-plants.
+
+Of course the case stood thus:--
+
+His sorites, as long as he lived, was the following: "He had come into
+the world, not feet foremost, but head foremost, and, accordingly,
+carried his head and nose high and lofty,[102] because he could not help
+it. Now he knew of no more genuine freedom than health;--every malady
+shuts up and warps the soul, and the earth is, merely for that
+reason, a universal block-house, _la salpetrière_ and house of
+bruises;[103]--whoso made use of an oyster-snail-viper medicine was
+himself a slimy, snaky, sticking viper, oyster, snail, and therefore the
+ever-free savages killed their invalids, and the vigorous Spartans gave
+no patient an office, least of all the crown;--and strength was
+especially necessary, in our degenerate days, in order to maul qualified
+subjects, because, to his certain knowledge, the fist with some
+substance in it was the best plaintiff's plea and _actio ex lege
+diffamari_ which a citizen could institute."
+
+Therefore he bathed summer and winter in ice-cold water, just as he, for
+the same reason, kept himself temperate in all things.
+
+Now, then, in this odious May-weather, he had merely, in his gray
+hussar-cloak,--at home, his night-gown,--and with shoes down at the
+heel, gone to the water-side; he had previously stripped himself at the
+house so as to be ready as soon as he should arrive at the bank. The
+mourning-company, who saw him go at his swift pace down to the water,
+and at last throw off everything and leap in, could not but believe the
+man meant to drown himself, and ran in a body to his bathing-place, not
+to let him do it. "Do not drown himself!" cried the mourning-company of
+blacks, while yet afar off. He just let them come on till he could
+discourse the matter to them somewhat nearer, in the following wise:--"I
+am yet open to conviction; I can hear reason, good folk, though I am
+already standing up to my neck in the water; but suffer yourselves to be
+correctly informed in this case, dear _Cherstens_ generally, for so
+Christians were called in the time of Charles. I am a poor
+Sacramentarian, and can hardly recollect what I have hitherto lived on,
+it was so bloody-desperate little. Whatever I have undertaken in this
+world, no blessing went with it, but it was all crab's-track backwards
+and forward. I set up, in Vienna, a neat little magazine of snipes'
+dung, but I made nothing out of it for want of snipes. I took hold on
+the other end, and hawked about in Carlsbad, for the lords and great
+ones, who are accustomed to set a picture upon every old stool and piece
+of trumpery, fine engravings for waste-paper and privy purposes, in
+order that, instead of the mere printed paper, they might have something
+tasty for consumption; but the whole set was left, a dead loss, on my
+hands, because the manner was too hard and not ideal enough. In London I
+prepared ready-made speeches (for I am a _litterateur_) to be used by
+men who are hanged, and yet would fain have something to say for
+themselves: I offered them to the richest parliamentary orators, and
+even knaves of booksellers, but came near having to use the speeches for
+myself. I would gladly have got my living by vomiting,[104] but that
+requires funds. I tried once to get a settlement as note-stand to a
+count's regiment, because it looks stupid enough on drill- and
+parade-days to see every one with a musical flap hanging on his
+shoulder, from which his next neighbor behind plays. I offered for a
+trifle to wear all the musicalia on my own person, and stand before them
+with the notes; but the first-lieutenant (who is at once in the regency
+and in the treasury) thought it would make the fifers laugh when they
+came to blow. Thus has it fared with me from time immemorial, dear
+Cherstens--but don't trample about on my precious cloak there! As ill
+luck would have it, I entered into wedlock with a lady of Vienna, who
+was endowed with melted seals;[105] her name was _Prænumerantia
+Elementaria Philanthropia_;[106] you don't know what this means in
+German,--a real hell-broom, who chased me, all heated, like a hunted
+stag, into the reeds here. Cherstens, I should defame myself in the
+water, were I to come out plainly with the whole story of our woful
+condition;[107] ... in short, my Philanthropia before marriage was soft
+as the spines of a new-born hedge-hog, but in the nuptial state, when
+the foliage was off, I saw, as on trees in winter, one raven's- and
+devil's-nest after another. She was all the time dressing herself and
+dressing herself, till it was time to undress; when a fault in me or the
+children had been removed, she would still continue to scold a little,
+as one continues to vomit, when the emetic and everything is out; she
+indulged me preciously little, and had I had a Fontanel[108] she would
+have reproached me for the fresh pea which I should have been obliged
+every day to put into it; in short, we two pulled opposite ways,--the
+linch-pin of love came out in the struggle, and I came with the
+forward-wheels down into the water here, and my Prænumerantia stays with
+the hind-wheels at home. See, my women, this is why I do violence to
+myself--besides, the gnawing-man[109] would have, at any rate, caught me
+by the throat; but behold yourselves in me as in a mirror! For when a
+man who is a _litterateur_, and therefore, as you yet know by the case
+of Fichte, goes about as instituted overseer, schoolmaster, and mentor
+of the human race, leaps overboard before his wife's face, and lets his
+Ephorie and tutorship go, you may conclude from this of what your own
+husbands, who cannot measure themselves with me at all in learning, are
+capable, in case you are such Prænumerantias, Elementarias, and
+Philanthropias as unfortunately you have the appearance of being. But,"
+he concluded suddenly, as he saw Albano and the Doctor, "clear
+yourselves away; I am going to drown myself!"
+
+"Ah, dear Schoppe!" said Albano. Schoppe blushed at his situation. "It
+must be a clown," said the retiring funeral retinue. "What child's
+foolery is this, then?" asked Sphex, resenting Albano's former passion
+and the anatomical misshot, and derived satisfaction from telling the
+story of the latter's rage. Schoppe knew how heartily the noble youth
+loved him, and he would not say anything, because he was ashamed, but he
+swore to himself (in the grotesque style to which he was accustomed even
+in soliloquy) very shortly to let him into his breast-cavern, and show
+him hanging therein a whole, wild heart full of love.
+
+
+49. CYCLE.
+
+The blue day on which an ascension, a rendering of allegiance, and a
+birthday were to be celebrated already stood over Pestitz, after having
+cast off its morning-red,--two horses were already harbingers of four,
+the lowly coach-box, of the highest,--the country nobility already went
+down, uncomfortably frizzled, into the rooms of the inn, and scolded at
+being cheated out of the fairest weather for heath-cock coupling,
+and the city nobility, yet unpowdered, spoke of the day, but
+without real earnestness,--the court-micrometer,[110] the
+court-marshal, was surrounded by all his quartermasters,--the
+court-transit-instruments,[111] the courtiers, instead of their
+half-holiday, when they work only in the afternoon, had a whole
+working-day, and were already standing at the wash-table,--the
+allegiance-preacher, Schäpe, believed almost every word of his
+discourse, because he had read it too many times over, and the nearness
+of publication infused emotion into him,--there was no longer a domino
+to be had for the evening, except among the Jews,--when a man alighted
+at the door of the Doctor's house, who among all others was the most
+honest and hearty about the allegiance, the Director Wehrfritz. There
+were a son and a father in each other's arms, a fiery youth and a fiery
+man. Albano seemed to him no longer to be the old Albano, but--warmer
+than ever. He brought with him from "his women," as he called them,
+congratulatory letters and birthday presents; he himself made not much
+of the birthday or forgot it, and Albano had only celebrated it a little
+just after waking. These festivals belong more to the other sex, who
+gladly toy with times and seasons in the way of loving and giving.
+
+The Titular Librarian marched out to a village, named Klosterdorf, where
+the Mayor with his family, after an ancient custom, had to imitate the
+Prince with his, and so, as commissioner, drive in the allegiance of the
+neighboring circle; this, Schoppe said, he still was pleased with, but
+the other worked too fatally on his inwards. The Director, dazzled by
+the prospects of the day, and posted in the front with an official
+speech to the chivalry, fell into a quarrel with Schoppe. "The Exchequer
+and the Court," said he, "have been, of course, from time immemorial,
+such as they are; but the Princes, dear sir, are good; they are
+themselves sucked dry, and then they seem to be the suckers."
+"Somewhat," rejoined Schoppe, "as the death-vampyres only give out blood
+from themselves, while they appear to take it; but I make up for that
+again by attributing wholly to the Regents, besides the sins of others,
+the merits, victories, and sacrifices of others also; herein they are
+the pelicans, who shed a blood for their children which really at a
+distance seems to be their own."
+
+All went off: Schoppe, out into the country; Wehrfritz, to church with
+the procession; Albano, into a spectator's-box in the allegiance-hall;
+for he would not in any wise be stuck into the train of the Prince, not
+even as embroidery. Soon the noisy stream of pomp came sounding back
+into the hall. The chivalry, the spirituality, and the cities mounted
+the stage, where the oath was to be taken. In the court-yard of the
+castle one foot stood upon another, and a needle might, to be sure, have
+reached the ground, but no one could do so, to pick it up; everybody
+looked up at the balcony, and cursed before he _swore_. The Prince, too,
+stayed not away; the throne, that graduated and paraphrased princely
+seat, stood open, and Fraischdörfer had decorated it with beautiful
+mythological and heraldic shoulder-pieces and appendages.
+
+Opposite the Count bloomed the court-dames, and below them a rose and a
+lily, Julienne and Liana. As one lifts his eye from the stiff frosty
+landscape of winter to the blue breathing heavens which looked down upon
+our spring evenings, and wherein the light summer clouds floated and the
+rainbow stood, so did he glance over the shining snow-light of the court
+at the lovely Grace of spring, around whom remembrances hung, like
+flowers, and who now stood so far aloof, so cut off, so imprisoned in
+the heavy finery of the court! Only through her friend, who sits beside
+her, was she gently melted and harmonized with the dazzling present.
+
+Now began fine official speeches, the longest being made by the old
+Minister, the shortest by Wehrfritz: the Prince let the warm eulogies
+glide over his December-visage without thawing it down,--a mistaken
+indifference! For the praise of the Minister, as well as of other
+court-servants, may yet help him with posterity, since, according to
+Bacon, no praise is of more consequence than that which servants give,
+because they surely know their master best.
+
+Then the Upper-Secretary, Heiderscheid, read Luigi's genealogical table,
+and illuminated the hollow family-tree, together with its dryness, and
+the last pale green twig; with sunken eyes Julienne heard this amid the
+_vivat_ of the people, and Albano, never subdued by _one_ thought alone,
+saw her eyes, and could not, however intently the Regent listened,
+avoid the funeral picture, how, one day, and that very soon, this
+extinguished man would bear down after him the name of his whole race
+into the vault; he saw them carving the inverted arms and hanging the
+shield upside down, and heard the shovels strike against the helmet and
+fling the earth after the coffin. Gloomy idea! the tender sister would
+certainly have wept, had she only been alone!
+
+At last the turn came to those, to whom it never comes first, although
+they are the only ones who have a hearty meaning in such ceremonies.
+Heiderscheid stepped out on the balcony, and caused the noisy swarming
+multitude to stretch out the forefinger and thumb, and repeat the oath
+after him. The mass, always fascinated, shouted their _vivat_; in the
+dazzled eyes gleamed the confident expectation of a better regency and
+love for the unknown individual. The Count, whom a multitude generally
+made enthusiastic, as it did Schoppe melancholy, glowed with the
+inspiration of brotherly love and thirst for achievement; he saw
+princes, like omnipotent ones, holding sway on their eminences, and saw
+the blooming provinces and the gay cities of a wisely-ruled land spread
+out before him; he represented to himself how he, were he a prince,
+could, with the electric sparkling of the sceptre-point, dart, with an
+animating shock, into millions of united hearts at once, whereas he
+could now, with so great difficulty, scarcely kindle a few of the
+nearest; he saw his throne, as a mountain in morning light, pouring out,
+instead of lava, navigable streams through the lands, and breaking the
+storms, with a hum of harvests and festivals around its feet; he thought
+to himself how far, from such a high place, he could send light abroad,
+like a moon, which does not hide the sun by day, but, from her
+elevation, flings his distant brightness into the night,--and how he
+would, instead of only defending, _create_ and _educate_ freedom, and be
+a regent for the sake of forming self-regents.[112] "But why am I not
+one?" said he mournfully.
+
+Noble youth! do thy estates, then, furnish thee no subjects? But just so
+does the lesser prince believe he would govern a duchy quite otherwise,
+and the higher one believes the same in regard to a kingdom, and so does
+the highest, in regard to universal monarchy.
+
+Meanwhile, all through this singular uneasy day, wild perspectives of
+youth passed to and fro before him, and the old spirit-voice, which he
+was going to meet to-day, repeated in him the dark exhortation, Take the
+crown! Wehrfritz came back in the evening with a red face from the fiery
+allegiance-banquet, and Albano took an agitated leave of him, as if of
+the ebb and calm of life--his childish youth; for to-day he launched out
+deeper into its waves. Schoppe came back and wanted to have him before
+the sight-hole of his show-box, wherein he slid through the
+vicariate-allegiance-swearing in Klosterdorf, in a series of comic
+pictures; but these contrasted too severely with higher ones, and gave
+little pleasure.
+
+At night Albano put on his beautiful, serious character-mask, that of a
+knight-templar,--for a comic one his form, and almost his mood, was too
+great;--the latter was made still more solemn by this funeral dress of a
+whole murdered knightly order. After he had caused to be described to
+him once more the awful paths of Tartarus, and the burial-place of the
+Prince's heart, to avoid mistaking of the way in the night, he went
+forth, about ten o'clock, with a high-heaving bosom, which the
+night-larvæ[113] of fancy, together with friendship and love and the
+whole future, conspired to excite.
+
+
+50. CYCLE.
+
+Albano stepped, for the first time, into the inverted puppet-world of a
+masquerade, as into a dancing realm of the dead. The black forms, the
+slit masks, the strange eyes, gleaming as out of night behind them,
+which, as in that mouldering Sultan in the coffin, alone remained
+alive,--the mingling and mimicking of all ranks, the flying and
+ring-running of the clinking dance, and his own solitude under the
+mask,--all this translated him, with his Shakespearian frame of spirit,
+into an enchanted and ghostly island full of juggleries, chimeras, and
+metamorphoses. Ah, this is the bloody scaffold, was his first thought,
+where the brother of thy Liana rent his young life, like a
+mourning-garment; and he looked fearfully round, as if he feared
+Roquairol might again attempt death.
+
+Among the masks he found no one under which he could suppose him to be;
+this meaningless cousinship of standing parts, footmen, butchers, Moors,
+ancestors, &c.,--these could not conceal any loved one of Albano's.
+Lonesomely and inquisitively he paced up and down behind the rows of the
+Anglaise; and more than ten eyes, which glistened opposite in the
+annular eclipse of the lace mask,--for women, from their
+open-heartedness, do not love masks, but are fond of showing
+themselves,--followed the powerfully and pliantly built form, which,
+with the bold helm and plume, with the crossed white mantle and the
+gleaming mail on his breast, seemed to bring a knight out of the heroic
+age.
+
+At last a masked lady, who was chatting between unmasked ones, came up
+to him with long steps and large feet, and boldly grasped his hand as if
+for a dance. He was extremely embarrassed at the boldness of the
+summons, and about the choice of an answer; it is valor precisely that
+loves to marry itself to gallantry, as the Damascene blade, besides
+hardness, possesses a perpetual fragrance; but the lady only wrote in
+his hand his initials, with the interrogation-mark after them,--"_v.
+C.?_" and after the Yes, the charming one said, softly, "Do you not
+remember me? the master of exercises, Von Falterle?" Albano testified,
+notwithstanding his dislike of the part, a real joy at finding again a
+companion of his youth. He asked which mask was Captain Roquairol;
+Falterle assured him he had not yet arrived.
+
+By this time--as the footmen, the butchers, Falterle, &c., were only the
+snow-drops of this masquerade-spring--better flowers--violets,
+forget-me-nots, and primroses--had sprung up or come in. For one such
+forget-me-not I see a churl entering, puffed out behind and before, and
+convex like a burning-glass, who now opened the back-door and shook out
+confects from his hump-back, and then the front-door and produced
+sausages. Hafenreffer, however, writes me the invention has once before
+appeared at a masquerade in Vienna. Then came a company of German
+play-cards, which shuffled and played out and took each other; a fine
+emblem of atheism, which exhibits it wholly free from the absurdity
+wherewith men have so loved to disfigure it! Mr. Von Augusti appeared
+also, but in simple dress and domino; he became (incomprehensibly to the
+Count) very soon the polar-star of the dancers, and the controlling
+Cartesian vortex of the dancing-school.
+
+With what miserable, black ammunition-biscuit and beggar's-bread of
+enjoyment these people get along! thought Albano, to whom, all day long,
+his dreams, those Jupiter's-doves, had been bringing ambrosia. And how
+pale and stale is their fire, their fancy, and their speech, he thought
+too. Verily, a life down in a gloomy glacier-chasm! for he imagined
+everybody must speak and feel as intensely and ardently as he.
+
+Now came a limping man, with a great glass-chest on his belly; of course
+it was easy to recognize the Librarian; he had on--either because he
+sent too late, or would not pay, for a domino--something black, which he
+had borrowed of a mourning-cloak lender, and was covered from
+shoulder-blade to shin-bone with awful masks, which he, with many
+finger-signs, offered mostly to those people who played their parts
+behind the opposite kind, e. g. short-nosed ones to long noses. He was
+waiting for the beginning of a hop Anglaise, the notes for which stood
+just on the hand-organ of his chest; then he, too, began; he had therein
+an excellent puppet-masquerade which had been planed out by Bestelmaier,
+and now he set the little masks to hopping parallel with the great ones.
+His object was a comparative anatomy of the two masquerades, and the
+parallelism was melancholy. Besides, he had rigged it all out with
+by-work: little dumb persons swung their little bells in the chest; a
+tolerably grown-up child rocked the cradle of an inanimate doll, with
+which the little fool still played; a mechanic was working away at his
+speaking machine, by which he was going to show the world how far mere
+mechanism could go toward giving life to puppets; a live, white
+mouse[114] sprang out by a little chain, and would have upset many of
+the club, if he could have broken it; a starling, buried-alive, a true
+first Greek comedy and school for scandal in miniature, was practising
+upon the dancing-company the death-blow of the tongue with perfect
+freedom and without distinction; a looking-glass-wall mimicked the
+living scenes of the chest so deceptively, that every one took the
+images for true puppets.
+
+The point of this comico-tragic dagger came home directly enough upon
+Albano, as, besides, the hopping wax-figure-cabinet of the great
+masquerade seemed to double the solitude of man, and to separate two
+selves by four faces; but Schoppe went further.
+
+In his glass case stood a faro-bank, and by it a little man, who cut out
+the masked banker in black paper, but into a likeness of the German
+gentleman; this picture he carried into the card-chamber, where a
+bank-keeping mask--most certainly Cephisio--must needs hear and see him.
+The banker looked at him some time inquiringly. Another, dressed wholly
+in black, with a dying expression, which represented the _Hippocratica
+facies_,[115] did the same. Albano looked towards it with a fiery
+glance, because it occurred to him it might be Roquairol, for it had his
+stature and torch-like eye. The pale mask lost much, and kept redoubling
+its loss; at that it drank out of a quill immoderate draughts of
+Champagne wine. The Lector came up; Schoppe kept on playing before the
+eyes that crowded round; the pale mask looked steadily and sternly at
+the Count. Schoppe took off his own before Bouverot; but there was
+another under it; he pulled this off; it disclosed an under-mask of the
+under-mask; he carried on the process to the fifth root;--at last his
+own rough face came forth, but bronzed with gold-beater's skin and
+distorted, as it turned towards Bouverot, with an almost frightful glaze
+and smile.
+
+The pale mask itself seemed to start, and hastened with long strides off
+into the dancing-hall; it threw itself wildly into the wildest of the
+dance. This, too, confirmed Albano's conjecture, as well as its great
+defying hat, which seemed to him a crown, because he prized nothing more
+highly about manly attire than fur, cloak, and hat.
+
+More and more fingers continually drew the letters "_v. C._" in his
+hand, and he nodded composedly. The time surrounded him with manifold
+dramas, and everywhere he stood between theatre-curtains. As with uneasy
+head and heart he stepped to the window, to see whether he should soon
+have moonshine for his night-walk, he saw a heavy hearse, flanked by
+torches, move along across the market, which was conveying a manor-lord
+to his family-vault; and the undisturbed night-watchman called out,
+behind the creeping dead man, the beginning of the spirit-hour and of a
+birth-hour, which is precious to us. Could his smitten heart refrain
+from saying to him how sharply Death, the hard, solid, insoluble, with
+its glacier-air, sweeps through the warm scenes of life, and leaves
+behind it all over which it breathes stiff and snow-white? Could he help
+thinking of the cold young sister, whose voice now awaited him in
+Tartarus? And as Schoppe, with his puppet-parody, came to him, and he
+pointed out to him the street, and the latter said: "Bon! Friend Death
+sits on his game-wagon, and glances quietly up, as if the friend would
+say, 'Bon! only dance on; I make my return trip, and carry you too to
+your place and spot,'"--how close must it have been to him under his
+sultry visor! At this second the pale mask came, with others, to the
+window; he opened his glowing face for coolness; a hasty draught of
+wine, and still more his fancy, showed him the world in burning
+surfaces; the mask surveyed him closely, with a dark, uncertain glow of
+the eye, which he at last could no longer bear, because it might as well
+have been kindled by hatred as by love, just as the spots on the sun
+seem now like abysses and now like mountains.
+
+Eleven o'clock had gone by; he suddenly disappeared from the hot looks
+and the crushing throng, and betook himself on his way to the heart
+without a breast.
+
+
+51. CYCLE.
+
+While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks
+(mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand,
+&c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the
+tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no
+servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy
+catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of
+others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than
+the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be
+murdered than shamed before his father.
+
+How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward
+toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars,
+stood erect before thee!--Beneath the heavens there is no terror, only
+under the earth!--Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on
+Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and butterflies. In the distance
+fiery prongs grew out of the earth and moved along;--it was the hearse
+with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which
+leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward
+the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had
+met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey
+(probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro.
+
+He passed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed
+down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of
+peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward
+Elysium,--a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some
+windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were
+continually seizing and vanishing.
+
+Impetuously Albano ran down a stairway darkened with hangings, and came
+upon an old battle-field,--a gloomy waste with a black wall, of which
+the monotony was broken only by white gypsum heads, which stood in the
+earth as if they were on the point of sinking or of resurrection; a
+tower full of blind gates and blind windows stood in the midst, and the
+solitary clock talked with itself therein, and, with its iron rod
+swaying to and fro, seemed fain to divide the wave of time, which ever
+tended to run together again: it struck three quarters to twelve, and
+deep in the wood the echo murmured as if in sleep, and softly spake once
+more to fleeting man of fleeting time. The road ran in an eternal circle
+round about the churchyard wall, without coming to a gate. Alban must,
+according to his information, seek a spot in the wall where it roared
+and reeled under him.
+
+At last he stepped upon a stone which sank with him; then a section of
+the wall fell down; and a tangled wood, full of clumps of trees, whose
+stems twined together into bush-work, intercepted every beam of the
+moon. As he looked round him under the gate, there hung over the shadowy
+stairway a pale head like a bust of the murder-field, and passed down
+without a body, and the bloodless dead seemed to awake and run after
+it;--the cold hellstone[116] of horror contracted his heart: he stood:
+the death's-head hovered immovable over the last step!
+
+All at once his heart sucked in warm blood again; he turned toward the
+misshapen wood with drawn sword, because he was bearing along his life
+in his hand near armed Death. He followed in the darkness of the
+moss-green towers the roar of the subterranean flood and the rocking of
+the ground. Unfortunately he looked round again, and there stood the
+death's-head behind him still, but high in the air on the trunk of a
+giant. The extreme of horror always drove him with compressed eyes full
+upon a phantom; he called twice through the echoing wood, "Who's there?"
+But when, at this moment, a second head seemed all at once to stand
+beside the first, then his hand clove, frozen, to the ice-cold key of
+the gate of the world of the dead, and he tore it away bleeding.
+
+He fled, and plunged through thicker and thicker twigs, till at last he
+came out into an open garden and into the splendor of the moon; here, ah
+here, when he saw the holy, immortal heavens and the rich stars in the
+north gleaming again, which never rise nor set, the pole-star and
+Friederich's-Ehre,[117] the Bear and the Serpent, and Charles's Wain
+and Cassiopæa, which looked down upon him mildly, as if with the bright
+winking eyes of eternal spirits, then his spirit asked itself, "Who can
+lay hands on me? I am a spirit among spirits"; and the courage of
+immortality beat again in his warm breast.
+
+But what a singular garden! Great and little flowerless beds, full of
+yew, rue, and rosemary, divided it among them; a circle of weeping
+birches drooped like a funeral train around the mute spot; under the
+garden murmured the buried brook, and in the middle stood a white altar,
+near which lay a man.
+
+Albano was strengthened by the appearance of the common dress and the
+mechanic's bundle on which the sleeper rested; he stepped quite close to
+him, and read the golden inscription of the altar: "Take my last
+offering, all-gracious one!" The heart of the Prince must here be
+mouldering in the altar.
+
+Ah, after these rigid scenes, it soothed his soul even to tears to find
+here human words and a human sleep, and the remembrance of God; but as
+he looked with emotion at the sleeper, suddenly that sister's voice
+which he had heard on Isola Bella said softly in his ear, "I give thee
+Linda de Romeiro." "Ah, good God!" he cried, and turned round; and there
+was nothing on either side of him, and he held himself up by the corner
+of the altar. "I give thee Linda de Romeiro," it said again; frightfully
+the thought seized him, that the hovering death's-head might be speaking
+near him, and he shook the sound sleeper, who woke not, and shook and
+called still more violently, when the voice spake for a third time.
+
+"What?" said the drowsy man, "directly! What will he?--you?" and raised
+himself reluctantly and with a yawn; but at the sight of the naked sword
+fell down on his knees, and said: "Mercy! I will, indeed, give up all!"
+
+"Zesara!" a cry came from the wood,--"Zesara, where art thou?" and he
+heard his own voice; but now he boldly called back, "At the altar!" A
+black form rushed out, with a white mask in hand, and hesitated in the
+moonlight before the armed one. Then at length Albano recognized the
+brother of Liana, for whom he had so long panted; he flung his sword
+behind him, and ran to meet him. Roquairol stood before him mute, pale,
+and with a sublime repose on his countenance. Albano continued to stand
+near him, and said with emotion, "Hast thou been seeking me, Charles?"
+Roquairol nodded silently, and had tears in his eyes, and opened his
+arms. Ah, then could the blissful man, with all the flames and tears of
+love fall upon the long-loved soul, and he kept saying incessantly, "Now
+we have each other! now we have each other!" And more and more
+passionately he embraced him, as the pillar of his future, and melted
+into tears, because now, indeed, the buried love of so many years and so
+many choked up fountains of the poor heart could at once gush forth.
+Roquairol, trembling, only clasped him to himself gently with one arm,
+and said, but without passion, "I am a dying man, and that is my face,"
+holding forth the yellow death-mask; "but I have my Albano, and will die
+on his bosom."
+
+Wildly they twined around each other; the sap of life, Love, ran through
+them with a creative power; the ground over the rolling, subterranean
+flood shook more violently; and the starry heaven, with the white, magic
+breath of its trembling stars, floated around the magic glow.
+
+Ah ye happy ones!
+
+
+52. CYCLE.
+
+Some men are born fast friends; their first finding of each other is
+only a second, and they then, like those who have been long parted,
+bring to each other not only a future, but a past also;--this latter our
+happy ones demanded of one another impatiently. Roquairol answered
+Alban's question, How he came hither, in a fiery manner: "He had been
+following him this whole evening,--he had gazed at him at the window
+during the funeral pomp with such a painful longing, and had almost been
+constrained to fly and embrace him,--he had already, but a moment ago,
+stood close by him, and at his question, 'Who's there?' immediately
+taken off his mask." Now did Albano's fallen arm strike again tensely
+through the thin magic-lantern show of ghostly fear, as he now
+learned that the two-headed giant had grown entirely out of an
+optically-magnifying, mistaken notion of the distance of a form which
+was so near, and the death's-head had forfeited its body on the stairway
+only by the dark curtains and its black dress; even the hard
+spirit-scene at the altar seemed to him now less insuperable through the
+rich gain of living love.
+
+Roquairol asked him what woe or joy had driven him hither at midnight to
+a _Moravian_ churchyard, and whither he had sent the man with the sword.
+Albano did not know that Moravians reposed here; and, moreover, he had
+not observed that the sword, probably from fear of its being used, had
+been stolen. He answered, "My dead sister was fain to speak with me at
+the altar; and she has spoken"; but he feared to say more of this. Then
+Roquairol's countenance suddenly changed; he stared at him, and demanded
+confirmation and explanation; during this he looked into the air as if
+he would draw faces from it by his looks, and said monotonously, fixing
+his eyes, however, on Albano the while, "Dead one, dead one, speak
+again!" But only the death-flood went on speaking under them, and
+nothing more. But he threw himself before the altar on his knees, and
+said in measured tone, and yet with trembling lips: "Fly open,
+spirit-gate, and show thy transparent world. I fear not you, the
+transparent ones; I become one of you, when you appear, and walk with
+you, and become an apparition myself." "O my good one, forbear," Albano
+entreated, not only from piety, but from love also; for an accident, a
+night-bird shooting over, might, indeed, kill them by horror: this
+horror stood, too, not far from them; for on the illuminated side of the
+weeping birches stepped out a white, majestic old form. But when
+Roquairol, frantic with wine and fancy, reached out the dying mask into
+the air, and said, turning toward the grave of the heart, "Take this
+face, if thou hast none, old man, and look at me from behind it!" Alban
+seized him; the white form stepped back with bowed head and folded arms
+into the branches; the round tower on the battle-field struck the hour,
+and the dreamy region, murmuring, struck a response.
+
+"Come to my warm heart, thou passionate soul. O that I were permitted to
+receive thee on my very birthday, at my very birth-hour!" This sound
+melted at once the ever-changing man, and he hung upon him with wet eyes
+of joy, and said: "And to keep me even till our dying hours! O look not
+upon me, thou unchangeable, because I appear so wavering and broken; in
+the waves of life man breaks and crinkles as the staff flickers in the
+water, but the essential being stands nevertheless firm as the staff. I
+will follow thee into other parts of Tartarus; but still relate the
+history."
+
+To give this history amounted to opening a _sanctum sanctorum_ of the
+inner man, or even a coffin to the light of day; but do you believe that
+Albano bethought himself a minute? or would you yourselves? We are all
+better, franker, warmer friends than we know and show; only let the
+right spirit meet you,--such a one as thirsting Love ever
+demands,--pure, large, clear, and tender and warm,--and you give him
+everything, and love him without measure, because he is without fault.
+Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his
+whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did
+not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his
+whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the
+rainy season;--hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad
+motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained,
+was a stream with waterfalls.
+
+Charles led him into the so-called catacomb, while he listened to the
+ghost-story of Isola Bella, which, however, from having been exhausted
+by the former, he heard with diminished fear. A dreary, charred vale,
+full of sunken shafts, basked gray in the moonshine; out of the wood
+crept forth the death-flood below their feet, and leaped down a stony
+stairway into the catacombs. The two followed it on another that ran by
+its side. The entrance bore as frontispiece an old dial-plate, of which
+the lightning had once struck away the hour _one_. "One?" said Albano;
+"singular!--just our coming hour!"
+
+How adventurously does the catacomb now wind onward! The long
+death-flood murmurs obscurely far in through the darkness, and glimmers
+at times under the silvery stream which the moonlight sends in through
+the shaft-openings; immovable creatures--horses, dogs, birds--stand
+drinking on the dark bank, that is to say, their stuffed skins; small
+gravestones, worn smooth by time, with a few names and limbs, are the
+pavement; on a brighter niche we read that a nun was immured here; in
+another stands the petrified skeleton of a miner, who was buried alive,
+with gilded ribs and thighs; in scattered spots were black paper hearts
+of men shot by the arquebuse, and heaped-up nosegays of poor sinners;
+the rod which had whipped a forgiven penitent to death, a glass bust
+with a phosphorus point in the water, chrisom-cloths[118] and other
+children's clothes and playthings, and a dwarf skeleton.
+
+As the explanatory words of Roquairol, whose life-path always ran down
+into vaults and out over graves, beat out life more and more thin and
+transparent before him, Zesara, after his manner, at once shaking his
+head, heaving forward his breast, stamping in the sand, and cursing
+(which he easily did in terror and in strong emotion), broke out with
+the words: "By the Devil! thou crushest my breast and thine own. It is
+not so! Are we not together? Have I not thy warm, living hand? Burns not
+within us the fire of immortality? Burnt-out coals are these bones, and
+nothing more; and the heavenly flame which has consumed them has again
+seized upon other fuel, and blazes on. O," he added, as if comforted,
+and stepped into the brook and looked through the opening of the shaft
+up to the rich moon, which streamed down from heaven, and his great eyes
+filled with splendor,--"O, there is a heaven and an immortality; we
+remain not in the dark hole of life; we, too, sweep through the ether
+like thee, thou shining world!"
+
+"Ah, thou glorious one," said Charles, whose soul consisted of souls, "I
+will now bring thee to a more cheerful place." They had hardly gone
+eight steps, when it darkened behind them, and a sword, flung in
+overhead, came perpendicularly down, and struck with its point in the
+sand under the waves. "O thou infernal devil up there!" cried the
+infuriate Roquairol; but Albano was softened at the thought of the iron
+virgin[119] of the death-hour, who had folded her sharp arms together so
+near him. They clasped each other more warmly, and went silent and sad
+towards a low music and a grave-mound. They seated themselves upon it
+opposite an avenue which formed a right angle with the tormenting
+catacomb, lined with green moss, and of which crumbled sparks of rotten
+wood pointed out the extent. It lost itself in an open gate, and a
+prospect of Elysium, of which only the white summits of some
+silver-poplars were distinguishable, and in the distance was seen the
+spring redness of midnight blooming in the heavens, and two stars
+twinkling overhead. The gate, however, was grated, and guarded by a
+skeleton with an Æolian harp in his hand, which seemed to strike upon it
+the thin minor tones which the draught of wind just now wafted into the
+cavern.
+
+"Here," said Charles, at the beautiful spot, and made more curious by
+the deadly fling of Albano's sword, "finish your narrative of to-day!"
+Albano reported to him candidly the word which the sister's voice had
+spoken: "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." In the tumult of his inner being
+he thought not of the anecdote, that she was the very one for whom
+Charles when a boy had proposed to die. "Romeiro?" he started up. "Be
+still! She? O thou mocking executioner, Fate! Why she, and to-day? Ah,
+Albano, for her I early braved death," he continued, weeping, and sank
+upon his breast, "and that is what has made my heart so bad, because I
+have lost her. Do thou only take her, for thou art a pure spirit; the
+glorious shape which appeared to thee on the sea, so she looks, or now
+still fairer. Ah, Albano!" This noble youth trembled at the complicated
+plot, and at the destiny, and said: "No, no, thou dear Charles, thou
+thinkest falsely about everything."
+
+Suddenly it was as if all the constellations rang, and a melodious
+spirit-choir thronged in through the gate. Albano was startled.
+"Nothing; let be," said Charles. "It is not the skeleton; the _pious
+father_ is walking in the _flute-dell_, and is just drawing out his
+flutes, because he prays. But how sayest thou, I think falsely of
+everything?" "How?" repeated Albano, and could not, in the magic circle
+of these echoes, which all-powerfully brought back to him that Sunday
+morning, either think or speak. For did not the silver-poplars wave to
+and fro against the stars, and rosy clouds lie couched about the
+heavens, and did not the whole Elysium pass openly by with the sounds
+which had floated through it, with the tears which had besprinkled it,
+and with the dreams which no heart forgets, and with the holy form which
+eternally abides in his breast? And now he held so fast the hand of her
+brother; so near was he to love and friendship, those two foci in the
+ellipse of life's pathway; impetuously he embraced the brother, with the
+words: "By Heaven, I say to thee, she whom thou hast just named concerns
+me not, and never will."
+
+"But, Albano, thou dost not surely know her yet?" said Charles, pursuing
+his inquiries, perhaps, too hardly; for the noble youth beside him was
+too bashful and too steadfast to unlock the sanctuary of wishes to the
+kinsman of his loved one; to a stranger he could have done it much more
+easily. "O torment me not," he answered sensitively; but he added more
+softly, "Believe me, I pray you believe me, this first time, my good
+brother!" Charles yielded full as seldom as he; and although swallowing
+the inquisitive tone, and speaking in a right loving one, nevertheless
+said this: "By my bliss, I'll do it, and with joy; a heart must have
+been heartily loved and divinely blessed which can renounce such a one."
+Ah, does Albano, then, know that! He only leaned silently, with his
+fiery cheek full of roses, on Liana's brother, shunning scrutiny for
+shame; but when the expiring calls of the flute-dell gathered together
+like sighs in his breast, and reminded him too often how that Sunday
+morning closed, how Liana stole away, and how he looked after her with
+dim, wet eyes from the altar; then, although his heart did not break,
+his eye broke into tears, and he wept violently, but silently, on his
+first friend.
+
+Then, with mute souls, they turned homeward, and looked thoughtfully
+toward the long, vanishing ways of the future; and when they parted,
+they well felt that they loved each other right heartily, that is, right
+bitterly.
+
+On the morrow the pious father lay prostrate under a shock which was
+more blissful than mournful; for he said he had in the night seen his
+friend, the deceased Prince, walking, clad in white, through Tartarus.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[92] [_Fauler Heinz._] Or Athanor, a chemical stove, which works
+on for a long time without poking. [Corresponding to our
+air-tight stove. _Athanor_, from the Greek, _undying_?--TR.]
+
+[93] The translator had to resort to the Scotch to help him get
+this pun into English.
+
+[94] Ezek. xiii. 18: "Woe to the women that sew pillows to all
+arm-holes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature, to
+hunt souls!"--TR.
+
+[95] According to Lempriere.
+
+[96] Sanhedrim, c. 2, Misch. 3.
+
+[97] Cic. ad Quirit. post redit, c. 3.
+
+[98] His sect represented Christ's journey to hell as having
+released all the wicked from that region, but not Abraham, Enoch,
+the prophets, &c.--Tertul. adv. Marcion.
+
+[99] A title given to black colors.
+
+[100] The Corinthian, who was hidden from his enemies in a chest
+of cedar, ivory, and gold, richly adorned with figures in relief,
+and at last expelled the usurpers and mounted the throne.--TR.
+
+[101] The line which is drawn from the aphelion to the
+perihelion, the two apsides, or the nearest and farthest points
+of a planet's distance from the sun.
+
+[102] A child coming into the world face foremost cannot
+afterward bend its head forward.--_The Mother of a Family_, Vol.
+V.
+
+[103] The name of the Invalid Hospital in Copenhagen.
+
+[104] In Darwin's Zoönomy, page 529, the case is adduced of a man
+who did this before spectators. In Paris another did the same by
+swallowing air.
+
+[105] In Vienna there was an Institute which made new sealing-wax
+out of old, and endowed poor persons with the proceeds.
+
+[106] Such was the tasteless name by which Basedow was going to
+baptize a daughter, in memory of the appearing of an elementary
+work by subscription. See Schlichtegroll's Necrology.
+
+[107] _Wehestande_, a parody of _Ehestande_, wedded state.
+
+[108] An issue.
+
+[109] A name given in some places to the consumption.
+
+[110] A micrometer consists of fine threads stretched across in
+the telescope, which serve to measure the smallest distance.
+
+[111] The transit-instrument, or culminatory, observes when a
+star has reached the highest point in its course.
+
+[112] Autarchs; for monarchs or sole-rulers are etymologically
+distinguished from self-rulers.
+
+[113] Ghosts of the dead.--TR.
+
+[114] Does he allude to the frightful white form, in my "vision
+of annihilation"?
+
+[115] A phrase applied to the form of a dying man. [Properly a
+distemper which gives one a deathly look. See Bailey's
+Dictionary.--TR.]
+
+[116] The _lapis infernalis_, or silver cautery.--TR.
+
+[117] Frederick's Honor.
+
+[118] Linen cloths smeared with aromatic ointment, anciently
+placed on the heads of children just born or baptized.--TR.
+
+[119] An allusion to a well-known instrument of the
+Inquisition.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+TENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.[120]--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF
+     FRIENDSHIP.
+
+
+53. CYCLE.[121]
+
+Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth,
+should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter
+as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life,
+when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung
+round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like
+gentle _goddesses_, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years,
+they summon us, like stern _gods_, with commands! And at this period
+Friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as
+later, in a narrow Gothic chapel.
+
+Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with
+islands and ships; he had his whole breast full of friendship and youth,
+and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had
+rebounded from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously
+upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched
+him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul
+and his whole life--(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into
+his heart); all models of friendship among the ancients he was fain to
+copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his
+being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a
+double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.
+
+When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,--which
+was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the
+spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of
+night,--and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery
+smoke-column of an Ætna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see
+the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the
+more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who,
+after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote
+island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the
+baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life,
+comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom
+we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any
+moment play again the give-away game with the human form.
+
+Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the
+disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped
+for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course,
+a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's
+tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as
+on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies the Hippocratic face of
+the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was
+occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a
+chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet
+hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the glasshouse of a run-down
+hour-glass, and the washing-and the writing-table stood open, on which
+latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or
+writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the
+ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers
+on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left
+ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like butterflies on the
+window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet
+there, much less a Cycle.
+
+Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one
+loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of
+tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house
+in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one
+in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a
+spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an
+infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was
+still something noble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an
+imitator of what he eulogized.
+
+As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green
+garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the
+warm air of friendship and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once
+into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states
+of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was
+a second Russia, which harbors all climates, from France even to Nova
+Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he
+was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could
+throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it
+sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The
+girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and
+city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was
+vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who
+pronounced everything correctly.--Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften
+instead of Juchten, Fünfzig instead of Füfzig, and Barbieren (the _r_ in
+which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),--Roquairol was a
+free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and
+spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time
+an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed
+that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of
+speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one
+another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the
+Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite
+and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several
+departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent
+masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts
+merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have
+to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order
+that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pestitz
+representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano,
+rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of
+life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.
+
+But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;--friendship has its
+deceptions as well as love;--and often, when he had long looked upon
+this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and
+proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon _his_ wavering
+soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose
+fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the noble one move him
+even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say
+to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I
+lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and
+decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and
+repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came--the
+momentous day for both--when he did it. How could he ever have resisted
+_Fancy_, when he only resisted _by and through_ Fancy? I do him half
+injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.
+
+Roquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the higher youth of our
+times are so early and richly overhung with the roses of joy that, like
+the inhabitants of spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by
+put under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose-sirup and
+bathe themselves in rose-oil,[122] until nothing more is left them
+thereof for a stimulus except the thorns, so are most of them--and often
+the very same ones--stuffed full in the beginning, by their
+philanthropic teachers, with the _fruits_ of knowledge, so that they
+come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, then the cider and
+perry thereof, until at last they ruin themselves with the brandy made
+of that. Now if, in addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy
+that makes their life a naphtha-soil, out of which every step draws
+fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences are thrown, and the
+consumption become still greater. For these burnt-out prodigals of life
+there is then no new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no
+old one entire and fresh; a dried-up future, full of arrogance, disgust
+with life, unbelief and contradiction, lies round about them. Only the
+wing of fancy still continues to quiver on their corpse.
+
+Poor Charles! Thou didst still more! Not merely truths, but feelings
+also, he anticipated. All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to
+which Love and Friendship and Nature exalt the heart, all these he went
+through in poems earlier than in life, as play-actor and theatre-poet
+earlier than as man, earlier on the sunny side of fancy than on the
+stormy side of reality; hence, when they at last appeared, living, in
+his breast, he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill them,
+and stuff them well for the refrigeratory of future remembrance. The
+unhappy love for Linda de Romeiro, which, at a later period, would
+perhaps have steeled him, opened thus early all the veins of his heart,
+and bathed it warmly in its own blood; he plunged into good and bad
+dissipations and amours, and afterward represented on paper or on the
+stage everything that he repented or blessed; and every representation
+made him grow more and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun
+by ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy
+sensibilities; but they were simply a new luxury, a tonic, at best; and
+precisely in proportion to their height did the road run down the more
+abruptly into the slough of the unholiest ones. As in the dramatic poet
+angelically pure and filthy scenes stand in conjunction and close
+succession, so in his life; he foddered, as in Surinam, his hogs with
+pine-apples; like the elder giants, he had soaring wings and creeping
+snakes'-feet.[123]
+
+Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one
+of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when
+she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings.
+But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and
+strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread
+every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first
+threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors,
+which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full
+of these eagles. They love you not, though they think so; because, like
+the blest in Mahomet's paradise, instead of their lost arms of love,
+they have only wings of fancy. They are like great streams, warm only
+along the shore, and in the middle cold.
+
+Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran through the alternation
+between ether and slime more and more rapidly, till he mixed them both.
+His blossoms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the Ideal, which,
+however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start with horror, but
+believe it,--he sometimes plunged on purpose into sins and torments, in
+order, down there, by the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into
+himself more deeply the oath of reformation; somewhat as the physicians,
+Darwin and Sydenham, assert that _strengthening_ remedies (Peruvian
+bark, steel, opium) work more powerfully when _weakening_ ones
+(bleeding, emetics, &c.) have been previously prescribed.
+
+External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow
+of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he
+been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and
+a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason
+the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some
+occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,[124] &c. But the
+lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more
+vain and bold.
+
+So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,--hunting like
+an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart,
+whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable
+of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth
+assimilated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able
+much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the
+true language of passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate
+dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided
+against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and
+indispensable--hearts and joys and truths--melted down and floated
+about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything
+which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking
+round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his
+resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of
+the _tuning-hammer_, and not of the _tuning-fork_, of the finest
+morality; and, in the midst of the roar of passion, standing in the
+bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his
+madness, and gives warning of it.
+
+Only _one_ good angel had not flown with the rest,--Friendship. His so
+often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but
+friendship it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto
+loved as a friend,--so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now
+Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace!
+
+In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with
+himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the
+country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose
+rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men--and he--are like the
+fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the
+morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at
+midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the
+sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a
+great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of
+lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread
+wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to
+Albano, when the whole girandole[125] of his faculties and feelings
+burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of
+flasks.
+
+But do you know the medicine of example, the healing power of
+admiration, and of that soul-strengthener, reverence? "It is shameful of
+me," said Roquairol, "when he is so credulous and open and honest. No, I
+will deceive the whole world, only not his soul!" Such natures would
+fain make good their devastation of humanity by being true to one.
+Humanity is a constellation, in which _one_ star often describes half
+the figure.
+
+From this hour forth, his resolution of the heartiest confession and
+atonement stood fixed; and Alban, before whom life had not yet run down
+into a jelly of corruption, but was capable of being analyzed as a sound
+and well-defined organism, and who did not, like Charles, complain that
+nothing would take right hold of him, but everything played round him
+like air,--_he_ it was who was to bring back youth to his sick wishes,
+and with the help of the pure youth's unwavering perceptions and the
+danger of losing his friendship, Roquairol proposed forcing himself to
+keep with _him_ the word of fruit-bearing repentance, which to himself
+he had too often broken.
+
+Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.
+
+
+54. CYCLE.
+
+Once Albano came early in the forenoon to the Captain, when the latter
+was usually, according to his own expression, "a fag-end of a
+yesterday's candle stuck on thorns"; but to-day he stood working away
+blusteringly at the piano-forte and writing-desk by turns; and, like a
+dried-up infusorial animal, was already, even at this early hour, the
+same old, busy creature, because wine enough had been poured upon him,
+that is to say, a good deal. Full of rapture, he ran to meet the welcome
+friend. Albano brought him from Falterle the childish leaves of
+love--for the Master of Exercises had not had the heart to throw them
+into the fire--which he had written from Blumenbühl to the unknown
+heart. Charles would have been moved on the subject almost to tears,
+had he not already been so before the arrival. The Count had to stay
+there all day, and neglect everything; it was his first day of
+irregularity; it was comic to see how the otherwise unfettered youth,
+subservient, however, to a long habit of daily exertions, struggled
+against the short calm, in which he should sail no ship, as against a
+sin.
+
+Meanwhile, it was heavenly; the low-lying day of childhood, which once
+clothed him with wings, when the house was full of guests, and he,
+wherever he wanted to be, came up again above the horizon; the
+conversation played and made gifts with everything which exalts and
+enriches us; all his faculties were unchained and in ecstatic dance. Men
+of genius have as many festal days as others do working days, and hence
+it is that they can hardly endure a trivial and commonplace[126]
+intercalary-day, and especially on such days of youth! When Charles
+conjured before him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe,
+Klinger, Schiller, and life saw itself colossally represented in the
+poetic magnifying-mirror, then did all the sleeping giants of his inner
+world rise up; his father came and his future, even his friend stood
+forth there as in new relief, out of that shining, fantastic time of
+childhood, when he had dreamed of him beforehand in these characters;
+and in the internal procession of heroes, even the cloud that floated
+through the heavens and the guard-troop marching away across the market
+were incorporated. His friend appeared to him far greater than he was,
+because, like all youths, he still believed of actors and poets, that,
+like miners, they always received into their bodies the metals in which
+they labored. How often they both said, in that favorite metaphor of the
+young man, "Life is a dream," and only became thereby more glad and
+wide-awake! The old man says it differently. And the dark gate of death,
+to which Charles so loved to lead the way, became before the youth's eye
+a glass door, behind which lay the bright, golden age of the belated
+heart in immeasurable meadows.
+
+Maidens, I own,--as their conversations are more fragmentary,
+matter-of-fact, and less intoxicating,--instead of such an Eden-park, go
+for a spruce Dutch garden, well trimmed with crab's-shears and
+lady-scissors, which is furnished them every day in the afternoon by the
+black hour, which serves up to them on the coffee- or tea-table, the
+small black-board[127] of some evil reports, a couple of new shawls
+sitting by, a well-bred man who passes by with a will or marriage
+certificate, and finally the hope of the domestic report. Come back to
+our young men!
+
+Towards evening the Captain received a red billet. "Very well!" said he
+to the woman who brought it, and nodded. "You'll get nothing out of
+that, madam," said he, turning toward Albano. "Brother, guard only
+against married women. Just snap once, for a joke, at one of their red
+beauty-patches; instantly they dart their fish-hooks into your
+nape.[128] Seven of these hooks, such as you see here, have made a
+lodgement in mine alone." The innocent child Albano! He took it for
+something morally great to assert at once the friendship of seven
+married ladies, and would gladly have been in Charles's case; he could
+not see the mischief of it,--that these female friends, like the
+Romans, love to clip the wings of victory (namely, of ourselves), so
+that the Divinity may not fly any farther.
+
+On a fine day, nothing is so fine as its sunset. The Count proposed to
+ride out into the evening twilight, and on the hill to look at the sun.
+They trotted through the streets; Charles pulled off his great cocked-up
+hat, now before a fine nose, now before a great pair of eyes, now
+before transparent forelocks. They flew into the Linden avenue,
+which was festally decked with a motley wain-scoting of female
+street-_sitters_.[129] A tall woman, with piercing, fiery eyes, in a red
+shawl and yellow dress, strode through the female flower-bed, towering
+like the flower-goddess: it was the authoress of the red note; she was,
+however, more attentive to the beautiful Count than to her friend. On
+all walls and trees bloomed the rose-espalier of the evening redness.
+They blustered up the white road toward Blumenbühl; on both sides the
+gold-green sea of spring heaved its living waves; a feathered world went
+rowing about therein, and the birds dove down deep among the flowers;
+behind the friends blazed the sun, and before them lay the heights of
+Blumenbühl, all rosy-red. Having reached the eminence, they turned their
+horses toward the sun, which reposed behind the cupolas and
+smoke-columns of the proudly burning city, in distant, bright gardens.
+In wondrous nearness lay the illuminated earth round about them, and
+Albano could see the white statues on Liana's roof blush like life under
+the blooming clouds. He drove his horse close to his companion's, to lay
+his hand on Charles's shoulder; and thus they beheld in silence how the
+lovely sun laid down his golden cloud-crown, and, with the fluttering
+foliage-breath around his hot brow, descended into the sea. And when it
+grew dusky on the earth, and a glow lighted up the heavens, and Albano
+leaned across and drew his friend over to his burning heart, then rose
+the evening-chime in Blumenbühl. "And down below there," said Charles,
+with soft voice, and turned thither, "lies thy peaceful Blumenbühl, like
+a still churchyard of thy childhood's days. How happy are children,
+Albano,--ah, how happy are children!" "Are not we so?" answered he, with
+tears of joy. "Charles, how often have I stood on high places, in
+evenings like this, and fervently stretched out my childish hands after
+thee and after the world. Now indeed I have it all. Truly, thou art not
+right." But he, sick with the murmur and ringing-in-his-ears of long
+past times, remained deaf to the word, and said, "Only our cradle-songs,
+only those cradle-songs, sounding back on the memory, soothe the soul to
+slumber, when it has wept itself hot."
+
+More silently and slowly they rode back. Albano bore a new world of love
+and bliss in his bosom; and the youth,--not yet a debtor to the past,
+but a guest of the present,--sweetly unbent by the long Jubilee of the
+day, sank into clear-obscure dreams, like a towering bird of prey
+hanging silent on pinions open with ecstasy.
+
+"We will stay all night at Ratto's," said Charles, when they reached the
+city.
+
+
+55. CYCLE.
+
+They alighted down in Ratto's Italian Cellar. The house seemed to the
+Count at first, after the contemplation of broad nature, like a fragment
+of rock rolled upon it,--although every story, indeed, groans under
+architectural burdens,--but the heavy feeling of subterranean
+confinement[130] soon forgot itself, and singular was the sound that
+came down into the Italian vault of the rattling of carriages overhead.
+The Captain bespoke a _punch royal_. If he goes on so in his
+good fire-regulation, and always has a full cask at home as
+extinguishing-apparatus, and his hose-pipes well proved, then my book
+cannot be touched by the objection, that, as in Grandison, too much tea
+is consumed; more likely is it that too much strong drink will be
+absorbed.
+
+Schoppe was sitting in the Italian souterrain. He loved not the Captain,
+because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were
+heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy
+guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings." Charles paid him back his
+dislike; the hottest waves of his enthusiasm immediately bristled up in
+ice-peaks before the Titular Librarian's face. Only not to-day! He drank
+so amply of king's-punch,--whereof a couple of glasses might have burnt
+through all the heads of Briareus or of the Lernean serpent,--that he
+then said everything, even pious things. "By heavens!" said he, healing
+himself in this Bethesda-pool by--drawing from it, "since it is all
+fiddle-faddle about this growing better, one should obfuscate
+himself[131] with a shot, in order that the baited spirit may once for
+all go free from its wounds and sins." "From sins?" said Schoppe; "lice
+and tape-worms of the better sort will by all means emigrate from my
+territory, when I grow cold; but the worst of them my inner man will
+certainly carry up with it. By the hangman! who tells you, then, that
+this whole churchyard of poor sinners here below shall at once march
+home as an invisible church full of martyrs and Socrateses, and every
+Bedlam come out a high-light lodge? I was thinking to-day of the next
+world, when I saw a woman in the market with five little pigs, every one
+of which she would fain drive before her with a string tied to its leg,
+but which shot off from her and from each other like wisps of electric
+light; now, said I, we, with our few faculties and wishes, which this
+cultivating age sets out _in quintuplo_, fare already as pitifully as
+the woman with her drove; but when we get ten or more new farrows by the
+rope, as the second world, like an America, must surely bring new
+objects and wishes, how will the Ephorus[132] manage his office there? I
+prepare myself to expect there greater indescribable distresses, feudal
+crimes and oppositions." But Roquairol was in his red blaze; he exalted
+himself far above Schoppe and above himself, and denied immortality
+plumply, by way of parodying Schoppe. "An individual man," said he,
+"could hardly, on his own account alone, believe in immortality; but
+when he sees the masses, he has pity, and holds it worth the while, and
+believes the second world is a _monte testaceo_ of human potsherds. Man
+cannot come nearer to God and the Devil hereafter than he does already
+here; like a tavern-sign, his _reverse_ is painted just like his
+_obverse_. But we need the fictitious future for a present; when we
+hover ever so still above our slime, we yet are continually flapping,
+like carps lying still, with poetic fins and wings. Hence we must needs
+dress up the future paradise so gloriously that only gods shall fit into
+it, but, just as in princes' gardens, no dogs. Mere trumpery! We cut
+out for ourselves glorified bodies, which resemble soldiers'-coats;
+_pockets_ and _buttonholes_ are wanting; what pleasure can they hold,
+then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano,
+what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even
+freaks of humor.
+
+At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux.
+He put on his cravat,--he had been sitting there _à la Hamlet_,--and
+said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused,
+still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps.
+
+In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring,
+overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven!
+drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked
+round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as
+slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing
+with them.
+
+Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly
+into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and
+then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his
+friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily
+bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a
+calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting
+through. He was now, after the analogy of the fire-eaters, a
+fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The
+latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer:
+"_Redeem the time_, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life
+all you can: _that_ is time. To this end the best shops of the times,
+the apothecaries', require that a man, after _punch royal_, shall go to
+bed and sweat immoderately."
+
+Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,--when
+the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in
+Derbyshire-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,--when from the
+Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner
+being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the
+proudest (only not the tenderest one),--and when, like Adam in the state
+of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such
+crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but
+from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,--then
+did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the
+unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic,
+credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking
+_naïve_ and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon
+that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he
+was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.
+
+"Come out o' doors,--out o' doors!" said Charles; and that had long been
+Albano's wish. It struck one, as they saw, on the narrow cellar-stairs,
+the stars of the spring heaven overhead glistening down through the
+entrance of the shaft. How freshly flowed the inhaled night over the hot
+lips! How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of
+stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How
+was the fiery eye of Albano refreshed and expanded by the giant masses
+of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the
+transparent mantle of night! Zephyrs, the butterflies of day, fluttered
+already about their dear flowers, and sucked from the blossoms, and
+brought in incense for the morning; a sleep-drunken lark soared
+occasionally into the still heavens with a loud day in her throat; over
+the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose
+jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the
+purple pennons of Aurora, as she sailed toward morning. With an exalting
+power the thought seized the youth, that this very minute was measuring
+millions of little and long lives, and the walk of the sap-caterpillar
+and the flight of the sun, and that this very same time was being lived
+through by the worm and God, from worlds to worlds, through the
+universe. "O God!" he exclaimed, "how glorious it is to exist!"
+
+Charles merely clung, with the drooping, heavy feathers of the
+night-bird, to the cheerful constellations around him. "Happy for thee,"
+said he, "that thou canst be thus, and that the sphinx in thy bosom
+still sleeps. Thou knowest not what I am about to do. I knew a wretch
+who could portray her right well. In the cavern of man's breast, said
+he, lies a monster on its four claws, with upturned Madonna's face, and
+looks round smiling, for a time, and so does man too. Suddenly it
+springs up, buries its claws into the breast, rends it with lion's-tail
+and hard wings, and roots and rushes and roars, and everywhere blood
+runs down the torn cavern of the breast. All at once it stretches itself
+out again, bloody, and smiles away again with the fair Madonna's face.
+O, he looked all bloodless, the wretch! because the beast so fed upon
+him and thirstily lapped at his heart."
+
+"Horrible!" said Albano; "and yet I do not quite understand thee." The
+moon at this moment lifted herself up, together with a flock of clouds
+that lay darkly camped along her sides, and she drew a storm-wind after
+her, which drove them among the stars. Charles went on more wildly: "In
+the beginning, the wretch found it as yet good: he had as yet sound
+pains and pleasures, real sins and virtues; but as the monster smiled
+and tore faster and faster, and he continued to alternate more and more
+rapidly between pleasure and pain, good and evil; and when blasphemies
+and obscene images crept into his prayers, and he could neither convert
+nor harden himself; then did he lie there, in a dreary exhaustion of
+bleeding, in the tepid, gray, dry mist-banks of life, and thus was dying
+all the time he lived.--Why weepest thou? Knowest thou that wretch?"
+"No," said Albano, mildly. "I am he!" "Thou? Terrible God, not thou!"
+"O, it is I; and though thou despisest me, thou wilt be what I ... No,
+my innocent one, I say it not. See, even now the sphinx rises again. O
+pray with me, help me, that I may not be obliged to sin,--only not be
+obliged! I must drink, I must debauch, I must be a hypocrite,--I am a
+hypocrite at this moment." Zesara saw the rigid eye, the pale, shattered
+face, and, in a rage of love, shook him with both arms, and stammered,
+with deep emotion, "By the Almighty! this is not true! thou art indeed
+so tender and pale and unhappy and innocent."
+
+"Rosy-cheek," said Charles, "I seem to thee pure and bright as yonder
+orb; but she too, like me, casts a long shadow up toward heaven." Zesara
+let go of him, took a long look toward the sublime, dark Tartarus,
+encompassing Elysium like a funeral train, and pressed away bitter
+tears, which flowed at the remembrance how he had found therein his
+first friend, who was now melting away at his side. Just then the
+night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the
+wood-caterpillar, and Albano pointed silently to the crashing tree.
+Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee
+to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair
+stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.
+
+This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears;
+a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with
+his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild
+self, and every selfish thought. Softly he laid himself on his friend's
+bosom, and with magical, low words, and full of humility, and without
+fiery images, told him his whole heart; and that it was not wicked, but
+only unhappy and weak, and that he ought to have been as heartily
+sincere towards him, who thought too well of him, as towards God; and
+that he swore, by the hour of death, to be such as he,--to confess to
+him everything, always,--to become holy through him. "Ah, I have only
+been loved so very little!" he concluded. And Albano, the
+love-intoxicated, glowing man, the good man, who knew by his own
+experience the sacred excesses and exaggerations of remorse, and took
+these confessions to be such, came back, inspired, to the old covenant
+with unmeasured love. "Thou art an ardent man!" said Charles; "why do
+men, then, always lie frozen together on each other's breasts, as on
+Mount Bernard,[133] with rigid eye, with stiffened arms? O why camest
+thou to me so late? I had been another creature. Why came she[134] so
+early? In the village down below there, at the narrow, lowly
+church-door,--there I first saw her through whom my life became a
+mummy. Verily, I am speaking now with composure. They carried along
+before me, as I went out to walk, a corpse-like white youth on a bier
+into Tartarus: it was only a statue, but it was the emblem of my future.
+An evil genius said to me, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee.' She
+stood at the church-door, surrounded by people of the congregation, who
+wondered at the boldness with which she took up, in her two hands, a
+silver-gray, tongue-darting snake, and dandled it. Like a daring
+goddess, she bent her firm, smooth brow, her dark eye, and the
+rose-blossoms of her countenance upon the adder's head, which Nature had
+trodden flat, and played with it close to her breast. 'Cleopatra!' said
+I, although a boy. She, too, even then, understood it, looked up calmly
+and coldly from the snake, and gave it back, and turned round. O, on my
+young breast she flung the chilling, life-gnawing viper. But, truly, it
+is now all gone by, and I speak calmly. Only in the hours, Albano, when
+my bloody clothes of that night, which my sister has laid up, come
+before my eyes, then I suffer once more, and ask, 'Poor, well-meaning
+boy! wherefore didst thou then grow older?' But, as I said, it is all
+over now. To thee, only to thee, may a better genius say, 'Love the fair
+one whom I show thee!'"
+
+But what a world of thoughts now flew at once into Albano's mind! "He
+continues to torment himself," thought he, "with the old jealousy about
+Romeiro. I will open heart to heart, and tell the good brother that it
+is indeed his sister I love, and that eternally." His cheeks glowed, his
+heart flamed, he stood, priest-like, before the altar of friendship,
+with the fairest offering, sincerity. "O Charles," said he, "now,
+perhaps, she might be otherwise disposed towards thee. My father is
+travelling with her, and thou wilt see her." He took his hand, and went
+with him more quickly up to a dark group of trees, to unfold, in the
+shadow, his tenderly blushing soul. "Take my most precious secret," he
+began, "but speak not of it,--not even with me. Dost thou not guess it,
+my first brother? The soul that I have loved, as long as I have loved
+thee?"--softly, very softly he added,--"thy sister?" and sank on his
+lips to kiss away the first sounds.
+
+But Charles, in the tumult of rapture and of love, like an earth at the
+up-coming of Spring, could not contain himself; he pressed him to
+himself; he let him go; he embraced him again; he wept for bliss; he
+shut to Albano's eyes, and said, as if he had found his sister anew,
+"Brother!" In vain did Albano seek to stifle, with his hand, every other
+syllable on his lips. He began to paint to the excited youth--who, amid
+the secluded and poetic book-world, had acquired a higher tenderness
+than the actual intercourse of society teaches--the portrait of Liana;
+how she did and suffered; how she watched and pleaded for him, and even
+impoverished herself to wipe out his debts; how she never severely
+blamed, but only mildly entreated him, and all that, not from artificial
+patience, but from genuine, ardent love; and how this, after all, made
+up hardly the accessories of her picture. In this purer inspiration than
+the foregoing evening had granted him, what crowned his bliss was, that
+he could love his sister, among all beings, the most intensely and the
+most disinterestedly, and with a love the most free from poetic luxury
+and caprice. Really strengthened by the feeling that he could, for once,
+exult with a pure and holy affection, he lifted once more in freedom his
+disengaged hands, hitherto, like Milo's, jammed and caught in the tree
+of happiness and life, which he would fain have torn open; he breathed
+fresh, living air and courage, and the plan of his inner perfection was
+now gracefully rounded by new good fortune and a consciousness full of
+fair objects.
+
+The moon stood high in heaven, the clouds had been driven away, and
+never did the morning-star rise brighter on two human beings.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[120] At the canonization of a saint, the _Devil_ was heard by
+_attorney_, in the shape of objections to the act. Jean Paul,
+with a slight variation of the sense of the old title, hints a
+converse process in Roquairol's case, making the better angel
+show cause why sentence of _damnation_ should not be absolutely
+pronounced against him.--TR.
+
+[121] Here began Jean Paul's second volume of the Titan.--TR.
+
+[122] Ottar of Roses.--TR.
+
+[123] The above description of Roquairol reminds one of a German
+_Sinn-spruch_ on sensuality, from the Persian:--
+
+    "Make his reason serve his passions,
+      That is what man never should;
+    _To the Devil's kitchen, angels_
+      _Never carry wood_."
+
+[124] Simon's Christian Antiquities. Mursinna, &c., p. 143.
+
+[125] Branch candlestick.--TR.
+
+[126] Schlendrians,--of a slow fellow,--corresponding to our _old
+fogy_.--TR.
+
+[127] Or Black-book.--TR.
+
+[128] Allusion to the mode of angling for frogs with a bit of red
+cloth.
+
+[129] Spazier-sitzerinnen,--not _gängerinnen_, i. e.
+street-walkers.--TR.
+
+[130] _Zwinger_ means, originally, the narrow space between
+town-walls and town.--TR.
+
+[131] Literally, press something before his brow.--TR.
+
+[132] Overseer, a Lacedæmonian officer.--TR.
+
+[133] Strangers who are frozen are placed by the monks, unburied,
+beside each other, each leaning on the next one's breast.
+
+[134] Linda de Romeiro.
+
+
+
+
+ELEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES.
+
+
+56. CYCLE.
+
+Joyfully did Roquairol, on the first evening when he knew his father had
+gone a journey, bear to his friend the invitation to go with him to his
+mother. Albano blushed charmingly for the first time, at the thought of
+that fiery night which had wrung from him the oldest mystery; for
+hitherto neither of them, in the common hours of life, had retouched the
+sacred subject. Only the Captain could easily and willingly speak of
+Linda as well as of every other loss.
+
+Liana always beheld her brother--the creator and ruling spirit of her
+softest hours--with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to
+get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book
+in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She
+and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately
+relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the
+Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the
+visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern
+chamber, from which he had seen, for the first time, the dear maiden,
+only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns!
+The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her,
+after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling
+of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire,
+of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent
+consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of
+Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical,
+strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the
+flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten
+years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden;
+afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually
+at once thirteen and seventeen years old.
+
+Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting
+because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be
+avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious
+spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground
+to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and
+warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and
+brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet _proudly_,
+but so _affectionately_, that true pair of eyes!
+
+And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,--whose continuance
+is often, on _men's_ faces, but not on _maidens'_, the title-vignette of
+falsehood,--she received our noble youth, but not him alone.
+
+She seated herself at the embroidery-frame; and the mother soon launched
+the Count out into the cool, high sea of general conversation, into
+which only occasionally the son threw up a green, warm island. Alban
+looked on to see how Liana made her mosaic flower-pieces grow; how the
+little white hand lay on the black satin ground (Froulay's _thorax_ is
+to wear the flowers on his birthday), and how her pure brow, over which
+the curly hair transparently waved, bent forward, and how her face, when
+she spoke, or when she looked after new colors of silk, lifted itself
+up, animated with the higher glow of industry in the eye and on the
+cheek. Charles sometimes hastily stretched out his hand towards her. She
+willingly reached hers across; he laid it between his two, and turned it
+over, looked into the palm, pressed it with both hands, and the brother
+and sister smiled upon each other affectionately. And each time Albano
+turned from his conversation with the mother, and true-heartedly smiled
+with them. But poor hero! It is of itself a Herculean labor to sit idly
+by where fine work is going on, such as embroidery, miniature painting,
+&c.; but above all, with a spirit like thine, which has so many sails,
+together with a couple of storms in behind, to lie inactively at anchor
+beside the embroidery-frame, and not to be, say, a spinning Hercules
+(that were easy), but only one that sees spinning,--and that, too, in
+the presence of a great spring and sunset out of doors,--and, in
+addition to all this, in the company of a mother, so chary of her words
+(in fact, before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to
+introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter),--these are sore
+things.
+
+He looked down sharply at the embroidered Flora. "Nothing pains me so
+much," said he,--for he always philosophized, and everything useless on
+the earth troubled him grievously,--"as that so many thousand artificial
+ornaments should be created in vain in the world, without a single eye
+ever meeting and enjoying them. It will touch me very nearly if this
+green leaflet here is not especially observed." With the same sorrow
+over fruitless, unenjoyed plantings of labor, he often shut his eyes
+upon wall-paper foliage, upon worked flowers, upon architectural
+decorations. Liana might have taken it as a painter's censure of the
+overladen stitch-garden, which, merely out of love for her father, she
+was sowing so full,--for Froulay, born in the days when they still
+trimmed the gold-lace with clothes, rather than the reverse, was fond of
+buttoning a little silk herbary round his body,--but she only smiled,
+and said, "Well, the little leaf has surely escaped that evil destiny:
+it _is_ observed."
+
+"What matters a thing's being forgotten and useless?" said Roquairol,
+taking up the word, full of indifference to the Lector, who was just
+entering, and full of indifference to the opinion of his mother, to
+whom, as well as to his father, only the entreaties of his sister
+sometimes made him submissive. "Enough that a thing _is_. The birds sing
+and the stars move in majesty over the wildernesses, and no man sees the
+splendor. In fact, everywhere, in and out of man, more passes unseen
+than seen. Nature draws out of endless seas, and without exhausting
+them; we, too, are a nature, and should draw and pour out, and not be
+always anxiously reckoning upon the profit, for watering purposes, of
+every transient shower and rainbow. Just keep on embroidering, sister!"
+he concluded, ironically.
+
+"The Princess comes to-day!" said the Lector, and, delighted with the
+prospect, Liana kissed her mother's hand. She looked up often and
+confidentially from her embroidery at the courtier, who seemed to be
+very intimate, but who, as a refined man, was full as much respected
+and as respectful as if he were there for the first time.
+
+The announcement of the Princess set the Captain into a charming state
+of easy good-humor; a female part was to him as necessary for society as
+to the French for an opera, and the presence of a lady helped him as
+much in teaching, as the absence of a button did Kant.[135] By way of
+drawing his sister off from the flowers, he removed the red veil from a
+statue on the card-table, and threw it, like a little red dawn, over the
+lilies on the face of the embroideress; just then the door opened and
+Julienne entered. Liana, trying to remove the veil, in her haste to
+welcome her, entangled herself in the little red dawn. Albano
+mechanically reached out to her his hand to relieve her of the veil, and
+she gave it to him, and a dear, full look besides. O how his enraptured
+eye shone!
+
+Julienne brought with her a train of _jeux d'esprit_. The Captain, who,
+like a pyrotechnist, could give his fire all forms and colors,
+reinforced her with his; and his sister sowed, as it were, the flowers
+with which the zephyrettes of raillery could play. Julienne almost said
+no to yes, and yes to no; only toward the Minister's lady was she
+serious and submissive,--a sign that, on her arena of disputation, among
+the grains of sand particles of golden sand still lay, whereas for
+philosophers the arena is the prize and the ground,--at once the
+battle-field, the _Champ de Mars_, and the _Champs Elysées_. Upon the
+Count she fixed her passionate gaze as boldly as only princesses may
+venture to and love to; and when he returned the glance of her brown
+eye, she cast it down; but she remembered him, from her old visit in
+Blumenbühl, and inquired after his friends. He now entered with pleasure
+upon something that was as ardent as his own soul,--encomiums. It is
+against the finest politeness to praise or blame persons with
+warmth,--things one may. While he portrayed with grateful remembrance
+his sister Rabette, Julienne became so earnestly and deeply absorbed in
+his eye, that she started, and asked the Lector about the steps of the
+_Anglaise_ which he had led at the masquerade. When he had done his best
+to give an idea of it, she said she had not understood a word of what he
+had been saying; one must, after all, execute it.
+
+And herewith I suddenly introduce my fair readers in a body to a
+domestic ball of two couples. See the two sisters-in-soul, side by side,
+like two wings on _one_ dove, harmoniously flutter up and down. Albano
+had expected Julienne would form a contrast, by nimble and sprightly
+fluttering, to the still, hovering movement of her friend; but both
+undulated lightly, like waves, by and through each other, and there was
+not a motion too much nor too swift.
+
+Hence I have so often wished that maidens might always dance exactly
+like the Graces and the Hours,--that is to say, only with one another,
+not with us gentlemen. The present union of the female wave-line with
+the masculine swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does
+not remarkably beautify the dance.
+
+Liana assumed a new ethereal form, somewhat as an angel while flying
+back into heaven lays aside his graceful earthly one. The dancing-floor
+is to woman's beauty what the horse's back is to ours; on both the
+mutual enchantment unfolds itself, and only a rider can match a dancing
+maiden. Fortunate Albano! thou who hardly dar'st take the finger-points
+of Liana's offered hand in thine! thou gettest enough. And only look at
+this friendly maiden, whose eyes and lips Charis so smilingly brightens
+for the dance, and who yet, on the other hand, appears so touchingly,
+because she is a little pale! How different from those capricious or
+inflexible step-sisters, who, with half a Cato of Utica on the wrinkled
+or tightly stretched face, hop, fall back, and slip round. Julienne
+flies joyfully to and fro; and it is hard to say before whose eyes she
+loves to flutter best, Liana's or Albano's.
+
+When it was done, Julienne wanted to begin over again. Liana looked at
+her mother, and immediately begged her friend rather for a cooling off.
+A mere pretext! A female friend loves to be alone with a female friend;
+the two loved each other before people only with a veil upon their
+hearts, and longed for the dark arbor where it might fall off. Liana had
+a real loving impatience, till she could, with her duplicate-soul, her
+twin-heart, snatch moments free from witnesses in the garden of evening
+and May. They came back changed and full of tender seriousness. The
+lovely beings were perhaps as like each other in their innermost souls
+and in stillness as in the dance, and more so than they seemed.
+
+And thus passed with our youth a fair-starred evening! Pardon him,
+however, that he grasped and pressed this nosegay so close as to feel
+some of the thorns. His heart, whose love grew painfully near another,
+could not help finding this other, where there was no sign of response,
+at once _higher_ and _farther_ off. Her love was love of man,--her smile
+was meant for every kind eye,--she was so cheerful. In Lilar she easily
+passed into emotion and general contemplations; not so here,--of course
+she would look right sympathetically upon her wildly loving brother,
+who, since that confession-night, had twined himself as if with
+oak-roots around the darling; but her half-blind love for the brother
+might indeed be only, in the deceiving light of reflection, shining upon
+_his_ friend. All this the modest one said to himself. But what he had
+enjoyed in full measure of ecstasy was the increasing, clear, tender,
+steadfast love of his soul's-brother.
+
+
+57. CYCLE.
+
+As to Liana's secret inclination and Zesara's prospects I shall never
+once institute any conjectures, although I might erase them again before
+printing. I remember what came of it, when I and others, on a former
+occasion, covered over with our hands Hafenreffer's official reports
+upon matters of consequence, and undertook to unfold at length, by pure
+fancy, how things might have gone on;--it was of no use! And naturally
+enough; for women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, many _doors_
+and few _windows_, and it is easier to _get_ into their hearts than to
+_look_ into them. Particularly maidens', I mean; since women,
+physiognomically and morally, are more strongly marked and boldly
+developed, I would rather undertake to guess at and so portray ten
+mothers than two daughters. The bodily portrait-painters make the same
+complaint.
+
+Whoever observes the influence of night, will find that the doubts and
+anxieties which he had contracted the evening previous about the heroine
+of his life it has, for the most part, completely killed by the time it
+gets to be towards morning. Albano, in the spring morning, opened his
+eyes upon life as in a triumphal car, and the fresh steeds stamped
+before it, and he could only let them have the reins.
+
+He alighted with his friend at Liana's after a few years, that is, days;
+the Minister had not yet come back. Heavens! how new and bloomingly
+young was her form, and yet how unchanged her demeanor! Why is it,
+thought he, that I can get only her motions, not all her features, by
+heart? Why can I not imprint this face, even to the least smile, like a
+holy antique, cleanly and deeply upon my brain, that so it may float
+before me in eternal presence? For this reason, my dear: young and
+beautiful forms are the very ones which are hard for the memory as for
+the pencil; and coarse, old, masculine ones easier for both. Again he
+filled himself with joys and sighs by looking at her,--and these were
+increased by the nearness of the garden, wherein June with his evening
+splendor lay encamped. O, if only _one_ moment could come to him, in
+which his whole soul might speak its inspiration! Out of doors there lay
+the young, fiery spring, basking, like an Antinoüs, in the garden, and
+the moon, impatient for the fair June-night, stood already under the
+gate of the east, and found the living day and the lingering sun still
+in the field. But the mother refused to the asking look of Liana the
+sight of sunset,--"on account of the unwholesome _Serein_."[136] Albano,
+with his heart full of manly blood, thought this maternal barrier around
+a child's health very small.
+
+The hour for shutting gates upon to-day's Eden would have struck for him
+the next minute, had it not been for the Captain and the _Cereus
+serpens_.
+
+The Captain came running down from the Italian roof, and announced that
+the Cereus would bloom this evening at ten o'clock, the gardener said,
+and he should stay there. "And thou too," he said to Albano. All that
+the double limitations of forbearing tenderness toward sister and friend
+would allow he lovingly set at stake, for the sake of pleasing the
+latter. Liana herself begged him to wait for the blooming; she was so
+delighted to find it was so near! Her soul hung upon flowers, like bees
+and dew. Already had her friend, the pious Spener, who fixed an
+enraptured eye upon these living arabesques of God's throne, made her a
+friend to these mute, ever-sleeping children of the Infinite; but still
+more had her own maidenly and her suffering heart done it. Have you
+never met tender, female souls, into whose blossoming time fate had
+thrown cold clouds, and who now, like Rousseau, sought other flowers
+than those of joy, and who wearied themselves with stooping, in valleys
+and on rocks, to gather and to forget, and to fly from the dead _Pomona_
+to the young _Flora_? The thorough-bass and Latin, wherewith _Hermes_
+proposes to divert maidens, must yield here to the broad, variegated
+hieroglyphics of Nature, the rich study of Botany.
+
+A nameless tenderness for Liana came into Albano's soul at the little
+four-seated supper-table; it seemed to him as if he were now nearer to
+her, and a relative; and yet he comprehended not his kinswoman, when,
+from every serious mood into which her mother sank, she strove to win
+her back with pleasantries. Out of doors the nightingales were calling
+man into the lovely night; and no one pined more to be abroad than he.
+
+For the soul's eyes, the _blue_ of heaven is what the _green_ of earth
+is to the bodily eyes, namely, an inward strengthening. When Zesara, at
+length, came free and clear out of the fetters of the room,--out of this
+spiritual house-arrest into the free realm of heaven, and beneath all
+the stars and on the magic Olympus of statues, at which he had so often
+longingly looked up,--then did his forcibly contracted breast
+elastically expand: how the constellations of life moved to meet each
+other in brighter forms; how did spring and night sit enthroned!
+
+The old gardener, who, simply from a grateful attachment to "the
+good-souled, condescending Fräulein," had, with rare pains, forced these
+early blossoms from the _Cereus serpens_, stood up there already,
+apparently as an observer of the flowers, but in fact as an expectant of
+the greatest praise, with a brown, indented, pitted, and serious face,
+which did not challenge praise with a single smile.
+
+Liana thanked the gardener before she came to the blossoms; then she
+praised them and his pains. The old man merely waited for every other
+one of the company to be astonished also; then he went drowsily off to
+bed, with a firm faith that Liana would to-morrow remember him in such a
+way as to make him contented.
+
+The exotic beads of nectar-fragrance which hung in five white calyxes,
+crowned as it were with brown leaf-work, seized the fancy. The odors
+from the spring of a hotter clime drew it away into remote dreams. Liana
+only stroked with a soft finger, as one glides over eyelids, the little
+incense-vases, without touching with predatory hand the full little
+garden of tender stamina which crowded together in the cup. "How lovely,
+how very tender!" said she, with childlike happiness. "What a cluster of
+five little evening stars! Why come they only by night,--the dear, shy
+little flowers?" Charles seemed to be on the point of breaking one. "O
+let it live!" she begged; "to-morrow they will all have died of
+themselves. Charles! thus does so much else fade," she added, in a lower
+tone. "Everything!" said he, sharply. But the mother, against Liana's
+will, had heard it. "Such death-thoughts," said she, "I love not in
+youth; they lame its wings." "And then," replied Liana, with a
+maiden-like turning of the tables, "it just stays with us, that's all,
+like the crane in Kleist's fable, whose wings they broke, so that he
+could not travel with the rest into the warm land."
+
+This gay, motley veil of deep earnestness was not transparent enough for
+our friend. But by and by the good maiden took pains to look just as the
+careful mother wished. The benumbing lily which the earth wears on her
+breast, the moon; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens;
+and the city, with its pierced-work of night-lights; and the high,
+majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white
+lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and
+the nightingales singing out of distant gardens;--did not all this stir
+omnipotently every heart, till it would fain confess with tears its
+longing? And the softest heart of all which beat at this moment below
+the stars, could it have succeeded in wholly veiling itself? Almost! She
+had accustomed herself, before her mother, to dry away with her eye, so
+to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall.
+
+Singular was her appearance, the next minute, to the Count. The mother
+was speaking with her son; Liana stood, far from the latter, with face
+turned half aside, and a little discolored by the moon, near a white
+statue of the holy Virgin, and looking out into the night. All at once
+she looked upon him and smiled, just as if a living being had appeared
+to her in the abyss of ether, and her lip would speak. Earthly form more
+exalted and touching had never before met his eyes; the balustrade by
+which he held swayed to and fro (but it was he himself who shook it),
+and his whole soul cried, "To-day, now, I love the heavenly one with the
+highest, the deepest love I have felt." So he also said lately, and so
+will he say oftener: can man, with the innumerable waves of love,
+institute measurements of altitude, and point to that one which has
+mounted the highest? Thus does man, whereever he may be standing, always
+imagine himself standing in the centre of heaven.
+
+Ah, at this moment he was again surprised, but it was with an "Ah!"
+Liana went to her mother, and when _she_ felt in the hand of her darling
+a slight shudder, she importuned her to go out of the night-air, and
+would not give over till she left with her the magic spot.
+
+The friends stayed behind. According to Albano's reckoning, it would
+not, of course, have been too much, if, in this frank time, wherein our
+holier thoughts, hidden by the common light of day, reveal themselves
+like stars, they had all lingered on the roof till toward morning. The
+two walked for a time up and down in silence. At last the incense-altar
+of the five flowers held them fast. Albano clasped accidentally the
+neighboring statue with both hands, and said: "On high places, one wants
+to throw something down,--even himself oftentimes; and I, too, would
+fain throw myself off into the world, into far-distant lands, as often
+as I gaze into the nightly redness yonder, and as often as I come under
+orangery-blossoms, as under these. Brother, how is it with thee? The
+heavens and the earth open out so broadly: why, then, must the spirit
+so creep into itself?" "Just so do I feel," said he; "and in the head,
+generally, has the spirit more room than in the heart." But here, by a
+delicate guess, he arrived, through agreeably circuitous routes, at the
+accidental discovery of the reason why his sister had hurried down so
+soon.
+
+"Even to obstinacy," said he, "she pushes her care for her mother. The
+last time, when she observed that mother saw her grow pale under the
+dance, she immediately ceased. To me alone she shows her whole heart,
+and every drop of blood, and all innocent tears therein; especially does
+she believe something in respect to the future, which she anxiously
+conceals from mother." "She smiled to herself just before she went
+away," said Albano, and drew Charles's hand over his eyes, "as if she
+saw up there a being from the veiled world." "Didst thou too see that?"
+replied Charles. "And then did her lip stir? O friend, God knows what
+infatuates her; but this is certain, she firmly believes she is to die
+next year." Albano would not let him speak further. Too intensely
+excited, he pressed himself to his friend's breast; his heart beat
+wildly, and he said: "O brother, remain always my friend!"
+
+They went down. In the apartment which adjoined Liana's they found her
+piano-forte open. Now that was just what the Count had missed. In
+passion--even in mere fire of the brain--one grasps not so much at the
+pen as at the string; and in that state alone does musical fantasying
+succeed better than poetic. Albano, thanking, meanwhile, the muse of
+sweet sounds that there were forty-four transitions,[137] seated himself
+at the keys, with the intention now to beat a musical fire-drum, and
+roar like a storm into the still ashes, and drive out a clear,
+sparkling swarm of tones. He did it, too, and well enough, and better
+and better; but the instrument struggled, rebelled. It was built for a
+female hand, and would only speak in female tones, with lute-plaints, as
+a woman with a friend of her own sex.
+
+Charles had never heard him play so, and was astonished at such fulness.
+But the reason was, the Lector was not there; before certain
+persons--and he was one of them--the playing hand freezes, so that one
+only labors and lumbers to and fro in a pair of leaden gloves; and,
+secondly, before a multitude it is easier playing than before one,
+because the latter stands definitely before the soul, the former floats
+vaguely. And, besides all that, blessed Albano, thou knowest who hears
+thee. The morning air of hope flutters around thee in tones,--the wild
+life of youth stalks with vigorous limbs and loud strides up and down
+before thee,--the moonlight, undesecrated by any gross earthly light,
+hallows the sounding apartment. Liana's last songs lie open before thee,
+and the advancing moonshine will let thee read them soon,--and the
+nightingale in the mother's neighboring chamber contends with thy tones,
+as if summoned by the Tuba to the field.
+
+Liana came in with her mother, not till late, because the heavy din of
+tones had something in it hard and painful to both. He could see the two
+sitting sidewise at the lower window, and how Liana held her mother's
+hand. Charles, after his manner, walked up and down with long steps, and
+sometimes stood still near him. Albano, in this nearness of the still
+soul, soon came out of the wilderness of harmony into simple moonlit
+passages, where only a few tones moved delicately like graces, and quite
+as lightly linked as they. The artistical hurly-burly of unharmonious
+_ignes fatui_ is only the forerunner of the melodious Charites; and
+these alone insinuate themselves into the softer souls. It seemed to
+him--the illusion was complete--as if he were speaking aloud with Liana;
+and when the tones, like lovers, went on ever repeating the same thing
+from heartiness and zest, did he not mean Liana, and say to her, "How I
+love thee! O how I love thee!" Did he not ask her, "Why mournest thou?
+why weepest thou?" And did he not say to her, "Look into this mute
+heart, and fly not from it, O pure, innocent one, my own!"
+
+How did the good youth blush, when suddenly the caressing friend placed
+his hands over _his_ friend's eyes, which hitherto, unseen in the
+darkness, had been overflowing for love! Charles stepped warmly to his
+sister, and she, of her own accord, took his hand and said words of
+love. Then Albano took refuge in the murmuring wilderness of sounds,
+until his eyes were dried enough for the leave-taking by lamp-light; by
+slow degrees he let the cradle of our heart cease rocking, and closed so
+mildly and faintly, and was silent for a little while, and then slowly
+rose. O, in this mute, young bosom lived every blessed thing which the
+most glorious love can bestow!
+
+They parted seriously. No one spoke of the music. Liana seemed
+transfigured. Albano dared not, in this spirit-hour of the heart, with
+an eye which had so recently calmed itself, rest long upon her mild blue
+ones. Her deeply touched soul expressed itself, as maidens are wont, to
+her brother only, and that by a more ardent embrace. And from the holy
+youth she could not, in parting, conceal the tone and the look, which
+he will never forget.
+
+That night he awoke often, and knew not what it was that so blissfully
+rocked his being. Ah! it was the tone whose echo rang through his
+slumber, and the dear eye which still looked upon him in his dreams.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[135] He is said, in teaching, to have always looked at the spot
+on a student's coat where the button was gone; and was
+embarrassed when it was sewed on again.
+
+[136] The evening hour, which people in southern countries shun
+so much.
+
+[137] From one key to another.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+TWELFTH JUBILEE.
+
+     FROULAY'S BIRTHDAY AND PROJECTS.--EXTRA-LEAF.--BABETTE.--THE
+     HARMONICA.--NIGHT.--THE PIOUS FATHER.--THE WONDROUS
+     STAIRWAY.--THE APPARITION.
+
+
+58. CYCLE.
+
+Happy Albano! thou wouldst not have remained so, hadst thou, on the
+birthday of the Minister, heard what he then proposed!
+
+Already, for a considerable time, had Froulay been full of noticeable,
+stormy signs, and might any moment, one must needs fear, let the
+thunderbolt fly from him; that is to say, he was gay and mild. Thus,
+also, in the case of phlegmatic children, does great liveliness threaten
+an eruption of the chicken-pox. As he was a father and a despot,--(the
+Greeks had for both only the one word, despot,)--so was it expected of
+him, as connubial storm-maker,[138] that he would provide the usual
+storms and foul weather for his family. Connubial storm-material for the
+mere _troubling_ of marriage can never be wanting, when one considers
+how little is required even for its dissolution; for instance, among
+the Jews, merely that the woman scream too loud, burn the dinner, leave
+her shoes in the place for the man's, &c. Beside all this, there was
+much in the present case about which there was a good chance to thunder;
+e. g. Liana, upon whom one might visit the misdemeanor of the brother,
+because he obstinately stayed away and begged for no grace. One always
+loves to let his indignation loose upon wife, daughter, and son at once,
+and would rather be a land-rain than a transient shower; one child can
+more easily imbitter than sweeten a whole family.
+
+But Froulay still continued the smiling John. Nay, did he not--I have
+the proofs--carry it so far, that when, on one occasion, his daughter,
+in taking leave of the Princess, fell upon her neck,--instead of
+representing to her, with flashing eyes, how one must only accept, not
+reciprocate, familiarities with superiors, and must take care not to
+forget one's self precisely then, when _they_ do forget themselves,--and
+instead of sternly asking whether she had ever seen him, in his warmest
+love toward the Prince, offend against _the Dehors_,--instead, I say, of
+doing this, and hailing and storming the while, did he not merely break
+out that once into the fair words: "Child, thou art too affectionate
+toward thy distinguished friend; ask thy mother; she knows, too, what
+friendly _liaisons_ are"?
+
+Only Liana--although so often deceived by these calms--was full of
+unutterable hope and joy at the domestic peace, and believed in its
+permanence, especially as the paternal birthday was so near, that
+Olympiad and normal period upon which and by which the house reckoned so
+largely. During the whole year the Minister had been looking out for
+this day, in order, in the morning, when the congratulations came, not
+to forget to make believe he had forgotten it, but to be astonished on
+the subject,--all owing to business, he said; and at evening, when the
+guests came,--on account of business he never dined, he said, to
+astonish _them_. He was alternately the worshipper and image-breaker of
+etiquette, ministerial and opposition party thereof, as his vanity
+dictated.
+
+Liana importuned her brother, till he promised to do something to please
+his father; he composed, for the purpose, a family-piece, in which he
+introduced the whole confession-night between himself and Albano, only
+he converted Albano into a sister. Liana gladly studied this part also
+for the birthday, although she had to deliver the blooming vest.
+
+The Minister, contrary to expectation, accepted the vest, the Captain
+and his hand-bill for the evening's performance, graciously; for he was
+wont, on former occasions, like some other fathers, to growl the louder
+the more his children stroked him. He danced away like a Polack right
+merrily with his family, and stuck the rod[139] behind the fur. Nothing
+worse at this moment revolved in his head than the question, where it
+would be best to open the amateur theatre, whether in the _Salon de
+Lecture_ or in the _Salon des bains domestiques_; for the two halls were
+entirely distinguished from one another, and from the other chambers, by
+their names.
+
+The day came. Albano, whose invitation Charles had to extort, because
+the Minister, out of pride, hated his pride, brought with him,
+unfortunately, in his soul, the tone which Liana had given him the last
+time to carry home with him. His hope had hitherto lived upon this
+tone. O blame him not for it! The airy nothing of a sigh bears often a
+pastoral world or an orcus on its ephemeron's-wing. Everything weighty
+may, like a rock, be placed on a point, whereupon a child's finger can
+set it in rotation.
+
+But the tone had died away. Liana knew no other way than that, in the
+visiting congregation,--of whose moral pneumatophobia,[140] after all,
+she was not aware in its full extent,--one should hide every religious
+emotion behind the church fan. Boxes, pit, and farthing gallery were,
+almost at the usual play-hour, set off and filled out with Gratulantes,
+all fit to be canons. The German gentleman was made particularly
+prominent by the rich and insolent ostentation of his circumstances. Of
+the visiting-company-lane it can, in passing, only be observed, that in
+it, as in the antiphlogistic system, _oxygen_[141] played the chief
+part, which, however, was given out less by the lungs than by the heart.
+
+When the curtain rose, and Roquairol made that night of forgiveness and
+ecstasy pass by again in a still more glowing form than it had actually
+had; when this dreamy imitation seemed the first appearance of the
+actual reality, how hotly and deeply did he burn himself thereby into
+his friend's soul! (Good Albano! This art of being his own _revenant_,
+his own ghost, his mock- and mimic-self, and of counterfeiting the
+splendid edition of his own life, should have left thee smaller hopes!)
+The Count must needs, in this most grave society that ever sate around
+him, break out into an unseemly weeping. And why did Charles put
+Albano's words, of that memorable night, into the mouth of Liana, so
+bewitchingly interesting in her emotion, and thus make his love,
+wrought upon by so many charms, grow even to anguish?
+
+The German gentleman himself gave to Liana, that white swan, floating,
+tinged with rosy redness, through the evening glow of Phœbus, several
+loud, and to the Count annoying signs of approbation. The Minister was
+chiefly glad that all this happened in his honor, and that the point of
+the last act was still going to throw a very special epigrammatic
+laurel-wreath on his crown.
+
+He got the wreath. The pair of children were very favorably criticised
+by the Erlangen literary gazette[142] of spectators, and by the
+belles-lettres review, and covered over with crowns,--with noble
+martyrs' crowns. The German gentleman had and used the public right of
+ushering in the Coronation, and the Coronation-car. Base man! why should
+thy beetle's-eyes be permitted to creep gnawingly over the holy roses
+which emotion and sisterly love plants on Liana's cheeks? But how much
+gayer still was the old gentleman,--so much so that he flirted with the
+oldest ladies,--when he saw the knight bring out magnificently into full
+daylight his interest in Liana, not fantastically or sentimentally, but
+by still and steady advances and marked attention, by jokes and glances
+and sly addresses, and at last by something decisive! That is to say,
+the German gentleman drew the old man into a cabinet, and both came back
+out of it vehemently animated.
+
+The lovely Liana, withdrawn into her own heart, fled from the upas-tree
+of the laurel away to her comforting mother. Liana had preserved, in the
+midst of the stormy mill-races of daily _assemblées_, a low voice and a
+delicate ear, and the tumult had driven her inward, and left her almost
+shy.
+
+The fair soul seldom guessed anything, except a fair soul: she so easily
+divined her like; with such difficulty her counterpart. Bouverot's
+advances seemed to her the usual forward and side steps of manly
+courtesy; and his knightly celibacy did not allow her entirely to
+understand him. Do not the lilies of innocence bloom earlier than the
+roses of shame, as the purple color, in the beginning, only dyes pale,
+and not till afterward puts on the red glow, when it lies before the
+sun? She kept herself this evening near her mother, because she
+perceived in her an unwonted seriousness. When Froulay had taken off
+from his head the birthday garland, wherein were planted more thorns and
+stalks than flowers,--when he had taken off the crown of thorns, and
+stood in his night-cap amidst his family,--he addressed himself to the
+business whereupon he had been thinking all the evening. "My little
+dove," said he to his daughter, borrowing a good expression from the
+Bastile,[143]--"my little dove, leave me and _Guillemette_ alone." He
+now laid bare his upper teeth by a characteristic grin, and said he had,
+as he hoped, something agreeable to communicate to her. "You know," he
+continued, "what I owe to the German gentleman." He meant not thanks,
+but money and consideration.
+
+We love to dwell upon it as a matter of great praise in the family of
+the Quintii,[144] that they never possessed gold: I adduce--without
+arraying a thousand other families of whom the same is to be sworn--only
+Froulay's. Certain families, like antimony, have no chemical affinity
+whatever with that metal, however much they might wish it; certainly
+Froulay wished it: he looked very much to his interest (to nothing
+else), he willingly (although only in cases of collision) set conscience
+and honor aside; but he got no further than to great outlays and great
+projects, simply because he sought money, not as the end and aim of his
+ambition, but only as the means of ambition and enterprise. Even for
+some pictures which Bouverot had purchased for the Prince in Italy he
+still owed that individual the purchase-shilling which he had taken out
+of the treasury. By his bonds as if by circulars, he stood in
+widely-extended connections. He would gladly have transposed his
+marriage contract into a bond, and had, with his lady, at least that
+most intimate community--of goods; for, under present circumstances,
+divorce and bankruptcy stood in neighborly relations to each other; but,
+as was said, many men, with the best talons,--like the eagle of the
+Romish king,[145]--have nothing in them.
+
+He continued: "Now, perhaps, this _géne_ will cease. Have you hitherto
+made any observations upon him?" She shook her head. "I have," he
+replied, "for a long time, and such as were really consoling to
+me,--_j'avais le nez bon quant à cela_,--he has a real liking for my
+Liana."
+
+The Minister's lady here could draw no inference, and begged him, with
+disguised astonishment, to come to the _agreeable_ matter. Comically on
+his face did the show of friendship wrestle with the expectation that he
+should be under the necessity immediately of being exasperated. He
+replied: "Is not _this_ an agreeable matter? The knight means it in
+earnest. He wished now to be privately espoused to her; after three
+years he retires from the order, and her fortune is made. _Vous êtes, je
+l'espere, pour cette fois, un peu sur mes interêts, ils sont les
+vôtres._"
+
+Her maternal heart, so suddenly and deeply wounded, wept, and could
+hardly be concealed. "Herr von Froulay!" said she, when she had composed
+herself a little; "I do not disguise my astonishment. Such a disparity
+in years, in tastes, in religion."[146]
+
+"That is the knight's affair, not ours," he replied, refreshed by her
+angry confusedness, and, like the weather, in his coldness threw only
+fine, sharp snow, no hail. "As to Liana's heart, I beg you just to sound
+that." "O, that innocent heart? You are mocking!" "_Posito!_ so much the
+more gladly will the _innocent_ heart reconcile itself to make her
+father's fortune, if she is not the greatest egotist. I should never
+love to constrain an obedient daughter." "_N'epuiséz pas ce chapitre;
+mon cœur est en presse._ It will cost her her life, which already
+hangs by such frail threads." This allusion always struck the fire of
+wrath from his flint. "_Tant mieux_," said he; "then it will never go
+further than an engagement! I had almost said--_Sacre!_ and who is to
+blame for that? So it fares with me at the hands of the Captain too,--in
+the beginning my children promise everything, then they turn out
+nothing. But, madam," he said, swiftly and venomously collecting
+himself; and, instead of compressing his lips and teeth, merely pinching
+moderately the auditory organs of a sleeping lap-dog; "you alone indeed
+know, by your influence upon Liana, how to dress and redress everything.
+Perhaps she belongs to you by a still prior claim than to me. I am not
+then compromitted with the knight. The advantages I detail no further."
+His breast was here already warmed under the vulture-skin of rage.
+
+But the noble lady now indignantly rose, and said: "Herr von Froulay!
+hitherto I have not spoken of myself. Never will I counsel or
+countenance or consent to it,--I will do the opposite. Herr von Bouverot
+is not worthy of my Liana."
+
+The Minister, during this speech, had several times unnecessarily
+snapped-to the snuffers over the wax candles, and only beheaded the
+point of the flame; the fixed air of wrath now colored the roses of his
+lips (as the chemical does botanical ones) blue. "_Bon!_" he replied, "I
+travel; you can reflect on the subject,--but I give my word of honor,
+that I never consent to any other match; and though it were (whereupon
+he looked at the lady ironically) still more considerable[147] than the
+one just projected,--either the maiden obeys or she suffers, _decidéz_!
+_Mais je me fie à l'amour que vous portéz au pere et à la fille; vous
+nous rendréz tous assêz contens._" And then he went forth, not like a
+tempest, but like a rainbow, which he manufactured out of the eighth
+color only, namely, the black, and that with his eyebrows.
+
+After some days of resentment with the mother and the daughter, he rode,
+as Luigi's business-agent, to Haarhaar to see the princely bride. The
+oppressed mother confided to her oldest and only friend, the Lector, the
+sad secret. The two had now a pure relation of friendship toward one
+another, which, in France, in consequence of the higher respect for
+women, is more common. In the first years of the ministerial forced
+marriage, which dawned not with morning dew, but with morning frost,
+perhaps the hawk-moth[148] Cupid fluttered after them; but by and by
+children drove away this sphinx. The wife is often forgotten when she
+becomes the mother. She, therefore, with her characteristic cool and
+clear strength, took all that was ambiguous in her relation to Augusti
+forever out of the way; and he made her firmness more easy by his own,
+because he, with more love of honor than of women, grew not more red at
+any kind of braided-work than at that of a basket,[149] and erroneously
+believed that a man who receives it, has as much to be ashamed of as a
+woman who does.
+
+The Lector could foresee that she would also, after her divorce,--which
+she postponed only for Liana's sake,--remain single, if only for this
+reason, in order not to deprive her daughter of an allodial estate,
+Klosterdorf, for the reservation of which she had now for one and twenty
+years exposed herself to the battering-ram and scythe-chariot and
+blunderbuss of the old Minister. Whether she was not even silently
+intending her dear Liana for a man so firm and tender, who differed from
+her in nothing but in a worldly coolness toward positive religion, is
+another and more delicate question. Such a reciprocal gift were worthy
+such a mother and friend, who must know from her heart, that combined
+feelings of tenderness and honor prepare for a loved soul a surer bliss
+than the love which genius offers, that alternation of flying heat and
+flying cold,--that fire which, like the electric, always twice
+destroys,--in the stroke and in the rebound. The Lector himself started
+not that question; for he never made rash, unsafe plans; and what one
+would have been more so than that of such a connection, in his poverty,
+or with such a father-in-law, in a country where, as in the Electorate
+of Saxony, a statute, so beneficial (for parents), can countermand even
+a marriage of many years' standing, which has been concluded without
+parental consent?
+
+With moist eyes the Minister's lady showed him the new storm-clouds,
+which had again descended upon her and her Liana. She could build upon
+his fine eye for the world, upon his dumb lip and upon his ready hand
+for business. He said, as ever, he had foreseen all this; but proved to
+her that Bouverot, if only from avarice, would never exchange his
+knightly cross for the wedding-ring, whatever designs he might cherish
+with regard to Liana. He gave her to surmise, so far as a tender regard
+to her sore relations would tolerate, to what degree of readiness for
+compliance with Bouverot's wishes the very frailty of Liana's life might
+allure the Minister, in order to harvest it before it had done blooming.
+For Froulay could much more nimbly swallow demands against honor than
+injuries done to his vanity, as the victim of hydrophobia can much more
+easily get down solid morsels than fluids. Yet all this did not sound so
+immorally hard to the Minister's lady as readers of the middling classes
+might imagine; I appeal to the more sensible among the higher.
+
+Augusti and the Minister's lady saw that something must certainly be
+done for Liana during the Minister's absence; and both wonderfully
+coincided in their project. Liana must go into the country this pleasant
+season,--she must muster up health for the wars that were in
+prospect,--she must be put out of the way of the knight's visits, which
+now the birthday would multiply fourfold,--even the Minister must have
+nothing to object to the place. And where can this be? Simply under the
+roof of the Director Wehrfritz, who cannot endure the German gentleman,
+because he knows his poisonous relation to the Prince. But of course
+there are first still other mountains to be climbed than that which lies
+on the way to Blumenbühl.
+
+The reader himself must now get over a low one; and that is a short
+comico-tragic Extra-leaf upon
+
+
+THE GREEN-MARKET OF DAUGHTERS.
+
+The following is certain: every owner of a very beautiful or very rich
+daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt under his roof, which to himself is
+of no service, and which he must put to its first use after it has long
+lain idle, by selling it to a _Regent_.[150] Strictly and commercially
+speaking, daughters are not an article of trade; for the parental grand
+adventurers no one can confound with those female dealers in second-hand
+frippery, and stall-women, whose transit-business one does not love to
+name; but a stock, with which one gains in a South Sea, or a clod,
+wherewith one transfers symbolically (_scortatione_) real estate. "_Je
+ne vends que mes paysages et donne les figures par dessus le
+marche_,"[151] said Claude Lorraine, like a father,--and could easily
+say it, because he had the figures painted in his landscapes by
+_others_;--even so in the purchase or marriage-contract only the
+knightly seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them is
+thrown into the bargain. Even so, higher up, is a princess merely a
+blooming twig, which a princely sponsor plucks off and carries home, not
+for the sake of the _fruits_, but because a _bee-swarm_ of lands and
+people has attached itself thereto.
+
+If a father, like our Minister, has not much, then he can pawn his
+children, as the Egyptians did their parents (namely, the mummies of
+them), as mortgages and hand-pledges or imperial pawns, which are not
+redeemed.
+
+At present the mercantile order, which formerly dealt only in foreign
+products, has got possession of this branch of commerce also; methinks,
+however, they might find room enough in their lower vaults to be selfish
+and damned, without going up stairs to the daughter. In Guinea only the
+nobility can trade; with us they are cut off and debarred from almost
+all trade, except the small trade in daughters, and the few other things
+which grow on their own estates; hence is it that they hold so fast to
+this liberty of trade, and that the noblesse seem here to be a Hanse
+alliance for this delicate branch of business; so that one may, in some
+manner, compare the high standing[152] of this class with the _higher_
+one (in a literal sense) which marketable people in Rome were obliged to
+mount[153] in order to be seen.
+
+It is a common objection of young and (so-called) sensitive hearts, that
+this sort of transaction very much constrains, or in fact crushes love;
+whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation for it as this very
+thing. For when the bargain is once concluded and entered by the
+bookkeeper (the parson) in the ledger, then does the time truly come on
+when the daughter can consider and provide for her heart, namely, the
+fair season after marriage, which is universally assumed in France and
+Italy, and is gradually coming to be in Germany also, as the more
+suitable time for a female heart to choose freely among the host of
+men; her state then, like the Venetian, grows out of a commercial into a
+conquering one. The husband himself, too, is quite as little interrupted
+afterward as beforehand in his love by this short business transaction;
+all is, that now--as in Nuremberg every Jew is followed by an old
+woman--close upon the heels of our bridegroom a young one is seen. Nay,
+often, the nuptial tradesman conceives an inclination even for the
+article which he has carried home with him,--which is an uncommon piece
+of good fortune; and as Moses Mendelssohn, with his bundle of silken
+wares under his arm, thought out his _letters_ upon the _affections_, so
+do better men, amidst their business, meditate love-letters on this
+branch of trade, and deal with the virgin--as merchants in Messina[154]
+do with the holy virgin--in Co.; but of course such profitable
+connections of love with business must always be rare birds, and are
+little to be counted upon.
+
+The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with
+children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make
+something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to
+prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show
+of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous
+leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of
+apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal
+liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your
+daughters _friendship_ for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage,
+exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in
+the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or
+do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for
+training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself?
+You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves
+educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy
+inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to _them_;
+and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and
+but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under
+the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale
+as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier
+period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the
+gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being?
+
+If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they
+afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what
+is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole
+heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly _your own_; _your_ glory and
+aggrandizement, _your_ feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy
+with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your
+silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage;
+for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a
+death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial
+merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them
+sinners,[155] in order not to be yourselves robbers?
+
+Tell me not that marriages of inclination often turn out ill, and forced
+marriages often well enough, as may be seen in the instance of the
+Moravians, the old Germans, and Orientals. Name me rather all barbaric
+times and nations, in which--for both indeed only reckon the man, never
+the wife--a happy marriage means nothing more than a happy husband. No
+one stands by near enough to hear and to count a woman's sighs; the
+unheard pang becomes at last speechless; new wounds weaken the bleeding
+of the oldest. Further: the ill-luck of fancy-marriages is chargeable
+upon your very opposition to them, and your war against the married
+couple. Still further: every forced marriage is, in fact, for the most
+part, half a marriage of fancy. Finally: the best marriages are in the
+middling class, where the bond is more apt to be love; and the worst in
+the higher, where it is more a mercenary motive; and as often as in
+these classes a prince should choose merely with his heart, he would get
+a heart, and never lose nor betray it.
+
+Now, then, what sort of a hand is that into which you so often force the
+fairest, finest, richest, but rebellious one? Commonly, a black, old,
+withered, greedy fist. For decrepit, rich, or aspiring libertines have
+too much of the connoisseur, too much satiety and freedom, to steal any
+other than the most splendid creatures; the less perfect fall into the
+hands and homes of mere lovers and amateurs. But how base is a man, who,
+abandoned of his own character, backed merely by the despotic edict of a
+stranger, paying for his fortune with a stolen one, can now drag away
+the unprotected soul from the yearning eyes of a weeping love into a
+long, cold life, and clasp her to his arms as against the edges of
+frosty swords, and therein so near to his eye see her bleed and grow
+pale and quiver! The man of honor even gives with a blush, but he takes
+not with a blush; and the better lion, the beast, spares woman;[156]
+but these soul-buyers extort from constrained beings at last even the
+testimony of free-will.
+
+Mother of the poor heart, which thou wilt bless by misfortune, hear me!
+Suppose thy daughter should harden herself against the misery which is
+forced upon her, hast thou not reduced her rich dream of life to empty
+sleep, and taken out of it love's islands of the blest, and all that
+bloomed thereon; the fair days when one roamed over them, and the
+perpetual happy retrospect of them when they already lie with their
+blooming peaks low in the horizon? Mother, if this happy time was ever
+in thy breast, then snatch it not from thy daughter; and if it was
+barbarously torn from thee, then think of thy bitter pang, and bequeath
+it not!
+
+Suppose, further, she makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now
+what she might have been to its darling; and whether she does not then
+deserve anything better than to gratify a jailer, locked in with her
+forever by one shutting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well
+as this; thou wilt heap a double disaster upon thy soul,--the long agony
+of thy daughter, and the growing coldness of her husband, who by and by
+comes to feel and resent refusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time
+when man first needs the morning-sun,--namely, youth. O, sooner make all
+other seasons of the day of life cloudy; they are all alike, the third
+and the fourth and fifth decades; only at sunrise let it not rain into
+life; only this one never returning, irredeemable time darken not!
+
+But how, if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely joys, relations, a
+happy marriage, hopes, a whole posterity, to thy plans and commands,
+but the very being herself[157] whom thou constrainest? Who can justify
+thee, or dry thy tears, when thy best daughter,--for she is the very one
+who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, as the monks of La
+Trappe see their cloister burn down, without one of them breaking the
+vow of silence,[158]--when she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and
+half in the shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and pale;
+when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last can no longer conceal
+anything from thee, but for years bears round the paleness and the pangs
+of decline in the very orient of life; and when thou canst not console
+her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience cannot suppress
+the name of infanticide; and when at last the worn-out victim lies there
+under thy tears, and the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young,
+so faint, and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complaining, with
+languishing and longing looks, with painfully confused and conflicting
+emotions, sinks with her blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of
+death,--O guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed her in, who
+will comfort thee? But I would call every guiltless one, and show her
+the bitter dying, and ask her, Shall thy child also perish thus?
+
+
+59. CYCLE.
+
+It was a romantic day for Zesara, even outwardly; sun-sparks and
+rain-drops played dazzlingly through the heavens. He had received a
+letter from his father, dated at Madrid, which stamped at last the black
+seal of certainty on the threatened death of his sister, and in which
+there was nothing agreeable but the intelligence that Don Gaspard, with
+the Countess of Romeiro, whose guardianship he was now concluding, would
+travel in autumn (the Italian spring) to Italy. Two tones had been, in
+his life, stolen away from the musical scale of love; he had never known
+by experience what it was to love a brother or a sister. The coincidence
+of her death-night with that night in Tartarus, this whole clawing into
+the holy images and wishes of his heart, stirred up his spirit, and he
+felt with indignation how impotently a whole assailing world might seek
+to remove Liana's image from his soul; and again he painfully felt, that
+this very Liana herself believed in her near decline.
+
+In this situation was he found by an unexpected invitation from the
+Minister's lady herself,--sun-sparks and rain-drops played in his heaven
+also. He flew; in the antechamber stood the angel who broke the six
+apocalyptic seals,--Rabette. She had run to meet him from a bashfulness
+before company, and had embraced him sooner than he her. How gladly did
+he look into the familiar, honest face! with tears he heard the name of
+brother, when he had lost a sister to-day!
+
+The reason of her appearance was this: when the Director was at the
+Minister's lady's the last time, the latter had, with easy, disguised
+hand, opened her house to his daughter, "for the sake of a knowledge of
+empty city life, and for change,"--in order that she might hereafter
+venture to knock at _his_ door on her own daughter's behalf. He said he
+would "forward the female wild deer to her with pleasure, and all
+possible despatch." And as in Blumenbühl Rabette had answered him No,
+then Yes, then No, then Yes, and had held with her mother, even before
+midnight, an imperial-exchequer-revision, a mint-probation-day about
+everything which a human being from the country can wear in the city,
+she packed up there and unpacked here.
+
+"Ah, I am afraid in there," said she to Albano; "they are all too
+clever, and I am now so stupid!" He found beside the domestic trio the
+Princess also, and the little Helena from Lilar, that lovely medallion
+of a fine day to his stirred heart. Indescribably was he smitten with
+Liana's womanly advances to Rabette, as if he shared her with her. With
+courtesy and tenderness, a mildness also, which was without falsehood or
+pride, came to the help of the embarrassed playmate, on whose face the
+inborn gayety and eloquence of nature now singularly contrasted with her
+artificial dumb gravity. Charles, with his ready familiarity, was more
+in a condition to entangle than to extricate her; only Liana gave to her
+soul and tongue, if only by the embroidery-frame, a free field; Rabette
+could write with the embroidering needle, no illuminated and initial
+letters, indeed, but still a good running-hand.
+
+She gave--turning her face toward her brother's, in order to pluck
+courage therefrom--a clear report of the dangerous road and upsets,
+laughing all the while, after the manner of the people when they are
+telling their mishaps. Her brother was to her, at the company's expense,
+both company and world; upon him alone streamed forth her warmth and
+speech. She said she could from her chamber see him "play on the
+harpsichord." Liana immediately led both thither. How richly and
+sublimely, beyond Rabette's demands upon city-life, was the maidenly
+_hospitium_ set out, from the tulip (not a blooming one, but a
+work-basket of Liana's,--although every tulip is such a basket for the
+finger of spring) even to the piano-forte, of which she, of course, for
+the present can use no more than seven treble-keys for half a waltz?
+Five moderate trunks of clothes--for therewith she thought to come out,
+and show the city that the country too could wear clothes--represented
+to him in their well-known flower-pieces and tin bands the old
+impressions (_incunabula_) of his earliest days of life; and to-day
+every trace of the old season of love refreshed him. She made him look
+for his windows, from one of which the Librarian was fixing a hard gaze
+on a paving-stone in the street to see how often he could hit it by
+spitting.
+
+Here alone, in the presence only of the brother, Liana spoke more loudly
+to the sister the word of friendship, and assured her how happy she
+meant to make her, and how sincere she was in all that she promised. O
+look not into the flame of the pure, religious, sisterly love with any
+yellow eye of jealousy! Can you not comprehend that this fair soul even
+now distributes its rich flames among all sisterly hearts, until love
+concentrates them into _one_ sun; as, according to the ancients, the
+scattered lightnings of night gather themselves in the morning into one
+solid solar orb? She was, everywhere, an eye for every heart; like a
+mother, she never once forgot the little in the great; and she poured
+out (let no one deny me the privilege of printing this minute example)
+for little Helena the cup of coffee, which the Doctor forbade, half
+full of cream, in order that it might be without strength or harm.
+
+The impatient Princess had already looked ten times toward the heavens,
+through which now beams of light, now rain-columns flew, till at length
+out of the consumed cloud-snow the broad fields of blue grew up, and
+Julienne could lead out the delighted young people into the garden, to
+the annoyance of the Minister's lady, who did not like to expose Liana
+to the _Serein_,--five or six blasts of the evening-wind, and the wading
+through rain-water that stood a nineteenth of a line[159] deep. She
+herself stayed behind. How new-born, glistening, and inviting was all
+down below! The larks soared out of the distant fields like tones, and
+warbled near over the garden,--in all the leaves hung stars, and the
+evening air threw the liquid jewelry, the trembling earrings, from the
+blossoms down upon the flowers, and bore sweet incense to meet the bees.
+The Idyl of the year, Spring, parcelled its sweet pastoral land among
+the young souls. Albano took his sister's hand, but he listened vacantly
+to her intelligence from home. Liana went far in advance with the
+Princess, and bathed herself in the open heavens of confidential
+communion.
+
+Suddenly Julienne stood still, chatting playfully with her, in order to
+let the Count come up, and to inquire after letters from Don Gaspard,
+and after tidings of the Countess Romeiro. He communicated, with glowing
+countenance, the contents of to-day's letter. In Julienne's physiognomy
+there was a smile almost of raillery. To the intelligence of Linda's
+intended journey she replied: "That is just herself; she will fain learn
+everything,--travel over everything. I wager she climbs up _on_ Mont
+Blanc and _into_ Vesuvius. Liana and I call her, for this reason, the
+Titaness." How graciously did Liana listen, with her eyes wholly on her
+female friend! "You are not acquainted with her?" she inquired of the
+tortured one. He answered, emphatically, in the negative. Roquairol came
+up; "_Passéz, Monsieur_," said she, making room, and giving him a sign
+to move on. Liana looked very earnestly after. "_La voici!_" said
+Julienne, letting the cover of a likeness spring up, by a pressure, on a
+ring of her little hand. Good youth! it was exactly the form which
+arose, that magic night, out of Lago Maggiore, sent to thee by the
+spirits! "She is hit there, exactly," said she to the agitated man.
+"Very," said he, confusedly. She did not investigate this
+contradictory[160] "very"; but Liana looked at him; "very--beautifully
+and boldly!" he continued; "but I do not love boldness in women." "O,
+one can readily believe that of men!" replied Julienne; "no hostile
+power loves it in the other party."
+
+They passed along now through the chestnut avenue by the holy spot where
+Albano had seen, for the first time, the bride of his hopes shining and
+suffering behind the water-jets. O it was here that he would gladly,
+with that soul of his painfully excited by the mutual reaction of
+wonderful circumstances, have knelt down before the still angel so near
+him! The tender Julienne perceived that she had to spare an agitated
+heart; after a tolerably loud silence, she said, in a serious tone: "A
+lovely evening,--we'll go to the water-house. There is where Liana was
+cured, Count! The fountains must leap, too." "O the fountains!" said
+Albano, and looked with indescribable emotion upon Liana. She thought,
+however, he meant those in the flute-dell. Helena cried out behind for
+them to wait, and came tripping along after with two little hands full
+of dewy auriculas, which she had plucked, and gave them all to Liana,
+expecting from her, as collatress of benefices, the flower-distribution.
+"The little one, too, still thinks of the beautiful Sunday at Lilar,"
+said Liana. She gave the Princess one or two, and Helena nodded; and
+when Liana looked at her, she nodded again, as a sign the Count should
+have something too: "More yet!" she cried, when he had got some; and the
+more Liana gave, the more did the child cry, "More,"--as children are
+wont to do, in the hyperboles of their tendency to the infinite.
+
+They went over a green bridge, and came into a neat room. Instead of the
+piano-forte formerly there, stood a glass chapel of the goddess of
+music, a harmonica. The Captain screwed in behind a tapestry-door, and
+immediately all the confined spring-waters shot up outside with silvery
+wings toward heaven. O how the sprinkled world burned as they stepped
+out on the top!
+
+Why wast thou, my Albano, just at this hour not entirely happy? Why,
+then, do pains pierce through all our unions,--and why does the heart,
+like its veins, bleed most richly when it is heated? Above them lay the
+still, wounded heavens in the bandage of a long, white mass of cloud;
+the evening sun stood as yet behind the palace, but on both sides of it
+his purple mantle of clouds floated in broad folds away across the sky;
+and if one turned round toward the east to the mountains of Blumenbühl,
+green living flames streamed upward, and, like golden birds, the _ignes
+fatui_ danced through the moist twigs and on the eastern windows, but
+the fountains still threw their white silver into the gold.
+
+Then the sun swam forth, with red hot breast, drawing golden circles in
+the clouds, and the arching water-shoots burned bright. Julienne bent
+upon Albano--near whom she had constantly remained, as if by way of
+atonement--a hearty look, as if he were her brother, and Charles said to
+Liana, "Sister, thy evening song!" "With all my heart," said she; for
+she was right glad of the opportunity to withdraw herself, with the
+melancholy seriousness of her enjoyment, and down below in the solitary
+room to utter aloud, on the harmonica-bells, all that which rapture and
+the eyes bury in silence.
+
+She went down; the melodious requiem of the day went up,--the zephyr of
+sound, the harmonica, flew, waving, over the garden-blossoms,--and the
+tones cradled themselves on the thin lilies of the up-growing water, and
+the silver lilies burst aloft for pleasure, and from the brightness of
+the sun, into flamy blossoms, and over yonder reposed mother sun in a
+blue pasture, and looked greatly and tenderly upon her human children.
+Canst thou, then, hold thy heart, Albano, so that it shall remain
+concealed with its joys and sorrows, when thou hearest the peaceful
+virgin walking in the moonlight of tones? O when the tone which trickles
+down in the ether announces to her the early wasting away of her life,
+and when the soft, long-drawn melodies flow away from her like the
+rose-oil of many crushed days; dost thou not think of that, Albano? How
+the human creature plays! The little Helena flings up auriculas at the
+flashing water-veins, in order that she may dash one of them with the
+spray of the intercepted jet, and the youth Zesara bends far over the
+balustrade, and lets the stream of water leap off from his sloping hand
+upon his hot face and eye, in order to cool and conceal himself. The
+fiery veil was snatched from him by his sister; Rabette was one of
+those persons whom this musical tremor gnaws upon even physically, just
+as, on the other hand, the Captain was little affected by the harmonica,
+and indeed was always least moved when others were most so; there were
+no pains with which the innocent girl was less familiar than with sweet
+ones; the bitter-sweet melancholy into which she sank away in the idle
+solitude of Sundays, she and others had scolded at as mere sullenness.
+At this moment she felt all at once, with a blush, her stout heart
+seized, whirled round, and scalded through as by hot whirlpools. Besides
+it had to-day already been swayed to and fro by the meeting with her
+brother again, the leaving of her mother, and her confused bashfulness
+before strangers, and even by the sight of the sunny-red mountain of
+Blumenbühl. In vain did the fresh brown eyes and the overripe full lip
+battle against the uprending pain; the hot springs tore their way
+through, and the blooming face with the strong chin grew red and full of
+tears. Painfully ashamed, and dreading to be taken for a child,
+especially as all her companions' emotions had remained invisible, she
+pressed her handkerchief over her burning face, and said to her brother,
+"I must go away, I am not well, I shall choke,"--and ran down to the
+gentle Liana.
+
+Yes, thou needest only carry thither thy shy pangs! Liana turned, and
+saw her hastily and violently drying her eyes. Ah, hers too were indeed
+full. When Rabette saw it, she said, courageously, "I absolutely cannot
+hear it,--I must scream,--I am really ashamed of myself." "O thou dear
+heart," cried Liana, joyfully falling upon her neck, "be not ashamed,
+and look into my eye! Sister, come to me, as often as thou art troubled;
+I will gladly weep with thy soul, and dry thy eye even sooner than my
+own." There was an overmastering enchantment in these tones,--in these
+looks of love, because Liana fancied she was mourning over some eclipsed
+star or other of her life. And never did trembling gratitude embrace
+more freshly and youthfully a venerated heart than did Rabette Liana.
+
+And now came Albano. Awakened by the dying away of the cradle-song, he
+had hurried after her, leaving all the cold and other drops unwiped from
+his fiery cheeks. "What ails thee, sister?" he asked, hastily. Liana,
+still lingering in the embrace and the inspiration, answered quickly,
+"You have a good sister; I will love her as her brother does." The sweet
+words of the so deeply affected souls and the fiery storm of his being
+carried him away, and he clasped the embracing ones and pressed the
+sisterly hearts to each other and kissed his sister; when, at the sight
+of Liana's confused bending aside of her head, he was terrified and
+flamed up crimson.
+
+He must needs fly. With these wild agitations he could not stay in the
+presence of Liana, and before the cold, mirroring glances of the
+company. But the night was to be as wonderful as the day; he hastened
+with live looks, that appeared like angry ones, out of the city to the
+Titaness, Nature, who at once calms and exalts us. He went along by
+exposed mill-wheels, about which the stream wound itself in foam. The
+evening clouds stretched themselves out like giants at rest, and basked
+in the ruddy dawn of America, and the storm swept among them, and the
+fiery Briareuses started up; night built the triumphal-arch of the
+milky-way, and the giants marched gloomily under. And in every element
+Nature, like a storm-bird, beat her rustling wings.
+
+Albano lay, without knowing it, on the woodland bridge of Lilar, under
+which the wind-streams went roaring through. He glowed like the clouds
+with the lingering tinges of _his_ sun; his inner wings were, like those
+of the ostrich, full of spines, and wounded while they lifted him; the
+romantic spiritual day, the letter of his father, Liana's tearful eyes,
+his boldness, and then his bliss and remorse about it, and now the
+sublime night-world on all sides round about him, passed to and fro
+within him and shook his young heart; he touched with his fiery cheek
+the moistened tree-tops, and did not cool himself, and he was near to
+that sounding, flying heart, the nightingale, and yet hardly heard her.
+Like a sun, his heart goes through his pale thoughts, and quenches on
+its path one constellation after another. On the earth and in the
+heavens, in the past and in the future, stood before Albano only one
+form; "Liana," said his heart, "Liana," said all nature.
+
+He went down the bridge and up the western triumphal-arch, and the
+glimmering Lilar lay before him in repose. Lo! there he saw the old
+"pious father" on the balustrade of the arch, fast asleep. But how
+different was the revered form from the picture of it which he had
+shaped to himself according to that of the deceased Prince. The white
+locks, flowing richly down under the Quaker hat, the femininely and
+poetically rounded brow, the arched nose and the youthful lip, which
+even in late life had not yet withered, and the childlikeness of the
+soft face, announced a heart which, in the evening-twilight of age,
+takes its rest and looks toward the stars. How lonely is the holy sleep!
+The Death-angel has conducted man out of the light world into the dark
+hermitage built over it; his friends stand without near the cell;
+within, the hermit talks with himself, and his darkness grows brighter
+and brighter, and jewels and pastures and whole spring-days gleam out at
+last,--and all is clear and broad! Albano stood before the sleep with an
+earnest soul, which contemplates life and its riddles;--not only the
+incoming and the outgoing of life are hidden with a manifold veil, but
+even the short path itself; as around Egyptian temples, so around the
+greatest of all temples sphinxes lie, and, reversing the case as it was
+with the sphinx, he only solves the riddle who dies.
+
+The old man spoke, behind the speech-grating of sleep, with dead ones
+who had journeyed with him over the morning meadows of youth, and
+addressed with heavy lip the dead Prince and his spouse. How sublimely
+did the curtain of the venerable countenance, pictured over with a long
+life, hang down before the pastoral world of youth dancing behind it,
+and how touchingly did the gray form roam round with its youthful crown
+in the cold evening dew of life, taking it for morning-dew, and looking
+toward the east, and toward the sun! The youth ventured only to touch
+lovingly a lock of the old man; he meant to leave him, in order not to
+alarm him with a strange form, before the rising moon should have
+touched his eyelids and awakened him. Only he would first crown the
+teacher of his loved one with the twigs of a neighboring laurel. When he
+came back from it, the moon had already penetrated with her radiance
+through the great eyelids, and the old man opened them before the
+exalted youth, who, with the glowing rosy moon of his countenance,
+glorified by the moon overhead, stood before him like a genius with the
+crown. "Justus!" cried the old man, "is it thou?" He took him for the
+old Prince, who, with just such blooming cheeks and open eyes, had
+passed before him in the under-world of dreams.
+
+But he soon came back out of the dreamy Elysium into the botanical, and
+knew even Albano's name. The Count, with open mien, grasped his hands,
+and said to him how long and profoundly he had respected him. Spener
+answered in few and quiet words, as old men do who have seen everything
+on the earth so often. The glory of the moonlight flowed down now on the
+tall form, and the quietly open eye was illumined,--an eye which not so
+much penetrates as lets everything penetrate it. The almost cold
+stillness of the features, the youthful gait of the tall form, which
+bore its years upright as a crown upon the head, not as a burden upon
+the back, more as flowers than as fruit, the singular mixture of former
+manly ardor and of womanly tenderness,--all this called up before Albano
+the image of a prophet of the Eastern land. That broad stream which came
+roaring down through the alps of youth, glides now calmly and smoothly
+through its pastures; but throw rocks before it, and again it starts up
+roaring.
+
+The old man looked upon the youthful youth, the oftener the more warmly.
+In our days youth is, in young men, a bodily and spiritual beauty at
+once. He invited him to accompany him this beautiful night to his quiet
+cottage, which stands overhead there near the church-spire, that looks
+down from above into flute-dell. On the singular, mazy paths which they
+now took, Lilar was transformed to Albano's eyes into a new world; like
+flying silver clouds of night, the glimmering beauties were continually
+shifting and arranging themselves together into new groups, and
+occasionally the two companions penetrated through exotic shrubbery with
+lively-colored blossoms and wondrous odors. The pious father asked him
+with interest about his former and present life.
+
+They came to the opening of a dark passage into the earth. Spener, in a
+friendly manner, took Albano's right hand, and said this way led _up_ to
+his mountain-abode. But soon it seemed to go downward. The stream of the
+vale, the Rosana, sounded even in here, but only single drops of
+moonlight trickled through scattered mountain openings overspun with
+twigs. The excavation extended farther downward; still more remotely
+murmured the water in the vale. And yet a nightingale sang a lay that
+grew nearer and nearer. Albano was composed and silent. Everywhere they
+went along before narrow gates of splendor which only a star of heaven
+seemed to fling in. They descended now to a distant, illuminated magic
+bower of bright red and poisonous dark flowers, arched over at once with
+little peaked leaves and great broad foliage; and a confusing white
+light, partly sprinkled about by the living rays that gushed in, and
+partly flying off from the lilies only as white dust, drew the eye into
+an intoxicating whirl. Zesara entered with a dazzled eye, and as he
+looked to the right, in the direction of the fire that rained in, he
+found Spener's eye sharply fixed upon something to the left; he looked
+thither, and saw an old man, entirely like the deceased Prince, dart by
+and stalk into a side cavern; his hand quivered with affright, so did
+Spener's,--the latter pressed hastily on downward; and at last there
+glistened a blue, starry opening: they stepped out....
+
+Heavens! a new starry arch; a pale sun moves through the stars, and they
+swim, as in play, after him,--below reposes an enraptured earth full of
+glitter and flowers; its mountains run gleaming away up toward the arch
+of heaven, and bend over toward Sirius; and through the unknown land
+delights glide, like dreams over which man weeps for joy.
+
+"What is that? Am I on or under the earth?" said Albano, astounded; and
+his wandering eye fled for refuge to the face of a living man,--"I saw a
+dead man." Much more affectionately than before, the old man answered,
+"This is Lilar; behind us is my little house!" He explained the
+mechanical illusion[161] of the descent. "Here, now, have I stood so
+many thousand times, and feasted myself with so fervent a heart on the
+works of God. How looked the form, my son?" "Like the dead Prince," said
+Alban. In a startled, but almost commanding tone, Spener said, with a
+low voice, "Be silent, like me, until his time,--it was not he. Thy
+salvation and the salvation of many hangs thereon. Go no more to-day
+through the passage."
+
+Albano, half-angered by all the experience of this singular day, said,
+"Well, then, I go back through Tartarus. But what means the ghostly
+creation that everywhere pursues me?" "Thou hast," said the old man,
+lovingly and refreshingly, laying a finger on the youth's brow, "nothing
+but invisible friends about thee,--and cast thyself everywhere upon God.
+There are a great many Christians who say, God is near or far off, that
+his wisdom and his goodness appear quite specially in one age or
+another,--truly that is idle deception; is he not the unchangeable,
+eternal Love, and does he not love and bless us at one hour just as much
+as at another?" As we ought, properly, to call the eclipse of the sun an
+eclipse of the earth, so it is man who is obscured, never the Infinite;
+but we are like the people who look at the obscuration of the sun in the
+water, and then, when the water trembles, cry out, "See how the
+glorious sun struggles!"
+
+Albano stepped into the solitude of the old man's neatly ordered
+dwelling, only with heaviness, because, in the hot ashes of his volcano,
+every feeling put forth and throve the more luxuriantly. Spener
+pointed over from his mountain-ridge to the little so-called
+"Thunderhouse,"[162] and advised him to occupy it this summer. Albano
+took his leave at length, but his agitated heart was a sea, in which the
+morning sun is glowingly still half reflected, and into which, at
+evening, a lead-colored storm dips, and which swells glistening under
+the storm. He looked up from below at the old man, who was looking after
+him; but he would hardly have wondered to-day if _he_ had either sunk or
+ascended. With indignant and spirited resolutions, to stake and
+sacrifice his life for his love, at which cold hands were grasping, he
+strode without any fear through Tartarus, which, by the magnifying
+mirror of night, was distorted into a black giant armament: thus is the
+spirit-world only a region of our inner world, and _I_ fear only
+_myself_. When he stood before the altar of the heart in the dumb night,
+where nothing was audible but the thoughts, then did the bold spirit
+advise him repeatedly to call upon the dead old man, and swear aloud by
+his heart, full of dust; but when he looked up to the fair heavens, his
+heart was consecrated, and only prayed, "O good God, give me Liana!"
+
+It grew dark; the clouds, which he had taken for the shining mountains
+of a new earth, stretching away into the heavens, had reached the moon,
+and overshadowed it with darkness.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[138] _Tempestiarii_, or Storm-makers, was a name given, in the
+Middle Ages, to the master-wizards who could conjure up foul
+weather. Weather-prayers were used in the churches against them,
+and other wizard-masters called in to counteract the former.
+
+[139] The Polish dancer always carries a rod under the fur-dress,
+wherewith his partner is excused by a blow or two, when she makes
+a misstep.--_Upper Siles. Monthly Mag._, July, 1788.
+
+[140] Dread of spirits.
+
+[141] The German for this is _sauer-stoff_ (sour-stuff).--TR.
+
+[142] A noted review in Richter's day, published at Erlangen near
+Nuremberg.--TR.
+
+[143] Thus did the turnkeys name their prisoners.
+
+[144] Alexand. ab Al., v. 4.
+
+[145] To distinguish himself from the eagle of the Emperor, who
+holds something in both claws.
+
+[146] Bouverot was a Catholic.
+
+[147] He meant one with the poor Lector.
+
+[148] Literally, "twilight-bird."--TR.
+
+[149] To _get the basket_ means a refusal.--TR.
+
+[150] I do not mean (as perhaps may appear from the _selling_)
+Pitt the Minister, but Pitt the Diamond, which the father of the
+present Pitt traded away to the Duke Regent of France, and for
+whose splinters he got twelve thousand ducats into the bargain.
+
+[151] I sell only my landscapes, and throw in the figures.
+
+[152] _Stand_, in German, has the double meaning of an _estate_
+and a _stand_.--TR.
+
+[153] Plaut. Bacch., Act 4, Scen. 7, 4, 16, 17.
+
+[154] Seventh Part of the new Collection of Travels.
+
+[155] I speak more particularly of the daughters, because they
+are the most frequent and greatest victims; the sons are
+bloodless mass-offerings.
+
+[156] Pliny, Nat. Hist., VIII. 16.
+
+[157] And this is quite probable. Dr. Edward Hill reckoned that
+in England eight thousand die annually of unhappy love,--of
+broken hearts, as the Englishwomen touchingly express it. Beddoes
+shows that vegetable food--and of this such victims are
+particularly fond--fosters consumption, and that females incline
+to this. Besides, the times of longing, which of itself, even
+without disappointment, as homesickness shows, is a poisonous
+revolving leaden ball, occur in youth, when the seed of pectoral
+maladies most easily springs up. O many married ones fall, under
+misconstructions, victims to the death-angel, into whose hand
+they had, previously to marriage, put the sword they themselves
+had sharpened!
+
+[158] Forster's Views, Vol. I.
+
+[159] A line (French) is one twelfth of an inch.--TR.
+
+[160] Because he had just said he did not know her.--TR.
+
+[161] Weigel. in Jena, invented the inverted bridge (_pons
+heteroclitus_), a stairway on which a person seems to descend, by
+going up.--_Bush's Handbook of Inventions_, Vol. VII.
+
+[162] It had the name from its height and its being so often
+struck with lightning.
+
+
+
+
+THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE
+     PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TÊTE-À-TÊTE.--THE
+     RIDE TO BLUMENBÃœHL.
+
+
+60. CYCLE.
+
+Out of the drops which the harmonica had wrung from Rabette's heart the
+old enchanter, Fate, is perhaps preparing, as other enchanters do out of
+blood, dark forms; for Roquairol had seen it, and wondered at the
+sensibility of a heart which hitherto had been set in motion more by
+occupations than by romances. Now he drew nearer to her with a new
+interest. Since the night of the oath, he had drawn his heart out of all
+unworthy fetters. In this freedom of victory, he went forward proudly,
+and stretched out his arms more lightly and longingly after noble love.
+He now visited his sister incessantly; but he still kept to himself.
+Rabette was not fair enough for him, beside his tender sister. She was
+an artificial ribbon-rose beside one by Van der Ruysch; she said
+herself, naively, that she looked, with her village-complexion in white
+lawn, like black-tea in white cups. But in her healthy eyes, not yet
+corroded into dimness by tragical drops, and on her fresh lips, life
+glowed; her powerful chin and her arched nose threatened and promised
+spirit and strength; and her upright and downright heart grasped and
+repelled decidedly and intensely. He determined to prove her. The
+Talmud[163] forbids to inquire after the price of a thing, when one does
+not mean to buy it; but the Roquairols always cheapen and look further.
+They tear a soul in two, as children do a bee, in order to eat out of it
+the honey which it would gather. They borrow from the eel, not only his
+dexterity in slipping away, but also the power to twine around the arm
+and crush it.
+
+And now he let all the dazzling powers of his multi-form nature play
+before her,--the sense of his ascendency permitted him to move freely
+and gracefully, and the careless heart seemed open on all sides,--he
+linked so freely earnestness and jest, glow and glitter, the greatest
+and the least, and energy with mildness. Unhappy girl! now art thou his;
+and he snatches thee from thy _terra firma_ with rapacious wings up into
+the air, and then hurls thee down. Like a vine running on a
+lightning-rod, thou wilt richly unfold thy powers and bloom up on him;
+but he will draw down the lightning upon himself and thy blossoms, and
+strip thee of thy leaves and rend thee utterly.
+
+Rabette had never conceived of such a man, much less seen one; he made
+his way by main force into her sound heart, and a new world went in
+after him. Through Liana's love for the Captain, hers mounted still
+higher; and the two could speak of their brothers in friendly
+reciprocation. The good Liana sought to bring to the help of her friend
+many a thing which would hardly take hold, particularly mythology,
+which, by reason of the French pronunciation of the names of the gods,
+was still more unserviceable to her. Even with books Liana sought to
+bring them together; so that reading was to her a sort of week-day
+Divine service, which she attended with true devotion, and was always
+delighted when it was over. Through all these water-wheels of knowledge
+streamed Roquairol's love, and helped drive and draw. How many blushes
+now flitted without any occasion over her whole face! The laugh which
+once expressed her gayety, came now too often, and betokened only a
+helpless heart, which longed to sigh.
+
+So stood matters with her when Charles once playfully stole behind her
+and covered her eyes with his hand, in order, under the mask of her
+brother's voice, to give her soft, sisterly names. She confounded the
+similar voices; she pressed the hand heartily, but her eye was hot and
+moist. Then she discovered the mistake, and flew with the concealed
+evening and morning redness of her countenance out of the room. Now he
+looked closer into the eyes of Liana, who blamed him for it, and hers
+too had wept. She would fain at first conceal from him the object of the
+sisterly emotion; but another's No was to him, of old, an auxiliary
+verb,--a fair wind blowing him into port. Liana grew more and more
+agitated; at last she related how Rabette's account of Albano's youthful
+history had drawn from her in turn the history of his early relations,
+and that she had portrayed to her the bloody night of the masquerade,
+and even shown his bloody dress. "And then," said Liana, "she wept with
+me as heartily as if she had been thy sister. O, it is a dear heart!"
+Charles saw the two linked together like two pastures, namely, by the
+rainbow which stands over both with its drops; he drew her with thankful
+love to his breast. "Art thou then happy?" asked Liana, in a tone
+ominous of something sad.
+
+She must needs disclose to him her full heart, and tell him all. He
+heard with astonishment, how that whole Tartarus-night, on which the
+unknown voice had promised Linda de Romeiro to his friend, had been made
+known to her. By whom? She held an inexorable silence; he contented
+himself, because, to be sure, it could only have been Augusti, who was
+the only one that knew of it. "And now believest thou, thou heart from
+heaven," said he, "that I and the brother of my soul could ever separate
+by robbing each other? O, it is all otherwise, all otherwise! He curses
+the mock-spirits and the object of the mimicry. O he loves me; and my
+heart will rejoice in the day when it is his!" The touching ambiguity of
+these last words dissolved him in a sacred melancholy.
+
+But she, in the midst of the heartiest overflow of feeling, took part,
+as if out of piety, with the spirits, and said: "Speak not thus of
+spiritual apparitions! They exist, that I know,--only one needs not fear
+them." Here, however, with firm hand she held fast the veil over her
+experiences; he too had known long since, that, notwithstanding her most
+tremblingly delicate feelings, which shrunk even from the sight of the
+blue veins on the lily hand, as from a wound, she had appeared
+unexpectedly courageous before the dead and in the ghostly hours of
+fantasy.
+
+Behind the waves of so different an emotion which now drove his heart up
+and down, Rabette was eclipsed. He burned now only for the hour when he
+could tell his Albano the singular treachery of the Lector.
+
+
+61. CYCLE.
+
+Even before the Captain disclosed to his friend Augusti's probable
+treachery, Albano was almost entirely at variance with his two tutors.
+In a circle full of young hearts which beat for one another, and still
+more fondly fight for one another, two always take an indissoluble hold
+of each other, and become one at others' expense.
+
+Albano boldly broke with every one whom Charles displeased. Besides,
+Schoppe had long been loved by few, because few can endure a perfectly
+free man; the flower-chains hold better, they think, when galley-chains
+run through them. He, therefore, could not bear it, when one "with too
+close a love clambered up round him so tightly that he had the freedom
+of his arms no more than if he wore them in bandages of eighty
+heads."[164] The sarcastic liveliness of his pantomime chilled the
+Captain, by having the appearance of a somewhat stricter observation,
+more than did the composed face of the Lector, who from that very
+circumstance took everything more sharply into his still eye.
+
+The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his
+intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isinglass," as he
+expressed it,--toward the tender errors of the heart, the sacred
+excesses by which man weaves into this short life a still shorter
+pleasure. On one occasion Charles walked up and down with arms akimbo
+and drooping head, as on a stage, and said, accidentally, so that the
+Titular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the
+world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody shake, in
+jest, a baker's dozen[165] of hornets, a basket of crabs, a mug of
+wood-pismires, all at once over the Librarian's skin, and take a flying
+observation of the effect of the stinging, nipping, biting; then can
+one, in a measure at least, conceive what a quivering, swelling, and
+irritation there was in him, so soon as he heard the above-mentioned
+phraseology. "Mr. Captain!" he began, drawing in a long breath, "I can
+stand through a good deal on this rusty, stupid earth,--famine,
+pestilence, courts, the stone, and fools from pole to pole; but your
+phraseology surpasses the strength of my shoulders. Sir Captain, you
+may, most certainly, use this rhetoric with perfect justice, because
+you, as you say, are not understood. But, O heavens! O devils! I hear,
+in fact, thirty thousand young men and maidens, from one
+circulating-library to another, all with inflated breast, saying and
+groaning round and round, that nobody understands them, neither their
+grandfather nor their god-parents, nor the conrector, when, in fact, the
+wrapping-paper,[166] commonplace pack does not itself understand. But
+the young man means by this merely a maiden, and the maiden a young man;
+these can appreciate each other. Out of love will I undertake, as out of
+potatoes, to serve up fourteen different dishes; let one just shear off,
+as they do off of the bears in Göttingen, its beastly hair, and no
+Blumenbach would any longer recognize it.
+
+"Mr. Von Froulay, I have somewhat often compared this cursed exaltation
+of souls, merely from low motives, with the English horsetails, which
+also always stand pointing to heaven, only because their sinews have
+been cut. Must not one be mad, when one hears every day, and reads every
+day, how the commonest souls, the very doggerels and trumpeters' pieces
+of Nature, think themselves exalted by love above all people, like cats
+that fly with hogs' bladders buckled on to them; how they rendezvous in
+the hare's form and emporium of love, the other world, as on a
+Blocksberg, and how, on this finch-ground, in this theatrical green-room
+(or dressing-room, which then becomes the opposite), they drive their
+business until they are coupled. Then it's all over; fancy and poesy,
+which now should be to them for the first time serviceable, are caught!
+They run away from them like lice from the dead, although on these the
+hair continues to sprout out. They shudder at the next world; and when
+they become widowers and widows, they do their courting very well
+without the hogs' bladders, and without the decoy-feathers, and the
+folding screen of the next world. Such a thing as this now, Sir Captain,
+provokes one, and then, in the heat, the just must suffer with the
+unjust, as your ears unfortunately attest!"
+
+Alban, who never light-mindedly forgave, silently separated himself from
+a heart, which, as he unjustly said, quenched the flames of love with
+satiric gall.
+
+In the chain of friendship with Augusti, one ring after another
+absolutely broke in twain. The Count found in the Lector a spirit of
+littleness which was more revolting to him than any bad spirit. The
+elegance of a good courtier, his propensity to keep the smallest secrets
+as faithfully as the greatest, his passion for starting up behind every
+action a long plan, his thirsty curiosity for genuine historical
+sources, at court and in the city, and his coldness toward philosophy,
+so dried up the overstrained image which Albano had formed of him, that
+it wrinkled up and grew full of rents. Such dissimilarities never rise
+among cultivated men to open feuds; but they secretly put upon the inner
+man one piece of armor after another, till he stands there in solid
+mail, and strikes out.
+
+Now, in addition to all this, the Lector bore the Captain a hearty
+grudge, because he cost the Minister's lady many anxious hours, and
+Liana, and even the Count, much money, and because he seemed to him to
+pervert the youth. The otherwise directly ascending flame of Albano was
+now, by the obstacles thrown in the way of his love, bent on all sides,
+and, like soldering fire, burned more sharply; but this sharpness
+Augusti ascribed to the friend. Albano appeared to those whom he loved
+warmer, to those whom he endured colder, than he was, and his
+earnestness was easily confounded with defiance and pride; but the
+Lector imagined that Albano's love was stolen from him by Charles.
+
+He undertook, with equal refinement and frankness, to play off on the
+Count a good map-card of the spots which were thickly sown in the
+heavenly body of this Jupiter. But he tore every map. Charles's painful
+confessions on that night extinguished all additions by other hands. And
+Albano's grand faith, that one must shield a friend entirely, and trust
+him entirely, warded off every influence. O it is a holy time, in which
+man desires offerings and priests, _without fail_, for the altar of
+friendship and love, and--beholds them; and it is a too cruel time, in
+which the so often cheated, belied bosom prophesies to itself, on
+another's bosom, in the midst of the love-draught of the moment, the
+cold neighborhood of bankruptcy!
+
+As the Lector saw perfectly that Alban, at many of his charges against
+Charles,--for instance, of his wildness and disorder,--remained cold,
+for the reason that he might deem himself to be reproached over
+another's shoulders, as the French (according to Thickness) give
+strangers praise over their own; he now, instead of the point of
+similarity, took hold of an entire dissimilarity of the Captain, his
+light-mindedness toward the sex. But this only made the matter worse.
+For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-worshipper,
+and the Lector only the one whom the coal of this fire blackens. Augusti
+cherished, in regard to love, pretty nearly the principles of the great
+world, which, merely for honor's sake, he never coined into action, and
+he assigned only the cloud-heaven near the earth to love. The Captain,
+however, spoke of a third heaven, or heaven of joy, as belonging
+thereto, wherein only saints are the blest. Augusti, after the manner of
+the great world, spoke much more freely than he acted, and sometimes as
+openly as if he were dining in the hall of a watering-place. Charles
+spoke like a maiden. The virgin ear of Albano, which was mostly closed
+in good visiting-parlors, and which in study-chambers remained open,
+united to his want of the experience that a cynical tongue is often
+found in the most continent men, for instance, in our buffoonery-loving
+forefathers, and an ascetic one in modest libertines,--these two things
+must naturally have involved the pure young man in a double error.
+
+Thus did Augusti start up within him more and more storm-birds. Both
+came often to the verge of a complete feud and challenge; for the Lector
+had too much honor to fear any one thing, and dared in cold blood as
+much as another in hot.
+
+Now, at length, did Charles disclose fully to his friend, though with
+all the tenderness of friendship, Liana's acquaintance with that
+Tartarus-night. "The otherwise reserved Lector must be after nearer
+advantages with his tattling," Albano concluded, and now the toad of
+jealousy, which lives and grows in the living tree without any visible
+way in or out, nursed itself to full size in his warm heart. Unanswered
+love is besides the most jealous. God knows whether he is not
+scenery-master of these ghost scenes working in and through each other
+with so many wheels. All these are Albano's private conclusions; open
+accusations were forbidden by his sense of honor. But his warm heart,
+always expressing itself, demanded a warmer society, and this he found
+when he followed the pious father, and went to Lilar into the
+Thunderhouse, into the midst of the flowers and summits, in order, lying
+nearer to the heart of Nature, to dream and enjoy more sweetly.
+
+There was only one warm, sun-bright spot for him in Charles's historical
+picture; namely, the hope that perhaps only the mistakes about his
+relation to the Countess, out of which Liana had been helped by her
+brother, had dictated to her the evenly cold deportment which she had
+hitherto maintained towards him. On this sunny side Rabette threw a
+billet, in which she wrote him that she was going back to her parents on
+Saturday, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence,
+the prospect of less favorable circumstances, his going to Lilar,--all
+this decided him in the purpose of snatching to himself a solitary
+moment, and therein casting off before Liana the veil from his soul and
+hers.
+
+
+62. CYCLE.
+
+Singularly did events cut across each other on the day when Albano came
+into the Ministerial house to take leave of Rabette, and (a trembling
+voice said within him) of Liana, too. Rabette beckoned to him, from the
+window, to come to her chamber. She had folded together the Icarus's
+wings of her apparel into the trunks. Over her inner being a prostrating
+storm swept to and fro. Charles had disturbed the equilibrium of her
+heart by his warmth, and had not restored it again by a word of
+recompense. Like the doves, she flutters around the high conflagration.
+O may she not, like them, escape with singed feathers, and come back
+again, and at last fall into it! She said she had longed for her
+friends, ever since she saw yesterday a flock of sheep driven through
+the city. She should accompany, on Saturday, Liana and her mother to
+attend the consecration of the church, and the interment of the princely
+couple. He begged her, so abruptly and eagerly, to contrive for him
+to-day a solitary moment with her friend in the garden, that he
+absolutely did not hear her sweet news of Liana's intention to stay
+there and make her a visit.
+
+Alas! he found with the Minister's lady that showman of magnificent
+pictures, who, like Nature, made not only a beginning of his spring, but
+an end of his autumn, with poisonous flowers,[167] Mr. Von Bouverot.
+Dian had sent him four heavenly copies from Rome; these he opened with
+dry, artistic palate. Liana received the Count again as ever. Was,
+perhaps, Raphael's _Madonna della Sedia_, in whose heaven-descended
+palladium her tender soul was absorbed, the seal-keeper of her holiest
+mystery? The all-forgetting artistic passion became her so gracefully!
+Her optic nerves had become, by her long painting, like delicate
+feelers, which closed fast around lovely forms. Certain female forms,
+like this one, stirred up her whole soul. For she had, in childhood,
+sketched in her inner heaven shining constellations of the heroines of
+romances, and in general of unseen women; great ideas of their spirit,
+their heavenly walk, their exaltation above all that she had ever seen;
+and she had felt equal shyness and longing to meet one such. Hence she
+went forth out of this colossal nympheum[168] of her fancy, so easily
+dazzled, and with such warm, heartfelt reverence, to meet pure female
+friends and the Countess Romeiro. Now certain pictures brought back
+these altar-pieces like copies. The good girl thought not of _this_, but
+her friend may well have done so, that one needed only to quicken into
+life the eyes of this loving, down-gazing Mary, and merely to warm these
+lips with tones, and then one had Liana.
+
+The German gentleman went on, and now placed beside each other Raphael's
+Joseph, telling his brothers a dream, and the older Joseph, interpreting
+one to a king, and began to translate the three Raphaels into words, and
+that with so much felicity, and not only with so much insight into
+mechanics and genius, but also with such a precise setting forth of
+every human and moral lineament, that Albano took him for a hypocrite,
+and Liana for a very good man. She seized every word with a wide-open
+heart. When Bouverot painted the prophesying Joseph, as at once
+childlike, natural, still, and firm as a rock, and glowing and
+threatening, there stood the original at her side.
+
+There also dropped from the German gentleman much thought about Da
+Vinci's boy Christ in the Temple, about the magnificently executed
+fraternization and adoption of the boy and the youth in one face. Liana
+had also copied the copy, but she and her mother were modestly silent on
+the subject.
+
+But at last Franciscus Albani disturbed the calm that had hitherto
+prevailed, by his "Repose during the Flight." While he acted the
+dream-interpreter to these picturesque dreams, and Rabette had her eyes
+fastened sharply on the Saint Joseph of this picture, sitting beside
+Mary, with an open book, Liana said, unluckily, "A fine Albani!" "I
+should think not," Rabette whispered; "brother is much more beautiful
+than this praying Joseph!" She had confounded Albani with Albano; her
+whole picture-gallery lay in the hymn-book, whose hymns she separated
+from each other with golden-red saints. The others did not comprehend;
+they knew him only as Count of Zesara,--but Liana, sweetly blushing,
+flung at Rabette a tenderly reproving glance, and looked, with mute
+endurance, more closely at another picture. Never before in Albano,--in
+whom the strongest and the tenderest feelings coupled, as the echo makes
+thunder louder and music lower,--had the bitter-sweet mingling of love
+and pity and shame wrought more warmly, and he could have at once knelt
+down before the maiden, and yet have kept silent.
+
+The German gentleman had finished, and said to the men, with a look full
+of victory, "He had, however, something more in his case, which bore
+away the palm from the Raphaels; and he would beg them to follow him
+into the adjoining apartment." On the way, he observed, that few works
+were executed with such magnificent freedom and bold abandon. In the
+room he unpacked a little bronze Satyr, against whom an overtaken nymph
+is defending herself. "Divine!" said Bouverot, and held the group by a
+thread, in order not to rub off the rust. "Divine! I set the Satyr
+against the Christ!" Few have even a moderate idea of the amazement of
+my hero, when he saw the critic set virtue and vice at once at a round
+table, without any quarrel for precedency.
+
+With a fiery glance of contempt, he turned away, and wondered that the
+Lector remained. It seems to be unknown to him that painting, like
+poetry, only in its childhood related to gods and divine service, but
+that by and by, when they grew up to a higher stature, they must needs
+stride out from this narrow churchyard,--as a chapel[169] was originally
+a church with church-music, until both were left out, and the pure music
+retained. Bouverot had the regard for pure form in so high a degree,
+that not only the smuttiest, most immoral subject, but even the most
+pure and devout, could not contaminate his enjoyment; like slate, he
+stood the two proofs of heating and freezing, without undergoing any
+change.
+
+Albano had seen the maidens through the window in the alley, and
+hastened down to take leave of his sister, and to something more
+weighty. He came, with fuller roses on his cheeks than those which
+glowed around him, to a grassy bank, where Liana, with his sister, was
+sitting behind the red parasol, with half-drooping eyelids, and head
+bent aside, softly absorbed in the harvest of evening, suffused with a
+sunny redness by the parasol, in white dress, with a little slender
+black cross on her tender bosom, and with a full rose; she looked upon
+our lover so simply, her voice was so sisterly, and all was such pure,
+careless love! She told him how delighted she was with the scenes of his
+youth, and with country life, and how Rabette would conduct her
+everywhere; and particularly to the consecration discourse, which her
+father-confessor, Spener, was to deliver on Sunday. She talked herself
+into a glow, with picturing how greatly the great breast of the old man
+would be moved by the dirge and pæan over the ashes of his princely
+friend.
+
+Rabette had nothing in her mind but the solitary minute, which she would
+fain leave her brother to enjoy with her. She begged her, in a lively
+manner, to play for her yet once more on the harmonica. Albano, at this
+proposal, plucked for himself a moderate nosegay from the--foliage of
+the tree that hung over his head. Liana looked at her warningly, as much
+as to say: "I shall spoil thy cheerfulness for thee again." But she
+insisted. At the entrance into the water-house, a light blush flitted
+across Albano, at the thought of the latest past and the nearest future.
+
+Liana speedily opened the harmonica, but the water, the colophonium[170]
+of the bells, was wanting. Rabette was just going to fill a glass down
+at the fountains, for the sake of leaving them alone; but the Count,
+from manly awkwardness about entering at once into a ruse, stepped
+courteously before her and fetched it himself. Hardly, at length, had
+the lovely, pleasing creature laid, with a sigh, her delicate hands on
+the brown bells, when Rabette said to her, she would go down into the
+alley to hear how it sounded at a distance. As if at the painful
+sunstroke of a too sudden and great pleasure, his heart started up, he
+heard the triumphal car of love rolling afar off, and he was fain to
+leap into it and rattle away into life. The credulous Liana took the
+withdrawal for a veil which Rabette wished to throw over her eye,
+sweetly breaking into tears at music, and immediately removed her hands
+from the bells; but Rabette kissed her entreatingly, pressed back her
+hands upon them, and ran down. "The true heart!" said Liana; but this
+pure, guileless confidence in her friend touched him, and he could not
+say, Yes.
+
+When, in the meadows of Persia, a happy one, who, on the luxuriant
+enamel has been sleeping down among the pinks and lilies and tulips,
+blissfully opens his eyes at the first evening call of the nightingale
+upon the still, tepid world, and the motley twilight, through which some
+gold threads of the evening sun float glowingly: that blissful one is
+like the youth Albano in the enchanted chamber,--the Venetian blinds
+scattered round broken lights, trembling green shadows; and there was a
+holy twilight as in groves around temples; only murmuring bees flew, out
+of the loud, distant world, through the silent cell, into the noise
+again. Some sharp streaks of sunshine, like lightnings before sleepers,
+were wafted romantically to and fro with the rose; and in this dreamy
+grotto, amid the rustling wood of the world, the solitude was not
+disturbed by so much as the shadowy existence of a mirror.
+
+Into this enchantment she let the tones fly out of her hands like
+nightingales,--the tones were propelled towards Albano, as by a storm,
+now more clearly, and now more faintly; he stood before her, with folded
+hands, as if in prayer, and hung with thousand looks of love on the
+downward gazing form; all at once she lifted upon him that holy eye,
+full of sympathy, but she suddenly cast it down before the sun-glance of
+his.
+
+Now the great eyelids immovably closed upon the sweet looks, and gave
+her, like a sleep, the appearance of absence; she seemed a white
+May-flower on wintry soil, hanging down its blossom-bells. She was a
+dying saint in the devotion of harmony, which she heard rather than
+made; only the red lip she took with her as a warm reflection of life,
+as a last rose, that was to deck the fleeting angel; O could he disturb
+this prayer of music with a word of his?
+
+With narrower and narrower circles did the magnetic vortex of tones and
+of love clasp him round,--and now, when the drawing of the harmonica,
+like the water-drawing of the scorching sun, licked up his heart; and
+when the lightnings of passion darted over his whole life, and illumined
+the mountain-ridges of the future and the valleys of the past, and when
+he felt his whole being concentrated into one moment, he saw some drops
+trickle out from Liana's drooping eyes, and she looked up cheerfully to
+let them fall; then Albano snatched her hand away from the keys, and
+cried, with the heart-rending tone of his longing, "O God, Liana!"
+
+She trembled, she blushed, she looked at him, and knew not that she
+still wept and looked on, and continued to play no more. "No, Albano,
+no!" she said, softly, and drew her hand out of his, and covered her
+face, started at the pause of the musical tones, and collected herself
+and again made them flow out slowly, and said, with trembling voice:
+"You are a noble being. You are like my Charles, but quite as
+passionate. Only one request! I am about to leave the city for a
+while."
+
+His alarm at this became ecstasy, when she named the place, his
+Blumenbühl. She went on with difficulty before the delighted lover; her
+hand often lay for a long time on the dissonance in forgetfulness of the
+analysis; her eyes glimmered more moistly, although she said nothing
+more than this: "Be to my brother, who loves you inexpressibly, as he
+has loved no other yet,--O be to him everything! My mother recognizes
+your influence. Draw him,--I will speak it out!--especially draw him off
+from playing deeply!"
+
+He could hardly, for his confusion, asseverate the "Yes," when Rabette
+came running in with the almost unsuitably accented tidings, that the
+mother was coming. Probably she had seen that Rabette was alone. Albano
+parted from the pair with abrupt wishes of a pleasant journey, and
+forgot, in the flurry, to answer in the affirmative Rabette's request
+for a visit. The mother, meeting him, ascribed his ardor to a brother's
+emotion at taking leave.
+
+While he hastened through the wealth of the season, he thought of the
+rich future,--of Liana's stammering and veiling: do not fair female
+souls, like those angels before the prophet, need only two wings to lift
+them, but four to veil themselves? The sea of life ran in high waves,
+but everywhere it flashed on its broad surface, and sparks dropped from
+the oar.
+
+
+63. CYCLE.
+
+Ah, on the morning following this, the evening redness of a whole heaven
+had grown, to be sure, into a sad cloudiness. For Liana walked before
+the youth in such long, thick veils. Any mystery of trouble throws up
+cold cloister-walls between hearts drawn near together; that is
+manifest. Hitherto accidents of various kinds had bent aside some
+flowers which Liana had drawn as a veil over her heart (as the ground
+stories in cities prevent looking in at the windows by flowers and
+grape-vines), and had disclosed the darkest corner of the background, in
+which something like the reverse side of a bust hung, which, turned
+round, would perhaps resemble the Count. But as yet the image hangs with
+its face toward the wall. However, a female heart is often like marble;
+the cunning stone-cutter strikes a thousand blows, without the Parian
+block showing the line of a crack; but all at once it breaks asunder
+into the very form which the cunning stone-cutter has so long been
+hammering after.
+
+On Saturday, when the Minister's lady and the pair of friends were about
+to start for Blumenbühl, in order to behold the burial and the
+consecration, the Captain came to the Count, not only full of joy,--for
+he had gladly, out of love to Rabette, helped make for Liana, not
+_wings_ indeed, but still _wing-shells_, and out of a threefold interest
+for his friend, helped tighten the fly-work,--but also full of anxiety.
+But, ye muses! why in the poetical world are there rarely any
+occurrences which have such manifold motives as often in the actual?
+
+His anxiety was simply this, lest his father should arrive earlier than
+his mother went off,--for he knew the Minister. The latter intended,
+according to his letters, to arrive on Monday or Tuesday (Saturday at
+the latest); but this might--as Froulay loved to let his friends swim in
+the broad play-room of expectation--still more certainly threaten that
+he--because, like the Basle clocks,[171] he always struck an hour too
+early, and came in the hope of catching his people at some right odious
+thing--might at any minute come driving in at the court-yard gate. If he
+came driving furiously up this forenoon, or at the moment when the
+servant was lifting the daughter into the carriage, and the mother
+already sat therein, then was this much certain, by a thousand
+conclusions from observance, that both would have to go up into the
+house again; that he would order all trunks and boxes unpacked, and, as
+to the daughter of the Provincial Director, after her ten thousand
+entreaties,--although her very second would freeze upon her lips,--he
+would, in a friendly manner, with quite jocose equanimity, let her be
+carried home, as a solitary member of a conclave, in a close carriage.
+Certain men--and he is their generalissimo--know no sweeter cordial for
+themselves, than to put under lock and key, before the very nose of
+their friends, the garden-gates of some Arcadia or other, for which they
+have not drawn up for them a map of the route and region, and judicially
+to seal them up. Besides, just before a pleasure party, most parents
+secrete gall; if Froulay, in fact, could absolutely prevent one, that
+was as much for him as if he were himself returning home from one red
+and gay.
+
+At three o'clock in the afternoon, our friends went to walk beneath the
+loveliest sky. Everything had been already arranged; Charles proposed to
+follow to-morrow; Albano not till Monday, after the general return (his
+tender motives, and the hard ones of others, decided it); and there
+floated through the whole vaulted blue no cloud but Charles's concern
+lest the second depositing of the princely corpse might draw his father
+along as early as to-day,... when he suddenly cried out, with a curse:
+"There he comes!" He knew him by the tiger-spotted post-team, and still
+more by the long line of horses tackled on tandem. A purgatorial moment
+of life! The carriage rattled swiftly down the street; the head horses
+streamed forth in a longer and quite disorderly train; the people
+stared. At last the pulling distance became an acre long,--that seemed
+quite impossible,--when Albano's eagle eye discovered that there was no
+leather connection between the post-train, and at last, that in fact
+there was merely a strange churl, with two horses, accidentally riding
+along before the carriage, and at this moment they saw the open
+triumphal car, with the female trinity slowly moving up the Blumenbühl
+heights, and the blended tulip-bed of the three parasols glimmered long
+after them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[163] Basa Metzia, c. 4, m 10.
+
+[164] The _head_ of a bandage is a technical term in
+surgery.--TR.
+
+[165] The German word _mandel_ (literally _almond_) means a
+collection of _fifteen_. There being no one word expressing it
+collectively in English, _baker's dozen_ (which means thirteen)
+seems to come near enough.--TR.
+
+[166] See Dr. Franklin's verses, comparing different classes of
+people to different kinds of paper. Sparks's edition of
+Franklin's Works, Vol. II. p. 161.--TR.
+
+[167] It is well known that spring flowers, on account of
+dampness and shade, are for the most part suspicious; as also the
+autumnal ones.
+
+[168] Museum of Nymphæ or Chrysalides.--TR.
+
+[169] In the artistic technical sense.--TR.
+
+[170] A black resin, used for violin-strings.--TR.
+
+[171] Alluding to the case where by this change of the town-clock
+the Basle people outwitted an enemy--TR.
+
+
+
+
+FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO AND LIANA.
+
+
+64. CYCLE.
+
+So many tender and holy sensibilities flutter round in our inner world,
+which, like angels, can never assume the bodily form of outward action,
+so many rich, full flowers stand therein which bear no seed, that it is
+lucky poetry has been invented, which easily treasures up all these
+inborn spirits and the flower-fragrance in its limbo. With this I catch,
+dear Albano, thy glorious perfume-breathing Sunday, and hold fast the
+invisible incense for the Schneider's-skin of the world!
+
+On Sunday he moved to the thunder-house in Lilar. The Lector kept
+himself up with the hope that the Count would very soon tread down the
+flower-parterre of the new enjoyment as flat and dead as a cross-way. It
+was a fine morning, all sprinkled with dew; a fresh wind blew from Lilar
+over the blooming grain; and the sun burned alone in a cool heaven. Over
+the Blumenbühl road a swarm of people were plodding onward, and no one
+went long alone; on the Eastern heights he saw his friend Charles, with
+bowed crest, dashing to meet the sun.
+
+The breezes of Lilar came flying to welcome him with a breath of
+orange-fragrance, and blew away the ashes which rested on the glowing
+altar-coals of that first magnificent Sunday. He went down the bridge,
+and Pollux, early in his finery, came driving a ruffled turkey-cock to
+meet him. A _SÅ“ur Servante_ of old Spener had been already for an
+hour cooking at Chariton's, merely to see him go by. The latter ran,
+festally decked, out of the house, which opened itself gayly with all
+its windows to the whole heavens, to meet him, and, in the confusion of
+her joy, broke out with the main matter first, namely, that everything
+was ready and beautiful up there in the little house, and whether he
+would have his dinner up there. She would fain, in the midst of the
+conversation, pull Pollux out of the Count's fingers, but he let him
+swing up for a kiss, and won thereby every heart, even the old one
+behind the kitchen fire.
+
+While he marched off toward his little house through the western
+triumphal arch, he felt, with indescribable strength and sweetness, that
+the lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of gods, temples,
+and bliss,--and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals stalk through
+and strip with their talons.
+
+His blooming path ran at length into the descending and ascending
+stairway, which he had passed with Spener; single streaks of day burned
+themselves into the moist ground and painted the scattered twigs fiery
+and golden. In the mystic bower, where the dead Prince had stalked along
+before him in the by-cavern, he found no such cavern, but only an empty
+niche. He stepped out above, as out of the haunch of the earth. His
+little house lay on the crooked back of the mountain ridge. Down below
+reposed around him those elephants of the earth, the hills, and Lilar
+gloriously swelling in blossoms, and he looked from his windows into
+the camp of the giants of Nature.
+
+Meanwhile he could not now stay on the window-sill, nor near the
+inspiring Æolian harp, nor in the eye-prison of books; through streams
+and woods and over mountains fresh nature longed to sweep. That he did.
+
+There are sometimes between the every-day days of life--when the rainbow
+of Nature appears to us only broken up, and as a misshapen, motley mass
+on the horizon--certain creation-days, when she rounds and contracts
+herself into a fair form, nay, when she becomes alive, and speaks to us
+like a soul. To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years
+often pass away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along
+on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow
+fuller and fuller to meet him;--without wind, a landscape was to him a
+stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;--and now the wind rolled the solid
+land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves
+like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods
+stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances.
+Majestically swam through the blue the silvery islands, the clouds, and
+on the earth shadows stalked like giants over streams and mountains; in
+the valley sparkled the Rosana, and rolled into the oak grove. He went
+down into the warm vale; the flowery pastures foamed and their seed
+played in its cloud-fleece ere the earth caught it; the swan spread
+voluptuously his long wing; pairs of doves were pecking each other for
+love; and everywhere lay beds and twigs full of hot maternal bosoms and
+eggs. Like a glorious blue bouquet, the neck of the reposing peacock
+played off its dissolving colors in the high grasses. He stepped under
+the oaks, which with knotty arms seized hold upon heaven, and with
+knotty roots the earth. The Rosana talked alone with the murmuring wood,
+and ate away, foaming, at the rocky crags and at the decaying
+shore;--night and evening and day chased each other in the mystic grove.
+He stepped into the stream, and went out with it before a warm, busy
+plain full of villages, and out from them came the Sabbath sounds, and
+out of the grain-fields larks arose, and on the mountains human
+foot-paths crept upward,--the trees lifted themselves up as living
+things, and the distant men seemed to be fast-rooted, and became only
+little shoots on the low bark of the enormous tree of life.
+
+The soul of the youth was cast into the holy fire; like asbestos-paper,
+he drew it out quenched and blank; it was to him as if he knew nothing,
+as if he were _one_ thought; and here the feeling came upon him in a
+wonderfully new manner, that is the world, thou art on the world;--he
+was _one_ being with it,--all was _one_ life, clouds and men and trees.
+He felt himself grasped by innumerable polypus-arms, and swallowed up at
+the same time with them, and yet running on in the infinite heart.
+
+In a blissful bewilderment he arrived at his dwelling, from which little
+Pollux came rolling down the mountain to meet him, and call him to
+dinner. In the little house the very thought of his heart was expressed
+by the Æolian harp at the open window. While the child was thundering
+away with his little fist on the harpsichord, and the birds joyfully
+screamed in out of the trees, the soul of the world swept exulting and
+sighing through the Æolian strings, now lawlessly and now regularly,
+playing with the storms and they with it; and Albano seemed to hear the
+streams of life rushing between their shores, the countries of the
+earth,--and through flower-veins and oak-veins, and through
+hearts,--around the earth, bearing clouds on their bosom,--and the
+stream, which thunders through eternity, a Divine hand was pouring out
+under the veil.
+
+Albano came, with the innocent boy dancing before him, to the still
+smiling mother. Even here, between the four walls, the sails continued
+to propel him which the great morning had swelled. Nothing surprised
+him, nothing seemed to him common, nothing remote; the wave and the drop
+in the endless sea of life flowed away in indivisible union with the
+streams and whirlpools which it bore onward. Before Chariton he stood
+like a shining god, and she would gladly have veiled either him or
+herself. Never was humanity individualized in purer forms, crippled by
+no alloy of provincialism or nationality, than in this circle of joy,
+wherein childhood, womanhood, and manhood, twined with flowers, met and
+softly clasped each other.
+
+Chariton spoke constantly of Liana, out of love, not merely for the
+absent one, but also for the one who stood near; for, although she
+looked with those open eyes, which seem more to image quietly than to
+behold, more to let in than to draw in, still she was, like children,
+virgins, country people, and savages, at once open-heartedly true and
+keen. She had easily detected Albano's love, because everything is
+easier to disguise from women,--even hatred, than its opposite. She
+praised Liana infinitely, particularly her incomparable kindness; and
+"her lord had said, few men had so much heart as she, for she had often
+been, without any fear, whole nights with her in Tartarus." Certainly,
+neither was this explicable to the Count. The marvellous is the aureole
+of a beloved head; a sun, softened down to a human countenance, takes
+less powerful hold than a beloved countenance glorified into a
+sun-image.
+
+More and more heartily delighted at his delight, she offered to lead him
+into Liana's chamber. A simple little chamber,--under a green twilight
+of glimmering vine foliage, some books of Fénelon and Herder, old
+flowers still in their water-glasses, little Chinese dishes, Julienne's
+portrait, and another of a deceased youthful friend, whose name was
+Caroline, an unstained writing-stand, with English-pressed paper,--was
+what he found. The holy spring hours of the virgin passed by before him,
+dropping dew like sunny clouds.
+
+He happened to touch a penknife, when Chariton brought quills to be cut,
+"because," she said, "they had so much trouble on this score since her
+master had gone away." For a woman can more easily drive any pen--even
+the epic and Kantian--than make one; and here, as in several other
+cases, the stronger sex must lend the weaker a hand.
+
+Albano wished to see, also, the working-chamber of his teacher; but this
+she decidedly--although an hour's eating together had not given her any
+new courage--refused, because her master had forbidden it. He begged
+once more; but she smiled more and more painfully, and adhered to her
+gentle no.
+
+He now dreamed away the murmur of the morning in the magic garden, on
+whose waters and paths the moonshine and reflection of memory played.
+Out of the nine million square miles of common earth, how do certain
+poetical lands stand out to a poetical heart! On the mountain with the
+altar, where he once saw her disappear down below, the afternoon chime
+of Blumenbühl came wafted to him with the fanning of a freer ether; and
+his childhood's life, and the present scenes yonder, and Liana, gave him
+a tender heart, and he surveyed, with dimmer eyes, the transfigured
+land.
+
+At evening came happy church-goers from Blumenbühl, and praised the
+consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still
+standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he
+should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all,
+overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in
+splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song
+of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,--the constellations over Blumenbühl
+shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his
+closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened
+him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of
+slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.
+
+
+65. CYCLE.
+
+Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day
+clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same
+old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in
+order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path
+was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully
+pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the
+broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and
+shepherd-boys had not, like the grass, shot up taller during his
+absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and
+the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much
+prolonged to his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear
+alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his
+breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the
+Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even
+the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up
+both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the
+earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high
+to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that
+the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.
+
+In the castle how profusely was his heart covered with hearts, and the
+youngest love drowned by the old, from the easily weeping mother,
+Albina, even to the hand-extending old servants, who, on his account,
+stirred more briskly their petrified limbs! He found all his
+loves--Liana excepted--in Wehrfritz's study,[172] because he loved
+"young folk" and discourse, and always insisted that they should set out
+the breakfast on his table of papers, which, he said, was as good as a
+breakfast-table with varnished scrap-pictures that nobody saw. Albano
+tormented himself with the fear that the Minister's lady had been the
+church-robber of a very goddess, and carried Liana back yesterday,--till
+the Captain hastily explained the non-appearance. The good soul had had
+yesterday to atone for the commotion of her sympathizing heart with
+sick-headache. Her loved teacher, Spener, with his sublime
+soul-stillness,--those eyes, which wept no more over the earth, buried
+with the princely pair,--standing with his head under the cold polar
+star of eternity, so that now, like the pole, it no longer saw any stars
+rise or set,--calmly, and with hands apostolically folded in one
+another, speaking so all-persuasively upon the sorrow and the great end
+of this pale life, pressing, with his inspired speech, men's hearts to
+the verge of tearful emotion, and yet with exalted tenderness drawing
+them back from extreme grief, that so only the heart may weep without
+the eye,--and then the consecration of the coupled coffins and of the
+church,--O, in the delicate Liana these emotions could not surely fail
+to grow into sorrows, and all that her teacher buried in silence was in
+her spoken aloud. In addition to this, she had not taken the usual
+medicine of keeping still, but had disguised all her pangs behind active
+joy, so as to give her departing mother no pains, although herself far
+too great ones.
+
+Into the midst of this explanation she herself entered pleasantly, in a
+white morning-dress, with a nosegay of Chinese roses,--a little pale and
+tired,--looking up with a dreamy softness,--her voice somewhat low,--the
+roses on her cheeks closed into buds,--and, like a child, smiling upon
+every heart;--thou angel of heaven! who may dare to love and reward
+thee? She beheld the lofty youth;--all the lilies of her still face
+were, contrary to her wont, baptized into a heavenly morning-red of joy,
+and a tender purple lingered upon them.
+
+She asked him, with an open manner, why he had not come yesterday to the
+festivities, and disclosed, as a matter of moment, that they would all
+to-day visit the pious father, for whom she had been tying her
+dwarf-roses. He took gladly the fourth voice in the concert of the
+pleasure-party. What a magnificent hanging garden, with its loveliest
+flowers and prospects, is built out into the evening-hours! How many
+happy ones a single roof covers!
+
+The ingenuous Rabette, more brisk and busy for her still gladness, was,
+unweariedly, Liana's sick-nurse and Roquairol's lion-keeper and
+_maîtresse de plaisirs_, who made every one of the mother's ground-plans
+of pleasure broader by a half, and her whole being was so happy! Ah, her
+poor innocent heart had not yet, indeed, been loved by any one, and
+therefore it glows, with the fresh energies of the first love, so
+brightly and truly before a mighty one which seems to come down to it
+with a blessing, like a loving god, drawing after it a whole heaven!
+Roquairol saw how bewitchingly a busy activity shook aside in the
+play-room of her character and her occupations the heavily hanging
+foliage, which in the visiting parlor darkly overspread her real worth;
+she was even made more lovely by the darker, neat house-dress, since he
+by his preaching had sent back every white drapery of her brunette
+person into the wardrobe. She would not obey her mother in this matter,
+till he had demanded it. Nay, he had yesterday brought her to the point
+of really wearing about with her the watch which the proud Minister's
+lady had presented her, though she blushed like fire at the unwonted
+ornament. Meanwhile he proposed to take with her, as it were, a true
+serpentine flowery way to the altar of his love's _loud_ Yes,--the
+_silent_ one he was saying all the time;--he knew she would get in at
+once so soon as he rode forth with the conch-chariot of Venus, to which
+he had tackled a dove and a hawk.
+
+How gloriously the forenoon flew away on golden wing-shells and on
+transparent wings! The beloved Albano was introduced into all the
+changes of the house; the finest was in his study-chamber, which Rabette
+had transformed into her toilet-chamber, sewing-room, and study, and
+which again, since yesterday, had become guest-chamber and library to
+Liana. How gladly did he step to the western window, where he had so
+often caused his invisible father and the beloved one to appear, in an
+unearthly manner, in the crystal mirror of his fancy! On the panes were
+many L's and R's drawn by his boyish hand. Liana asked what the R's
+meant; "Roquairol," said he, for she did not inquire after the L. With
+infinite sweetness did the thought flow around his heart, that his
+beloved was indeed to live through some blooming days in the dreamy cell
+of his first fresh life. Liana showed him with childlike joy how she
+shared everything, that is, the chamber, fairly with Rabette, in her
+double housekeeping and chum-ship, and how she made her very hostess her
+guest.
+
+I have often admired with envy the fine, light, nomadic life of maidens
+in their Arcadian life-segments; easily do these _doves of passage_
+flutter into a strange family, and sew and laugh and visit there, with
+the daughter of the house, one or two months, and one takes the
+ingrafted shoot for a family twig; on the other hand, we _house-pigeons_
+are inhabitive and hard to transplant, and generally, after a few days,
+journey back again. Since we, as more brittle material, less easily melt
+in with the family ore; since we do not weave our work into that of
+others so easily as maidens do theirs,--because carriages full of
+working-tools must follow after us,--and since we need much and contrive
+much;--from all this our claim to a passport is very well deduced,
+without the least detriment to our characters.
+
+After a half-eternity of dressing,--since, in the neighborhood of the
+loved one, an hour of absence lasts longer than a month when she is far
+off,--the maidens entered, equipped for travelling, in the black dress
+of brides. How charmingly the roses become Rabette, in her dark hair,
+and the lace edging on the white neck, and the timid flames of her pure
+eye, and the flitting blushes! And Liana--I speak not of this saint.
+Even the good old Director, when the innocent face looked upon him so
+childlike from beneath the white veil of India muslin, sprinkled with
+gold wire, which was simply thrown over her head after the manner of the
+nuns, could not but give his satisfaction words: "Like a nun, like an
+angel!" She answered: "I wanted once really to be one with a friend; but
+now I take the veil later than she," she added, with a wondrous tone.
+
+She hung to-day with tender enthusiasm upon Rabette, perhaps from the
+weakness of ill health, perhaps from love for Albano and the parents,
+and perhaps because Rabette, in her love, was so good and beautiful, and
+because she herself was nothing but heart. She had, besides, the sacred
+fault of forming too enthusiastic conceptions of her female
+friends,--into which the nobler maidens easily fall, and which belongs
+less to married women,--carried to an unusual height; thus, for
+instance, her friend Caroline, who had met her like a heroine of romance
+only on the romantic playground of friendship and beautiful nature, she
+could not, in the beginning, without a rending away of the saintly halo,
+at all conceive of as having hands, which drove the needle and
+flat-iron, and other implements of the female field of labor.
+
+Whoso will feel the tenderest participation in joy, let him look not at
+happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never
+did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina--across whose face time had
+struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no
+step-motherly discord appeared--look oftener to and fro, and more
+benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they
+were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and
+perturbations of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the
+"hypocrisy and spiritlessness[173] of the young people now-a-days,"
+compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was
+chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day
+assigned himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the
+pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for
+as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had
+he--(others have the devil, the deuse)--the journeyman's greeting of
+genius, _Rascal_, together with the derivatives, _rascality_, &c. But
+how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the
+stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits.
+The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not
+been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of
+man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the
+higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds
+itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly
+characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not
+in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly.
+
+The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his
+glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a
+glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a
+youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing
+whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art,
+by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom!
+
+
+66. CYCLE.
+
+The carriage flew through the village with the four young people. How
+grateful to our youth was the expanse of heaven and of earth! The portal
+of life--youth--was hung with flowers and lights. They rolled along at
+the foot of the mountain by the bird-pole, the sign-post of a boyish
+Arcadia, by the cradle where, in the enraptured sleep of childhood, he
+had stretched out his boyish arm after the high heaven; and through the
+birch thicket, now dwindled in his eyes to a bush, which, on that golden
+morning, he had found so broad and long; and by the open triumphal arch
+of the east, behind which the sea of the many-shaped Lilar poured the
+tide of its charms; and when they arrived behind the mountain-wall of
+the flute-dell, they sent back the carriage.
+
+They walked on a glorious earth, under a glorious heaven. Pure and white
+swam the sun like a swan through the blue flood,--meadows and villages
+crowded up close around the distant, low mountain-ridges; a soft wind
+swayed the green waves of the crop to and fro all over the plain; on the
+hills shadows lay fast asleep under the wings of white clouds; and
+behind the summits of the heights the mast-trees of the Rhine ships
+majestically sailed away.
+
+As Albano went along so close by the side of his beloved, the purgatory
+burning under his Eden fell back deeper and deeper into the earth's
+core; full of uneasiness and hope, he cast his fiery eye now on the
+summer, now on the mild vesper-star, which glimmered so near to him out
+of the spring ether. The good maiden seemed to-day more still, serious,
+and restless than usual. As they went through a little wood, open on all
+sides, along the ridge of a hill that ran round the flute-dell, Liana
+suddenly said to the Count, she heard flutes. Scarcely could he say, he
+heard only far-off turtle-doves, when she at once collected herself as
+for something wonderful, fixed her eyes on heaven, smiled, and suddenly
+looked round toward Albano, and grew red. Then turning to him, she said:
+"I will be frank; I hear at this moment music within me.[174] Forgive me
+to-day my weakness and tenderness; it comes from yesterday." "I--you?"
+said he, passionately; for he, about whom in sicknesses only burning
+images stormed, was inspired with veneration for a being to whom, as if
+from her higher world, low tones like golden sunbeams reach down in her
+pains, and pass veiled through the rough deep.
+
+But Liana, as if for the sake of turning aside his enthusiasm, came upon
+the subject of her friend Caroline, and told how she always hovered
+before her on such days, and especially on this walk. "In the beginning
+I sought her out," said Liana, "because she resembled my Linda. She was
+my instructress, although she was only a few weeks older than I. Her
+pure, severe, unflinching character, and her readiness to sacrifice
+herself cheerfully and in silence, made her even, if I may say so,
+worthy of veneration in the eyes of her mother. She was never seen to
+weep, tender as she was, for she wished to keep her mother always
+cheerful. We were going to take the veil in company, for the sake of
+being always together; I should not live to become old, she said, and I
+must spend my short life happily and without anxiety; but also in
+preparation for the next. Ah, she herself went up before me!
+Night-watching by the sick-bed of her mother, and sorrow for her death,
+took her away. She received the holy supper, for which we were preparing
+ourselves together, only on her death-bed. Then did the angel give me
+this veil, in which I am some time to follow her. O good, good
+Caroline!" She wept unconcealedly, and pressed, with emotion, Albano's
+hand. "O, I should not have begun about this! There comes already our
+friend; we will be right cheerful!"
+
+They had now passed through a high wood of under-brush, which teasingly
+disclosed and hid by turns the landscapes that glided around them, and
+had come near to the spire which looks in upon the flute-dell, and near
+which lay a solitary church and Spener's dwelling, and in the plain
+below the open village. Spener came to meet his pupil--after the manner
+of old men--unconcerned about the others; and a young roe ran after him.
+A beautiful spot! Little white peacocks; turtle-doves at large; a city
+of bees in the midst of their bee-flora,--all bespoke the tranquil old
+man, whom the earth serves and honors, and who, indifferent towards it,
+lives only in God. He came--disappointing one's expectation of an
+ecclesiastical gravity--with a light playfulness upon the gay train, and
+laid his finger in benediction on the forehead of Liana, who seemed to
+be his granddaughter, as it were, a second tree-blossom in the late
+autumn of life. In a daughterly way, she placed the bunch of dwarf-roses
+in his bosom, and took very careful notice whether it pleased him. She
+smiled quite serenely, and all her tears seemed fanned away; but she
+resembled the rain-sprinkled tree, when the sun laughs out again,--the
+least agitation flings the old rain from the still leaves.
+
+The old man was delighted with the sympathy of the young people, and
+remained with them upon the blooming and resounding eminence, which sat
+enthroned between a wide landscape and the richly laden mountain-ridge,
+running away into Elysium. Since, as with one who ascends in a balloon,
+the tones of earth did not reach him from so great a distance as its
+forms, they let him talk more than listen, as one spares old people.
+
+He spoke soon of that in which his heart lived and breathed, but in a
+singular, half-theological, half-French, Wolfian, and poetic speech. One
+ought, of many a mystic's poetry and philosophy to give, instead of
+verbal, real translations, in order that it may be seen how the pure
+gold of truth glows under all wrappages. Spener says, in my translation:
+"He had formerly, before he found the right way, tormented himself in
+every human friendship and love. He had, when he was fervently loved,
+said to himself, that he could surely never so regard or love himself;
+and even so the beloved being could not truly so think of itself, as the
+loving one did, and though it were ever so perfect or so full of
+self-love. If every one looked upon others as upon himself, there could
+be no ardent love. But all love demands an object of infinite worth, and
+dies of every inexplicable and clearly recognized failure; it projects
+its objects out of all and above all, and requires a reciprocal love
+without limits, without any selfishness, without division, without
+pause, without end. Such an object is verily the divine being, but not
+fleeting, sinful, changeable man. Therefore must the lovesick heart sink
+into the Giver himself of this and of all love, into the fulness of all
+that is good and beautiful, into the disinterested, unlimited,
+universal Love, and dissolve and revive therein, blest in the
+alternation of contraction and expansion. Then it looks back upon the
+world and finds everywhere God and his reflection: the worlds are his
+deeds; every pious man is a word, a look, of the All-loving; for love to
+God is the Divine thing, and the heart yearns for him in every heart."
+
+"But," said Albano, whose fresh, energetic life rebelled against all
+mystical annihilation, "how, then, does God love us?" "As a father loves
+his child, not because it is the best child, but because it needs
+him."[175] "And whence," he further inquired, "comes, then, the evil in
+man, and whence sorrow?" "From the Devil," said the old man, and
+pictured out uninterruptedly, with transfigured joy, the heaven of his
+heart,--how it was always surrounded with the all-beloved, all-loving
+One, how it never desired any good fortune or any gifts from him at all
+(which one did not wish even in earthly love), but only a higher and
+higher love towards himself, and how, while the evening mists of old age
+were gathering thicker and thicker around his senses, his heart felt
+itself, in the darkness of life, embraced more and more closely by the
+invisible arms. "I shall soon be with God!" said he, with a radiance of
+love on that countenance of his, chilled with life, and breaking in
+under the weight of years. One could have borne to see him die. So
+stands Mont Blanc before the rising moon; night veils his feet and his
+breast, but the light summit hangs high in the dark heaven as a star
+among the stars.
+
+Liana, like a daughter, had not let her eye nor her hand go from him,
+and had languishingly drunk in every sound; her brother had heard him
+with more pleasure than Albano, but merely for the sake of remodelling
+more clearly and fully the mystic Hero into the mimic Mount Athos of his
+representation, and Rabette had contemplated him as in a church among
+believing by-thoughts.
+
+He withdrew now without ceremony to take care of his animals, which he
+loved, as he did everything involuntary, for instance, children, as
+coming at first hand from God. "Everything is divine," he said, "and
+nothing earthly but what is immoral." He could not bear to smoke bees
+with brimstone, let flowers dry up with thirst in the pot-cage, or see
+an overdriven wounded horse, and he passed by a butcher's stall not
+without shuddering limbs.
+
+"Shall we," said friend Charles, "take in the glorious evening on the
+magnificent mountain road, and see thy thunder-house, and cast down
+every cup of sorrow into the vales below?" Through what a magic
+neighborhood did they now pass along the sloping ridge of the
+thunder-house! On the right, as it were, the occident of nature; on the
+left, the orient; before them Lilar, glittering in the _faerie_ of
+evening,--lying in the arms of the glancing Rosana,--golden grain behind
+silver-poplars, and overhead a heaven filled with a life-intoxicated,
+tumultuous creation,--and the sun-god stalking away over his
+evening-world, and stooping a little under the midnight to raise his
+golden head in the east. Albano went forth, holding Liana's holy hand.
+"O how beautiful is all!" said he. "How the fluttering world-map rustles
+and murmurs with long streams and woods,--how the eastern mountains bask
+in steadfast repose,--how the groves climb the hills, with glowing
+stems! One could plunge down into the smoking vales and into the cold,
+glistening waves. Ah, Liana, how beautiful is all!" "And God is on the
+earth," said she. "And in thee!" said he, and thought of the word of the
+old man, that love seeks God, and that he dwells in the heart which we
+esteem.
+
+Now came rolling toward him the great waves which the Æolian-harp dashed
+out in the thunder-house; and his genius flew by before him with the
+words, "Tell her there thy whole heart!"
+
+Before the little tabernacle of yesterday's dreams his stormy heart was
+dissolved; and the sun and the earth reeled before his passionate tears.
+As he entered with her into the rosy splendor of the evening sun that
+filled the apartment, and into the spirit-like din of tones discoursing
+with one another alone, he seized Liana's hands and pressed them wildly
+to his breast, and sank down before her speechless and dazzled; flames
+and tears suffused his eyes and his cheeks,--the whirlwind of tones blew
+into his blazing soul,--the mild angel of innocence bowed herself,
+weeping and trembling, toward the burning sun-god, and a sharp pain
+twined itself like a pale serpent through the roses of the mild
+countenance,--and Albano stammered: "Liana, I love thee!"
+
+Then the serpent turned round and clasped and covered the sweet rosy
+form. "O good Albano! thou art unhappy, but I am innocent!" She stepped
+back with dignity, and quickly drew down the white veil over her face,
+and said, beside herself, "Wouldst thou love the dead? This is my
+corpse-veil; the coming year it will lie upon this face." "That is not
+true," said Albano. "Caroline, answer him!" said she, and stared at the
+burning sun as if looking for a higher apparition. Frightful moment! as
+during an earthquake the sea heaves and the air rests in fearful
+stillness, so was his lip dumb beside the veiled one, and his whole
+heart was a storm. On the strings swept by a sighing world of spirits,
+and the last ended with a sharp scream. The beauty of the earth was
+distorted before him, and in the evening clouds broad fiery banners were
+planted; and the sun's eye shut-to in blood.
+
+All at once Liana folded her hands as if in prayer, and smiled and
+blushed; then she raised the veil from her divine eyes, and the
+transfigured one, tinged with the rosy reflection, looked on him
+tenderly,--and cast her eye down,--and raised it again,--and again let
+it sink,--and the veil fell again before her, and she said, in a low
+tone, "I will love thee, good Albano, if I do not make thee miserable."
+"I will die with thee!" said he. "What then?"--And now let a holy cloud
+veil the sun-god, who moves flaming through the midst of his stars!
+
+His solitude and Liana's solution of so many wonders were suspended by
+the entrance of Rabette and Charles, who both seemed more touched than
+blessed,--she by the comforting nearness of the loved one, he by the
+singular situation and the subduing evening; for after certain beings a
+storm follows, and they must, against their will, make the steps that
+they take more rapid.
+
+When Albano, with the peace-angel of his life, with the beloved one,
+who, in the midst of the rush of her feelings, heard, nevertheless, the
+voice of her female friend, walked forth again once more alone upon the
+rocky causeway between fragrant vales of Tempe in the glimmering world,
+he felt as if he had struggled through his life like an eagle through a
+storm-cloud, and as if the black tempest were running far away below his
+wings, and the whole starry heaven burned bright above his head. Liana,
+with maidenly nobleness and firmness, gave him, before he had put a
+question, the answer: "I must now tell you a mystery, which I have
+hidden from every one, and even from my mother, because it would have
+disquieted her. I spoke just now of my never-to-be-forgotten Caroline.
+On the day of my sacrament, which I had wished to take with her, I went
+back by night from my teacher to my mother, and in fact through the
+singular, long cavern, wherein one seems to descend, when one is in
+reality going upward. My maid went before with the lantern. In the
+romantic arbor, where a concave mirror stands, I turn round toward the
+full moon which was streaming in, from a dread of the wild mirror, which
+distorts people too horribly. Suddenly I hear a heavenly concert, such
+as I often heard again afterward in sicknesses,--I think of my blessed
+friend,--and gaze, full of longing, into the moon. Then I saw her
+opposite to me, beaming with innumerable rays: in her fair eyes was a
+tender look, but yet something dissolving; the tender mouth, almost the
+only living feature, resembled a red, but transparent fruit, and all her
+hues seemed to be nothing but light. Yet only in the blue eye and red
+mouth did the angel seem like Caroline. I could sketch her, if one could
+paint with light. I became dangerously sick; then she appeared to me
+oftener, and refreshed me with inexpressibly sweet tones,--they were not
+properly words,--whereupon I always sank into a soft sleep, as into a
+sweet death. Once I asked her--more with inner words--whether I should,
+then, soon come to her into the realm of light. She answered, I should
+not die just now, but somewhat later; and she named very clearly the
+coming year, and the very day, which I have, however, forgotten.... O
+dear Albano! forgive me only a few words! I soon recovered, and mourned
+over the slow, lingering passage of time...."
+
+"No," Albano interrupted her, for his feelings were striking against
+each other like swords, "I revere, but I hate her dangerous phantom.
+Fancy and sickness are the parents of the air-born, destroying angel,
+who flies scorching, like a dumb heat-lightning, over all the blossoms
+of youth!"
+
+She answered, with emotion, "O thou good, pure spirit! thou hast never
+distressed me, thou hast ever comforted, guided, made me happy and
+holy,--a phantom is it, Albano? It even preserves me against all
+phantoms of terror, against all ghostly fear, because it is always about
+me. Why, if it is only a phantom, does it never appear to me in my
+dreams?[176] Why comes it not when I will? But it comes only in weighty
+cases; then I consult and obey it very willingly. It has already to-day,
+Albano," she added, in a lower and fainter tone, "twice appeared to me
+on the way, when I heard the inner music, and previously in the
+thunder-house, when the sun went down, and has affectionately answered
+me."
+
+"And what says it, heavenly one?" asked Albano, innocently. "I saw it
+only on the way, and asked no question," replied the childlike one,
+blushing; and here, all at once, her holy soul stood unconsciously
+without a veil before him; for she had, in the thunder-house, received
+from the invisible Caroline the yes to her love; because that being was
+her own creation, and this a suggestion of her own. Yes indeed, heavenly
+one! thou standest before the mirror with the virgin's veil over thy
+form, and when thy image softly raises its own, thou fanciest thyself
+still covered!
+
+No word can express Albano's veneration for such a sanctified heart,
+which dreamed into such distinctness glorified beings; whose golden
+flowers only grew the higher over the thought of death, as earthly ones
+do in churchyards over the reality; which, simultaneously with his own,
+invisible hands had drawn into two similar dreams;[177] to which one was
+ashamed to give common truths for its holy errors. "Thou art from
+heaven," he said, inspired, and his joy became the pearl melted in the
+eye which quenches the thirst of the human heart; "therefore thou
+wouldst go back thither!" "O, I consecrate to thee, my friend," said
+she, smilingly weeping, and pressed his hand to her pure heart, "the
+whole little life which I have, every hour to the last, and I will,
+meanwhile, prepare thee for everything which God sends."
+
+Before they entered the cottage of the pious father, Albano seized his
+friend's hand, and the sisters joined each other. The friends went
+forward for a time in silence; Charles looked upon Albano, and found the
+peace of blessedness upon his face. When the latter saw how Liana
+pressed her overfraught heart to her sister's, then were sincerity and
+joy too strong in him, and he fell without a word upon the heart of the
+dear brother of the eternal bride, and let him silently guess all from
+his tears of bliss. O, he might have guessed it, to be sure, from the
+bridal look of love which his sister more seldom removed from his
+friend, and from the heartiness wherewith she drew Rabette to her heart;
+just as if they two would soon be related to each other, as if her
+brother himself would soon speak more sweetly, since he for some time
+had no longer called her the little Linda; and consecrated her thereon
+for the heart of her brother. Not before the pious father did the
+enraptured look hold itself much in abeyance, which Albano, standing as
+if under the gate of eternity, cast into the heavens, gleaming like
+worlds one behind another; he was still and tender, and in his heart
+dwelt all hearts. O love _one_ heart purely and warmly, then thou lovest
+all hearts after it, and the heart in its heaven sees like the
+journeying sun, from the dew-drop even to the ocean, nothing but mirrors
+which it warms and fills.
+
+But in Roquairol started up immediately, when he saw the heavenly bliss
+so near, the mutinous spirit of his past, and struck with a bloody
+epilepsy the limbs of the inner man: those immortal sighings after an
+ever-flying peace again tormented him; his transgressions and errors,
+and even the hours when he innocently suffered, were painfully reckoned
+up before him; and then he spoke, (and stirred every heart, but most of
+all poor Rabette's, which he pressed against his own to warm himself,
+as, according to the tradition, the eagle does with the dove, after
+which he does not tear her to pieces,)--nobly he spoke then of life's
+wilderness, and of fate, which burns out man, like Vesuvius, into a
+crater, and then again sows cool meadows therein, and fills it again
+with fire; and of the only blessedness of this hollow life, love, and of
+the injury inflicted, when fate with its winds sways and rubs a
+flower[178] to and fro, and thereby cuts through the green skin against
+the earth.
+
+But while he thus spoke, he looked on the glowing Rabette, and would
+fain by these warmings burst open, as it were by force, the fast-closed
+flower-bud of his love, and spread its leaves out under the sun. O the
+bewildered and yearning one was surely not yet quite happy even to-day,
+and he wished not so much to affect others as himself.
+
+With what blissful presentiments did they step out again before the
+sphinx of night, who lay smiling before them with soft, starry glances!
+Did they not go through a still, glimmering, subterranean world, light
+and free, without the heavy clogging earth on their feet, while in the
+wide Elysium the warm ether only flutters because invisible Psyches fan
+it with their wings? And out of the flute-dell the old man sends after
+them his tones as sweet arrows of love, in order that the swelling heart
+may blissfully bleed of their woundings. Albano and Liana came out upon
+a prospect where the broad eastern landscape, with its light-streaks of
+blooming poppy-fields, and its dark villages, ascended the soft
+mountains, where the moon awoke, and the splendor of her garment already
+swept like that of a spirit through heaven: here they remained standing
+and waiting for Luna. Albano held her hand. All the mountain-ridges of
+his life stood in a glowing dawn. "Liana," said he, "what innumerable
+springs are there at this moment up yonder on the worlds which hang in
+the heavens; but this is the fairest!" "Ah, life is lovely, and to-day
+it is too dear to me! Albano," she added, in a low voice, and her whole
+face became an exalted, tearless love, and the stars wove and
+embroidered its bridal dress, "if God calls me, then may he let me
+always appear to thee as Caroline does to me. O, if I could only attend
+thee thus through thy whole dear life, and console and warn thee, I
+would willingly wish for no other heaven."
+
+But as he was about to express the fulness of his love, and the anger
+of his pain about the death-delusion, just then came his wild friend,
+who, like a Vesuvius, pouring out at once lava- and rain-streams over
+the credulous Rabette, had made both her heart and his own only fuller,
+not lighter; then Charles beheld the glorified beings and the blue
+horizon, where already the moon was flinging forth her glimmering light
+between the bristling mast-peaks and summits, and looked again into the
+splendor of holy love. Then could he no longer contain himself; his
+heart, full of agony, mounted to an eternal purpose, as if to God, and
+he embraced Albano and Rabette, and said: "Beloved man! beloved maiden!
+keep my unhappy heart!"
+
+Rabette clung around him compassionately, as a mother around her child,
+and gave up to him, in hot, gushing tears, her whole soul. Albano,
+astonished, enfolded in his arms the love-bond; Liana was drawn to the
+beloved hearts by the whirlpool of bliss. Unheard the flutes sounded on,
+unseen waved the white banners of the stars overhead. Charles spoke
+frantic words of love, and wild wishes of dying for joy. Albano touched
+trembling Liana's flower-lip, as John kissed Christ, and the heavy
+milky-way bent down like a magic wand toward his golden bliss. Liana
+sighed: O mother, how happy are thy children! The moon had already flown
+up into the blue, like a white angel of peace, and glorified the great
+embrace; but the blest ones marked it not. Like a sounding waterfall,
+their rich life covered them, and they knew not that the flutes had
+ceased, and all the hills were shining.[179]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[172] Museum (home of the muses) is the beautiful German name for
+it.--TR.
+
+[173] _Kopf-und Ohr-hängerei._ Hanging down of head (hypocrisy)
+and ears.--TR.
+
+[174] This self-resounding--as the Æolian-harp [_riesen-harfe_,
+giant-harp, in German.--TR.], when the weather changes, sounds
+without a touch--is common in sick-headache and other maladies of
+weakness; hence in dying; for instance, in Jacob Boehme, life,
+like a concert-clock, rung out its hours amidst surrounding
+harmonies.
+
+[175] Some disinterested love or other must from eternity have
+existed. As there are eternal truths, so must there also be an
+eternal love.
+
+[176] For the same reason, perhaps, that the poet does not see
+his, so often and distinctly beheld, creations pass in his dreams
+among the images of the day.
+
+[177] For on his and her sacrament-day he had imagined her death
+by lightning.
+
+[178] The winter stock-jelliflower.
+
+[179] Jean Paul's second volume ends here.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+MAN AND WOMAN.
+
+
+67. CYCLE.
+
+I have often in the theatre made the pleasant experience, that when
+painful scenes immediately followed the rising of the curtain, I took
+but a slight interest in them, while in joyful ones which, immediately
+after the music, came on with their own music, I took the greatest; man
+demands more that sorrow than that rapture should show its motive and
+its apology. Without hesitation, therefore, I begin a third volume[180]
+with blisses of which, to be sure, the foregoing couple have been
+preparing more than enough.
+
+At the moment where our story has arrived, among all the descendants of
+Adam who lifted a glad face to heaven, and imaged in that face a still
+fairer heaven, there must have been some one who had the highest
+heaven,--a happiest of all men. Ah yes! And to be sure, among all
+suffering creatures upon this _globe_, which our short race makes a
+_plain_, there must also have been one most unhappy; and may the poor
+man soon lie down to sleep under, not _on_, his rocky road! Although I
+could wish that Albano might not be the happiest of all,--in order that
+there might yet be a higher heaven above his,--still it is probable
+that, on the morning after that holiest night, in his present dream of
+the richest dream, deep in the threefold bloom of youth, of nature, and
+of anticipation, he bore the broadest heaven in himself which the narrow
+bosom of man can span.
+
+He looked from his thunder-house,--that little temple on whose walls
+still lingered the radiance of the goddess who had therein become
+visible to him,--out over the new-created mountains and gardens of
+Lilar; and it was to him as if he looked into his white and red blooming
+future, adorned with mountain-peaks and fruit-tree-tops, a full Paradise
+built out into the naked earth. He looked round in his future after any
+robbers of joy who might attack his triumphal chariot; he found them all
+visibly too weak to cope with his arms and weapons. He called up Liana's
+parents, and his own father, and the host of spirits which had hitherto
+been working in the air, and set them out on the road which lay between
+him and his beloved; in his muscles glowed more than sufficient power
+easily to dash through them to her, and take her with him into his life
+by main force. "Yes," said he, "I am completely happy, and need nothing
+more,--no fortune, only my heart and hers!" Albano, may thy evil genius
+not have heard this dangerous thought, so as to carry it to Nemesis! O,
+in this wildly entangled wood of thy life, no step, even in the blooming
+avenues of pleasure, is wholly safe; and amidst the very fulness of this
+artistic garden there awaits thee a strange, gloomy upas-tree, and
+breathes cold poisons into thy life! Therefore it was better as it was
+once, when men were still lowly and prayed to God even in their great
+raptures; for in the neighborhood of the Infinite One the fiery eye
+sinks and weeps, but only out of gratitude.
+
+Let no mean almanac measurement be applied to the fair eternity which he
+now lived, when he saw the beloved every evening, every morning, in her
+little village. As evening star she went forth before his dreams; as
+morning star, before his day. The interval both filled out with letters,
+which they themselves carried to each other. When they parted at
+evening, not long before they were to see each other again, and while in
+the north already the rose-bud twigs shot along low down in the heavens,
+which during men's sleep speedily grew out toward the east, in order to
+hang down from heaven with thousands of full-blown roses ere the sun and
+love came back again,--and when his friend Charles stayed with him by
+night, and he asked, in the course of an hour, whence the light came,
+whether from the morning or from the moon,--and when he sallied forth,
+while moon and morning still appeared together in the dew-dripping
+pleasure-woods,--and when the road, left only a few hours before,
+appeared wholly new and the absence too long, (because Cupid's wing is
+half a second-hand, which shows the day of the month, and half a
+month-hand, which points to the second, and because, in the neighborhood
+of the loved one, the shortest absence lasts longer than the longest
+when she is far away,)--and when at last he saw her again,--then was the
+earth a sun, from which rays proceeded: his heart stood all in light;
+and as a man, who on a spring morning dreams of a spring-morning, finds
+it still brighter around him when he awakes, so, after the blessed
+youthful dream of the beloved, did he open his eyes before her, and
+desire the fairest dream no more.
+
+Sometimes they saw each other, when the long summer day was too long,
+on distant mountains, where by appointment they looked upon the
+harvests; sometimes Rabette came alone to Lilar to her brother, that he
+might hear something from Liana. When Liana had read a book, he read it
+after her; often he read it first and she last. Whatever of divine the
+fairest, purest souls can manifest to each other when they unfold
+themselves,--a holy heart which makes one still holier, a glowing heart
+which makes one still more glowing,--that they manifested to each other.
+Albano was mild toward all, and the radiance of a higher beauty and
+youth filled his countenance. The fair realms of nature and of his
+childhood were both adorned by love, not it by either of them; he had
+mounted from the pale, light moon-car of hope upon the sounding, shining
+sun-car of living ecstasy. Even on the galleys of wooden sciences, as if
+animated by the wonder-working hand of Bacchus, masts and shrouds
+fluttered out into vine-stalks and clusters. If he went to the Froulay
+house, he always, because he went in full of tolerance, came back
+without any sacrifice of the same: the Minister, who had returned from
+Haarhaar with a veil of gay, blooming ideas on his face, imparted to him
+charming prospects of the exultation wherewith city and country would
+celebrate the approaching marriage-feast of the Prince and the gain of
+the most beautiful bride.
+
+And had he not, in addition to all, his friend too? When one stands so
+close before the flame of joy, one does indeed shun men,--because they
+easily step between us and the pleasant warmth,--but one seeks them too;
+a hearty friend is our wish and joy, who shall gently lead on, without
+chasing away, the happy dream in which we sleep and speak. Charles
+played softly into his friend's dream; he would, however, have also done
+it from sincere love for the sister.
+
+In fact, with so much youth, summer weather, innocence, freedom,
+beautiful scenery, and deep love and friendship, there may well be
+constructed, even on this low earth, something like that which up in
+heaven is called a heaven; and a celestial chart, an Elysium-atlas,
+which one should map out thereof, would perhaps look not far otherwise
+than this: in front, a long pastoral land, with scattered
+pleasure-castles and summer-houses; a philanthropist's grove in the
+middle, the Tabor mountains overhead, with herdsmen upon them, long
+Campanian vales; then the broad archipelago, with St. Peter's islands;
+over on the other side the shores of a new pastoral continent, all
+covered with Daphnean groves and gardens of Alcinoüs; behind that again,
+stretching far inward, an Arcadia; and so on.
+
+All the philosophy and stoicism that he now had in him--for he held that
+which the arm out of the clouds gave him as booty gained by his
+own--Albano applied to the purpose of taking _from_ his ecstasy the
+moderation which they impart. Moderation, he said, was only for patients
+and pigmies; and all those anxious, evenly balanced sticklers for
+temperament[181] and time-keepers had, whether in the cultivation of a
+pleasure or of a talent, profited themselves more than the world; on the
+contrary, their antipodes had benefited the world more than
+themselves.[182]
+
+He kept in view very good fundamental principles. Man, said he, is free
+and without limits,--not in respect to what he will do or enjoy, but in
+respect to what he will do without; he can, if he _will_, will to
+dispense with _everything_. In fact, he continued, one has simply the
+choice, either _always_ or _never_ to fear; for thy life-tent stands
+over a loaded mine, and, round about, the hours aim at thee naked
+weapons. Only one in a thousand[183] hits; and, in any case, I am sure I
+would sooner fall standing than bending like a coward. But, he
+concluded, in order to justify himself on the subject, is then
+steadfastness made for nothing better than for a surgeon and
+serving-maid, and not much rather for our muse and goddess? for it is
+not surely a good, merely because it helps do without something which we
+have lost, but it is intrinsically one, and a greater than the one whose
+place it supplies; even the happiest must acquire it, even without
+outward occasion or bestowal; yes, it is so much the better, if it is
+possessed earlier than applied.
+
+These deceptions or justifications were partly weapons of self-defence
+against the tragic Roquairol, who would fain heighten every pleasure,
+and even those of his friend, by sombre contrasts; and partly they were
+such as a noble man, who hitherto has plunged into sorrow without
+measuring its depth, and who would always feel his power of swimming
+through life, must necessarily fall upon, when he is inwardly aware that
+the centre of gravity of his bliss and of his hell has shifted and
+fallen out of himself into another being. "O, what if she should die?"
+he asked himself. He had not been wont to shudder so at the thought of
+any death as of this. Therefore he squeezed these thorns of fancy right
+sharply in his hand in order to crush them. At last, when the pure
+country air of love and the shepherd-dance in this Arcadia had brought
+more and more roses to Liana's cheek, then his thorns ceased to grow.
+
+To all other vipers of life, so long as they could find no entrance
+through Liana's heart, he was inaccessible. At whatever price,--and
+though he should have to forsake, give up, provoke, undertake all,--he
+would buy Liana. The phantoms of terror which came threateningly to meet
+him out of two houses,--Froulay's and Gaspard's,--he let come on, and
+dispelled them: let the foe once show himself, thought he, so am I his
+foe too. Often he stood in Tartarus, and found, in this still life of
+death _in rilievo_, peace of soul. The actual world takes more quickly
+our image than we its; even here he gained soft, broad, life-illumining
+hopes and sweet tears, which flowed from him at the thought of Liana's
+faith in her death, not because he believed in the probability, but in
+the improbability thereof, which, through love and joy and recovery,
+would daily grow greater.
+
+Only one misfortune was there for him, against which every weapon
+snapped in pieces, whose possibility, however, he held to be a sinful
+thought,--namely, that he and Liana, by some fault or time or the
+world's influence, might cease to love each other. Here, relying on two
+hearts, he boldly defied the future. O, who has not said, when, in
+reliance upon a warm eternity, he has expressed his rapture, The Fatal
+Sister may clip the thread of our life, but shall she come and open the
+scissors against the bond of our love? The very next day the Fatal
+Sister has stood before him, and snapped the scissors to.
+
+
+68. CYCLE.
+
+Once Roquairol came quite late to take Albano with him to the
+"Evening-Star Party" at the herdsman's hut, which he had arranged with
+Rabette. The Captain loved to build around the warm springs of his love
+and joy the well-curb of wholly select days and circumstances; if he
+could contrive it, for instance, he made his declarations of love, say
+on a birthday, during a total eclipse of the sun, on a valentine's day,
+in a blooming hot-house in winter, in a skating chair on the ice, or in
+a charnel-house; so, too, he loved to quarrel with others in significant
+days and places, in the church-pew, in the beginning of spring or
+winter, in the green-room of the amateur theatre, at a great fire, or
+not far from Tartarus or in the flute-dell. Albano, however, was too
+young, as others are too old, to have to season his fresh feeling with
+artificial hours and situations; he preferred to beautify the latter
+through the former.
+
+With impetuous joy Albano flew along the road to the unexpected
+pleasure. Last evening had been so rich,--the four rivers of Paradise
+had, in one cataract, poured down from heaven into his heart,--and this
+evening he would leap into its sprayey whirlpool. The evening heaven
+itself was so fair and pure, and Hesperus went with growing splendor
+down his brightly glimmering path.
+
+Rabette waited at the foot of the mountain on which stood the herdsman's
+hut (the little shooting-house), in order to lead him unsuspecting to
+the unprepared female friend, who at the window, with her gleaming eye
+on Hesperus, lay musing, and thought of the full, glowing autumn
+flowers, which, at this late time of her life, and so shortly before the
+longest night, were springing up. She was troubled to-day about many
+things. She had, in fact, sought hitherto more to deserve and to justify
+than to enjoy and increase her love, and more to bless with it another's
+heart than her own. How indescribably she longed to do deeds for
+him,--only sacrifices were to her deeds,--and she really envied her
+friend who had, every time, at least to prepare Charles a beverage. As
+she knew no other way, she expressed her devoted zeal by greater
+daughterly love and attention to Albano's parents and sister; and
+learned even to cook a little, which other ministers' daughters, who
+make nothing but salad and tea, must pardon her, especially when they
+reflect that, in Liana's case, they themselves would not have done
+otherwise, but rather have made one dish more. Yes, she accounted
+Rabette as more virtuous, because she could be more broadly and
+extensively active; Rabette, on the other hand, held Liana to be the
+better of the two, because she prayed so much the more. A similar error
+they repeated twofold in respect to the brothers; Rabette thought
+Charles the gentler, and Liana, Albano; both, according to inferences
+from their mutual reports.
+
+So long as a woman loves, she loves right on, steadily. A man has to do
+something between whiles. Liana transformed everything into his image
+and his name: this mountain, this little chamber, this, to him once
+dangerous, bird-pole, became the crayon pencils for his stereotype
+image. She always came back upon this, that he deserved something better
+than her; for love is lowliness, on the wedding-ring sparkles no jewel.
+It touched her that her early death affected him. There she saw still
+the maiden blinded by the small-pox, whom he had once unconsciously
+pressed to his heart;[184] and, with the quick apprehension of sadness,
+she felt herself to resemble the blind one also, in that incident, and
+not merely in the similar, although shorter night, which pain had once
+thrown over her eyes.
+
+As gentle as her emblem, Hesperus, dipping into the western horizon of
+life, did she seem to her lover. She never could pass immediately out of
+her own heart into the startling present; her turnings were always like
+those of the sunflower, very slow, and every sensation lived long in her
+faithful breast. Seldom, indeed, does a lover find the welcome of his
+loved one like the last image, which the farewell had imparted to him; a
+female soul must--so man desires--with all the wings, storms, heavens,
+of the last minute, sound over into the next. But Liana had ever
+received her friend shyly and softly, and otherwise than she had parted
+with him; and sometimes, to his fiery spirit, this tender waiting, this
+slow lifting of the eyelid, appeared almost as a return to the old
+coldness.
+
+To-day it seized the more ardent Count more strongly than usual. Like a
+pair of strange children who are to become acquainted with each other,
+and smile upon and touch each other, the two stood beside each other
+friendly and embarrassed. She told how she had made his sister tell her
+of his childish break-neck adventure on this mountain. A loved maiden
+knows no more beautiful, no richer history than that of her friend. "O
+even then," he said with emotion, "I looked toward thy mountains! Thy
+name, like a golden inscription, was written on my whole youth. Ah,
+Liana! didst thou haply love me as I thee, when thou hadst not yet seen
+me?"
+
+"Certainly not, Albano," answered she, "not till long after!" She meant,
+however, her blindness; and said he appeared to her in this twilight of
+the eyes, on that evening when he ate with her father, like an old
+northern king's son, somewhat like Olo,[185] and she had had a certain
+awe before him, as for her father and brother. Her high respect for men
+the fewest were hardly worthy to guess, not to say, occasion. "And how
+when thou hadst regained thy sight?" said Albano. "I just told thee
+that," she replied naively. "But when thou didst so love my brother,"
+she continued, "and wast so good to thy sister, then to be sure I quite
+took heart, and am now and henceforth thy second sister. Besides, thou
+hast lost one--Albano, believe me, I know I am surely unworthy,
+especially of thee; but I have _one_ consolation."
+
+Perplexed by this mixture of sanctity and coldness, he could only
+passionately kiss her, and was constrained, without contradicting her,
+to ask forthwith, "What consolation?" "That thou wilt one day be
+entirely happy," said she softly. "Liana, speak more plainly!" said he.
+For he understood not that she meant her death and the announcement of
+Linda by the spirits. "I mean after one year," she replied, "from the
+date of the predictions." He looked at her speechless, wild, guessing
+and trembling. She fell weeping upon his heart, and suddenly gave vent
+to the swell of inward sighs: "Shall I not then be dead at that time,"
+said she with deep emotion, "and look down from eternity to see that
+thou art rewarded for thy love to Liana? And that, too, certainly in a
+high degree!"
+
+Weep, be angry, suffer, exult, and wonder more and more, passionate
+youth! But, to be sure, thou comprehendest not this lowly soul!--Holy
+humility! thou only virtue which God, not man, created! Thou art higher
+than all which thou concealest or knowest not! Thou heavenly beam of
+light! like the earthly light,[186] thou showest all other colors and
+floatest thyself invisible, colorless, in heaven! Let no one profane
+thy unconsciousness by instruction! When thy little white blossoms have
+once fallen, they come not again, and around thy fruits only modesty
+then spreads her foliage.
+
+Painfully did the heart in Albano split into contradictions, as if into
+two, his own heart and Liana's. She was nothing but pure love and
+lowliness, and the splendor of her talents was only a foreign
+border-work, as white marble images of the gods have the variegated
+border only as decoration: one could not do anything but adore her, even
+in her errors. On the other hand, she had, in conjunction with tender,
+susceptible feelings, such firm opinions and errors; his modesty fought
+so vainly against her humility, and his clear-sightedness against her
+visionary tendency. The hostile train which this propensity drew after
+it he saw too clearly sweeping along over all the joys of her life. His
+ever-besetting suspicion, that she loved him merely because she hated
+nothing, and that she was always a sister instead of a lover, again
+charged home upon him like an armed man. Thus did all things fight
+together in this case,--duty and desire, fortune and place. Both were
+new and unknown to each other, because of love; but Liana divined as
+little as he. O how strange to each other and unlike each other two
+human beings, kindred souls, become, merely because a Divinity hovers
+between the two and shines upon both!
+
+Something remained in him unharmonious and unsolved. He felt it so
+sadly, now that the summer night glimmered for higher raptures than he
+possessed; now that, deep in the ether, the trembling evening star
+pressed on after the sun through the rose-clouds under which he was
+buried; now that the meadows of grain breathed perfume and murmured not,
+and the closed pastures grew green and did not glow, and the world and
+every nightingale slept, and life below was a still cloister-garden,
+and, only overhead, the constellations, like silver, ethereal harps,
+seemed to tremble and sound before the spring winds of distant Edens.
+
+He must needs see Liana again to-morrow, by way of tuning his heart.
+Rabette came up from the mountain with her friend, infinitely animated.
+Both seemed almost exhausted with laughing and joking; for Roquairol
+carried everything, even mirth, to the degree of pain. He had converted
+the evening star, for which he had given the invitation, into a hothouse
+and homestead of pleasant conceits and allusions. At first he would not
+come home with her, even to-morrow; but at last he consented, when
+Rabette assured him "she understood the fine gentleman well enough, but
+he must nevertheless just let her take care of things."
+
+When the ruddy dawn arose, Albano, accompanied by him, came again; but
+the garden-gate of the "manor-garden" was already open, and Liana
+already in the arbor. A stitched book of public documents (seemingly)
+lay in her lap, and her folded hands beside it; she looked rather
+straightforward, as in thought, than upwards, as in prayer; yet she
+received her Albano with so mild and distant a smile, as a man, greeting
+a guest who comes right into the midst of his prayers, smiles upon him,
+and then continues his devotion. The Count had hitherto been obliged
+always to prepare himself for a certain reserve in her reception of him.
+A misunderstanding, which returns quickly, however often it is removed,
+acts again and again as deludingly and freshly as at the first time. He
+felt very strongly that something more fixed than that first virgin
+bashfulness, wherewith a maiden will always invent for the dazzling sun
+of love, besides the dawn, a twilight too, and again another for that,
+hindered the fiery melting together of their souls.
+
+He asked what she was reading; she hesitated, covering it up. A thought,
+suddenly darting upon her, seemed to open her heart; she gave him the
+book, and said it was a French manuscript,--namely, written prayers,
+drawn up by her mother several years before, which touched her more than
+her own thoughts; but still there was ever-more looking through her
+tenderly woven face a cloistral thought, which sought to leave her
+heart. What could Albano object to this Psalmist of the heart? Who can
+answer a songstress? A praying female stands, as does also an unhappy
+one, on a high, holy place, which our arms cannot reach. But how
+miserable must most prayers be, since, although in earlier life
+possessing the attraction of charms, like the rosary, which is made out
+of sweet-smelling woods, yet afterward in advanced age they act only as
+blemishes, and like the relic or the death's-head with which the rosary
+itself ends!
+
+Without waiting for his question, she told him at once what had
+disturbed her during her prayer; namely, this passage in it: _O mon
+Dieu, fais que je sois toujours vraie et sincere_, &c., whereas she had
+hitherto concealed her love from her dear mother. She added, she would
+come now very soon, and then the closed heart should be opened to her.
+"No," said he, almost angrily, "thou mayest not; thy secret is also
+mine!" Men are often hardened by that in prose which in poetry softens
+them; for example, woman's piety and open-heartedness.
+
+Now no one hated more than he the clutching of the parental
+writing-finger, forefinger, and little finger into a pair of clasped
+hands; not that he feared, on the part of the Minister, wars or
+rivals,--he rather presupposed open arms and feasts of joy,--but
+because, to his magnanimous spirit, at once claiming and granting
+liberty, nothing was more revolting than the reflection, what smutty
+turf now for the kindling of the fire the parents might lay on the altar
+of love, or what pots they might set on to boil; how easily, then, even
+poetic parents often transform themselves with the children into prosaic
+or juristical ones, the father into an administrative, the mother into a
+financial board; how, then, to say the least, the court atmosphere makes
+one a bondsman, just as only the poetic heaven's ether makes free; and
+what perturbations his Hesperus might expect from the attracting world,
+the old Minister, who found nothing more unprofitable about love than
+love itself, and to whom the holiest sensibilities seemed about as
+useful for marriages of rank as the Hebrew is for preachers, namely,
+more in examination than in actual service. So ill did he think of his
+father-in-law, for he knew not something still worse.
+
+But the good daughter thought far higher of her mother than did a
+stranger, and her heart struggled painfully against concealing from her
+her love. She appealed to her brother, who was just entering. But he was
+wholly of Albano's mind. "Women," he added, not in the best humor, "are
+more fond of speaking _about_ love than _in_ love; men, the reverse."
+"No," said Liana, decidedly; "_if_ my mother ask me, I cannot be
+untrue." "God!" cried Albano, with a shudder, "and who could wish that?"
+For to him, also, free truth was the open helmet of the soul's nobility;
+only he spoke it merely from self-respect, and Liana out of human
+affection.
+
+Rabette came with the tea-things and a flask, wherein was tea-juice and
+elementary fire, or nerve-ether for the Captain,--arrack. He never liked
+to visit people in the morning, with whom he could not drink it till
+evening; Rabette had yesterday guessed this naughtiness, and to-day
+gratified it. "How can the soul," said the sound Albano to him often,
+"make itself a slave to the belly and the senses? Are we not already
+bound closely enough by the fetters of the body, and thou wilt still
+draw chains through the chains?" To this Roquairol had always the same
+answer: "Just the reverse! Through the corporeal itself, I free myself
+from the corporeal; for instance, by wine from blood. As long as thou
+canst never escape servitude to the bodily senses, and all thy
+consciousness and thy thinking can only, through a bodily servitude,
+attaching itself to the glebe of the earth, abide in their nobility; I
+cannot perceive why thou dost not properly use these rebels and despots
+as thy servants? Why must I let the body only work ill upon me, and not
+advantageously as well?" Albano stood to it, that the still light of
+health was more dignified than the poppy-oil flame of a slave of opium;
+and the fate of being prisoner of war to the body, which one spirit has
+to bear in common with the whole human army, more honorable than the
+cramping confinement of a personal arrest.
+
+To-day, however, not even the spirituous brimstone-smoked tea-water
+could wash away a certain discontent from Roquairol, whom night-watching
+had colored more pale, as it had the Count more red. He could not be
+reconciled to it, that the manor-garden was all shut in with a
+board-fence as high as a man, which was less intended as a
+billiard-table border, not to let the eye-ball go out, than as a
+mountebank's booth, to let nothing in, and which of course insured no
+other _prospect_ than the prospect proper; quite as little did the
+pleasure-garden commend itself to his favor by the fact that the
+turf-benches on which they sat in the arbor had not yet been mowed, that
+in all the beds only vegetables for the trimming of cooked meat flapped
+about, that nothing ripe yet hung there but one or two moles in their
+hanging death-beds, that on a bowling-green, whereupon one rolls into a
+tinkling middle-hole, the crooked return-alley let the balls run home
+again, much more easily than they could--unless one threw them--be made
+to pass over the earth-bottom of the main alley, and that no orangery
+was anywhere to be seen, excepting once, when fortunately the
+garden-gate stood open, just as a blooming orangery box passed by in a
+wheelbarrow on its way to Lilar.
+
+The Captain needed only to bring forward these particulars satirically,
+and thereby inwardly to wound the outwardly laughing Rabette,--because
+no woman can bear to hear fault found with her bodily property, whether
+it be children, clothes, cakes, or furniture;[187] and then his
+mountain-heights could gradually disencumber themselves of their clouds
+again, and Rabette become still more uncommonly gay.
+
+Albano, in this morning hour of the day, and, as it were, of childhood,
+and in this little paradise-garden of his childish years, was inwardly
+glad,--for in the first love, as in Shakespeare's pieces, nothing
+depends on the wooden stage of the performance; but to-day's afterwinter
+of yesterday's chill would nevertheless not melt. The morning-blue began
+to be filled with brighter and brighter golden fleeces; as the garden,
+like small cities, had only two gates, the upper and the lower, he
+opened like an aurora that of the morning sun; the splendor gushed in
+over the smoking green; the Rosana gliding below caught lightnings, and
+flung them over hitherward; Albano departed finally full of love and
+bliss.
+
+But the love was greater than the bliss.
+
+
+69. CYCLE.
+
+Flying Spring! (I mean love, just as one calls the after summer a
+_flying summer_) thou hurriest away of thyself over our heads with
+arrowy speed; why do authors again hurry over thee? Thou art the German
+blossoming season; which is never a blossoming month long. We read all
+winter in almanacs and similes much about its magnificence, and we pine
+for it; at last it hangs thick on the dark boughs six days long, and
+beside that, under cold May showers, sweeping bliss-month[188] storms,
+and with a dumb-session of half-frozen nightingales,--and then, when one
+comes out at length into the garden, the footpath is already white with
+blossoms, and the tree at most full of green; then it is over, till in
+winter we again hear with exaltation of heart the beginning of a tale:
+"It was just in the lovely season of the blossoming." Even so do I see
+few authors, at the long session-and-scribbling-table of romance,
+working right and left for the benefit of the reading-desk, who, after
+the long preface to love, do not so soon as, like a war, it is declared,
+forthwith conclude it; and really, there are more steps _to_ love than
+_in_ it; all that is _coming to be_,--for instance, spring, youth,
+morning, learning,--opens out more widely and in a richer variety of
+hues than fixed _being_; but is not this latter in turn a progress, only
+a higher; and this, again, a state of being, only a quicker?
+
+Albano would fain lead along more beautifully the fleeting, divine
+season, when the heart is our god; he would have it rather fly _upward_
+than fly _away_. He was angry the next day with nobody but himself. He
+tore his way through such petty and yet closely entangling troubles,
+through a condition like that of men during an earthquake, when an
+invisible vapor holds the heavy foot as a snare. "I would rather let
+myself be rained on upon mountains," said he, "than in valleys." Men of
+quick fancy more easily reconcile themselves to the loved one when she
+is absent, than when she is present.
+
+After some days, he went again to Blumenbühl just before sundown. A
+burning red cut through the night-like gloom of the foliage. His
+darkening, woody road was made, by the flames which danced about
+therein, an enchanted one. He transferred his illuminated present deep
+into a future, shady past. O, after years, thought he, when thou
+returnest, when all is gone by and changed, the trees grown up, human
+beings passed away, and only the mountains and the brook left, then wilt
+thou congratulate thyself that thou couldst once in these walks so often
+journey to thy sweetest heart, and on either hand the music and the
+glory of Nature went along with thy joyful soul, as the moon seems to
+the child to run after him through all streets. An unwonted rapture
+flung through his whole being the long, broad streak of sunshine; the
+farthest flowers of his fancy opened; all tones came through a brighter
+ether, and sounded nearer. The flowers around him, too, exhaled a keener
+fragrance, and the peal of the bell sounded nearer; and both are signs
+of foul weather.
+
+Thus inwardly happy, he made his appearance,--and, indeed, without
+Roquairol, who in fact came more and more seldom,--and found his beloved
+up in his childhood's study, her guest-chamber, which was now the usual
+scene of his visits. In a white dress, with dark trimming, as in a
+beautiful half-mourning, she sat at the drawing-table with her eyes
+sharper than usual, buried in a picture. She flew to his heart, but only
+to lead him back presently to the dear form upon which her heart hung as
+in a mother's arms. She related that her mother had been here to-day
+with the Princess, and had showed so much pleasure in her improving
+color, such infinite kindness toward her happy daughter. "She was
+obliged," continued she, "to let me take a slight sketch of her, in
+order that I might only look upon her so much the longer, and have
+something of her to keep by me. I am just finishing the outline of the
+face, but it is absolutely too poor a likeness." She could not tear her
+fancy away from the image, and still less from the original. To be sure,
+no more beautiful medallion can hang _on_ a daughter's heart, or in fact
+_in_ it, than that of a mother; but, nevertheless, Albano thought to-day
+the hanging-ring took up too broad a space.
+
+She talked only of her mother. "I certainly sin," said she; "she asked
+me in such a friendly way whether thou camest often, but I said only
+yes, and nothing further. O good Albano, how gladly would I have given
+up to her frankly my whole soul!"
+
+He answered, that the mother seemed not to be so frank; she perhaps knew
+already the whole through the Lector, and the pure draught of love would
+now be continually disturbed by foreign substances. Against Augusti he
+declared himself very strongly, but Liana quite as strongly upheld him.
+Through both that counterfeiter of the coin of truth, namely,
+suspicion,--the suspicion that she perhaps loved him as she loved
+everything, since she grew as by a living tie to everything
+good,--gained, under Albano's sensibilities, which besides had been
+to-day so warm and glad, more and more mint-stamps and currency.
+
+She suspected nothing, but she came back to the subject of her secrecy.
+"But why, then, does it make me unhappy," said she, "if it is right?
+Beloved one, my Caroline too appears to me no longer, and truly that is
+no good sign." This spectral-machinery always came on as oppressively
+and gloomily to him as a thunder-cloud in the outer world. His old
+exasperation against the teasings practised in his own case by apes of
+the air, whom he could not lay hold of, passed over into a similar
+feeling against Liana's optical self-deception. That veil presented her
+by Caroline, wherewith, in the beginning, she had so sublimely arrayed
+herself for the cloister of the tomb,--that travelling veil for the next
+world,--had long been to this Hercules a burning garment, drenched in
+the poisonous blood of a Nessus; therefore she no longer dared to wear
+it before him. The conclusion that the fancy of being destined to death
+laid the seed of the reality, and that in the deep overhanging cloud an
+accident might easily attract the striking-spark of death, fell like a
+mourning into his love festival. So are all strange sea-wonders of fancy
+(like this death-delusion) desired only _in_ fancy (in romance), but not
+in life, except once on fantastic heights; but then must such comets,
+like others, soon recede again from our heaven.
+
+He spoke now very seriously,--of suicidal fancies, of life's duties, of
+wilful blindness to the fairest signs of her recovery, among which he
+reckoned as well the disappearance of the optical Caroline as the
+blooming of her color. She heard him patiently; but through the
+Princess, who, notwithstanding her love, seldom left behind with him
+pleasant impressions, her fancy had to-day taken quite another road, far
+beyond herself and her grave. She stood only before Linda's image, of
+which Julienne had this afternoon communicated to her sharper outlines
+than maidens are wont to give of maidens. "She is a very good girl,"
+they say of each other. Linda's manly spirit, her warm attachment to
+Gaspard in connection with her contempt of the mass of men, her
+inflexibility, her bold strides in manly knowledge, her masterly and
+often severe letters, more pithy than flowery, and, most of all, her
+probably approaching arrival, took a powerful hold of Liana's tender
+heart. "My Albano must have her," was the constant thought of this
+disinterested soul; and if the Princess had had the intention of
+humiliating comparisons, she remarked it not, but fulfilled it. The good
+creature found, too, so much of a higher providence here,--for example,
+that her brother need now no longer be the rival of her lover and of his
+friend,--that she herself could portray beforehand her vigorous Albano
+to the proud Romeiro, and that certainly, despite all opposition, all
+the ghostly prophecies strikingly connected and coincided with each
+other. All this she now said (because she concealed only her sorrows,
+not her hopes) right to the Count's face.
+
+What a gnashing bite did an evil genius at this moment make into his
+tenderest life! That glowing love which neither divides nor is divided
+possessed _his_ heart, he thought, not hers. He came very near to
+showing up his inner being just as it was, all kindled at once, as if by
+a lightning stroke, into a lofty blaze. Only the innocent white brow,
+with festive roses in its little ringlets; the childishly bright
+looking-up of the pure blue pair of eyes, and the soft face, which even
+at a musical fortissimo, and at every vehemence in movement or laughter
+on the part of another, caught a sickly redness from the beating heart;
+and his indignant shame at the levity with which a man can abuse his
+omnipotence and his sex, to the terror of the tenderer, restrained him,
+like guardian spirits; and he said merely, in that noble anger which
+sounded like a tender emotion, "O Liana, thou art hard to-day!"
+
+"And yet I am indeed so tender!" said the innocent one. The two had
+hitherto been standing at the window, before the dark tempest which came
+rolling on out of Lilar. She turned suddenly round; for since the day of
+her blindness, when a dark cloud had seemed to fly towards her, she had
+never been able to look at one long; and Albano's tall form, with his
+whole live-glowing face and his soul-speaking eyes, stood illumined by
+the evening light before her. With the hand which he left free she
+softly and playfully swept aside the dark hair from his defiant
+forehead, smoothed the contracted eyebrow, and said, as his look stung
+like a sun, and his mouth shut with determination, "O, joyfully,
+joyfully, shall this fair face one day smile!" He smiled, but sadly.
+"And then shall I be still more blest than to-day!" said she, and
+started, for a lightning-flash darted across his earnest face, as over a
+jagged mountain, and showed it, like that of the god of war, illuminated
+with war-flames.
+
+He hurried away; would not be held back; spoke of a weather-cooling;
+went out into the storm; and left Liana behind in the joy that she had
+spoken to-day merely out of pure love. From the last house in the
+village Rabette flew to meet him; the torrents of the restrained tears
+rolled down his cheeks. "What dost thou want? why weepest thou?" she
+cried. "Thou art dreaming!" cried he, and hurried, without further
+answer, out into the tempest, which had suddenly, like a mantle-fish,
+flung itself stiflingly over the whole heaven. There, under the
+rain-drops and lightning-flashes, he began, first of all, to reckon up
+for himself the best proofs that Liana had saintly charms, divine sense,
+all virtues, especially universal philanthropy, daughterly, sisterly,
+friendly affection, only not, however, the glowing love for one
+person,--at least, not for him. She is so entirely and exclusively--such
+is always his conclusion--possessed and absorbed with the present
+object, whether it be myself or a broken arm of the little Pollux, that
+it hides from her heaven and earth. Hence the setting of her life's day,
+with all the attendant partings, is no more to her than the setting of a
+star. Hence it was that I stood beside her so long, with a heart full of
+the pangs of love, and she saw not into my love, because she found none
+in her own bosom. And this is what makes it so bitter, when man, pining
+in poverty among the common hearts of earth, is rendered by the noblest
+only unhappy at last.
+
+The rain pattered and trickled through the leaves, the fire darted
+through the woods, and the Wild Huntsman of the storm drove his crazy
+chase. This refreshed and rejoiced him like the cooling hand of a friend
+taking his to guide him. As he ascended, not through the cavern, but
+outside over the back of the mountain to his high thunder-house, he saw
+a thick, gray night of rain settle down heavily upon the green Lilar,
+and on the winding Tartarus rested under the flashes the illuminated
+storm. He shuddered, on entering his little house, at a cry which his
+Æolian-harp emitted under the snatches of the wind; for it had once,
+gilded by the evening sun, ethereally clothed his young love like
+starlight, and had followed it with ever-varying tones, as it went out
+over this suffering life.
+
+
+70. CYCLE.
+
+On the morning after both storms were dissolved into a still
+cloudiness.--And out of the great griefs came only errors. Weaklings
+that we are! when at our sham execution fate touches us with the rod,
+not with the sword, we sink impotently from the block, and feel the
+process of dying reach far into our life! All fevers, including
+spiritual ones, are cooled by the freshness of a new morning, just as
+sad evening stirs all their embers into a glow. Who of us has not at
+evening,--that proper witching hour of tormenting spectres,
+house-haunting ghosts and hobgoblins,--caught in the threads which he
+himself had spun, but which he took for a web spread by other hands,
+entangled himself more and more deeply the more he turned about and
+tried to extricate himself, till in the morning he saw his turnkey
+before him, namely, himself?
+
+Albano saw on the whole theatre of yesterday's war nothing left standing
+but a pale, kindly figure in half-mourning, who looked round after him
+with innocent maidenly eyes, and toward which he could not help looking
+over, albeit she was now more a bride of God than of a mortal. He felt
+now, to be sure, more strongly how high his demands upon real friends
+rose, than he once did, when he could heighten at pleasure the highest
+which he made upon the beings of his dreams, whom he always cast exactly
+into the temporary mould of his heart; and how he was possessed by a
+spirit that spared no one, that would stretch the wings of every other
+according to its own, because it could bear no individuality except that
+which was copied.
+
+He had hitherto experienced from all his loved ones too little
+opposition, as Liana had too much; both extremes injure one. The
+spiritual as well as the physical man, without the resistance of the
+outer atmosphere, is blown up and burst by the inner, and without the
+resistance of the inner is crushed by the outer; only the equilibrium
+between inner resistance and outer pressure keeps a fair play-room open
+for life and its culture. Besides, men--since only the best of them
+appreciate in the best of their own sex strong conviction--can hardly
+tolerate it in women, and would have them not merely the reflection, but
+even the echo, of themselves. They want, I mean, not merely the look,
+but also the word, that says yes.
+
+Albano punished himself with several days of voluntary absence, till the
+unclean clouds should have cleared away from within him which had
+overshadowed the gnomon of the sundial of his inner man. "When I am
+quite cheerful and good-natured," said he, "I will go back to her, and
+err no more." He errs at this moment. Whenever a strange, uncomfortable
+semitone has repeatedly intruded itself between all the harmonies of two
+natures, it swells more and more fatally till it drowns the key-note,
+and ends all. The dividing tone was, in this case, the strength of the
+man's pitch in connection with the strength of the woman's. But the
+highest love is most easily wounded by the slightest difference. O,
+little avails it then for man to say to himself, I will be another man!
+Only in the finest, only in unimpaired enthusiasm, does he propose to
+himself such a thing; but it is just when the feeling is impaired, when
+he were hardly capable of the purpose, that he has to rise to the
+fulfilment of it, and then he can hardly make the achievement.
+
+The Count went in the morning, as usual, to his lecture-rooms and
+parlors in the city. In the former it was hard for him to fix his
+instruments and his eyes upon the stars of the sciences, and to take
+sight, sailing as he was on such a sea of emotion. In the latter he
+found the Lector colder than ever, the Bibliothecary warmer, the
+household more inflated. He went to Roquairol, whom he to-day loved and
+treated still more cordially, as if by way of atonement to his offended
+sister. Charles said at once, with his sudden and tragical flinging up
+of the curtain of futurity, "All was discovered,--in the highest degree
+of probability!" As often as lovers see that their Calypso's
+island--which, to be sure, lies free on the open ocean--has at length
+come to the eyes of the seafaring world, and that they are making sail
+for it, they are astonished to an astonishing degree; for is there any
+one Paradise which has such a loose and low palisado, allowing every
+passer-by to see in, as theirs?
+
+For a long time, he related, had the Doctor's children always had
+something to fetch from the Architect's wife at Lilar,--flowers,
+medicine-phials, &c.; certainly as spy-glasses and ear-tubes of Augusti,
+who again was the opera-glass of his mother. In short, his father had,
+at least, been at the Greek woman's yesterday, but had luckily found
+only an empty package[189] from Rabette to him (Charles), which,
+according to the liberties of the ministerial Church, he had opened and
+closed.
+
+"Why _luckily_?" said Albano. "I will justify and honor my love before
+the world." "I referred to myself," he replied; "for never was my father
+more friendly to me than since he broke open my last letters. He is this
+afternoon in Blumenbühl, and it may well be more on my own account than
+my sister's."
+
+Albano had no fear that the city could drill mining-galleries under his
+childhood's land, so as to blow up in one conflagration the blessed
+isle,--could he not trust his character and courage and Liana's
+own?--but it pained him now that he had so needlessly robbed the
+childlike Liana of the joy and merit of a childlike open-heartedness.
+How he longed now for the atoning and recompensing moment of the first
+meeting again, after the next morning!
+
+He stayed by his friend as by a consolation, and did not go back till
+the evening redness floated about in the rain-clouds. When he came, he
+found already awaiting him a letter from Liana, written to-day.
+
+     "O good Albano, why camest thou not? How much I had to say
+     to thee! How I trembled for thy sake on Friday, when the
+     frowning cloud pursued thee with its thunder! Thou hast
+     weaned me too much from sorrow, so strange and heavy has it
+     become to me now. I was inconsolable the whole evening; at
+     last, when night fell, the thought sank into my mind that
+     thou hadst been oppressed as with presentiments, and that
+     the lightning loved to strike the thunder-house. Why,
+     indeed, art thou there? I hurried up, and knelt by my bed,
+     and prayed to God, although the storm had long been
+     dispersed, that he would have preserved thee. Smile at my
+     tardy prayer; but I said to him, 'Thou knewest indeed,
+     all-gracious One, that I would pray.' I was consoled, too,
+     when I looked up to the stars, and the broken ray of joy
+     trembled within me.
+
+     "But in the morning Rabette made me sad again. She had seen
+     thee weeping on the road. A thousand times have I asked
+     myself, whether I am to blame for that. Can it have come
+     from this,--for she says so,--that I afflict thee too much
+     with my death thoughts? Never more shalt thou hear them; the
+     veil, too, is laid away; but I calculated upon thee
+     according to my brother, to whom, as he himself says, the
+     dusk of death is an evening-twilight, in which forms seem to
+     him more lovely. Truly, I am quite blest; for thou art even
+     so, and yet hast so little in having me,--only a small
+     flower for thy heart, but I have thyself. Leave me my
+     grave-mound; therefrom, as from a mountain, comes better,
+     more fruitful soil into my valley. O how one loves, Albano,
+     when all around us crumbles and sinks and melts away in
+     smoke, and when, still, the bond and splendor of love stand
+     firm and inviolate on the fleeting ground of life, as I have
+     often seen with emotion, when standing by waterfalls, a
+     rainbow hover, undisturbed and unchanged, over the bursting,
+     impetuous floods! O, would that the nightingales were yet
+     singing; now I could sing with them! Thy Æolian-harp, my
+     harmonica, how gladly would I have it in my hand! My father
+     was with us, and more cheerful and friendly toward all than
+     ever. Lo, even he is kindly disposed! My parents surely send
+     no tempest into our feast of roses. I readily did him the
+     pleasure, therefore,--forgive it!--of promising him, that I
+     would receive no visits from strangers in a strange
+     house--because, he said, it was improper. I must go home for
+     some days on account of the Prince's marriage; but I shall
+     see thee soon. O forgive! When my father speaks softly, my
+     soul cannot possibly say, No. Farewell, my noble one!
+
+                                                         L.
+
+     "P. S. Soon a little leaf will come fluttering again over to
+     thy mountain. Only continue in perpetual joy! O God! why am
+     I not stronger? What beings shouldst thou then take to thy
+     heart!--Thou dear one!"
+
+How was he shamed by this full-blooming love, which never rightly knows
+when it is misunderstood, and which presupposes no other fault than its
+own! How sadly did the thought of the commanded separation affect him
+now, after the voluntary one! He could now love her as a guarding angel
+_before_ Paradise, how much more as a giving angel _in_ it! But it is
+hard for a man, as the youth felt, clearly to distinguish in the female
+heart, especially in this one, intention from instinct, ideas from
+feelings, and in this dark, full heaven to count and arrange all the
+stars. Everything like hardness, every unpromising bud, arose at last as
+a flower; and her worth unfolded itself piece-wise like spring; whereas,
+generally, from other maidens, a traveller who visits them carries away
+with him directly at his first evening's departure a little complete
+flower-catalogue of all their charms and arts, as a Brocken-passenger
+gets at the tavern a neat nosegay of the various kinds of mosses which
+are found on the mountain.
+
+He supposed she was now with her parents; and he followed, not as a
+pouting schoolboy, but as a harmonious man, the giant of destiny. In the
+garden rainy weather held sway, the crop of every heavy tempest, which,
+like a war, always devastates the scene of conflict.
+
+The promised leaflet appeared: "Only be happy. We shall see each other
+very, very soon, and then most blissfully. Forgive me! Ah, I long
+exceedingly!"
+
+Now he experienced what days they were which had _once_--that is, only a
+few days ago--passed before him as divine apparitions, and which now
+again were to come up in the East as returning stars! Why does a
+blessing, not till it is lost, cut its way like a sharp diamond so
+deeply into the heart? Why must we first have lamented a thing, before
+we ardently and painfully love it? Albano threw both past and future
+away from him, that he might dwell wholly and purely in that present
+which Liana had promised him.
+
+
+71. CYCLE.
+
+On Sunday morning, when all the blue heavens stood open, and the earth
+was festally decked with pearls and twigs, a gentle finger tapped at
+Albano's door, which could belong to none but a female hand. It was
+Liana who entered at so early an hour; Rabette and Charles without
+uttered a loud greeting. On his exulting breast fell the beautiful
+maiden, blooming from, her walk, with blessed, bright eyes, a freshly
+bedewed rose-bud. It was his finest morning; he had a clear feeling of
+Liana's love. As the Æolian-harp sounded in, she looked towards it,
+remembered with a blush that fairest evening of the covenant, and
+listened in silence, and dried her eyes when she turned them again
+towards Albano. But he could not enter into this temple of joy without
+having cleansed and healed himself by a frank confession of his late
+errors. What a sweet rivalry ensued between them of confessing and
+forgiving, when Liana lovingly exclaimed and owned that she had not
+understood him lately, that only she was the blamable one, and that she
+would begin this very moment to speak better. She could not give herself
+any comfort about the secret pangs which she had caused her friend. As
+mahogany furniture cracks in no temperature, and contracts no spots, and
+needs no polishing, so was it with this heart, Albano's felt, as he now
+swore to himself always, even when he did not understand her, to say to
+himself, She is right.
+
+She solved for him the riddle of her appearing to-day with those
+friendly looks which a good nature redoubles, when it has anything to
+sweeten,--namely, she was going back to Pestitz to-day; but the carriage
+would not come till late, till evening, in fact, about tea-time, and so
+there remained a whole day before them; and she hoped her father would
+not take this circuitous route through Lilar as a breach of her promise.
+A loving maiden grows unconsciously more bold. Thereupon she sought to
+make him quite calm about the peaceful intentions of her father, and
+represented his strictness, in subjecting himself and others to
+convenience, as the reason of his prohibition, as well as of her being
+summoned back to the wedding-festival. Albano, so soon after the oath
+which he had just sworn to himself, kept it, and said, She is right.
+
+The Captain came in with the red-cheeked Rabette, whose eyes glistened
+with joy. The small apartment did not, by narrowness and confusion, make
+the pleasure less. Charles, generally so much like Vesuvius, which in
+the first hours of morning is still covered with snow, presented already
+a warm summit; he seated himself at the instrument and thundered into
+the noisy presence with a prestissimo (which lay open) of Haydn's,--that
+true hour-caller of rejoicing hours,--and played, to the astonishment of
+the females, the hardest part so easily, at sight, that he rather played
+into it, than from it, and kept composing much (for instance, the bass)
+himself; whereas Albano, with almost comic fidelity, gave you the exact
+truth in music quite as much as in history, which, again, always became
+in Charles's mouth a piece of his own personal biography. The morning
+added wings to all their souls, whereas noon always binds men's wings
+down,--hence Aurora goes with winged steeds, and the god of day with
+wingless ones. "But how now are our seven pleasure-stations to be made
+out?" inquired Charles, "for the day lies like a garden-hall, with
+nothing but pleasure-avenues on all sides open before us." "Charles, is
+it not, then, a matter of indifference _where_ a man loves?" said
+Albano. Blessed one, whose heart needs nothing but one heart more, no
+park into the bargain, no _opera seria_, no Mozart, no Raphael, no
+eclipse of the moon, not so much as moonlight, and no read or acted
+romance!
+
+"First, I must see my Chariton," said Liana. "Yes," added her brother,
+immediately, "she can bring our dinner after us into the gothic temple."
+He proposed, namely, on this lovely day, to dine in the twelfth century,
+and to sit by a sombre, motley window-light, and on sharp-cornered,
+heavy, thick furniture, and, as it were, darkly under the earth of a
+green present, glistening overhead, to sit with blooming faces; for
+thus did he overload the fullest enjoyments with external contrasts, and
+enjoyed every happy present most in the near gleam and reflection of the
+sharpened sickle which was to mow them away.[190] "God forbid and avert
+it, friend!" said Rabette. Albano, too, deemed the friendly Greek, her
+laughing children, and the neighboring rose-fields far preferable, and,
+with the aid of Liana, prevailed. Before the embowered cottage the
+children came running to meet them, Helena, with her little apron full
+of orange-blossoms, which she had picked up, for the breaking of them
+off had been forbidden her, and Pollux, in the last, light bandage of
+his broken arm, the hand of which had now been obliged to work with its
+companion, the right hand, at puckering up and cracking the rose-leaves.
+Both gave notice: "Mother was not ready yet, and had dressed them
+first." But presently, neat and simple as a priestess destined to dance
+around the altar of gods of joy, sprang Chariton to meet her Liana, and,
+as she came, continued adjusting her hastily donned clothes by a light
+hitching and twitching. "This," said Roquairol, after he had easily
+obtained from Rabette a nodding assent thereto, because she had not
+understood his French request for the same, "is my spouse since
+yesterday,"--and he enjoyed without further circumstance the right of
+thouing her, which she, since the friendly encouragement of the
+Minister, accepted the more fondly with maidenly presentiments.
+
+When Liana kindly announced four noonday guests for Chariton, there
+stood in the dark eyes of the Greek gleams of joy, and the little face,
+with great arched Italian eyebrows, became a stereotype smile, which was
+not culinary embarrassment, but merely tongueless joy; which only made
+her white semicircle of teeth shine more broadly, when Charles spoke
+right out: "Surely thou canst help her, wife!" "Of course!" said
+Rabette, quite delighted; because her heart had no longer any other lips
+than her two hands, for which, if they could only lay hold of hard work,
+it was full as much as if they were pressed by the hand of a lover. Did
+she not again and again curse her awkward, hesitating throat, when
+Roquairol, in her presence, poured out his sounding and fiery torrents
+of speech? On this occasion, when he had again set off the surroundings
+with artificial, shadowy refinements, he insisted upon it, of course,
+that Chariton should be executive secretary, and Rabette only
+corresponding secretary. Liana, too, out of a like womanliness, would
+fain do something for her darling; but since she, as a maiden of rank,
+could not cook anything, but only bake a little, accordingly it was
+assigned her,--but reluctantly on the part of her friend, who never
+loved to see the sweet form anywhere else than, like other butterflies,
+by his side among the flowers,--at a quite late moment, and for a space
+of ten minutes, with her eyes and in extraordinary cases with her three
+writing-fingers, to co-operate in making the snow-balls, which were to
+close and crown the dessert.
+
+Never had kitchen ball-queen a broader canopy, or a more beautifully
+carved sceptre and apple, or fairer _dames d'atour_[191] than Chariton,
+and vessels and fire were quite thrown into the shade thereby.
+
+Now the happy couples--and the children too--went out into the joyful
+day, into the youthful garden, in order, like planets, with their moons,
+to stand now near each other, now far off, now in opposition, and now in
+conjunction, on their heavenly orbit around the same sun. "We will
+launch out at a venture," said Charles, in port, "and see whether we do
+not meet." Albano went with Liana after the children, who were already
+skipping along on the little houses through the rose-walks, on the
+bridge over the singing wood. He whose heart beats in such calm
+blissfulness, seeks in the invisible church no visible one: the whole
+temple of nature is the temple of love, and everywhere stand altars and
+pulpits. On the smoothly descending life-stream man stands without
+rudder, happy in his skiff, and leaves it to its own will.
+
+Then the children, mindful of the maternal prohibition against
+excursions, led the way up along the right, over the bridged eminence,
+to the western triumphal arch; and Helena, merely as guide of the little
+convalescent, ran forward quite unexpectedly and wildly with his hand.
+How gladly did Albano follow the little pilots and pointers! Heavens!
+when they looked round them on the magnificent height, and into the rich
+outspread day, and then into each other's eyes, how freely and broadly
+did the arches of their life-bridge rear themselves, and ships, with
+swollen sails and proudly towering masts, sail away beneath! Rose-trees
+clambered up the triumphal arches, the children reached up, snatched
+roses from their summits, and trudged away (working out and proving the
+unusual obedience) over four gates, in order, from the fifth, to look
+down into the smooth, shining lake, and to descend into the "enchanted
+wood," where art, like the children, played her pranks.
+
+Out of the entrance of the wood came forth Charles and Rabette, on their
+way back to Chariton over the arches, the former bound to the
+wine-cellar (he had something empty therefrom in his hand), and she
+intending to run a moment into the kitchen. He went blissfully, as if on
+wings, and said: "Life travels to-day in the constellation of the wain,
+far away through the blue." He turned round, however, to let the
+_Pleiades_ rise before them, that is, the so-called "inverted rain,"
+which ascends only for the space of five minutes, and properly only in
+an illumination. He led them all into the wondrous wood, through a light
+that lay in noonday slumber, glowing under free trees, whose stems,
+standing far asunder, only tendered each other their long twigs. At the
+focus of the picturesque paths, he let them await the play of the rain.
+The children sprang after him with their hopes, and, backed by the
+courage of the grown ones, sat down by them, on designated seats of the
+gods, or children's seats, between two little round lakes.
+
+While Charles ran swiftly up and down in zigzag, attending to the
+hydraulic and other mechanism,--nearly according to the points of the
+labyrinth-garden in Versailles,--they could fly about through the magic
+wood that rose everywhere. An all-powerful arm of the Rosana, which
+swept by without, struck in among the flowers, and bore a heavy, rich
+world; now the water was a fixed mirror, now a winding, beating vein,
+now a gushing spring, now a flash of lightning behind flowers, or a dark
+eye behind leafy veils; tapering shores, short beds, children's gardens,
+round islands, little hills, and tongues of land lay between: they held
+their motley, blooming children on arm and bosom, and the blue eyes of
+the forget-me-not, and the full tulip-cheeks, and the white-cheeked
+lilies played together like brothers and sisters apart from strangers,
+but roses ran through all. Now they heard a murmuring and purling; the
+lakes beside them bubbled up; on a peeled May-tree, fenced in on an
+island, the yellow fir-needles began to drop from above; from the
+hanging birches on the tongue of land, an inner rain dripped and glided
+down; out of the two lakes beside them water-jets flew like
+flying-fishes toward heaven. Now it gushed everywhere, and rows of
+fountains, those water-children, played with the flower-children. Like
+birds, streams fluttered with broad wings out of the laurel-hedges, and
+fell into the groups of roses. On a hill full of oaks, a water-snake
+crawled up; victoriously shot out from all the mouths of the shores
+besieging arches to the summits; suddenly the cheated spectators found
+themselves overhung with rainbows, for the lakes flung their waters high
+across over them, so that the wavering sun blazed through the
+lattice-work of drops, as through a shivered jewel-world. The children
+screamed with a terror of joy. The scared birds cruised through the
+shower; night butterflies were cast down; the turtle-doves shook
+themselves on the ground, beaten down in the torrents; the banks and the
+beds held their blooming little ones beneath the heavens.
+
+After five minutes the whole was over, and nothing remained, save that
+in all flowers and eyes the moist radiance trembled, and on the waves
+the stars continued to glisten. The children ran after the
+wonder-worker, Charles. "All is over outwardly," said Albano, "but not
+within us. I am to-day perfectly and peacefully happy; for thou lovest
+me, and the whole world, too, is friendly. Art thou, too, happy, Liana?"
+She answered, "Still more happy, and I must needs weep for joy if I told
+how happy I am." But she was weeping already. "See! drops!" said she,
+naively, as he looked upon her, and wiped _his_, which were the
+sprinklings of the rainbow, softly from his cheeks. His lips touched her
+holy, tender eye, but the other remained open, and her love looked out
+from it at him, and never did her holy soul hover nearer to him.
+
+After a few minutes this inverted heavenward shower was also over. They
+went across the middle of the free gardens to the eastern parts and
+gates. How brightly lay the coasts of the future before them, with
+thick, high green, and nightingales flying around the shores! Rapture
+makes the manly heart more womanly. The voice of his full bosom spoke
+but softly to Liana, on whose countenance, turned sidewise and
+heavenward, lay a still, pious gratitude; his fiery glance moved but
+slowly, and rested on the beautiful world; and he went without hasty
+strides around the smallest points of land. The young nightingale whet
+her well-fed bill against the twig, and shook herself merrily; the old
+one sang a short lullaby, and skipped chanting after fresh food; and
+everywhere flew and screamed across each other's paths the children of
+spring and their parents. Little white peacocks ran, without their
+pride, like little children in the grass. Blissfully floated the swan
+between her waves, with the white arch over the eyes that dipped under,
+and blissfully hovered the glistening music-fly, like a fixed star,
+undisturbed in the air, over a distant, flowery bell. The butterflies,
+flying flowers, and the flowers, fettered butterflies, sought and
+sheltered each other, and laid their variegated wings to wings; and the
+bees exchanged flowers only for blossoms, and the rose which has no
+thorns for them they exchanged only for the linden.
+
+"Liana," said Albano, "how I love the whole world to-day, on thy
+account! I could give the flowers a kiss, and press myself into the very
+heart of the full trees; I could not tread in the way of the long chafer
+down there." "Should one," she replied, "ever feel otherwise? How can a
+human being, I have often thought, who has a mother, and knows her love,
+so afflict and rend the heart of a brute mother? But Spener says, we do
+not forgive beasts even their virtues." "Let us go to him," said he.
+
+They came out through the eastern gate on the mountain-way behind the
+flute-dell, up to the house of old Spener, which lay in noonday
+brightness; but, as they heard loud reading and praying, they chose
+rather to walk by at a great distance, in order not to throw so much as
+their shadow into his holy heaven.
+
+They gazed into the fair, still flute-dell, and would fain go directly
+in; at length it spoke up to them with one flute. Their friends seemed
+to be down below there. The flute continued long to complain, as if
+lonely and forsaken; no sisters and no fountains murmured in with it. At
+last there rose, panting, in company with the flute, a timid, trembling
+singer's voice, struggling forth. It was Rabette, behind the tall
+bushes. She stirred both to the depths of the soul, because the poor
+creature, with the labor of her helpless voice, was rendering her loved
+one the meek sacrifice of obedience. "O my Albano," said Liana, twining
+around him with ecstasy, "what sweetness to think that my brother is
+happy, and has found peace of soul, and _that_ through thy sister!" "He
+deserves all my peace," said he, with emotion; "but we will not disturb
+the two, but go back the old way." For Rabette's tones were often cut
+short, but it was uncertain whether by fear, or by kisses, or by
+emotion.
+
+When they came in again through the eastern gate, the songstress and
+Charles came out of the green portal to meet them, both with wet eyes.
+Charles, stepping impetuously over living beds, and with wandering eyes,
+grasped a hand of both with his, and said, "This is, for once in this
+rainy world, a day which does not look like a night. Brother, but when
+one is so deeply blest, and catches the music of the spheres, the tones
+are such as were once heard in token that from Mark Antony his patron
+deity, Hercules, was departing." Thus are joys, like other jewels,
+mechanical poisons, which only in the distance shine, but, when touched
+and swallowed, eat into us. But Albano replied, smiling, "Since thou now
+fearest, dear friend, thou hast nothing to fear; for thou art not
+perfectly happy. I, however, alas! fear nothing." "Bravo!" said Charles;
+"now go into your kitchen, maiden!" He went into the so-called "Temple
+of Dreams," but soon hastened after her into the forbidden kitchen.
+
+Albano visited Liana's spring chamber. Here he painted to himself from
+memory that bright Sunday when Liana led him through Lilar, and he let
+the past soothingly glimmer into the present; but the latter overpowered
+the former with its beams. Out in the garden stood and shone, so it
+seemed to him, the pure pillars of his heaven, the supporters of his
+temple, the trees; and all that he here saw near him belonged again to
+his happiness, Liana's books and pictures and flowers, and every little
+mark of her tender hand.
+
+At last the saint of the Rotunda herself--suffused with a virgin blush
+at this nearness and at his blushing--stepped in, to take him away into
+the cool dining-room. It was small and dusky, but the heart needs not
+for its heaven much space nor many stars therein, if only the star of
+love has arisen. To the table-talk,--whereby alone an eating becomes a
+human one,--and to the jokes,--the finest _entremets_, the powdered
+sugar of conversation,--the children contributed their share, especially
+as they, unqualified to ascend from the forbidden _thou_ to _you_,
+always used thou-you at once. The deeply-red Chariton made extracts from
+Dian's letters and from the history of her life, and from the surgeon's
+bulletins in relation to Pollux's broken arm; she sought to extol the
+snow-balls, listened with a half-credulous, half-cunning look to the
+Captain, who spun out the sportive marriage-thou toward Rabette into
+five acts, and smiled with pleasure just where it was required.
+Especially did that music-barrel of all souls, Charles, spin joyously
+round; that Jupiter, around whom the eclipses of so many satellites were
+always flying, could show a great, serene splendor, when he and others
+wished. As often as Albano, according to the old way, would not come to
+his tragedy, he drew up the curtain of a comedy. To the good Rabette a
+word was as good as a look from him, although she only returned the
+latter, so as neither to fall into the _Thou_ nor into the _You_.
+Albano, knit with ears and eyes to one soul, could not produce with his
+lips much more than a smile of bliss; he could more easily have made a
+hymn than a _bon-mot_, a grace at meat than a dinner speech. For his
+Liana was to-day too affectionate, so contentedly and exhilaratingly did
+the sweet maiden look round with such hearty play, acting the chatty,
+bantering hostess, that a man who saw it and thought of her firm
+death-belief, would only have been so much the more deeply affected by
+this dance around the grave with flowers on the head, though he should
+remark--or rather for the very reason of his remarking--that she was
+here merely carrying on a joke with jocoseness itself for the
+sake--according to her new moral funeral arrangement--of sweetening for
+her beloved every parting-hour, as well the next as the last of all. But
+this was hard to perceive, because in female souls every show easily
+becomes reality, whether it be a sad or a gay one.
+
+How happy was her friend and every good being to think that the saint
+pronounced herself blest! And then she became, in turn, still more so.
+Thus does the radiance of joy dart to and fro between sympathizing
+hearts, as between two mirrors, in growing multiplication, and grows
+without end.
+
+
+72. CYCLE.
+
+The hour of departure came rolling on with swifter and swifter wheels;
+more constellations of joy went down than came up. Thus do the blooming
+vineyards of life always grow green on the ups and downs of a
+mountainous way, never on a smooth plain. The two lovers needed quiet
+now, not walks. They took the nearest, the path to the thunder-house.
+They stepped into the glimmering vesper-grounds as into a new land; at
+mid-day man is awakened from one dream after another, and has always
+forgotten and sees things always new. In Albano the golden splendor of
+the strings of joy still lingered under the declining sun; he told her
+gladly, how often he would visit her at her parents', and how he
+certainly hoped to find them friendly. Liana, as a daughter and a lover,
+retouched all his hopes with her own. But now she let her hitherto light
+heart, which had been rocking itself on the flowers of sport, sink back
+upon the solid ground of earnest.
+
+When there is peace and fulness in a man, he wishes not to enjoy
+anything else but himself; every motion, even of the body, jostles the
+full nectar-cup. They hastened out of the loud, lively garden into the
+still, dark thunder-house. But when, as if parted from the world, which
+lay out around the windows, brightly glistening and far receding, they
+stood alone together in the little twilight, and looked upon each
+other,--and when Albano's soul became like a sun-drunken mountain at
+evening, light, warm, firm, and fair, and Liana's soul like an
+up-gushing spring on the mountain, which glides away purely bright and
+cool and hidden, and only under the touch of the evening-beam glows in
+rosy redness,--and now that these souls had just found each other in the
+wide, unharmonious world,--then did a mighty joy thrill through them
+like a prayer, and they cast themselves upon each other's hearts, and
+glowed and wept and looked upon each other exaltedly in the
+embrace;--and, on the Æolian-harp, suddenly the folding doors of an
+inspired concert-hall flew open, and outswelling harmonies floated by,
+and suddenly again the gates shut to.
+
+They seated themselves at the breezy eastern window, before which the
+mountains of Blumenbühl and Lilar's hills and paths lay in the sunlight.
+Around them was evening shade, and all was still, and the Æolian-harp
+breathed low. They only looked at each other, and felt joy to their
+innermost being that they loved and possessed each other. How
+ecstatically did they look, from the protection of this citadel, down
+into the sounding, stirring world! Down below the wind blew the blaze of
+poppies and tulips far and wide, and in among the heavy, yellow harvest.
+The silver-poplars, wearing eternal May-snow, fluttered with uptossing
+splendor; a flock of pigeons went rustling away, and dipped into the
+blue; and overhead, amid flying clouds, stood those round temples of
+God, the mountains, in rows, beside each other, bearing alternate nights
+and days; and the pious father stood alone on his hill, and handed his
+roe tender branches.
+
+"Thus may we ever remain!" said Albano, and pressed her dear hand with
+both of his to his heart. "Here and hereafter!" said she. "Albano, how
+often have I wished thou wert at the same time my female friend, that I
+might speak with thee of thyself! Who on the earth knows how I esteem
+thee, except myself alone?" "Here and hereafter? Liana, I am happier
+than thou, for I alone believe in our _long_ life here," said he, all at
+once changed.
+
+Whatever, now, may have been the reason,--whether that man is not at all
+accustomed to be happy in a pure present, severed from all future and
+past, because his inner heaven, like the natural one, directly over his
+head and close to him, always looks dark-blue, and only round about the
+distant horizon radiant; or that there is a bliss so tender and
+unearthly as, like the moonshine, to be made too dark by every passing
+cloud, whereas a sturdy one, like daylight, can bear the broadest; or
+that Albano was too much like men who always in joy feel their powers so
+strongly that they would rather kick over the table of the gods than see
+a dish or a loaf of the heavenly bread less thereupon, rather be
+perfectly miserable than not perfectly happy;--suffice it, he could not
+and would not be guilty of longer fear and concealment.
+
+So, when Liana, instead of answering, only embraced him, and was silent,
+because she meant to remain the whole day true to her promise not to
+dash the festal tapestry of fair days with a shade of mourning-cloth,
+then, as if urged on by a strange spirit, he spoke out: "Thou answerest
+nothing? Only joys, not sorrows, shall I share? Thou hast not thy veil?
+Wilt thou spare _me_ as a weakling? and thee alone shall thy
+death-belief continue to oppress? Liana, I will have pangs, too, and all
+thine,--tell all!"
+
+"Truly, I only meant to keep my promise," said she, "and no more. But
+what then shall I say to thee, dear?"
+
+"Dost thou believe, then, that thou art certainly to die after a year,
+superstitious one?--heavenly one!" said he.
+
+"In so far as it is God's will, certainly," said she. "O my good Albano,
+how can I help my belief, much as it pains thee too?" And here she could
+no longer restrain her tears, and all the crucifixes of memory started
+up alive in the fair soul, and bled intensely.
+
+"God's will?" asked he. "Quite as well might he at this moment
+precipitate a winter as an iceberg, into this happy summer. God?" he
+repeated, looked up, knelt down, and prayed, "O thou all-loving God--But
+thou shalt not die to me!" He turned, as if in anger, towards her,
+incapable of continuing his prayer, for the cry of his heart, and wiping
+hastily with both hands over his moist face. Now he prayed on, with a
+soft, trembling voice: "No, thou all-loving One! kill not this fair,
+young life! Leave us together long in purity and in peace."
+
+She knelt involuntarily at his side;--to-day more exhausted with
+pleasures and unknown inner victories, even with long walking, so much
+the more intensely struck by a moving reality that she had been spoiled
+and softened by moving fancies, and inexpressibly afflicted at Albano's
+sorrow;--she could not speak; her head and neck bowed, as under a
+burden suddenly laid upon them; and thus, as one heavily overclouded by
+a whole life, she looked down upon the floor. The embracing death-flood
+sounded with one arm around her; then did she see, without looking up,
+her Caroline pass by somewhere in bridal dress, and with the white,
+gold-spangled veil trailing along far over life; and she saw clearly how
+the celestial shape, when Albano begged for her life, shook its head
+slowly to and fro. "Cease to pray!" she cried, inconsolably. "But listen
+to me, thou cold apparition, and only make _him_ happy!" she prayed, but
+she saw nothing more; and, with inexpressible love, she hid her face,
+marked all over with the lines of agony, upon his breast.
+
+Here her brother called up, that the carriage was ready. She threw down
+a quick, thin-voiced "Yes." "Must we part?" asked Albano; the fiery rain
+of ecstasy had now fallen back into his open soul, in the shape of a
+darker rain of ashes; and so he went on without any bounds to his
+anguish. "Then have we seen each other for the last time?" and under the
+closed eyelid his noble eye wept.
+
+"No! in the name of the All-gracious, no!" said she, and rose to go.
+"Stay!" said he, and she staid, and embraced him again. "But do not
+accompany me!" she entreated. "Not!" said he, and held her for some time
+as she withdrew, by the tips of the fingers; it pained him so much, when
+he saw the sufferings which had been brought upon this still form, that
+these white wings of innocence had beaten themselves bloody against his
+cliffs and mountain-horns. He drew her again to himself, ere he let her
+and his salvation go from him. He looked after her as she slowly stole
+down along the sunny mountain, drying her eyes under the twigs, and
+went with bowed head along all the gay, blooming paths of the forenoon's
+walk. But he gazed not after, when her carriage rolled away across the
+joyous wood; he stood at the eastern window, and saw his childhood's
+mountains tremble, because he had forgotten to dry his eyes.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[180] The Titan was originally divided into four volumes.--TR.
+
+[181] A musical term, meaning the compensation made by
+transferring to imperfect concords part of the beauty of the
+perfect ones.--TR.
+
+[182] Every partial development of course works well for the
+whole; but only for this reason, because its opposite partial one
+balances it in a higher equation and sum total, so that all
+individual men are only the limbs of a single giant, such as the
+Swedenborgian _man_ is. But in so far as, in one individual, a
+want arises which helps out an opposite one in another,--so that
+the road of humanity plagues and trips equally much by hills and
+by hollows,--it will be seen that every one-sided fulness is,
+only a cure of the times, not their health; and that the higher
+law is, after all, a culture slower in the individual, but still
+harmonious; less in amount, indeed, but impartial, and thereby,
+in the long run, even more rapid. We always forget that--as in
+mechanics power and time are mutual supplements--eternity is the
+infinite power.
+
+[183] According to Borreux, the engineer, literally only every
+thousandth shot from small-arms hits. So is it in all cases; fear
+death, and then there stand flower-pots ready to fall from
+chamber-windows, lightnings from the blue sky, air-guns going
+off, polypuses in the heart, mad dogs, robbers, every gash in the
+finger, _aqua toffana_, proud flesh, &c., in short, all
+nature--that ever-going, crushing cochineal-mill--stands with
+innumerable open scissors of fate round about thee, and thou hast
+no consolation, save this, that--nevertheless people grow eighty
+years old. Fear impoverishment: then fire, flood, famine, and
+war, banditti and revolutions, set upon thee with greedy claws
+and fangs; and yet, thou rich man! the poor man--creeping along
+under the same birds of prey--becomes at last as rich as thou.
+March, therefore, boldly through the slumbering lion-herd of
+dangers, lying on the right and left, and go up to the fountain,
+only do not wantonly wake them up; of course a hell-god drags
+down individuals who feared nothing; but so, too, does a higher
+God draw up individuals who expected nothing; and fear and hope
+are swallowed in one common night.
+
+[184] Titan, 13. Cycle.
+
+[185] At the court of King Olaus, the royal youth Olo, dressed as
+a peasant, offered himself as a champion of the daughter against
+robbers. Then did the fire of the eyes and nobleness of form tell
+as proof of a high descent; thus did Suanhita, for example,
+recognize King Regner in a herdsman's guise by the beauty of his
+eye and face. The king's daughter looked searchingly into Olo's
+flaming eye, and came near swooning; she essayed a second look,
+and was senseless; and at the third, swooned. The divine youth
+therefore cast his eyelids down but uncovered his brow and his
+golden hair and the signs of his rank. See "The German and his
+Native Land," by Rosenthal and Karg, Vol. I. pp. 166, 167.
+
+[186] For what we call light is only an intenser white. No one
+sees, by night, the luminous stream which rushes upward along by
+the earth, pouring from the sun upon the full moon.
+
+[187] This warmer, tenderer, more timid, ever-praised sex, living
+more in the opinion of others than in its own, is poisonously
+pierced by a reproach which only pricks _us_ so as to draw a
+little blood, as noxious beasts, in warm countries and months,
+poison, and in cold ones only wound. Therefore let the girls'
+schoolmaster consider that a dose which is satire upon the
+boy--who, besides, must withstand opinion--becomes a lampoon,
+when it lights upon his sister.
+
+[188] Poetic name for May.--TR.
+
+[189] In which were always enclosed letters from Liana to Albano.
+Let every one see here, by two examples, how on the harmonica of
+love a brother must stand in front as key-bank for the sister,
+who would reach the bells. There should, therefore, always be a
+couple of couples, diametrically connected in sisterhood and
+affection.
+
+[190] "Such a character," writes Hafenreffer in this connection,
+"were desirable for romancing Kotzebues, for they, as he always
+will, according to his nature, create and raise the dignity of
+the situation by the accidental place thereof, might, under the
+cloak of his personality, humor entirely their own and disguise
+the weakness of the poet under the weakness of the hero."
+Methinks this is, so far as a biographer of romancers can decide,
+very striking.
+
+[191] Tiring-women.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE SORROWS OF A DAUGHTER.
+
+
+73. CYCLE.
+
+Clouds like these last consisted with Albano less of falling drops than
+of settling dust. His life was yet a hothouse, and stood therefore
+toward the sunny side. Every day brought a new apology for the absent
+sweetheart, till at last she needed one no longer. But still he gave to
+every day its letter of indulgence for her silence; by and by they grew
+into letters of respite (moratories); finally, when she never let
+anything at all be heard or read from her; then he began to re-examine
+the afore-said apologies, and strike out many things therein.
+
+Quite as little could he find for himself, or for a note, a way of
+access to her. Even the Captain had been gone for some days on a journey
+to Haarhaar. With faint hands he held the heavy, drained cup of joy,
+which, when empty, weighs the heaviest. The wild hypotheses which man in
+such a case trots[192] through him--as in this, for instance, that of
+Liana's being sick, having caught cold, her imprisonment, absence on a
+journey--are, in their alternation and value, to be compared with
+nothing, except with the quite as great wildness and number of the
+plans which he enlists and dismisses,--that of abduction, of hate, of a
+duel, of despair.
+
+The terrible motionless time had no gnomon on its dial-plate. He stood
+as near his fate as man does to his dreams, without being able to
+recognize or prepare for its form, any more than one can for that which
+dreams will take. He went often into the city, through all whose streets
+there was riding, running, and driving, because they were about bringing
+and nailing together the beams for the grandest throne-scaffolding, on
+which the princely bride at her introductory compliment in the land,
+might look round the farthest; but he heard nothing there of his own
+bride, except that she quite often visited the picture-gallery with the
+Minister.
+
+Hereby two distressing hypotheses, that of her sickness, and that of her
+being at war with her family, seemed to lose their stings. The best,
+though the hardest thing was, to go straight to the Minister, as to
+Vesuvius, in order there to have the fairest prospect. He visited the
+Vesuvius. In fact this volcano was never more still and green. He asked
+after everything, and expressed himself upon much which immediately
+concerned the marriage festival; nor did he seek to conceal his hopes
+and wishes that the Count would help welcome the admirable bride.
+
+At last the latter, too, must venture to unfold _his_ hopes and wishes
+about the ladies. The Minister replied, with uncommon pleasantness, that
+the two had just carried back the "charming Mademoiselle von Wehrfritz"
+to Blumenbühl; and indulged himself forthwith in a eulogium of that
+"unsophisticated nature." Albano soon took his leave, but much happier
+than when he came. A few street-lamps[193] certainly were now burning on
+his path.
+
+But in the morning he fell into a little obscure alley, where there was
+not a single one; in other words, Rabette, the little reindeer, came
+running to Lilar, as she yesterday had to Pestitz,--for what is a race
+of a mile to a country-girl, else than a simple _Allemande_?[194]--and
+shook and shook her heart before him, even to its very ears, but nothing
+fell out of it except pleasant images, a few heavens, a complete
+wedding-day, a couple of parents-in-law, and a Captain's wife. "The
+Minister had been so courteous toward me, but--the mother afterward
+still more so toward my parents; and they have mentioned and praised the
+Captain so much,--in short, they of course know all, my glorious,
+heartily-loved brother!" said she,--but of Liana she had nothing to
+bring to her glorious brother, except a bill of her health; her joyous
+eye had not turned toward any dark region whatever. "We were not alone a
+minute, that is the reason of it," she added, and came again upon the
+subject of her Captain, whom the Minister had sent out on the Haarhaar
+road, as chief marshal of the escort of the Princess; yet she referred
+him to the illumination night in Lilar, when she and Liana, and the
+parents on both sides, had arranged to be there. Thou good creature! who
+is so cruel as to begrudge thee the glittering ring of joy, which thou
+contemplatest on thy brown and hard-boiled hand, and who does not fondly
+wish that its stones may never fall out?
+
+Soon after, the brother of the past festivals flew to the heart of the
+deserted one,--Charles. He repeated almost exactly Rabette's deposition,
+although not her rapture; he said,--but without special emotion,--that
+his father actually threw him the brotherly hand kiss through several
+rooms, distinguished and designated him quite particularly, and kindly
+made use of him for business purposes; and all this merely since he had
+become acquainted with his love for Rabette, and the silent assent of
+the parents; for with his father, though the heart was of no account,
+yet Rabette's fief was, especially as one could not trust, with all the
+romantic stock-jobbing of his heart, that he would not himself one day
+realize the poorest result.
+
+With a sighing breast, which would gladly have imparted more to an
+expecting one, Charles merely related that he had found Liana well and
+quiet, but not alone for one minute. The association of another's want
+with his own open, rich fortune was, so Albano believed, the fair,
+tender reason why Charles glided with such cool, fleeting pleasure over
+the parental benediction of his soul's bond. O, how he loved him at this
+moment! Could he have loved him ever so much more, he would have done
+it, though Liana had been actually lost to the sum of his happiness,
+merely to show himself and him that holy friendship wants no third heart
+in order to love a second.
+
+This cloud of silence lay fixed for weeks, and grew more and more dark
+around his fairest heights; and the guiltless one went round and round
+through the darkness in a circle of contradictions. How must this youth
+have harassed himself when he thought, as he soon did, that the parents
+would, in all probability, reject an alliance with him, as he, indeed,
+thought himself obliged rather to forget than to reciprocate their
+advances, and that they might sacrifice two hearts to political
+heartlessness; or when he let fall upon the innocent Liana the suspicion
+of giving way before parental assaults, which suspicion received
+reinforcement from the past through the conjecture that she had
+embraced him rather in poetical enthusiasm and from goodness, and more
+with wings than with arms, and that, in fact, accustomed to such long
+submissions, she could hardly distinguish sacrifices and inclinations,
+and might take one for the other; or when, as he soon and oftenest did,
+he turned the point of all these weapons against his own breast, and
+asked himself why he had such a firm confidence in friendship, and such
+a wavering one in love. Then this reproach led him to a second, upon
+every previous one, which he had cast upon the good soul merely for the
+sake, according to the proselyting system and reforming mania which men
+exercise more upon their wives than upon their friends, of melting her
+down for his own mould. This last he might rue; as Holberg[195] observes
+that men do not keep estates so well as women, because the former are
+always wanting to improve them more than the latter; on the same ground,
+also, lovers spoil women more than these do them.
+
+For the sake merely of getting more expeditiously from the tedious
+tribunal of the future his sentence of death, or a more agreeable
+document, he went again to the ministerial house. He was again smilingly
+received by the Minister, and seriously by the mother; and, in reply to
+his question, Liana was not quite well. He laid before old Schoppe (who
+now pressed his friendship upon him more warmly, and who, for some time
+near the dissecting-knife of the Doctor, had not studied any other heart
+than that which was to be spattered to pieces and prepared) a short
+question about the Doctor's visits at the Minister's. How was he
+astonished when he heard that no one out of the house any longer made
+any visits to it, (while Liana, quite blooming, went into all circles,)
+except merely the Lector, who made very frequent ones!
+
+He well comprehended that only the Medusa's-heads of the parents could
+turn the softest heart into stone against him; but even this he found
+not right. He boldly demanded that she should love him more than her
+parents, "not from egotism," said he to himself, "not on my account, but
+on her own." A lover wishes a great, indescribable love, of which he
+thinks himself always only the accidental and unworthy object, merely
+for the sake of tendering the highest himself.
+
+Even the silent Lector, who generally placed all newly rising lights
+behind light-shades and fire-screens, communicated unbidden to the Count
+the novel tidings that Liana would be, under the administration of the
+coming Princess, something--[196]maid of honor. His old jealous
+suspicion of Augusti's wishes or relations allowed him no answer to
+that.
+
+Now his spirit manned itself, and he wrote straight to the soul that
+belonged to him, and sent the letter to her brother for delivery. The
+latter came the next day, but seemed to him not to have any answer yet,
+because he would otherwise have given it with the first greeting.
+Charles introduced him to the Haarhaar court, where he had lately been;
+said every nerve there had on jack-boots, and every heart a
+hoop-petticoat; then went on to eulogize the youngest, but most
+unpopular Princess, _Idoine_; declared she possessed, in addition to all
+her other advantages,--for instance, purity, kindness, decision of
+character, which even on the throne selects for itself its own lot and
+life,--the further grace of amiableness, since even the princely bride,
+who loved no one else, hung upon her heart, and--last, not least--the
+advantage of a very deceptive similarity to Liana.
+
+"Has Liana received my letter yet?" asked Albano. Charles handed it back
+to him. "By Heaven!" said he, ardently, and yet ambiguously, "I could
+not get it to her just now. But, brother, canst thou believe, only for
+one minute, that she does not remain forever most thine?" "I do not
+believe anything at all!" said Albano, offended, and tore his leaf on
+the spot into little bits no bigger than the letters. "Only _we_ will,"
+he continued, with a tone of emotion, "remain, as we are, firm as iron,
+and flexible as iron when it comes out of the furnace." The deeply
+touched friend sought to console him with the following: "Only wait, I
+pray, the illumination evening;[197] then she will speak with thee. She
+must certainly appear, and thou wilt wonder in what character, and for
+whom." He nodded silently; he easily gathered her part from her
+resemblance to Idoine, and from her expected office at court. But what
+help was it to his fortune?
+
+With the return of his note, which he despatched against his pride, that
+same pride came back in renewed strength. Now was a hot seal stamped on
+Albano's bleeding lip; he had now nothing for and before him, except
+time, which was now his poison, and would by and by, as he hoped, be his
+antidote. Nothing was ever master over his sense of honor, when it was
+once roused. He could look forward to a scaffold on which blood spurted
+out, but he could not look upon a pillory where, under the heavy,
+poisonous, murderous pain of scorn and self-contempt, a downcast,
+distracted face hung on the sinful breast.
+
+Charles sometimes approached with a few lights the long night-like
+riddle; but Albano, however much he wished them, staggered him by
+opposition, and sought not even to hear him, much less to ask him
+questions. So he lay on hard, youthful, thorny rose-buds, which a single
+hour can open into tender roses. Victories beget victories, as defeats
+do defeats; he found now, if not a complete relief from the emotions
+which besieged him, nevertheless a mountain-fortification against them,
+provisioned for a little eternity, in the shape of an astronomical
+observatory. With an entire and firmly collected soul he threw himself
+upon theoretical astronomy, in order not to see daylight, and upon
+practical astronomy in order not to see night. The watch-tower stood
+indeed upon a mountain intermediate between the city and Blumenbühl, and
+commanded a view of both; but he cast his eyes only upon the
+constellations, not upon those rosy-red spots of the earth, where they
+now could have sucked out of the cold flower-cups only water instead of
+honey. Thus amid the festive preparations in Lilar did he go armed to
+meet the long delaying evening when the presence of the fairest soul
+should either bless or destroy him, vainly looking from time to time at
+the distant telegraph of his destiny, which was constantly moving,
+uncertain whether with peaceful or hostile significance.
+
+
+74. CYCLE.
+
+To remove the seals from the enrolled acts of the foregoing history for
+the purpose of looking into it,--or to push back the blinds and shove up
+the windows of the same,--or to uncover so many covered ways and
+vehicles,--or, in fine, the whole matter,--all that is mere
+metaphors,--and the most inappropriate ones, too,--which cannot serve
+any other purpose than only to hold off still longer and more tediously
+the long-expected solution, which they would fain describe; much rather
+and better, methinks, will the whole war and peace position in the
+ministerial palace be at once freely laid bare as follows:--
+
+Herr Von Froulay had, as has been already mentioned, come home from
+Haarhaar with a _Belle-vue_ in his face, and with a _mon-plaisir_ in his
+heart (provided these tropes do not seem more elaborate than exquisite).
+He told his lady openly, what had hitherto detained and enchanted him so
+long,--the future Princess, who had conceived for him a more than
+ordinary fancy. He threw a full, glorifying light on her enriched
+understanding,--he never praised anything beyond this in
+ladies,[198]--as well as a faint streak of shade upon his own _her's_;
+and pronounced himself fortunate in the possession of a person whose
+fine, persistent coquetry (he said) he for his part could recommend as a
+model, and whose attachment he, in fact, (that he pretended not to
+conceal,) reciprocated half-way, but only half-way, for it was perfectly
+true, what the Duke of Lauzun[199] asserted: in order to keep the love
+of Princesses, one must just hold them in right hard and short. In the
+old man accordingly there shoots up, as we see, quite late,--not unlike
+the case of fresh teeth,--which oftentimes old men do not cut till they
+are nonagenarians,--a lover's heart beneath the star; only it is more to
+be wished than hoped, he will especially play the ridiculous in the
+matter. For as he all the week long holds the helm of state, either on
+the rower's bench, to keep it in motion, or on the cabinet-maker's
+bench, to trim it down into a fine and light shape for the Prince; the
+consequence is, he is so tired when Saturday comes, that no Virgil and
+no tempest could persuade him--and though his feet had not more steps to
+take for the purpose than the number of feet in Virgil's hexameter, or
+of commandments in the Decalogue of Moses--to accompany a Dido out of
+the storm into the nearest cave. He does no such thing. He remains quite
+as free from sentimental and pathetic love as from sensual, especially
+as he apprehends that the former would in the end entangle him in the
+latter, because like a minor-tone it has quite a different returning
+scale from its ascending one. The ironical and stinging element in the
+man made every marriage--even that of souls--to him as well as to other
+world's people as disagreeable in the end as the spines of the hedgehogs
+make theirs. He lays up, therefore, in the future for the Princess only
+a cold, politic, coquettish, courtly love, such as she herself haply
+has, and such as he has occasion for, in order less to gain her than to
+gain from her, and to gain first of all the entire Prince. I promise
+myself cosmopolitan readers, who, I hope, find no offence to this
+personage in Froulay's partiality for his lady; for so soon as the
+court-preacher has but once laid his joining hand on the Princess, then
+has this house-steward made, as it were, the cut in the pea-hen,[200]
+and she can then be taken off untouched, and be feasted on in other
+places.
+
+I have already (in the second volume) intimated the anxiety of the
+Minister's lady lest the Minister, if he should (in this volume) come
+back and not find Liana at home, should chafe; but, contrary to
+expectation, he approved; her use of the country air-bath fell in
+exactly with his design of sending her into the vapor-bath of the court
+atmosphere. He told her mother that it by no means displeased him that
+she should now be entirely well, since the new Princess would select her
+for her maid of honor, whenever he should say the word. He could not for
+three minutes see a sceptre or a sceptrelet lying by him without proving
+its polarity for himself, and either attracting or repelling something
+with it. As the famous theologian, Spener,--a predecessor of our
+Spener,--prayed to God so beautifully thrice a day for his friends, one
+finds with similar pleasure that the courtier daily prays a little for
+his friends before his god, the Prince, and seeks to obtain something.
+
+The Minister's lady, never opposing his changeable plans in the sketch,
+but only in the execution, easily became reconciled with his latest one,
+because it at least seemed rather to stand in no auxiliary relation to
+the old one of the bethrothal to Bouverot.
+
+One evening, unfortunately, the fatal, anxious Lector--who pasted the
+smallest visiting-card to a Fulda's historic chart--arrived in her
+presence with his packet-ship, and came ashore having under his two arms
+the state and imperial advertisements of her two children; he had one of
+them under each; and yet why do I fly out upon the man? Could a
+double-romance, especially when played in the open air, remain better
+concealed than a single one?
+
+Her astonishment can be compared with the greater astonishment of her
+husband, who happened to have just been screwing on in the third chamber
+his tin ear,--made by Schropp of Magdeburg,--in order to listen to the
+servants, and who now caught a number of things. Nevertheless, the
+double-ear, with the broad meshes of its nocturnal lark-net, had only
+fished up from Augusti's low, whispering, courtly lips single, long,
+proper names,--such as Roquairol and Zesara. Hardly had the soft-spoken
+Lector gone out, when he stepped gayly into the chamber, with his ear in
+his hand, and demanded of her a report of the reports. He held
+it beneath his dignity either to patch up or disguise his
+suspicion,--which, even in the friendliest and gayest mood, would never
+shut its Argus ears and eyes,--or to dissemble his eavesdropping, with
+so much as a syllable or a blush of shame; the fair lilies of the most
+colorless impudence were not painted, but branded on him. The Minister's
+lady immediately seized upon the female expedient, of telling the
+truth--half-way; namely, the agreeable truth of Roquairol's
+well-received advances at the house of Wehrfritz, whose estate and
+provincial directorship had been cast into a very fitting shape for a
+father-in-law. Meanwhile the Minister had seen in his lady's face the
+mourning-border around this pleasant notification-document, far too
+clearly and broadly not to inquire about that prominent word "Zesara,"
+which his delicate tin searcher had also caught up, but he inquired in
+vain; for the mother held her good daughter too dear to set this wolf on
+the scent for her into her Eden; she hoped to get her out of it in a
+gentler way, by a divine voice and angels; and so evaded his question.
+
+But the wolf now ran farther on in his track; he got the gout in his
+stomach,--so it was reported to Dr. Sphex,--demanded of him speedy aid,
+and also some intelligence of his tenant, the Count. Doctor and Madam
+Sphex had already a grudge against the inflated youth; through their
+four juvenile envoys, as _enfans perdus_ in every sense, as four
+hearing-organs of every city rumor, much might be brought in on
+advice-yachts from Blumenbühl and Lilar. In short, the auricular organs
+fitted in so well to those of others, that Froulay, in a few days, was
+in a situation to ask, with his lily brow, the Greek woman for a letter
+to his son, which he offered to take along with him.
+
+He found one, which he broke open with great joy, without, however,
+finding anything therein from Albano's or Liana's hand, but only some
+stupid allusion of Rabette to that couple, which, to the Minister, were
+as much as if, with his sharp exciseman's-probes, he had bored into
+Liana's heart and lighted upon contraband there. Without any long,
+slavish copying of the former seal, he set a second upon the letter, and
+went away enlightened by it.
+
+We can all follow him, when we have detained ourselves only a few
+minutes for his justification, with my
+
+
+_Apology and Defence[201] in the Matter of the Second Seal upon Letters
+in State Affairs._
+
+Whether the examination of other people's letters pertains to old
+Froulay as minister or father,--(although the latter presupposes the
+former, the father of the country implying every other father and his
+own too,)--I will not decide, except by the parenthesis just inserted.
+The state which tackles on the post-horses before letters has, it
+should seem, the right to examine more narrowly, under the closed visor
+of the seal, these not so much _blind_ as blinding _passengers_,[202] in
+order to know whether it is not using its horses in the service of its
+enemies. The state, an ever-drawing light-magnet, means certainly only
+to have light in the case, and particularly light upon all light in
+general; it requires only the naked truth, without cover or covering.
+All that rides and fares through its gates must, though it were dressed
+in a surtout, just open its _red_ mouth, and say what name and business.
+
+As the common soldier must first show his letters to his officer, the
+garrison-soldier of the Bastile to the governor, the monk his to the
+prior, the American colonist his to the Dutchman,[203]--in order that he
+may burn them up, if they find fault with him,--so, surely, can no
+statesman, whether he regards the state as a barrack, or as an
+Engelsburg, or as a _monasterium duplex_, or as a _European possession
+in Europe_, deny it the right to keep all its letters as open as bills
+of lading, patents of nobility, bills of sale, and apostolic epistles
+are. The only mistake is, that it does not get hold of the letters
+before they are enveloped and sealed. That is immoral enough; for it
+necessitates the government to open and shut,--to draw the letter out of
+the case, and put it back again, as the cook with pains turns the snail
+out of his shell, and then, when he is once taken off from the fire,
+shoves him back again into it, to serve him up therein.
+
+This last is the point of the compass and cardinal wind which is to
+guide us onward; for universally acknowledged as it is, just as custom
+and observance are, that the government, on the same ground on which it
+opens the _last_ will, must have the power to unseal also the last but
+one, and the one before that, and finally the very first, before its
+heir can do it, and that a prince must be able still more readily to
+bring servants' letters into the same deciphering chancery (and into
+their antechamber, the unsealing chamber), wherein the letters of
+princes and legates fly open before the caper-spurge,[204] nevertheless
+the cork-drawing of letters,--the joint seal, the vicariate seal, the
+laborious imitation of the L. S., or _loco sigilli_,--all this is
+something very annoying and almost detestable; out of the wrong a right
+must therefore be made by constitutional repetition.
+
+Something of the kind might be brought about, I flatter myself, if it
+were commanded to write letters only on stamp-paper. An inspecting and
+stamping office appointed for that purpose would then read everything
+over beforehand.
+
+Or one might prohibit in future all private seals, just as they do
+mint-stamps for private coin. A seal-department would then interfere,
+with full rights, and seal up, as they now do the legacies of the
+deceased, so in that case those of the living.
+
+Or--which is perhaps preferable--an epistolary _censorship_ must
+commence. Unprinted newspapers, _nouvelles à la main_,[205]--that is,
+letters,--can never, inasmuch as they divulge still greater mysteries,
+demand a greater freedom of censorship than printed newspapers;
+especially as every letter, now-a-days, so easily becomes a circular,
+going everywhere. A catalogue of prohibited letters (_index
+expurgandarum_) would always be, in that case, a _word to
+correspondents_.
+
+Or let the postmasters be put under oath that they will be faithful
+referendaries of whatever they find weighty or considerable in the
+letters, which, before despatching, they have laid in the mental
+letter-balance, and closed again, with the hope, according to the
+Leibnitzian principle of the non-distinguishable seal, of speeding them
+far and wide.
+
+If the State finds all these ways of reading and closing letters new and
+difficult, then it may go on in its own way--of opening them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Froulay flew, laughing, to his lady, and assured her her falsehood
+towards him was no news to him at all. Her present plan, merely to work
+against Herr von Bouverot and himself, he understood full well. Hence it
+was that Rabette had had to come in, and the daughter to go out.
+Meanwhile he would show the hypocrite and bigot, or whoever it might be,
+that she had not merely a mother, but a father too. "She must
+immediately come home; _je la ferai damer,[206] mais sans vous et sans
+M. le Compte_," he concluded, with an allusion to the office of
+court-dame.
+
+But the Minister's lady began, in accordance with her vehement contempt
+of his projects and powers, with that coldness which would have more
+exasperated every ardent one than this cold one, to say to him that she
+must needs disapprove and oppose Liana's and the Count's love still more
+than he did; that she had merely, in an excessive and otherwise never
+disappointed confidence in Liana's openness of soul, believed her rather
+than herself, and, notwithstanding so many signs of Albano's partiality,
+let her go to Blumenbühl; that she would, however, give him her word on
+the spot to act with as much energy and spirit against the Count as
+against the German gentleman, and that she was, as surely as she knew
+Liana, almost certain of the easiest and happiest result.
+
+Of course this was unexpected to him and--incredible, especially after
+the previous concealment; only the finest man's soul distinguishes in
+the female the blending boundaries of self-deception and wilful
+delusion, weakness and deceit, accident and intent; besides, the
+Minister's lady was one of those women whom one must first love in order
+to know them, a case which is generally reversed. He readily accepted on
+the one hand the confession of her agreement and co-operation,--merely
+for the sake, hereafter, of turning it as a weapon against her;--but he
+could not conceal, on the other hand, that _there again_ (that was
+always his phrase) she had, according to her own confession, neglected
+to watch over her children from a want of jealousy. He retained the
+habit, when an open-hearted soul showed him its breaches, of marching in
+upon it through those breaches, as if he himself had made them. The
+penitent who knelt before him for forgiveness he would crush still
+lower, and instead of the key of absolution draw forth the hammer of the
+law.
+
+I owe it here to the Spaniards, who will one day become acquainted with
+me through miserable translations,[207] and to the Austrian knighthood
+of the Golden Fleece, who perhaps read the original in a counterfeit
+edition, to assign the reasons why the house of Froulay did not bespeak
+feasts of joy--instead of court-mourning--on the occasion of these
+advances by a son of their order, a Spanish Grandee, who often lays upon
+himself a German princely sceptre as a yardstick to measure himself
+withal. For every Spaniard must have hitherto wondered about this.
+
+I answer every nation. The Froulays had, in the first place, nothing
+against the union except the--certainty of separation; since on the same
+ground, which the Knights of the Fleece and the Spaniards have opposed
+to me, old Gaspard de Zesara can in no wise suffer a bridge to be thrown
+over from his Gothard to the Jungfrau [virgin]. Secondly, on this very
+ground the Minister could oppose to this romantic love a much older,
+wiser, which he bore toward the German gentleman and his moneys and
+_liaisons_, as well as the old grudge of the Knight of the Fleece.
+Thirdly, the Minister's lady had, beside these same grounds,--and
+besides several in favor of the Lector, perhaps,--one quite decisive
+one, and that was, she could not endure the Count; not merely and solely
+for the reason that she discovered a painful similarity between him and
+her son, and even husband, in pride, in excitability, in the
+characteristic fierceness of genius against poor married women, in want
+of religious humility and devoutness; but the principal reason why she
+could not well endure him was this: that she could not bear him. As the
+system of Predestination sentences some men to hell, whether they
+afterward deserve heaven or not, so a woman never takes back an enmity
+to which she has once doomed any one, all that country and city, God,
+time, and the individual's virtues may say to the contrary,
+notwithstanding.
+
+In the treaty of peace, concluding the usual chamber-war, the following
+private articles were adjusted between the married couple: The Count
+must be, on the Father's and Director's account, treated with the most
+courtly consideration, and shoved aside,--and Liana gently and gradually
+drawn away from Wehrfritz's house,--the whole dissolution of the
+engagement must seem to happen of itself without parental interference,
+merely through the breaking off of the daughter,--and the whole affair
+remain a mystery. Froulay hoped to keep the whole interlude or episode
+concealed from Liana's earlier-intended, the German gentleman,
+particularly as he, just now, in August, was more at the card-tables of
+the baths than at home.
+
+So it stood; and into this cold, awful pass the friendly Liana moved on,
+when on that warm living Sunday she left the blessed, open Lilar.
+Refined and sanctified by joy,--for every Paradise was to her a
+purifying Purgatory,--she came nobly to her mother's bosom, without
+remarking the strange seriousness of the reception by reason of the
+earnest warmth of her own. Her easy confession of the garden-company
+opened the trying scene,--almost in the _coulisse_. For the mother, who
+would fain have begun otherwise, had to mount the thunder-car at once,
+in order to thunder and lighten against such incomprehensible
+forgetfulness of female propriety; and yet she held in the
+thunder-steeds in mid-career, in order to enjoin upon Liana immediately,
+as the Minister might come any moment, a perfect silence on the subject
+of to-day's garden-party. Now she cast the deepest strengthening shade
+upon her previous mute falsehood towards a mother; for she arbitrarily
+transposed in her story the sowing and blossoming time of this love,
+even into the days preceding the journey to the country. How did the
+warm soul shudder at the possibility of such an unkindness! She led her
+mother as far as she could up along the pure, light pearl-brook of her
+history and love, and told all that we know, but without giving much
+satisfaction, because she left out precisely the main point; for, out of
+forbearance toward her mother, she felt obliged to let the apparition of
+Caroline, who in the beginning had been the image-stormer of her love
+and then its inspiring muse and bride's-maid, together with the
+death-certificate of the future, remain out of sight in the narration.
+
+She held, with fervent pressure, her mother's hand amidst more and more
+cheerful assurances, how she had always been disposed to tell her
+everything; she thought hopingly, she needed to save nothing but her
+_open_ heart. O thou hast more to save, thy warm, thy whole and living
+heart! Her mother now, from old habit, half believing her, found fault
+with nothing more than the whole affair, its impropriety, impossibility,
+folly. "O good mother," said Liana, simply remaining tender under the
+harsh picturing of the future Albano; "O he is not such, assuredly not!"
+Quite as tenderly did she far overlook the darkly-sketched future
+refusal of Don Gaspard, because to her faith the earth was only a
+blooming grave-mound hanging in the ether. "Ah!" said she, meaning how
+little time she was for this world, "our love is not so important!" Her
+mother took this word and the whole gentleness of her resistance, as
+preludes of an easy victory.
+
+At this moment Albano's father-in-law came in with a kettle-drum,
+alarm-bell, fire-drum, and rattlesnake, in his girdle, in order
+therewith to make himself audible. First he inquired,--for he had been
+listening in vain,--in a very exasperated manner, of the Minister's
+lady, where she had stowed away his ear (it was the tin duplicate ear,
+wherein, as in a Venetian lion's-head, all mysteries and accusations of
+the whole service and family met); he said, he had a little occasion for
+it just now, particularly since the newest "adventures of his worthy
+daughter there." The Siamese physicians begin the healing of a patient
+with treading upon him, which they call softening. In a similar manner
+Froulay loved to soften, by way of moral pre-cure; and accordingly
+began, with the above-mentioned speaking-machines in his girdle, to
+declare his sentiments explicitly on the subject of degenerate children;
+upon their arts and artifices; and upon intrigues behind fathers' backs
+(so that no father can accompany a volume of love-poems with a prose
+preface); backed up many points with the strongest political grounds,
+which all had reference to himself and his interest, and wound up with a
+little cursing.
+
+Liana heard him calmly, as one already accustomed to such daily
+returning equinoctial storm-bursts, without any other emotion, except
+that she often raised her downcast eye pityingly upon him, out of tender
+sympathy for the paternal dissatisfaction. In a calm he became loudest.
+"You will see to it, madam," said he, "that to-morrow forenoon she sends
+the Count what she has of his, together with a farewell, and notifies
+him of her new office, as an easy excuse; thou art to be court-dame to
+the reigning Princess, although thou didst not deserve that I should
+labor for thee!"
+
+"That is hard!" cried Liana, with breaking heart, falling upon her
+mother. He supposed she meant the separation from Albano, not from her
+mother, and asked, angrily: "Why?" "Father, I would so gladly," said
+she, and turned only her face away from the embrace, "die near my
+mother!" He laughed; but the Minister's lady herself shut to the
+hell-gates upon the flames which he still would fain have vomited forth,
+and assured him it was enough, Liana would certainly obey her parents,
+and she herself would be surety for it. The preacher of the law came
+down his pulpit-stairs with an audible ejaculation about a better
+security, calling back, as he went, that his ear must be produced
+to-morrow, and though he should have to search for it in all chests and
+cupboards.
+
+The mother kept silence now, and let her daughter softly weep on her
+neck; to both, after this drought of the soul, the draught of love was
+refreshment and medicine. They came out of each other's arms with
+cheered spirits, but both with entirely delusive hopes.
+
+
+75. CYCLE.
+
+A hard, black morning; only the outward atmospheric morning was
+dark-blue; there was nothing loud and stormy, except perchance the
+swarms of bees in the linden-thicket; the heaven's ether seemed to
+flutter away high over the stony streets, so as to settle down low in
+the bright open Lilar upon all hill-tops and tree-tops, and, blue as
+peacock's plumage, to play its hues over the twigs.
+
+Liana found on her writing-table a billet, folded in large quarto,
+wherein the Minister, ever-working, like a heart, sought even at this
+early hour of the morning, before raising out of the public documents
+for the several administration and exchequer counsellors the transient
+tempests which were necessary to fruitfulness, to descend upon his
+shuddering daughter with a cold morning rain-gust. In the decretal
+letter referred to, he developed more in detail, upon a sheet and a half
+what he had meant yesterday,--separation on the spot; and offered six
+grounds of separation,--first, his uncongenial relation with the Knight
+of the Fleece; secondly, her own and the Count's youth; thirdly, the
+approaching place of court-dame; fourthly, that she was his daughter,
+and this the first sacrifice to which he, her father, for all his
+previous ones, had ever laid claim; fifthly, she might perceive, by his
+indulgent "Yes," to the love of her brother, whose apparent improvement
+he held out to her as a model, that he lived and cared only for the
+welfare of his children; sixthly, he would send her to Fort * * * to his
+brother, the commandant, in case she were refractory, by way of exiling,
+punishing, and bringing her round; and neither weeping, nor falling at
+feet, nor mother, nor hell should bend him; and he gave her three days'
+time for reflection.
+
+Mutely, and with wet eyes, she handed to her who had been hitherto her
+comforter the heavy sheet. But the comforter had become a judge: "What
+wilt thou do?" said the Minister's lady. "I will suffer," said Liana,
+"in order that _he_ may not suffer; how could I so sorely sin against
+him?" The mother, whether actually under the old notion of her easy
+conversion, or from dissimulation, took that "He" for the father, and
+asked: "Say'st thou nothing of me?" Liana blushed at the substitution,
+and said: "Ah! poor me, I will not indeed be happy,--only true!" How had
+she during this night prayingly lived and wept amidst the fearful wars
+of all her inner angels! A love so guiltless, consecrated by her holy
+friend in heaven,--a fidelity so exceedingly abridged by early death;
+so sound-hearted a youth, shooting up with high, fruit-bearing summit
+heavenward, whom not even ghostly voices could scare or allure out of
+his faithful childhood's love toward her, insignificant one; the
+everlasting discomfort and grief which he would experience at the first,
+greatest lie against his heart; her short, straight path through life,
+and the nearness of that cross-way, at which she should wish to throw
+back,--not stones, but flowers upon the other pilgrims;--all these forms
+took her by _one_ hand to draw her away from her mother, who called
+after her with the words: "See how ungratefully thou art going from me,
+and I have so long suffered and toiled for thee!" Then came Liana back
+again out of the dusky, warm rose-vale of love into the dry, flat
+earth-surface of a life, wherein nothing breaks the monotony save her
+last mound. O how imploringly did she look up to the stars, to see
+whether they did not move as the eyes of her Caroline, and tell her
+_how_ she must sacrifice herself, whether for her lover or for her
+parents; but the stars stood friendly, cold, and still in the steadfast
+heavens.
+
+But, when the morning sun again beamed upon her heart, it beat
+hopefully, newly strengthened with the resolution to endure this day for
+Albano full many sorrows,--ah yes, even the first. Could Caroline,
+thought she, approve a love to which I must be untrue?
+
+Hardly had she left the lips of her mother with the morning greeting,
+when the latter sought, but more earnestly than yesterday, to draw up
+the roots of this steadfast heart out of its strange soil by a longer
+use of yesterday's flower-extractor. In her comparative anatomy of
+Albano and Roquairol, from the similarity of voice even to that of
+stature, she grew more and more cutting, till Liana, with a maiden's
+wit, at once asked, "But why may my brother, then, love Rabette?"
+"_Quelle comparaison!_" said the mother. "Art thou nothing better than
+she?" "She _does_, strictly speaking, much more than I," said she, quite
+candidly. "Didst thou never quarrel with the wild Zesara?" asked the
+mother. "Never, except when I was in the wrong," said she, innocently.
+
+The mother was alarmed to perceive more and more clearly that she had to
+pull up deeper and stronger roots than light flowers strike into the
+soil. She concentrated all her maternal powers of attraction and
+lifting-machines upon one point, for the upturning of the still green
+myrtle. She disclosed to her the Minister's dark plan of an alliance
+with the German gentleman, her hitherto concealed strifes and sighs on
+the subject, her thus far effectual resistance, and the latest paternal
+stratagem, to make her a garrison-prisoner with his brother, and thereby
+probably Herr von Bouverot a besieger of the citadel.
+
+For some readers and relicts of the heavy, old-fashioned, golden age of
+morality, the remark is here introduced and printed, that a peculiar,
+cold, unsparing, often shocking and provoking, candor of remark upon the
+nearest relatives and the tenderest relations is so very much at home in
+the higher ranks, that even the fairer souls, among whom, surely, this
+mother belongs, cannot, absolutely, understand or do otherwise.
+
+"O thou best mother!" cried Liana, agitated, but not by the thought of
+the rattle and the snaky breath of Bouverot, or of his murderous spring
+at her heart,--she thought with as much indifference of being betrothed
+to him as any innocent one does of his dying on a scaffold,--but by the
+thought of the long building over and crowding out of sight of the
+motherly tears, the streams of motherly love, which had hitherto flowed
+nourishingly deep down under her flowers. She threw herself gratefully
+between those helpful arms. They closed not around her, because the
+Minister's lady was not to be made weak and soft by any washing wave and
+surge of sudden emotion.
+
+Into this embrace the Minister struck or stepped in. "So!" said he,
+hastily. "My ear, madam," he continued, "cannot be found again at all
+among the domestics; I have that to tell you." For he had to-day posted
+himself upon a law-giving Sinai, and thundered into the ears of the
+service assembled at its foot the inquiry after his own ear, "because I
+must believe," he had said to them, "that you, for very good reasons,
+have stolen it from me." Then he had swept like a hail-storm, or a
+kitchen-smoke in windy weather, through the servants' apartments and
+corners, one by one, in quest of his ear. "And thou?" said he, in a
+half-friendly tone to Liana. She kissed his hand, which he, as the Pope
+does his foot, always despatched for kisses, as proxy and lip-bearer,
+agent, and _de latere nuncio_ of his mouth.
+
+"She continues disobedient," said the severe lady. "Then she is a little
+like you," said he, because the mistrustful one looked upon the embrace
+as a conspiracy against him and his Bouverot. Upon this, his ice-Hecla
+burst out, and flamed and flowed, now upon daughter, now upon wife. The
+former was absolutely a miserable creature, he said; and only the
+Captain was worth anything, whom he luckily had educated by himself
+alone. He saw through all, heard all, though they had hid away his
+ear-trumpet. There was, accordingly, as he saw, (he pointed to his
+unsealed morning-psalm,[208]) a communication between the two colleges;
+but he invoked God to punish him if he did not--"my dear daughter, pray
+answer at last!" he begged.
+
+"My father," said Liana, who, since the fraternization of Bouverot and
+the ill treatment from her mother, had begun to feel her heart wake up,
+which, however, could only despise and never hate, "my mother has to-day
+and yesterday told me all; but I have surely duties towards the Count!"
+A bolder liveliness than her parents had ever missed or found in her
+beamed under her upraised eye. "Ah, I will truly remain faithful to him
+just as long as I live," said she. "_C'est bien peu_," replied the
+Minister, astounded at such pertness.
+
+Liana listened now, for the first time, after the word which had escaped
+her; then, in order to justify the past and her mother, she conceived
+the pleasant and ridiculous purpose, of moving and converting the old
+gentleman by her ghost-visions or dream-seeings. She begged of him a
+solitary interview, and afterward--when it was reluctantly
+granted--intreated him therein for his sacred promise to be silent
+towards her mother, because she feared to show to that loving one the
+clock-wheels of her death-bell rattling so near to the fatal stroke. The
+old gentleman could only, with a comic expression,--which made him look
+like one who with a bad cold wants to laugh,--vow that he would keep his
+word so far as was necessary, because never, so far as he could
+recollect, had his word been kept by him, only he had been often kept by
+his word. In such men, word and deed are like theatrical thunder and
+lightning, which, though generally occurring in close connection, and
+simultaneously in heaven, on the stage break forth out of separate
+corners, and by means of different operators. But Liana would not rest
+till he had put on a word-keeping, sincere face,--a painted window.
+Thereupon she began, after a kissing of the hand,[209] her ghostly
+history.
+
+With unbroken seriousness, and firmly contracted muscles, he heard the
+extraordinary narration through; then, without saying a word, he took
+her by the hand and led her back into the presence of her mother, to
+whom he handed her over with a long psalm of praise and thanksgiving
+about her successful daughter's-school. "His boy's-school with Charles
+had not been blessed to him, at least in this degree," he added. As a
+proof, he frankly communicated to her--cold-bloodedly working up all
+Liana's pangs, as the coopers do cypress-branches into cask-hoops--the
+little which he had promised to bury in silence, because he always
+prostituted either himself or the other party, generally both. Liana sat
+there, deeply red, and growing hotter and hotter, with downcast eyes,
+and begged God to preserve her filial love towards her father.
+
+No sympathizing eye shall be further pained with the opening of a new
+scene, when the ice of his irony broke, and became a raging stream, into
+which flowed tears of maternal indignation, also, at the thought of a
+precious being, and her feverish, fatal, dreaming of herself away into
+the last sleep. The object and the danger almost united the married
+couple for the second time; when there is a glazed frost, people go very
+much arm in arm. "Thou hast sent nothing to Lilar?" asked the father.
+"Without your permission I certainly should not do it," said she; but
+she meant her letters, not Albano's. He took advantage of the
+misunderstanding, and said, "Thou hast, however, surely." "I will gladly
+do, and let be done everything," said she, "but only on condition the
+Count consents, in order that I may not appear to him disingenuous; he
+has my sacred word for my truth!" At this mild firmness, at this Peter's
+rock overgrown with tender flowers, the father stumbled the hardest. In
+addition to this, the transition of a haughty lover from his own wishes
+to those of his enemies, supposing they had allowed Liana the question
+to the Count, was so impossible on the one hand, and the solicitation of
+this change, whether it were granted or refused, absolutely so degrading
+on the other, that the astounded Minister's lady felt her pride rise,
+and asked again, "Is this thy last word to us, Liana?" And when Liana,
+weeping, answered, "I cannot help it; God be gracious to me!" she turned
+away indignantly toward the Minister, and said: "Do now what you take to
+be _convenable_; I wash my hands in innocence!" "Not so entirely, _ma
+chère_; but very well!" said he, "thou wilt stay after to-morrow in thy
+chamber, till thou hast corrected thyself, and art more worthy of our
+presence!" he announced, as he went out, to Liana; firing at her
+meanwhile two eye-volleys, wherein, according to my estimate, far more
+reverberating fires, tormenting ghosts, eating, devouring medicaments,
+brain and heart-borers, were promised, than a man can generally hold to
+give or bear to receive.
+
+Poor maiden! Thy last August is very hard, and no harvest-month day!
+Thou lookest out into the time, where thy little coffin stands, on which
+a cruel angel wipes away the still fresh flower-pieces of love running
+round it, in order that it may, all white, as rosy-white as thy soul or
+thy last form, be consigned to the grave!
+
+This banishment by her mother into the desert of her cloister-chamber
+was quite as frightful to her, only not more frightful than her anger,
+which she had to-day, only for the third time, experienced, though not
+deserved. It was to her as if now, after the warm sun had gone down, the
+bright evening glow had also sunk below the horizon, and it grew dark
+and cold in the world. She remained this whole day, which was yet
+allowed her, with her mother; gave, however, only answers, looked
+friendly, did everything cheerfully and readily, and--as she quickly
+dashed away, with her tiny finger, every gathering dew-drop out of the
+corner of her eyes, as if it were dust, because she thought, at night I
+can weep enough,--she had very dry eyes; and all that, in order not to
+be an additional burden to her oppressed mother. But she, as mothers so
+easily do, confounded a timid, loving stillness with the dawning of
+obduracy; and when Liana, with the innocent design of consolation,
+wished to have Caroline's picture brought for her from Lilar, this
+innocence also passed for hardness, and was punished and reciprocated
+with a corresponding on the part of the parent, namely, with the
+permission to send. Only the Minister's lady demanded the French prayers
+of her again, as if she were not worthy to lay them under her present
+heart. Never are human beings smaller than when they want to plague and
+punish without knowing _how_.
+
+As every one who rules, whether he sits on a chair of instruction or a
+princely one, or, like parents, on both, when the occupant of its
+footstool once leaves off his former obedience, imputes that obedience
+to him, not as a mitigation, but as an aggravation of his offence, so
+did the Minister's lady also toward her hitherto so uniformly docile
+child. She hated her pure love, which burned like ether, without ashes,
+smoke, or coal, so much the more, and held it to be either the author
+or the victim of an incendiary fire, particularly as her own married
+love hitherto had seldom been anything more than a showy chimney-piece.
+
+Liana at last, too heavily constrained, since on the other side of the
+wall-tapestry the serene day, the loveliest sky was blooming, ascended
+to the Italian roof. She saw how people were travelling and riding back
+contentedly from their little places of pleasure, because the earth was
+one; on Lilar's bushy path the walkers were sauntering with a blissful
+slowness home,--in the streets there was a loud carpentering at the
+festive scaffoldings and Charles's-wains for the princely bride, and the
+finished wheels were rolled along for trial,--and everywhere were heard
+the drillings of the young music, which when grown up was to go before
+her. But when Liana looked upon herself, and saw her life alone standing
+here in dark raiment,--over yonder the empty house of her loved one,
+here her own, which to her had also become empty,--this very spot, which
+still reminded her of a lovelier, rarer blossoming than that of the
+_Cereus serpens_,--and oh! this cold solitude, in which her heart
+to-day, for the first time, lived without a heart; for her brother, the
+chorister of her short song of gladness, had been sent off, and Julienne
+had for some time been incomprehensibly invisible to her,--no, she could
+not see the fair sun go down, who, so serene and white, was sinking to
+slumber with his high evening star,--or listen to the happy evening
+chorus of the long day, but left the shining eminence. O how does joy
+die a stranger in the untenanted, dark bosom, when she finds no sister
+and becomes a spectre there! Thus does the beautiful green, that spring
+color, when a cloud paints it, betoken nothing but long moisture.
+
+When she entered, soon, the asylum of day, the bedchamber, the heavens
+without flashed heat-lightning; O why just now, cruel fate?--But here,
+before the still-life of night, when life, covered with her veil, sounds
+more faintly,--here may all her tears, which a heavy day has been
+pressing,[210] gush forth freely. On the pillow, as if it bore the last,
+long sleep, rests this exhausted head more softly than on the bosom
+which reproachfully reckons up against it its tears; and it weeps
+softly, not _upon_, only _for_ loved ones.
+
+According to her custom, she was on the point of opening her mother's
+prayers, when she recollected, with a startled feeling, that they had
+been taken from her. Then she looked up with burning tears to God, and
+prepared alone out of her broken heart a prayer to him, and only angels
+counted the words and the tears.
+
+
+76. CYCLE.
+
+The father had made this chamber-imprisonment a punitory mark of her
+refusal. With deep anguish she uttered this mute no, in the very fact
+that she voluntarily stayed in the chamber, and denied her mother the
+morning kiss. She had, in the course of the night, cast many an ardent
+look at the dead image of her counsellor Caroline, but no original, no
+fever-created form had appeared to her. Can I longer doubt, she inferred
+from this, that the divine apparition, which has spoken the assenting
+word to my love, was something higher than my own creation, since I must
+otherwise have been able to form it again over against her picture?
+
+She had Albano's blooming letters in her desk, and opened it, in order
+to look over from her island into the remote orient land of warmer
+times; but she shut it to again; she was ashamed to be secretly happy,
+while her mother was sorrowful, who into these melancholy days had not
+even come, like her, out of pleasant ones.
+
+Froulay did not long leave her alone, but soon sent for her; not,
+however, to sound her or pronounce her free, but for the purpose--which,
+as may well be conceived, required an unvarnished brow and cheek, whose
+fibrous network was as hard to be colored as his with the Turkish red of
+shame--of appointing her his mistress in artistic language, and taking
+her with him to the Prince's gallery, in order to learn from her the
+explanation of these frontispieces (for such they were to him) in this
+private deaf-and-dumb institution so well that he might be in a
+condition, so soon as the Princess should come to inspect it, to
+represent something better than a mute before the beauties of the
+pictures and the image-worshipping Regentess. Liana had to transfer an
+impression of every pictured limb, with the praise or blame appertaining
+thereunto, over into his serious brain, together with the name of the
+master. How delightedly and completely did she give this kallipædeia to
+her growling old cornute,[211] and would-be _connoisseur_ in painting,
+who paid her not a single thankful look as instruction-money!
+
+At noon, for the first time, did the daughter find her longed-for
+mother, among the kitchen-servants, very serious and sad. She ventured
+not to kiss her mouth, but only her hand, and opened upon her her
+love-streaming eyes only timidly and a little. Dinner seemed a
+funeral-feast. Only the old gentleman, who on a battle-field would have
+danced his marriage-minuet, and celebrated his birthday, was in good
+spirits and appetite, and full of salt. In case of a family jar, he
+usually ate _en famille_, and found in biting table-speeches, as common
+people do in winter and in famine, a sharper zest for food. Quarrelling,
+of itself, strengthens and animates, as physicians can electrify
+themselves merely by whipping something.[212]
+
+Laughable, and yet lamentable, was it that poor Liana, who was all day
+long to keep a prison, was always called out of it just for
+to-day,--this time into the carriage again, which was to set down the
+sad heart and the smiling face before nothing but bright palaces. She
+had to go with her parents to the Princess, and look as happy as they,
+who, on the melancholy road, regarded her as if she were to be envied.
+So does the heart which has been born not far from the throne never
+bleed, except behind the curtain, and never laugh but when it rises;
+just as these same distinguished ones were formerly executed only in
+secret. The Prince, who was ridiculously loud on the subject of his
+marriage; Bouverot, just returned from card-tables or privateering
+planks, whom Liana now, since the latest intelligences, could only
+endure with a shudder; and the Princess herself; who excused her
+previous absence from her on account of the distraction of preparing for
+the festival, and who very strangely jested at once about love and
+men,--only to a Liana who guessed so little, suffered so much, and
+endured so willingly, could all these beings and incidents seem anything
+but the most intolerable.
+
+Ah, what was intolerable, but the iron unchangeableness of these
+connections, the fixedness of such an eternal mountain-snow? Not the
+greatness, but the indefiniteness, of pain; not the minotaur of the
+labyrinth, its cellar-frost, sharp-cornered rocks, and vaults, make the
+breast contract and the blood curdle therein, but the long night and
+winding of its egress. Even under bodily maladies, therefore, unwonted
+new ones, whose last moment stretches away beyond our power of
+prediction, appear to us more ominous and oppressive than recurring
+ones, which, as neighboring frontier-enemies, are ever attacking us, and
+find us in arms.
+
+Thus stood the dumb Liana in a cloud, when the exulting Rabette, with a
+bosom full of old joys and new hope, came running into the house,--that
+sister of the holy youth who had been torn away from her, that
+confederate of such glorious days. She was honorably received, and
+constantly attended by a guard of honor,--the Minister's lady,--because
+she might, indeed, as likely be an ambassadress of the Count as an
+electress of her son. The cunning girl sought to snatch some solitary
+moments with Liana by boldly begging for her company to Blumenbühl. The
+company was granted, and even that of the mother freely offered, into
+the bargain. Liana led the way to Blumenbühl over the still-blooming
+churchyard of buried days. What a torrent of tears struggled upward in
+her breast when she parted from the still happy Rabette! _She_ had
+innocently left to the house one of the greatest apples of discord for
+the evening meal which the Minister had ever plucked for his fruit-dish
+with his apple-gatherer. Therefore he supped again _en famille_. That is
+to say, a silly word had escaped Rabette about the Sunday's meeting at
+Lilar. "Of that," said Froulay, in a very friendly manner, "thou hast
+not made one word of remark, daughter." "I did to my mother
+immediately," she replied, too fast. "I should be glad, too, to take an
+interest in thy amusements," said he, saving up his fury. In the
+pleasantest mood imaginable did this raftsman of so many tears and
+hewn-down blossoming branches, which he let float down thereupon, take
+his seat at the supper-table. He first asked servants and family for his
+auxiliary ear. Thereupon he passed over to the French, although the
+plate-exchangers found a rough translation thereof for themselves, a
+_versio interlinearis_, on his face, by way of giving notice that the
+distinguished Count had been there, and had inquired after mother and
+daughter. "With good right he asked for you both," continued the moral
+glacier, who loved to cool his warm food. "You are conspired, as I heard
+again to-day, to keep silence towards me; but why, then, shall I still
+trust you?" He hated from his heart every lie which he did not utter
+himself; so he seriously regarded himself as moral, disinterested, and
+gentle, merely for this reason, that he inexorably insisted upon all
+this in the case of others. With an abundant supply of the stinging
+nettles of persiflage,--the botanical ones also come forward best in
+cold and stony soil,--he covered over all his opening and closing
+lobster-claws, as we keep brook-crabs in nettles, and took first his
+tender child between the claws. Her soft, submissive smile he took for
+contempt and wickedness. How comes this soft one intelligibly by his
+paternal name, unless one assumes the old hypothesis, that children are
+usually most like that for which the pregnant mother vainly longed,
+which in this case was a soft spouse? Then he assailed, but more
+vehemently, the mother, in order by his mistrust to set her at variance
+with his daughter; yes, in order, perhaps, to torment the latter, by
+means of her mother's sufferings, into childlike sacrifices and
+resolutions. He very freely declared himself--for the egotist finds the
+most egotists, as love and Liana find only love, and no
+self-love--against the egotism around and beside him, and concealed not
+how very cordially he cursed them both for female egotists (as the old
+heathen did the Christians for atheists). The Minister's lady,
+accustomed to live with the Minister in no wedlock so little as in that
+of souls,--as Voltaire defines friendship,--said merely to Liana, "For
+whom do I suffer so?" "Ah, I know," she answered, meekly. And so he
+dismissed both full of the deepest sorrows, and thought afterward of his
+business matters.
+
+This general distress was increased by something which should have
+lessened it. The Minister was vexed that he had daily, in the midst of
+his wrath, to consult the taste of the women upon his--exterior. He
+wanted, at the marriage festival,--for the sake of his beloved,--to be a
+true bird of paradise, a Paradeur, a _Vénus a belles fesses_.[213] Of
+old he had loved to act the double part of statesman and courtier, and
+would fain, by way of monopolizing pride and vanity, grow into a
+Diogenes-Aristippus. Something of this, however, was not vanity; but
+that tormenting spirit of the male sex, the spirit of order and
+orthodoxy, would not go out of him. He was a man who would flourish
+against his very livery the clothes-switch wherewith the servant had let
+a few particles of dust settle on the state coat; still more dangerous
+was it--because he sat between two looking-glasses, the frizzling-glass
+and the large mirror in the stove-screen--to lay the dust rightly on his
+own wool; and hardest of all was it for him to be satisfied with the
+_fixing_ of his children. Liana, as artist, had now to suggest the
+proper color of a new surtout. _Sachets_, or smelling-bags, he directed
+to be filled, and with them his pockets; and a musk-plant pot placed in
+his window, not because he wished to use the leaves for perfume (that he
+expected of his fingers), but because he wished to anoint his fingers by
+rubbing the leaves together. Patent pomatum for the hands, and English
+pressed ornamental paper also for the same (when they wished to use a
+_billet-doux_ pen), and other knickknacks, excited less attention than
+the snuff which he procured for himself; not, however, for his nose, but
+for his lips, in order to rub them red. In fact, he would have rendered
+himself quite ridiculous in the eyes of many a merry blade, if such a
+one had seen him draw privately out of his souvenir the hair-tweezers,
+and with them the hair out of his eyebrows, just where the saddle of
+life, as upon a horse's back, had worn it white; and only the Minister
+himself could look serious during the process, when he sat before the
+looking-glass, smiling through all the finest ways of smiling,--the best
+one he caught and kept,--or when he tried the most graceful modes of
+throwing one's self on the sofa,--how often he had to practise
+this!--and finally, in short, through all his operations upon himself.
+
+Fortunately for the mother, the good Lector came; from the hand of this
+old friend she had so often taken, if not a Jacob's ladder, yet a
+mining-ladder, upon which to climb out of the abyss; hopefully she now
+laid before him all her trouble. He promised some help, upon the
+condition of speaking with Liana alone in her chamber. He went to her
+and declared tenderly his knowledge and her situation.
+
+How did the childlike maiden blush at the sharp day-beams which smote
+the scented night-violet of her love! But the friend of her childhood
+spoke softly to this smitten heart, and of his equal love for her and
+her friend; of the temperament of her father, and of the necessity of
+considerate measures; and said the best was to make him a sacred vow
+that she would yield to her parent's wish of her strictly avoiding the
+Count, only until he had received from his father, to whom he himself,
+as attendant of the son, had long been obliged to communicate
+intelligence and inquiries about the new connection, the yes or no in
+respect to it; if it were "no,"--which he would not answer for,--then
+Albano must solve the riddle; if it were "yes," he himself would stand
+security for a second on the part of her parents; at the same time,
+however, he must lay claim to her profoundest silence toward them in
+relation to his inquiries, whereby they might perhaps find themselves
+compromitted. Thereby he rooted himself only the more deeply in her
+confidence.
+
+She asked, trembling, how long the answer would tarry? "Six, eight,
+eleven days after the nuptials at most!" said he, reckoning. Yes, good
+Augusti! "Ah! we are all suffering, indeed," said she, and added,
+confidentially, and out of a weeping breast: "But is he well?" "He is
+diligent," was the reply.
+
+So he brought her, burdened with two secrets, and for the present
+consenting to an interim-separation, back to her mother; but she
+bestowed only upon the Lector the reward of a friendly look. He desired,
+meantime,--after his Carthusian manner,--no other reward than the most
+good-natured silence toward the Minister on the subject of his
+interference, since the latter might hold his deserts in this connection
+much greater than they were.
+
+The eight days' improvement and abstinence was announced to the
+Minister. He believed, however,--keeping in reserve a mistrust towards
+his lady,--that he could carry the war farther into the enemy's country
+with his own weapons; nevertheless, he contented himself, at the same
+time, with the new respite and Liana's disincarceration, for the sake of
+driving his daughter before him to his beloved at the nuptial festival,
+blooming and healthy as a sparkling pea-hen.
+
+Roquairol at this moment came back, and ushered into the house a cloud
+or two full of beautiful, bright morning redness. He delivered to his
+father tidings and greetings from the Princess. To Liana he brought the
+echo of that beloved voice, which had once said to her heaven: "Let it
+be!"--ah! the last melody among the discords of the unharmonious time!
+He guessed easily--for he learned little from his mother, who neglected
+him, and nothing from her daughter--how all stood. When he was actually
+on the point of slipping Albano's letter to her, in the twilight of
+evening, into her work-bag, and she said, with an ah! of love, "No, it
+is against my word,--but at some future time, Charles!"--then he saw, as
+he expressed it, "with crying indignation, his sister, in Charon's open
+boat, sailing into the Tartarus of all sorrows." About his friend he
+thought less than of his sister. The friendly, flattering Minister--he
+presented, as a proof of it, a valuable saddle to the Captain--informed
+him of Rabette's visit, and gave hints about betrothment and the like.
+Charles said, boldly: "He postponed every thought of his own happiness,
+so long as his dear sister saw none before her." By way of drawing the
+old gentleman again into more interest for Liana, he suggested to him a
+romantic invention for the marriage festival, which Froulay did not
+dream of, when he already stood quite close to it; namely, Idoine (the
+sister of the bride) was strikingly like Liana. The Princess loved her
+inexpressibly, but saw her only seldom, because on account of her strong
+character, which once refused a royal marriage, she lived in a village
+built and governed by herself, in a courtly exile from court. He now
+proposed to his father the poetic question, whether, on the illumination
+night, Liana might not for a few minutes, in the dream-temple, which was
+entirely suited to this beautiful illusion, delight the Princess with
+the image of her beloved sister.
+
+Whether it was that love toward the Princess made the Minister bolder,
+or he was intoxicated by the desire of brilliantly introducing Liana to
+her office of court-lady; suffice it, he found in the idea good sense.
+If anything supplied tobacco for the calumet of the _ex parte_ peace
+which he had made with his son, it was this theatrical part. He hastened
+immediately to the Prince and the Princess with the prayer for his
+permission and her sympathy; and then, when he had secured both, he
+hastened on to his Orestes, Bouverot, and said: "_Il m'est venu une idée
+tres singulière qui peut-être l'est trop; cependant le prince l'a
+approuvée_," etc.,--and finally--for he must not forget her either--to
+Liana.
+
+The Captain had already sought to persuade her beforehand. The mother
+opposed the dramatic imitation from self-respect, and Liana from
+humility; such a representation seemed to her a piece of presumption.
+But at last she gave in, simply because the sisterly love of the
+Princess had seemed to her so great and unattainable, just as if she did
+not cherish a similar sentiment in her own heart; thus she always
+regarded only the image in the mirror, not herself, as beautiful; just
+as the astronomer thinks the same evening, with its red splendors and
+night shadows, more sublime and enchanting, when he finds it in the
+moon, than when he stands in the midst of it on the earth. Perhaps, too,
+there entered another element of secret sweetness into Liana's love for
+the Prince's bride, namely, a step-daughter's affection; because she
+should once have been the bride of the Knight Gaspard. Women regard
+relationship more than we; hence, too, their ancestral pride is always
+several ancestors older than ours.
+
+Thus, then, did she make ready her oppressed heart for the light plays
+of the shining festival, which the coming Cycles are to present on the
+New-Year's holiday, as it were, of a new Jubilee.
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[192] This is Jean Paul's own image.--TR.
+
+[193] That is, of course, some lights of hope.--TR.
+
+[194] A German or Suabian dance.--TR.
+
+[195] His Moral Treatises, Vol. II. p. 96.
+
+[196] The Germans call the dash the _stroke of thought_. Here it
+implies an emphatic pause, as much as to say, "What do you think
+is coming?"--TR.
+
+[197] At the Prince's marriage.
+
+[198] With the Egyptians the enchanters were only learned men;
+with him the learned women were enchantresses.
+
+[199] _Mémoires secrets sur les Règnes de Louis XIV._, etc. Par
+Duclos. Tom. I.
+
+[200] It is well known that a cut is made in a fowl left whole as
+a sign that it has been upon the Prince's table, so that it may
+not be set on again, but otherwise enjoyed.
+
+[201] In German, _Schutz- und Stich-blatt_,--literally, a plate
+to defend the hand in parrying and thrusting,--_Blatt_, meaning
+_leaf_ (of paper) also, conveys a _pun_ not easily
+translated.--TR.
+
+[202] The blind-passenger in the German stage-coach corresponds
+to our _dead-head_ in stage or steamboat.--TR.
+
+[203] See Klockenbring's collected Essays.
+
+[204] (In German, _Spring-wurzel_.) The juice of some plant
+(perhaps Devil's-milk) highly and quickly corrosive.--TR.
+
+[205] News by hand.--TR.
+
+[206] The King had to _damer_, or make a dame of an unmarried
+maiden of rank, before she could go to Versailles to court.
+
+[207] Not so miserable perhaps as a French mangling the
+translator remembers to have seen.--TR.
+
+[208] He refers to the letter he had left on Liana's table, and
+which she had shown to her mother.--TR.
+
+[209] _Fist_ in the original.--TR.
+
+[210] I.e. as in a wine-press.--TR.
+
+[211] Alluding to the horned hat once worn by graduated printers'
+apprentices.--TR.
+
+[212] Beseke discovered it. See "On the Elemental Fire," by him,
+1786.
+
+[213] Venus with beautiful thighs.--TR.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+RICHTER'S WRITINGS.
+
+
+TITAN. A ROMANCE. 2 vols. 16mo. $3.00.
+
+FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 2 vols. 16mo. $2.75.
+
+LEVANA; OR, THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+HESPERUS. 2 vols. 16mo. _Preparing._
+
+_The above volumes are printed in uniform size and style._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+IN PRESS.
+
+LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. By ELIZA BUCKMINSTER LEE. New Edition, Revised. 1
+volume.
+
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2), by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2), by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2)
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Charles T. Brooks
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2011 [eBook #35664]
+[Most recently updated: November 22, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TITAN: A ROMANCE V. 1 (OF 2) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="500" height="539" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+
+<h1>TITAN:</h1>
+
+<h2>A ROMANCE.</h2>
+
+<h4>FROM THE GERMAN OF</h4>
+
+<h2><i>JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.</i></h2>
+
+<h4>TRANSLATED BY</h4>
+
+<h3>CHARLES T. BROOKS.</h3>
+
+<h4>IN TWO VOLUMES.</h4>
+
+<h4>VOL. I.</h4>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 150px;">
+<img src="images/illus004.jpg" width="150" height="189" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">
+BOSTON:<br />
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS.<br />
+1864.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by<br />
+<br />
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS,<br />
+<br />
+in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of<br />
+Massachusetts.<br />
+<br />
+THIRD EDITION.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<i><span class="smcap">University Press:</span></i><br />
+<span class="smcap">Welch, Bigelow, and Company</span>,<br />
+<i><span class="smcap">Cambridge.</span></i><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/hornstart.jpg" width="550" height="137" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2>TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The "Titan" is Jean Paul's longest&mdash;and the author meant it, and held
+it, to be his greatest and best&mdash;romance; and his public (including Mr.
+Carlyle) seems, on the whole, to have sustained his opinion. He was ten
+years about it, and his other works, written in the interval, were
+preparatory and tributary to this.</p>
+
+<p>As to the <i>general</i> meaning of the title there can hardly, on the whole,
+be any doubt. It does <i>not</i> refer, as the division into Jubilees and
+Cycles might, to be sure, suggest to one on first approaching it, to the
+titanic scale and scope of the work, but to the titanic violence against
+which it is aimed.</p>
+
+<p>It seems, indeed, from a letter of the author's, that he thought at
+first of calling it "Anti-Titan." The only question in regard to the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span><i>application</i> of the title seems to be, whether the champion of truth
+and justice against the moral Titans in this case was meant to be
+understood as represented by the hero of the story, with his friends,
+resisting the iniquity which moved earth and hell to ruin him, or
+whether the book itself is the Anti-Titan, and an age of extravagance
+the Titan.</p>
+
+<p>A French critic says of the "Titan":&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological <i>résumé</i>, a satire, an elegy,
+a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization
+in the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>"How is it to end, this civilization which exaggerates alike
+intellectual and industrial power at the expense of the life of the
+soul,&mdash;wholly factitious, theatrical,&mdash;intoxicating, consuming itself
+with pleasure, seeking everywhere new enjoyments,&mdash;exploring all the
+secrets of nature, without being able to penetrate the first causes, the
+secrets of God,&mdash;what will be the fate of these generations
+supersaturated with romances, dramas, journals, with science, ambition,
+with vehement aspirations after the unknown and impossible?...</p>
+
+<p>"In augmenting the sum of its desires, will it augment the sum of its
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span>happiness? Is it not going to increase immensely its capacity of
+suffering?</p>
+
+<p>"Will it not be the giant that scales heaven&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"And that falls crushed to death?</p>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Titan!</span>"</p>
+
+<p>In giving his romance the title of "Titan," says the same writer, "it is
+not Albano de Cesara the author has in view, but his antipode, Captain
+Roquairol,&mdash;that romantic being, that insatiable lover of pleasure, that
+anticipated Byron, that scaler of heaven,&mdash;who, after having piled
+mountain upon mountain to attain his object, ends in finding himself
+buried under the ruins....</p>
+
+<p>"Even while at work upon 'Hesperus,' he had formed the resolution of
+placing a pure man, great and noble, by the side of a reprobate, and of
+surrounding them both with a multitude of beings corresponding to them.
+He wished to concentrate in a single work all the ideas of high
+philosophy which he had disseminated in his other creations, and to show
+them followed by their natural consequences. So strong a mind could not
+stop there: he resolved to show the absurdity of exaggeration, whether
+in good or in evil, in virtue or in vice.</p>
+
+<p>"Hence those reproductions of the same types, those satellites
+gravitating around their respective<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> planets; in fine, those parodies of
+the principal personages of the drama.</p>
+
+<p>"By the side of the coldness and the vast plans of Don Gaspard de
+Cesara, we have the no less dangerous intrigues, though upon a less
+elevated scale, of the Minister von Froulay; by the side of the
+ventriloquist Uncle, the lying Roquairol; the Princess Isabelle is
+opposed to Linda de Romeiro, the aerial Liana to her physical
+counterpart, the Princess Idoine; the comic vulgarity of Dr. Sphex
+contrasts with the more elevated buffoonery of Schoppe; and if we have
+Bouverot, we have also Dion, that Greek so elegant and so noble, happy
+mixture of the antique and the modern, that artist so sensible and so
+true....</p>
+
+<p>"The history of Albano, opposed to Roquairol, is the history, taken from
+his tenderest childhood to the epoch of his greatest development, of a
+being who, as the strictest consequence of a quite special education,
+goes through life, wounding himself with all its griefs, drinking at the
+source of all its lawful pleasures; suffering with nobleness, tasting of
+happiness, but only the purest kind; exposed every instant to see
+himself drawn away by fallacious principles, and nevertheless moving on
+with a steady step towards the end which his reason has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span> marked out for
+him; sacrificing to the fulfilment of his duties all the delights that a
+debauched court can offer a young man entering into the world. While all
+the personages who gravitate around him, and who represent each a
+different aberration from the fundamental principle of the work, fall
+successively at his side, victims of the natural consequences of their
+passions, he, strengthening himself by every fall of which he is
+witness, ends by attaining the loftiest position which the ambition of
+man can desire,&mdash;a position which he could not have expected, and for
+which, consequently, he had not been able to make the sacrifices that,
+in the course of the work, he does not cease to achieve."</p>
+
+<p>The author whom we have thus copiously quoted alludes to Jean Paul's
+having had the idea of "Titan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us
+of a Philistine disparagement of the "Titan," that so many of the
+characters of the other work reappear here under new names. There are
+some critics who ought to object to the full moon, that she is only the
+same old moon that we had, in her first quarter or half, several nights
+ago. However, as we have not yet had "Hesperus" in English, nor are
+likely to for some time, this kind of objection will not trouble English
+readers of "Titan."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Jean Paul has been justly praised for his success in drawing and shading
+female characters. Our French critic says: "Richter has the rare merit
+of placing on the stage in the same work six female personages, who have
+not a shadow of resemblance to each other, and who, from the moment of
+their appearance on the scene to that of their quitting it, never
+deviate a single minute from the character the author has given them."</p>
+
+<p>The fate of his Titanide, Linda, created a loud remonstrance in Germany;
+and one can hardly, indeed, help feeling as if poetic justice had been a
+little caricatured, at least, in Richter's disposal of that half
+strong-headed and half headstrong woman. Painful, however, as her end
+is, the Translator could not listen an instant to the suggestion of
+omitting a line of the scenes in which that terrible tragedy is brought
+to a close.</p>
+
+<p>When the "Titan" first appeared, complaint was made by some that there
+was too much of drollery, by others that there was not enough; some
+found too much sentimentality, others too much philosophy; the
+Translator has found it full, if not of that brevity which is the soul
+of <i>wit</i> (not, however, of humor), yet of that variety which is the
+spice of life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Translator (or Transplanter, for he aspires to the title) of this
+huge production, in his solicitude to preserve the true German aroma of
+its native earth, may have brought away some part of the soil, and even
+stones, clinging to the roots (<i>stones of offence</i> they may prove to
+many, stones of stumbling to many more). He can only say, that if he had
+made Jean Paul always talk in ordinary, conventional, straightforward,
+instantly intelligible prose, the reader would not have had <i>Jean Paul
+the Only</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of
+metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd
+digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that
+characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a
+broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in
+this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost
+tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose <i>heart</i> (to use
+the homely phrase) is ever <i>in the right place</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It has seemed necessary to give a few notes, and only a few. Properly to
+furnish such a work with annotations would require Jean Paul's own
+voluminous un-commonplace-books of all out-of-the-way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span> knowledge, and
+that <i>Dictionary to Jean Paul</i> which one of his countrymen began, but
+unfortunately carried only through one of his works, the work on
+Education, <i>Levana</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The Translator desires emphatically to express his obligations to his
+friend, Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and to <i>his</i> friend, the
+accomplished scholar, Mr. Knorr, to whose kind and patient care whatever
+of accuracy or felicity there may be in his version of the first Jubilee
+is largely due; also, to Rev. Dr. Hedge, and all the friends who have
+helped him with suggestion and encouragement in this large and difficult
+undertaking, he makes his warmest acknowledgments;&mdash;and he closes by
+commending the Titan to all lovers of the humanities, confident (in the
+words of Mrs. Lee, in her Life of Jean Paul) that "the more it is read,
+the more it will be acknowledged a work of exalted genius, pure
+morality, and perennial beauty."</p>
+
+<p class="sig">
+C. T. B.<br />
+<span class="smcap">Newport, R. I.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/harpend.jpg" width="400" height="83" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/3flowerstart.jpg" width="550" height="142" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h4>TO</h4>
+
+<h2>THE FOUR LOVELY AND NOBLE SISTERS ON THE THRONE.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>
+</h2>
+<h3><i>THE DREAM OF TRUTH.</i></h3>
+
+
+<p>Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia once looked down into the
+clear-obscure of earth, and, weary of the ever-bright but cold Olympus,
+yearned to enter in beneath the clouds of our world, where the Soul
+loves more because it suffers more, and where it is sadder but more
+warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, with which Polyhymnia passes
+invisibly up and down the low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our
+hearts; and they mourned that their throne stood so far from the sighs
+of the helpless.</p>
+
+<p>Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and to clothe themselves
+in our mortal form. They came down from Olympus; Love and little loves
+and genii flew playfully after them, and our nightingales fluttered to
+meet them out of the bosom of May.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But, as they touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of
+light, and cast no shadows, then the earnest Queen of gods and men,
+Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and said: "The immortal becomes mortal
+upon the earth, and every spirit becomes a human being!"</p>
+
+<p>So they became human beings and sisters, and were called <i>Louisa</i>,
+<i>Charlotte</i>, <i>Theresa</i>, <i>Frederica</i>; the little loves and genii
+transformed themselves into their children, and flew into their maternal
+arms, and the motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love in
+a great embrace. And when the white banner of the blooming spring
+fluttered abroad, and more human thrones stood before them,&mdash;and when,
+blissfully softened by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon
+each other and their happy children, and were speechless for love and
+bliss,&mdash;then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by over them, and
+recognize them, and gave them the tones wherewith the heart expresses
+and awakens love and joy.</p>
+
+<p>And the dream was ended and fulfilled; it had, as is always the case,
+shaped itself after waking reality. Therefore, be it consecrated to the
+four fair and noble sisters, and let all which is like it in <i>Titan</i> be
+so consecrated too!</p>
+
+<p class="sig">
+<span class="smcap">Jean Paul Fr. Richter.</span><br />
+</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/flowerend.jpg" width="400" height="79" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The Titan was published during the years 1800-1803. The
+four sisters were the four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, viz.
+the Duchess of Hildburghausen, the Princess von Solms, the Princess of
+Thun and Taxis, and the Louisa who afterward became Queen of Prussia,
+and was so in the Liberation War.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/rivetstart.jpg" width="550" height="140" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>CONTENTS OF VOL. I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>FIRST JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="tocnum">PAGE</span><br /></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Passage To Isola Bella.&mdash;First Day of Joy in the Titan.&mdash;The
+Pasquin-Idolater.&mdash;Integrity of the Empire
+eulogized.&mdash;Effervescence of Youth.&mdash;Luxury of
+Bleeding.&mdash;Recognition of a Father.&mdash;Grotesque
+Testament.&mdash;German Predilection for Poems and the Arts.&mdash;The
+Father of Death.&mdash;Ghost-Scene.&mdash;The Bloody Dream.&mdash;The Swing
+of Fancy</span>                                                         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p>SECOND JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The two Biographical Courts.&mdash;The Herdsman's Hut.&mdash;The
+Flying.&mdash;The Sale of Hair.&mdash;The Dangerous Bird-pole.&mdash;A
+Storm locked up in a Coach.&mdash;Low Mountain-Music.&mdash;The loving
+Child.&mdash;Mr. Von Falterle from Vienna.&mdash;The Torture
+Soupé.&mdash;The Shattered Heart.&mdash;Werther without Beard, but
+with a Shot.&mdash;The Reconciliation</span>                                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_70'>70</a></span></p>
+
+<p>THIRD JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Methods of the two Professional Gardeners in their
+Pedagogical Grafting-School.&mdash;Vindication of Vanity.&mdash;Dawn
+of Friendship.&mdash;Morning Star of Love.</span>                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_110'>110</a></span></p>
+
+<p>FOURTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">High Style of Love.&mdash;The Gotha Pocket-Almanac.&mdash;Dreams on
+the Tower.&mdash;The Sacrament<br /> and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span> Thunder-Storm.&mdash;The
+Night-Journey into Elysium.&mdash;New Actors and Stages, and the
+Ultimatum of the School-Years</span>                                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_128'>128</a></span></p>
+
+<p>FIFTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Grand-Entry.&mdash;Dr. Sphex.&mdash;The drumming Corpse.&mdash;The Letter
+of the Knight.&mdash;Retrogradation of the
+Dying-Day.&mdash;Julienne.&mdash;The still Good-Friday of Old
+Age.&mdash;The healthy and bashful hereditary
+Prince.&mdash;Roquairol.&mdash;The Blindness.&mdash;Sphex's Predilection
+for Tears.&mdash;The fatal Banquet.&mdash;The Doloroso of Love</span>           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_161'>161</a></span></p>
+
+<p>SIXTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Ten Persecutions of the Reader.&mdash;Liana's Eastern
+Room.&mdash;Disputation upon Patience.&mdash;The picturesque Cure</span>        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_197'>197</a></span></p>
+
+<p>SEVENTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Albano's Peculiarity.&mdash;The intricate Interlacings of
+Politics.&mdash;The Herostratus of Gaming-Tables.&mdash;Paternal
+"Mandatum sine Clausula."&mdash;Good Society.&mdash;Mr. Von
+Bouverot.&mdash;Liana's Spiritual and Bodily Presence</span>               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_215'>215</a></span></p>
+
+<p>EIGHTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Le petit Lever of Dr. Sphex.&mdash;Path to
+Lilar.&mdash;Woodland-Bridge.&mdash;The Morning in
+Arcadia.&mdash;Chariton.&mdash;Liana's Letter and Psalm of
+Gratitude.&mdash;Sentimental Journey through a Garden.&mdash;The
+Flute-Dell.&mdash;Concerning the Reality of the Ideal</span>               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_238'>238</a></span></p>
+
+<p>NINTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Pleasure of Court-Mourning.&mdash;The Burial.&mdash;Roquairol.&mdash;Letter
+to him.&mdash;The Seven last Words in the Water.&mdash;The Swearing of
+Allegiance.&mdash;Masquerade.&mdash;Puppet Masquerade.&mdash;The Head in
+the Air, Tartarus, the Spirit-Voice, the Friend, the
+Catacomb, and the two united Men</span>                               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_268'>268</a></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>TENTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Roquairol's Advocatus Diaboli.&mdash;The Festival Day of
+Friendship</span>                                                     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_310'>310</a></span></p>
+
+<p>ELEVENTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Embroidery.&mdash;Anglaise.&mdash;Cereus Serpens.&mdash;Musical Fantasies</span> <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_334'>334</a></span></p>
+
+<p>TWELFTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Froulay's Birthday and Projects.&mdash;Extra-Leaf.&mdash;Rabette.&mdash;The
+Harmonica.&mdash;Night.&mdash;The Pious Father.&mdash;The Wondrous
+Stairway.&mdash;The Apparition</span>                                    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_351'>351</a></span></p>
+
+<p>THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Roquairol's Love.&mdash;Philippic Against Lovers.&mdash;The
+Pictures.&mdash;Albano Albani.&mdash;The Harmonic T&ecirc;te-à-t&ecirc;te.&mdash;The
+Ride to Blumenbühl</span>                                          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_384'>384</a></span></p>
+
+<p>FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Albano and Liana</span>                                        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_405'>405</a></span></p>
+
+<p>FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Man and Woman</span>                                           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_432'>432</a></span></p>
+
+<p>SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The Sorrows of a Daughter</span>                               <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_481'>481</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/oend.jpg" width="400" height="83" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/shieldstart.jpg" width="550" height="131" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>TITAN.</h2>
+
+<h2>FIRST JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Passage to Isola Bella.&mdash;First Day of Joy in the Titan.&mdash;The
+Pasquin-Idolater.&mdash;Integrity of the Empire
+Eulogized.&mdash;Effervescence of Youth.&mdash;Luxury of
+Bleeding.&mdash;Recognition of a Father.&mdash;Grotesque
+Testament.&mdash;German Predilection For Poems and the Arts.&mdash;The
+Father of Death.&mdash;Ghost-scene.&mdash;the Bloody Dream.&mdash;The Swing
+of Fancy.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>1. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/o.jpg" width="100" height="105" alt="O" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">
+On a fine spring evening, the young Spanish Count Cesara came, with his
+companions, Schoppe and Dian, to Sesto, in order the next morning to
+cross over to the Borrom&aelig;an island, Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore. The
+proudly blooming youth glowed with the excitement of travelling, and
+with thoughts of the coming morrow, when he should see the isle, that
+gayly decorated throne of Spring, and on it a man who had been promised
+him for twenty years. This twofold glow exalted my picturesque hero to
+the form of an angry god of the Muses. His beauty made a more triumphal
+entry into Italian eyes than into the narrow Northern ones from the
+midst of which he had come; in Milan many had wished he were of marble,
+and stood with elder gods of stone, either in the Farnese Palace or in
+the Clementine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> Museum, or in the Villa of Albani; nay, had not the
+Bishop of Novara, with his sword at his side, a few hours before, asked
+Schoppe (riding behind) who he was? And had not the latter, with a droll
+squaring of the wrinkle-circle round his lips, made this copious answer
+(by way of enlightening his spiritual lordship): "It's my Telemachus,
+and I am the Mentor. I am the milling-machine and the die which coins
+him,&mdash;the wolf's tooth and flattening mill which polishes him down,&mdash;the
+man, in short, that regulates him"?</p></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>hollow</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 Borrom&aelig;ans, stands on the upper terrace of the island.</p>
+
+<p>After the death of his mother his father transplanted him from the
+garden-mould of Italy&mdash;some of which, however, still adhered to the
+tap-roots&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And to-morrow he sees that father for the first time!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>the Knight</i>, 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 <i>Albano</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a
+Wilkes's magnetic table of inclinations;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> to ascend the long tone-ladder;<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> 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,&mdash;<i>that</i> 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> 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,&mdash;just as they take all strange petrifactions to be Devil's
+bones,&mdash;in him the reverse was the case: in him <i>love</i> dwelt a neighbor
+to <i>wonder</i>, 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,&mdash;and is he as greedy for a great head as for an abortion with
+three heads,&mdash;or a Pope with as many caps,&mdash;or a stuffed shark,&mdash;or a
+speaking-machine or a butter-machine,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the foaming surge&mdash;raised a higher in his bosom; the giant
+statue of St. Borrom&aelig;us,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> looking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a dreaming heart, wings for the ice-chasms of life, and wide-open
+arms for every human breast.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> which he would rebuke in an
+old man to be no extravagance in a youth,&mdash;an inundation to be no
+inundation in Egypt, though it would be in Holland,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>Pippo</i> (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 <i>right</i> 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
+<i>lightly</i> on her left arm;<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> but the error of the good youth is a merit
+in him as well as the truth.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+<p>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,<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> and she
+would float again."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+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. Borrom&aelig;us 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?"</p>
+
+<p>The happy youth was silent, and returned for answer a hand-pressure of
+love;&mdash;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,&mdash;how much more beautiful realized in life!</p>
+
+<p>The mantle of night grew thinner and cooler,&mdash;the morning air fanned
+livingly against the breast,&mdash;the larks mingled with the nightingales
+and with the singing boatmen,&mdash;and he heard, beneath his bandage, which
+was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;and when the morning
+breeze drove distant ships in between the Alps,&mdash;and when <i>Isola Madre</i>
+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,&mdash;and when he saw the pheasants darting down from the <i>Madre</i>
+into the waves,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;then did
+his whole, full soul, like a thunder-cloud, burst asunder and burn and
+weep, and from the pure, white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> sun his mother looked upon him, and in
+the fire and smoke of the earth his father and his life stood veiled.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;and before
+the eye which is impoverished and forsaken, and which no human creature
+will any longer gladden,&mdash;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,&mdash;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!</p>
+
+
+<h3>2. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>I could wish nothing finer for one whom I held dear, than a mother,&mdash;a
+sister,&mdash;three years of living together on Isola Bella,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> happy Albano, on the rose-parterre of
+childhood,&mdash;under the deep, blue sky of Italy,&mdash;in the midst of
+luxuriant, blossom-laden citron-foliage,&mdash;in the bosom of <i>beautiful</i>
+nature, who caresses and holds thee like a mother, and in the presence
+of <i>sublime</i> nature, which stands like a father in the distance, and
+with a heart which expects its own father to-day!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> I school my sun-horse as well as my sumpter-horse far
+otherwise."</p>
+
+<p>First of all, now, they took possession of this Otaheite-island<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> 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,&mdash;the upper pays off the
+imperial tax in <i>prospects</i>,&mdash;the Grotto down below there will pay, I
+hope, Jews-scot in the <i>murmur</i> of waters, and the cypress-wood up
+yonder its princess's tribute in <i>coolness</i>,&mdash;the ships will not defraud
+us of their Rhine and Neckar toll, but pay that down by showing
+themselves in the distance."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+<h3>3. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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."&mdash;"From my father?" asked he quickly. "Beg pardon,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> 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,&mdash;for he never let himself be
+imposed upon by any man: "We are then pedagogic copartners and
+confederates. Welcome, dear Gray-leaguesman!"<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> "It gives me pleasure,"
+said the stranger, coldly, who was dressed in gray.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> in the Borrom&aelig;an 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,&mdash;for with courtiers and saints
+everything goes by grace,&mdash;and that the Prince was uncommonly afflicted
+in his nerves, &amp;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 <i>Des Erreurs et de la Verité</i>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Cesara,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> Lector could not say with what menstrua Gaspard
+forced these rapid solutions and evaporations and precipitations.</p>
+
+<p>At length the Lector, who had long been <i>frappé</i> 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 <i>in partibus infidelium</i>, 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 <i>chevaliers
+d'honneur</i> 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 <i>magistri sententiarum</i>, oppugn one another
+within the walls of the universities on Commencement days? Pasquino, can
+no Delia Porta<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> restore thee, were it only so far that thou mightest,
+at least, at Congresses and treaty-makings of the diplomatic corps, play
+the <i>silhouetteur</i> as the figure-head of the stove, or must you serve at
+the highest only in university libraries, as the busts of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> 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)."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a sitting from the Count, his profile, and&mdash;when both
+these had been granted&mdash;yet a third and a fourth, in the following
+terms: "Must I suffer myself to be <i>calendered</i><a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> 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 <i>fixum</i> 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 <i>don gratuit</i>, and should expect of the
+Knight, from time to time, a considerable <i>don gratuit</i> 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,&mdash;a copying and a copied?</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+<p>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;&mdash;and it is with reluctance, I am free to confess, I leave the
+Harlequin and Pulzinella and Scapin, and the whole <i>comedia dell' arte</i>
+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, <i>Perukes-allongées</i>, 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 <i>Long
+Parliament</i>, namely, a most lengthy Diet of the Empire, as it were, an
+extraordinarily wholesome <i>pillula perpetua</i><a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> which the patient is
+incessantly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> swallowing, and which as incessantly purges him; and who is
+not reminded, as well as myself, in this connection, of the <i>capitulatio
+perpetua</i>, and in general of the body politic of the Empire, that
+<i>perpetuum immobile</i>,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 <i>nexus</i> 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 R&ouml;sel,&mdash;turn it wrong side outward like a glove,&mdash;like
+Lichtenberg, cut the polypus in two dexterously with a hair,&mdash;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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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 Cyrop&aelig;dia."</p>
+
+
+<h3>4. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the sun hung in the blue like a white
+glistening snow-ball,&mdash;the glaciers cast their silvery glances down into
+the green,&mdash;from distant clouds it thundered occasionally,<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> as if
+spring were rolling along in his triumphal chariot far away towards us
+at the north,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> to him as if a particular heart beat in every
+limb,&mdash;the lungs and the heart are heavy and full of blood,&mdash;the breath
+is hot as a Harmattan wind,&mdash;and the eye dark in its own blaze,&mdash;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
+<i>longer</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>With such emotions Albano now stood alone behind the palace towards the
+south, when a sport of his boyish years occurred to him.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> of the evening and the journey he had taken had conspired
+to make the day of his life now too warm and stimulating.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>The sun grew cold on the damp earth,&mdash;and now only the indented mural
+crown formed by the gold wedges of the glacier-peaks glowed above the
+spent clouds,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>It was Don Gaspard.</p>
+
+<p>The sparkling chain of his order, made of steel and precious stones,
+betrayed him. He had been seized with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> 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,&mdash;he kissed the rigid lip, and cried more
+loudly,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;it is very good." But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;ah,
+how must thy warm heart cleave to the ice-cold metal, and tear itself
+away not without a skin-peeling wound!</p>
+
+<p>But, good youth! who of us could blame thee that wounds should
+attach thee as it were by a tie of <i>blood</i> to thy true or false
+demigod,&mdash;although a demigod is oftener joined to a demi-beast than a
+demi-man,&mdash;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!</p>
+
+
+<h3>5. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;one represented a remarkably youthful-looking female face,
+with the circumscription, "Nous ne<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>As I do not perceive what people will gain by it, if I insert those (to
+me) annoying geese-feet<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> 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,&mdash;one in the morning,
+one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> at noon, and one in the evening,&mdash;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,&mdash;but what
+this wooden Guerike's weather-prophet of his destiny would do, the
+Knight himself could not predict.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>father</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> 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 <i>Linden City</i>
+(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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> 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,&mdash;although I can still
+excuse that, if he means by basilisks only what the naturalists
+mean,&mdash;wingless lizards,&mdash;and by dragons, nothing but winged ones, and
+thus regards them only as amphibia, hardly less cold and odious than
+Linn&aelig;us 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 <i>artolatry</i> (loaf
+and fish service) of our age, always transubstantiating (inversely) its
+<i>god</i> into <i>bread</i>,&mdash;for the best bread-studies or bread-carts,&mdash;for the
+making of a <i>carrière</i>,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> same in hers, when she will accept no husband; by and by
+they both change, and often take one another into the bargain.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 <i>swimming</i>, and not like a drowned man by <i>corruption</i>.
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> Don
+Gaspard, who seldom, and then only mildly, found fault with men,&mdash;not
+from love, but from indifference,&mdash;patiently replied to the youth: "Thy
+warmth is to be praised. All will come right in good time. Now let us
+eat."</p>
+
+
+<h3>6. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The banquet-hall of our Islanders was in the rich palace of the absent
+Borrom&aelig;an 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 <i>Shakespeare Gallery</i> than London,) our
+gallows-birds hung in effigy,&mdash;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)<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> 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,&mdash;etched leaves only on packages of
+tobacco-leaves,&mdash;cameos on pipe-bowls,&mdash;gems on seals, and wood-cuts on
+tallies; flower-pieces are sought, but on bandboxes,&mdash;faithful
+Wouwermanns, but in horses' stalls before the stallions,<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>&mdash;bas-reliefs
+of princes' heads, either on dollars or on Bavarian beer-pitcher covers,
+but both must be of unalloyed pewter,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> and said:
+"Formerly Rome took away from other lands only works of art, but now
+artists themselves."</p>
+
+<p>Schoppe continued: "So also our statues are no idle, dawdling citizens,
+but they all drive a trade;&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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, &amp;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> work; and had both been with
+families in Wetzlar, they would have extorted from the latter the
+<i>negligence-money</i>.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> 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,<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> 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."</p>
+
+
+<h3>7. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> 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,<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;take the crown,&mdash;I will help thee." The
+monk asked: "Is the evening-star already gone down? Is <i>it</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> 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,&mdash;love the beautiful one,&mdash;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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>When before us feeble, rheumy creatures, who, like Polypuses and
+flowers, only <i>feel</i> and <i>seek</i>, but cannot <i>see</i> the light of a higher
+element, a flash darts, in the total eclipse of our life, through the
+earthly mass which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> hangs before our higher sun,<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> that ray cuts in
+pieces the nerve of vision, which can bear only <i>forms</i>, not <i>light</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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).</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;as if
+nothing <i>were</i>, 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 <i>was</i>. 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.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>8. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;the little cloud, hovering freely, floated gleaming down to the
+column,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But what an unearthly waking! The little, white, spent cloud, stained
+with storm-drops, still hung bending down over him, in Heaven,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> had melted the night-frost of
+ghostly terror. In a transfiguring euthanasia, his firm being fluttered
+loosely around like an uncertain dream,&mdash;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,&mdash;his heart, flung into
+a warm tear, gently dissolved therein,&mdash;out of him was only shadow,
+within him dazzling light,&mdash;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....</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;which, with Gaspard, was
+only the poisonous meadow-saffron in the autumnal moment of
+leave-taking,&mdash;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,&mdash;the pain
+of the dream still continued, and inspired him,&mdash;his flying father
+seemed to him a loving father again,&mdash;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!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> 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.&mdash;&mdash;Ah, when thou shalt be loved,
+glowing youth, how thou wilt love!&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+<h3>9. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;the most intimate and like-minded friend and the beloved
+object,&mdash;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,&mdash;for show me, I pray, the difference,&mdash;as to
+gaze on thee, Nature, my beloved, through a long vanguard and rear-guard
+of witnesses to my enraptured attitude!</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;the next Ascension-day,&mdash;he should learn the name of his
+bride. The laughing day took away, indeed, from the ghost-scenes their
+deathly hue,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> but gave to the crown and the water-goddess fresh
+radiance.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>warmer</i>
+Spain, full of voluptuous spring-times, full of soft orange-nights, full
+of the scattered limbs of dismembered giant mountain-ridges,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> heaped
+around in wild grandeur,&mdash;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,&mdash;because, indeed, it is easier to <i>overflow</i>
+than to <i>fill</i> our hearts.</p>
+
+<p>All at once Albano was touched and smitten,&mdash;as if the Divinity of Love
+had sent an earthquake into his inner temple, to consecrate him for her
+approaching apparition,&mdash;as he read on a young Indian-tree near him the
+little sign bearing its name,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the two rings around the Saturn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> of time,&mdash;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<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a> 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,&mdash;since they cost us either our
+days, or our energies, or our illusions,&mdash;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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>Albano welcomed his friends with atoning tenderness; but the youth
+became, as the day waxed, as dull and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Scale.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> This statue, thirty-five ells high, on a pedestal of
+twenty-five ells, in whose head twelve men can find room, stands near
+Arona, and is exactly of a height with Isola Bella, which stands over
+against it, and which rises on ten gardens or terraces built one upon
+another.&mdash;<i>Keysler's Travels, &amp;c.</i>, Vol. I.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The old Kremnitz ducats have the infant Jesus on the right
+arm; but the new and <i>lighter</i> ones on the left.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Franklin advised the preserving and corking up of vessels
+from which all the liquor had been drunk, in order thereby to keep the
+ship afloat.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> The horse, in the funeral procession of a prince, that
+comes last, and is decked out gayly for the successor of the
+deceased.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Gray-league (Grau-bünden), the Swiss Canton of the
+Grisons.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Pictures by Peter Molyn, who, on account of his fine
+storms, was called only Tempesta.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> The Pasquino is notoriously mutilated.&mdash;Delia Porta was a
+great restorer of old statues.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> I. e. to be pressed between two wooden cylinders and a
+metallic one.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> This pill consists of Antimonia Regia, and by reason of
+its hardness may be swallowed over and over again with the same effect
+each time; only a little wine is sprinkled on it before each repetition
+of the experiment.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>Tirare di primavere</i>, the people call it; and Peter
+Schoppe translated it grandly enough, <i>Electrical pistol-firing of
+spring</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Quotation-marks.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> A good Wouwermann means, in painters' language, a
+well-executed horse, the sight of which has an influence on the beauty
+of the future colt.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> This name is given to the quantum which is withheld from
+the associate judges of the Supreme Court when they have not worked
+enough.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> The Ipecacuanha belongs to the Violet species.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> Of the order of St. Paul, or <i>memento mori</i>, which died in
+France in the seventeenth century. The above address is its usual
+greeting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with
+the power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &amp;c. far under the
+earth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> According to the account of some astronomers, that the
+sun, when eclipsed, has sometimes shone through an opening of the moon,
+Ulloa, e. g., assures us that he once witnessed.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> In Calabria (1785) a thousand and four earthquakes
+happened in the space of three fourths of a year.&mdash;<i>Münter's Travels,
+&amp;c.</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><i>INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMME</i></h2>
+
+<h3>TO TITAN.</h3>
+
+
+<p>Before I dedicated Titan to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor and Feudal
+Provost of Flachsenfingen, Mr. Von Hafenreffer, I first requested
+permission from him in the following terms:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Since you have assisted far more in this history than the Russian Court
+did in Voltaire's Genesis-History of Peter the Great, you cannot confer
+any handsomer favor upon a heart longing to thank you, than the
+permission to offer and dedicate to you, as to a Jew's God, what you
+have created."</p>
+
+<p>But he wrote me back on the spot:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"For the same reason, you might still better, in imitation
+of Sonnenfels, dedicate the work to yourself, and, in a more
+just sense than others, combine in one person author<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> and
+patron. I beg you then (were it only on Mr. Von **'s and
+Mrs. Von **'s account) to leave me out of the play, and
+confine yourself to the most indispensable notices, which
+you may be pleased to give the public, of the very
+mechanical interest which I have in your beautiful work; but
+for the gods' sake, hic h&aelig;c hoc hujus huic hunc hanc hoc hoc
+hac hoc.</p>
+
+<p class="sig">
+"<span class="smcap">Von Hafenreffer.</span>"<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Latin line is a cipher, and shall remain dark to the public.
+What the same public has to demand in the way of Introductory
+Programme consists of four explanations of title, and one of
+fact.</p>
+
+<p>The first nominal explanation, which relates to the <i>Jubilee Period</i>, I
+get from the founder of the Period, the Rector Franke, who explains it
+to be an Era or space of time, invented by him, of one hundred and
+fifty-two Cycles, each of which contains in itself its good forty-nine
+tropical Lunar-Solar years. The word <i>Jubilee</i> is prefixed by the Rector
+for this reason, that in every seventh year a lesser, and in every seven
+times seventh, or forty-ninth, a greater, Jubilee-, Intercalary-,
+Indulgence-, Sabbath-, or Trumpet-year occurred, in which one lived
+without debts, without sowing and laboring, and without slavery. I make
+a sufficiently happy application, as it seems to me, of this title,
+Jubilee, to my historical chapters, which conduct the business-man and
+the business-woman round and round in an easy cycle or circle full of
+free Sabbath-, Indulgence-, Trumpet-, and Jubilee-hours, in which both
+have neither to sow nor to pay, but only to reap and to rest; for I am
+the only one who, like the bowed and crooked-up drudge of a ploughman,
+stand at my writing-table, and see sowing-machines, and debts of honor,
+and manacles, before and on me. The seven thousand four<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> hundred and
+forty-eight tropical Lunar-Solar years which one of Franke's Jubilee
+periods includes are also found with me, but only dramatically, because
+in every chapter just that number of ideas&mdash;and ideas are, indeed, the
+long and cubic measure of time&mdash;will be presented by me to the reader,
+till the short time has become as long to him as the chapter required.</p>
+
+<p>A Cycle, which is the subject of my second nominal definition, needs by
+this time no definition at all.</p>
+
+<p>The third nominal definition has to describe the <i>obligato-leaves</i>,
+which I edit in loose sheets in every Jubilee period. The
+obligato-leaves admit absolutely none but pure contemporaneous facts,
+less immediately connected with my hero, concerning persons, however,
+the more immediately connected with him; in the obligato-leaves,
+moreover, not the smallest satirical extravasate of digression, no, not
+of the size of a blister, is perceptible; but the happy reader journeys
+on with his dear ones, free and wide awake, right through the ample
+court-residence and riding-ground and landscape of a whole, long volume,
+amidst purely historical figures, surrounded on all sides by busy
+mining-companies and Jews'-congregations, advancing columns on the
+march, mounted hordes, and companies of strolling players,&mdash;and his eye
+cannot be satisfied with seeing.</p>
+
+<p>But when the Tome is ended, then begins&mdash;this is the last nominal
+definition&mdash;a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no
+narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long
+bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I
+name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private
+gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my <i>honey-moons</i>,
+because I make less honey therein<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> than I eat, busily employed, not as a
+working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb.
+Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily
+distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the
+undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked
+myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity
+to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the
+readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'Horen,'
+Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a
+wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened?</p>
+
+<p>As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the
+<i>contrat-social</i> among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a
+crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound
+than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under
+date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always
+stick to the subject-matter,&mdash;which is the history,&mdash;because otherwise
+people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this,
+that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty
+volumes, or even a longer one,&mdash;as in this, for instance,&mdash;thinks or
+laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in
+the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,&mdash;which sentence
+has been already executed on me more than once.</p>
+
+<p>Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in
+the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and
+digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as
+the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present
+reduced to a prescriptive right and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> confirmed into a servitude, the
+reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of
+Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but
+honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in
+former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and
+begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,&mdash;as I
+do here,&mdash;have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a
+matter of course, not only the <i>tribute</i> as <i>alms</i>, but also the <i>don
+gratuit</i> as <i>quarterly assessment</i>. So does not merely the cultivated
+Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the
+traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.</p>
+
+<p>I come now to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor, Von Hafenreffer, who is
+the subject of my promised <i>exposé of fact</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It must have been formerly learned from the 45th Dog-Post-Day, who
+governs Flachsenfingen, namely, my revered father. This striking
+promotion of mine was, at the bottom, more a step than a spring; for I
+was, previously, no less than a Jurist, consequently the germ or bud of
+an embryo Doctor <i>utriusque</i>, and consequently a nobleman, since in the
+Doctor the whole spawn and yolk of the Knight lies; therefore the
+former, as well as the latter, when anything chances by, lives upon his
+saddle or stirrup, although less in a robber's castle than in a robber's
+chamber; I have, therefore, since the preferment, changed less myself
+than my castle of residence;&mdash;the paternal seat in Flachsenfingen is at
+present my own.</p>
+
+<p>I care not now to eat my sugar-cake at court with sin,&mdash;although one
+earns sugar-cake and manna more comfortably than ship-bread,&mdash;but I
+represent, in order to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> make a profit upon my adventure, the whole
+Flachsenfingen Department of Foreign Affairs at home here in the castle,
+together with the requisite deciphering chancery. This, then, is what we
+shall do: we have a Procurator in Vienna, two Residents in five Imperial
+cities, a Secretary of the Comitia in Ratisbon under the
+Cross-Bench,<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> three Chancery-clerks of the circle, and an
+Envoyé-Plenipotentiary at a well-known and considerable court not far
+from Hohenfliess, who is no other than the aforementioned Mr. Feudal
+Provost Von Hafenreffer. To the latter my father has even advanced a
+complete silver-service, which we lend him, till he shall have received
+his recall, because it is for our own interest that a Flachsenfingen
+ambassador should, while abroad, do extraordinary honor, by his
+extravagance, to the princely hat or coronet of Flachsenfingen.</p>
+
+<p>Now it is no joke to stand on such a post as this of mine; the whole
+legation-writing-and-reading company write to me under frank, the
+<i>chiffre banal</i> and the <i>chiffre déchiffrant</i> are in my hands, and I
+understand, as it seems to me, the whole mess. It is unutterable, all
+that I thus learn: it could not be read by men nor drawn by horses, if I
+were disposed to hatch, biographically, and feed and reel off the whole
+silk-worm seed of novels, which the corps of ambassadors send me every
+post-day in closely-sealed packages. Yes (to use another metaphor), the
+biographical timber which my float-inspection launches for me from up
+above,&mdash;now into the Elbe, now into the Saale, now into the
+Danube,&mdash;stands already so high before me in the ship-yard, that I could
+not use it up, supposing I drove on the &aelig;sthetical building of my
+biographical fools'-ships, masquerade-balls, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> enchanted castles, day
+and night, year out and year in, and never danced, nor rode, nor spoke,
+nor sneezed again in my life....</p>
+
+<p>Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against
+many another spawn, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man
+should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from
+himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and
+hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my
+legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports,
+would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean
+cloister-passages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now,
+for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent
+women of the world, veimers<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> ministers of justice, as well as jesters
+pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the
+Pointeurs.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a></p>
+
+<p>I come back to my ambassador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned
+distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies
+me&mdash;without neglecting other duties&mdash;from month to month with as many
+personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his
+legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;&mdash;the smallest trifles
+are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different
+way of thinking from that of other ambassadors, who in their reports
+make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance
+into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every <i>cul de sac</i>,
+servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his
+opera-glass of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's
+virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a
+hand-and-horse service<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> of good luck, no one of us can wonder,&mdash;that is,
+I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,&mdash;with
+such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,&mdash;with
+such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,&mdash;in
+short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, or
+Montgolfiers,<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a>&mdash;it cannot of course be anything but just what is
+expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain
+height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which
+will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much)
+on the Sun, on Uranus and Sirius, and for which even the lucky
+quill-scraper who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints
+the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself,
+and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy <i>tooth</i> of
+time,&mdash;especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by
+the tooth-saw of the critical file,&mdash;shall be able to make any
+impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of
+humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but
+unhappily every nature holds itself,&mdash;as Dr. Crusius does the
+world,&mdash;not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.</p>
+
+<p>The present <i>Titan</i> enjoys, besides, the further advantage that I at
+this moment inhabit and grace the paternal court, and accordingly, as
+draughtsman, have certain sins near and bright before my eyes in a
+position most favorable for observation, of which at least Vanity,
+Libertinism, and Idleness will stay and sit for their likeness; for fate
+has sowed these mushrooms and mosses as high as possible among the upper
+classes, because in the lower and broader they would have spread too
+much, and sucked them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> dry,&mdash;which seems to be the pattern of that same
+foresight by which ships always have their assafœtida which they
+bring from Persia hanging overhead on the mast, in order that its stench
+may not contaminate the freight on deck. Moreover, I have up here in the
+court all the new fashions already around me for my observation and
+contempt, before they have been, down below there, only traduced, not to
+say commended,&mdash;e. g. the fine fashion of the Parisians, that women
+shall by a slight tuck in their dress show their calves, which they do
+in Paris, in order to let it be seen that they are not gentlemen, who,
+as is well known, walk on wooden legs,&mdash;this fashion will to-morrow or
+day after to-morrow (for it has arrived on an individual lady) be
+certainly introduced. But the females of Flachsenfingen imitate this
+fashion on quite another ground,&mdash;for gentlemen among us have no
+defect,&mdash;and that is, as a way of proving that they are human beings,
+and not apes (to say nothing less), since, according to Camper and
+others, man alone has calves. The same proof was adduced ten years ago,
+only on higher grounds. For since, according to Haller, man is
+distinguished from monkey in no other respect than by the possession of
+a posterior, the female officers of the crown, the dressing-maids,
+sought as much as possible to magnify in the persons of their mistresses
+this characteristic of their sex by art,&mdash;by the so-called <i>cul de
+Paris</i>; and, with such a penultimate of the ultimate, it became then a
+jest and an amusement to distinguish at a distance of two hundred paces
+a woman of the world from her female ape,&mdash;a thing which now many who
+know their Buffon by heart will venture to do, when they are no nearer
+to her than too near.</p>
+
+<p>Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> maintain in several
+of the German cities;&mdash;my honored father pays for them;&mdash;in most places
+one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as
+many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much
+like perspective-glasses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that
+is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author,
+from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household
+operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles
+distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that
+a staid, quiet man, whom nobody knows but his barber, and whose course
+of life is like a dark, unfrequented <i>cul de sac</i>, but whom one of my
+envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror,
+which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all,
+into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,&mdash;the case may
+occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up
+to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there
+smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair,
+buttons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three
+hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of <i>Indian</i> plants
+which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter.</p>
+
+<p>People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the
+people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no ambassadors
+near me.</p>
+
+<p>But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but
+from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into
+cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out.
+No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery,
+and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> has seemed thus far
+to avert the discovery of the <i>true</i> names of my histories, and, indeed,
+with such success, that of all the manuscripts which have hitherto been
+despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject,
+not one has smelt the mouse,&mdash;and truly fortunate for the world; for so
+soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first
+volumes of Titan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic
+chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is to be inferred from the names which I use, for I press into
+the service God-parents for my heroes in the most singular ways. Have I
+not, e. g., often of an evening, during the marching and countermarching
+of the German armies, who made their crusades to the holy sepulchre of
+freedom, gone up and down through the lanes of the camp, with my
+writing-tablets in my hands, and caught and entered the names of the
+privates,&mdash;which, just before bedtime, were called out aloud, like the
+names of saints,&mdash;just as they fell, in order to distribute them again
+among my biographical people? And has not merit been promoted thereby,
+and many a common soldier risen to be a nobleman fit for table and
+tournament, and have not provost-marshals been raised to ministers of
+justice, and red-cloaks to <i>patribus purpuratis</i>? And did ever a cock
+crow in all the army after this corps of observation slinking round
+mobilized on two legs?</p>
+
+<p>For authors who wish at the same time to narrate and disguise true
+anecdotes, I am, perhaps, on the whole, a model and file-leader. I have
+studied and imitated longer than other historical inquirers those little
+innocent stretching and wrenching processes which can make a history
+unrecognizable to the very hero of the same, and I fancy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> I know how one
+is to make good biographies of princes, protocols of high traitors,
+legends of saints, and auto-biographies; no stronger touches decide the
+matter than those slight ones, by which Peter of Cortona (or Beretino)
+in the presence of Ferdinand of Tuscany transformed a weeping child into
+a laughing one, and the reverse.</p>
+
+<p>Voltaire demands more than once, as he always does,&mdash;for he gave
+mankind, like an army, every order of march three times, and repeated
+himself and everything else most indefatigably,&mdash;that the historian
+shall arrange his history after the law-table of the drama, to a
+dramatic focal point. It is, however, one of the first dramatic rules
+which Lessing, Aristotle, and the Greek models give us, that the
+dramatic poet must lend to every historical circumstance which he treats
+all that is favorable to the poetic illusion, as well as keep clear of
+everything opposite, and that he must never sacrifice beauty to truth,
+but the reverse. Voltaire gave, as is well known, not only the easy
+rule, but the hard model also; and this great theatre poet of the
+world's theatre, in his <i>benefit</i> dramas of Peter and Charles, never
+stuck to the truth where he was sure he could attain sooner to illusion.
+And that is properly the genuine romantic history corresponding to the
+historical romance. It is not for me, but for others,&mdash;namely, the
+Provost and the Secretaries of Legation,&mdash;to decide how far I have
+treated a true history illusorily. It is a misfortune that the true
+history of my hero can hardly ever see the light; otherwise the justice
+might be done me that connoisseurs would confront my poetical deviations
+with the truth, and thereafter give each of us more easily his own, as
+well the truth as myself. But this reward is what all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> royal
+historiographers and scandalous chroniclers must resign <i>nolens volens</i>,
+because the true history never appears in conjunction with their works.</p>
+
+<p>But in the composition of a history an author must also keep a sharp
+look-out upon this point, that it shall not only hit and betray no real
+persons, but also no false ones, and in fact nobody at all. Before I, e.
+g., choose a name for a bad prince, I must look through the genealogical
+index of all governing and governed families, in order not to use a name
+which some person or other already bears; thus, in Otaheite, even the
+words which sound like the name of the king are abolished after his
+coronation, and supplied by others. Now, as I was formerly acquainted
+with no living courts at all, I was not in a situation, when preparing
+the battle-pieces and night-pieces which I painted of the Cabals, the
+Egoism, and the Libertinism of biographical courts, to succeed in
+skilfully avoiding every resemblance to real ones; yes, for such an
+idiot as I, it was a miserable help, even, to be often laying
+Machiavelli open before me, in order, with the assistance of the French
+history, by painting from the two, to turn off the edge of the
+application at least upon countries in which no Frenchman or Italian
+ever had the influence that is generally attributed to both of them upon
+other Germans; just as Herder, in opposition to those naturalists who
+derive certain misshapen tribes of men from a half-parentage of apes,
+makes the very good remark that most of the resemblances to apes&mdash;the
+retreating skull of the Calmucks, the prominent ears of the Pevas, the
+slender hands in Carolina&mdash;appear just in those countries where there
+are no apes at all. Formerly, then, as was said, striking unlikenesses I
+could not succeed in hitting; now, on the contrary, every court<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> around
+which my legation-flotilla coasts is well known to me, and therefore
+secure from accidental resemblances, particularly every one which I
+describe,&mdash;that of Flachsenfingen, that of Hohenfliess, &amp;c. The
+theatrical mask which I have on in my works is not the mask of the Greek
+comedian, which was embossed after the face of the individual
+satirized,<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> but the mask of Nero, which, when he acted a goddess on
+the stage, looked like his mistress,<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> and when he acted a god, like
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>Enough! This digressive introductory programme has been somewhat long,
+but the Jubilee-period was so, too: the longer the St. John's day of a
+country, the longer its St. Thomas's night. And now let us dance along
+together into the book,&mdash;into this free ball of the world,&mdash;I first as
+leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me; so
+that, amidst the sounding baptismal and funeral bells in the Chinese
+house of this world-building,&mdash;welcomed by the singing-school of the
+muses,&mdash;serenaded from on high by the guitar of Phœbus,&mdash;we may dance
+gayly from Tome to Tome, from Cycle to Cycle, from one digression to
+another, from one dash to another,&mdash;till either the work comes to an
+end, or the workman, or everybody!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/flowerend.jpg" width="400" height="79" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> <i>Querbank</i>,&mdash;Bench for Protestant Bishops in the Germanic
+Diet.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Veimer</i>,&mdash;old Westphalian judges.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> Tellers in faro-banks.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> The inventor of the balloon.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie, etc. de Dubois, Tom.
+I. Sect. 42.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Sueton. Nero.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/hornstart.jpg" width="550" height="137" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>SECOND JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">The two Biographical Courts.&mdash;The Herdsman's Hut.&mdash;The
+Flying.&mdash;The Sale of Hair.&mdash;The dangerous Bird-pole.&mdash;A
+Storm locked up in a Coach.&mdash;Low Mountain-Music.&mdash;The loving
+child.&mdash;Mr. Von Falterle from Vienna.&mdash;The
+Torture-Soupé.&mdash;The Shattered Heart.&mdash;Werther without Beard,
+but with a Shot.&mdash;The Reconciliation.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>10. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/i.jpg" width="100" height="108" alt="I" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_3">In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful
+prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the
+full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cluster and the olive often
+ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan
+(Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all
+things which belong to May&mdash;in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May
+butter&mdash;he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood
+itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a
+princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of
+counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that
+mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent
+clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and
+fencing-schools, all anticipation of the coming riddles and conflicts of
+his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> his heart full of the
+glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms
+no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double
+conquest.</p></div>
+
+<p>The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke
+around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in
+full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he
+revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook
+their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;&mdash;the
+Librarian sought a <i>physical</i> solution of the acoustic and optical
+illusion; the Lector sought a <i>political</i> one: he could not at all
+comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially
+meant by it all.</p>
+
+<p>This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was
+directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he
+could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar.
+"Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I
+should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I
+would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit
+and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during
+the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too
+few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve
+in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls
+curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain
+beats gladly a free heart.</p>
+
+<p>At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and
+nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they
+approached the goal of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> their long riding-ground, full of countries, and
+now the Principality of <i>Hohenfliess</i> lay only one principality distant
+from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the
+first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been
+merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is
+known to geographical readers, <i>Haarhaar</i>. The Lector told the
+Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the
+two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much
+because they were <i>diplomatic</i> relatives&mdash;although it is true that,
+among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than
+brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old
+folks among the Brandenburghers&mdash;as because they were really relatives,
+and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were
+disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two
+courts,&mdash;which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,&mdash;with all their
+heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him,
+namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the
+principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last
+hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to
+wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the
+land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned
+advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political
+mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told
+for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so
+generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial
+estate of Hohenfliess&mdash;its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and
+breed of horses&mdash;in the highest bloom, and to hate and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> curse in the
+highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great
+intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to
+population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of
+Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not
+even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the
+shepherd's-flute; not of the <i>energies</i> and <i>matrimonial prospects</i> of
+others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must
+ruin!"</p>
+
+<p>As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an
+excursion to Blumenbühl,<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a
+look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his
+cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the
+city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which
+besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the
+conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness
+of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at
+his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short,
+that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of
+Blumenbühl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the
+world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high
+life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy
+and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.</p>
+
+<p>It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee,
+because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go
+to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however,
+to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates
+against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they
+stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the
+church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned
+round, the tower of Blumenbühl below them to the east; from the one and
+from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his
+future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village,
+and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which
+gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days.
+He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life,
+and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the
+Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.</p>
+
+<p>But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red
+shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy
+day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood,
+when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod,
+over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with
+him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and
+become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so
+sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.</p>
+
+
+<h3>11. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day&mdash;and likewise on the
+birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not
+received the title yet&mdash;that this same director&mdash;that was to be&mdash;had
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pestitz, and see the
+Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the <i>flail</i> of the
+state, by way of experiment, into a <i>drill-plough</i>. He was a brisk,
+bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill
+to others, and to whom nothing made time pass heavily but pastime. "In
+the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it,
+for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist
+in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an
+Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,&mdash;little as there was in
+it,&mdash;and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.</p>
+
+<p>But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to
+the reader?</p>
+
+<p>Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had
+chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to
+mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted
+with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has
+generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only <i>inborn</i> not <i>acquired</i>
+sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not
+to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclop&aelig;dia of
+all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say,
+the rector of the place,&mdash;named Wehmeier, better known by the title of
+Band-box-master,&mdash;after schooling the village youth for the usual number
+of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest <i>Struve's spare hours</i>, his
+<i>Otia</i> and <i>Noctes Hagian&aelig;</i>, in teaching Albano, and driving into the
+mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy&mdash;impelled by internal
+streams&mdash;alphabetic pins,&mdash;so as to make it the barrel of a
+speech-organ. Of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something
+heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the
+language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a
+hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of
+counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither
+note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering
+pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the
+Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself
+so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So,
+also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it
+were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary,
+sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery
+of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent
+its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often
+in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed
+of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from
+quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which
+would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests,
+only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating <i>aura
+seminalis</i> to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider,
+you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the
+thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the
+flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups,
+instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,&mdash;and who
+grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the
+dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the
+vine-dressers, with your hoeing and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> your dunging and your clipping. O,
+can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe
+organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all,
+alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt
+ourselves to the perception of her beauty,&mdash;can you ever, in any way,
+make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had
+they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with
+their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence
+it is that your <i>élèves</i> so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in
+spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow
+and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.</p>
+
+<p>Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards
+him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and
+made the mark ["with care"] with which merchants commend valuable boxes
+of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery
+child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had
+confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the
+centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without
+hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own
+off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at
+evening before the new teacher from the city.</p>
+
+<p>Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all
+that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark
+and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the
+creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those
+king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in
+reference to her companion, may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> be compared with Luke, and mine with
+Matthew.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family
+feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great
+good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which
+installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid
+up against this day as a birthday christening present.</p>
+
+<p>But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano
+stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting
+out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house;
+for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him
+than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to
+Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at
+least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will,
+however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister,
+Rabette, that annoying <i>foster</i>) said, without thinking, No, although
+she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn
+little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will
+and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,&mdash;then
+the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and
+pleaded for him, without knowing why,&mdash;then Albina protested at least he
+should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,&mdash;then he
+marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the
+female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition,
+gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the
+presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>12. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules
+strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed
+them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years.
+Exultingly did his new and old Adam&mdash;they flew side by side&mdash;flap their
+wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring
+ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a
+journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the
+butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned
+herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a
+shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a
+shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the
+upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party
+and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted
+and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their
+dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for
+the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and
+although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and
+earnings,&mdash;because an honest man like him finds always in the body
+politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the
+stone <i>drapery</i> remains,&mdash;nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and
+feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was
+just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.</p>
+
+<p>The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I
+offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the
+herdsman's mountain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> fortification, and received from the soldier's wife
+the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all
+eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the
+wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry
+chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the
+windows and looked in beckoning,&mdash;when Albano beheld, under the window
+toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on
+which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun
+shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,&mdash;when at the western window
+he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the
+Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,&mdash;when he
+placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!"
+then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must
+needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.</p>
+
+<p>The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat.
+The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden
+full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the
+cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to
+sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet
+ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who,
+blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she
+dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano
+stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley,
+and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish
+longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself
+away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> free and
+passive into the broad ether!&mdash;and so plashing up and down in the cool,
+all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and
+unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,&mdash;or to sweep
+after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured
+assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn
+between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to
+little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the
+peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun,
+and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into
+his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at
+last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter,
+intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red
+clouds!...</p>
+
+<p>Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones?
+Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the
+slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,&mdash;just as
+if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low
+earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its
+chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the
+horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through
+the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the
+presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the
+chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness,
+and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it
+must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the
+body the body also can lift up the soul.</p>
+
+<p>The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade
+along with the brook, which was running<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> away into the pale-green birch
+thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown
+him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> and he loved to go
+with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would
+itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook,
+deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out
+through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He
+could not accomplish it,&mdash;the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the
+brook broader,&mdash;the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high
+overhead;&mdash;but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic
+polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus,
+for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so
+agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as
+the longest; but the day after either was fatal.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>
+
+<p>At last, after the progress of some hours in time and space, he heard,
+beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of
+the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by
+two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent
+to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called
+out on all sides of him, but in a cry;&mdash;it was his private patron saint,
+the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his
+account at the foot of the mountain.</p>
+
+<p>He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with
+a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch
+of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of
+passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the
+landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white,
+glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,&mdash;when
+he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town&mdash;views of which hung in
+the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the
+mountains&mdash;distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates
+for him were closed,&mdash;and when, indeed, everything seemed flying
+westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the
+grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away
+over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the
+oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned
+Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great
+fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero
+the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the
+subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood&mdash;ah yes, every
+age&mdash;often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every
+other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's.
+Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of
+consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye
+turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than
+they show or we imagine.</p>
+
+<p>Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved
+tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner,
+and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the
+bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,&mdash;and the thought that
+this was the birthday of his foster-father,&mdash;and his inexpressible love
+for his afflicted mother,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when
+he was alone,&mdash;and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to
+weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the
+Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his
+seeking mother.</p>
+
+<p>He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind
+Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly
+through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a
+fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons
+from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her
+arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young
+gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and
+from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.</p>
+
+<p>Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep
+only their promises, but never a threat,&mdash;resembling the forest-officers
+of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws,
+impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to
+one hundred kreutzers.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> They, however, like Solon, who gave out his
+laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the
+proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.</p>
+
+
+<h3>13. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a
+grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute
+among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> were I
+not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying
+back of the table dinner-service.</p>
+
+<p>Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and
+phosphorescing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the
+blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the
+morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender
+emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,&mdash;even as
+at evening we remember the morning,&mdash;and the forms of Nature drew nearer
+to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present
+offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is
+the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With
+what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the
+eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the
+screaming of the cocks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper
+and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again
+on the shore of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the
+valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead
+in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy
+lamb-clouds!</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes
+and groping too far into the garden,&mdash;besides, the blind girl did not
+see,&mdash;holding his arms open before him so as not to run against
+anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up,
+he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside,
+stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one,
+holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"&mdash;and as she, with a
+modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down
+on her bowed head with sweet emotion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money
+and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by
+him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,&mdash;from whose
+ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically
+possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give
+them back,&mdash;she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound
+off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But
+the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an <i>inner</i>, finer band, and the
+blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so
+overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of
+Dresden into her apron, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one
+on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came
+trudging up the Pestitz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly,
+to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of
+exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a
+magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind
+eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink
+herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and
+would rather please herself in the glass than others out of it. The
+merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought
+up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a
+piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into
+short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair
+down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon,
+and a very serviceable leather queue of Würzburg fabric into the
+bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,&mdash;so was Lea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> with
+hope,&mdash;the Jew said he must pack up,&mdash;besides, the hair-queue which he
+had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the
+first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every
+morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the
+poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French Insigné, and
+buckled on the Würzburg sheath.</p>
+
+<p>And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise
+of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very
+pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue
+actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living
+scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-god,
+to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.</p>
+
+<p>By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real
+wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had
+her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of
+pure <i>monkery</i> and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape,
+and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires
+of Pestitz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not
+now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor
+any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....</p>
+
+<p>But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the
+shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's
+wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious
+lady,&mdash;for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the
+male support of <i>Titan</i>, firmly planted by some farmers'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> boys&mdash;to whom,
+moreover, Albina has intrusted the <i>remarche-règlement</i> of hastening his
+return&mdash;on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of
+the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying
+horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the
+arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could
+not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his
+picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and
+coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half
+as much as the last bird.</p>
+
+<p>I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff
+dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous
+Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green
+Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine
+figure!</p>
+
+<p>The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at
+the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the
+Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned
+bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.</p>
+
+
+<h3>14. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form
+and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil
+lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy
+shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of
+a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every
+minute his <i>élève</i> fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments,
+like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> "and this too,
+now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far
+along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore
+scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the
+sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a
+lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of
+the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the
+master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a
+real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God!
+Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of
+bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there
+better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting&mdash;like
+a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge&mdash;that
+children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are,
+and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of
+village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet,
+in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble
+chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly
+bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be
+outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years
+old,&mdash;supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.</p>
+
+<p>When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and
+the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor
+had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the
+locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps.
+The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the
+Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in
+the way of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a
+forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The
+soldier's wife wrung her hands,&mdash;the servants arranged themselves for
+the taking down from the cross,&mdash;the poor little fellow, in a fever,
+drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose
+and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole."
+He would have done it&mdash;and put an untimely end to his life and my
+Titan&mdash;merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal
+insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the
+chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide
+and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet
+proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at
+that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the
+key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably
+exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an
+Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;&mdash;ah,
+Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler,
+end in a discord?&mdash;and, secondly, because he had there a
+singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant
+house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as
+spectator of this <i>début</i>. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round
+before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his
+pockets;&mdash;the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated
+Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard,
+and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another
+has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in
+his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> Band-box master was best off;
+for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of
+agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his
+consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with
+him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its
+finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and
+the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and
+highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes
+from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and
+from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides
+turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and
+sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and
+energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to
+behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the
+ground below.</p>
+
+<p>Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had
+it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it,
+from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as
+if they could eat him,"&mdash;as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He
+voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted
+him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the
+work-shop,&mdash;and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned,
+controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's
+harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's
+mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his
+staving through a window, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> firing, from the port-hole, a few of the
+most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and
+boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came
+slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth
+of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down
+along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line
+of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of
+a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the
+Würzburg queue like a tail-feather.</p>
+
+<p>Wehmeier stared at the <i>cauda prehensilis</i> (the ring-tail), and by his
+attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as
+much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of
+his&mdash;Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day
+with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten,
+home.</p>
+
+
+<h3>15. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of
+her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous
+spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might
+transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,&mdash;yes, as a
+sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had
+packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the
+cabinet of the dining-room,&mdash;and for Albano Albina had already contrived
+an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the <i>vocation</i> of
+the Province. Ah, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> what did the lady get from it all but flames,
+which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in
+his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the
+sprinkling of the magister?</p>
+
+<p>Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband
+for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in
+the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as
+ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness,
+because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,&mdash;then step by step she
+took back the right,&mdash;but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as
+nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their
+mouths,&mdash;and at last said he should just give the child up to her.</p>
+
+<p>But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the
+Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in
+reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast
+in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened
+evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own,
+and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a
+teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him&mdash;though he himself
+dared and did too much&mdash;to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback,
+or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not
+just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose
+educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter
+condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner,
+and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?</p>
+
+<p>Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his
+defiant way to the father's study, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> therefore to the court-martial
+punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from
+behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him
+down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning,
+tied on the <i>vena cava</i> of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up
+to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited
+him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical
+mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and
+hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and
+impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally
+she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"</p>
+
+<p>He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated,
+into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant.
+Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice
+of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its
+unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the
+table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad
+habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation
+with wine.</p>
+
+<p>In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by
+their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time
+had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the
+violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a
+low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world
+that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to
+be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of
+the dulcimer let his musical hammer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> fall on the stringed floor.
+Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the
+whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and
+waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the
+cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs,
+ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their
+leather aprons and <i>culs de Paris</i>, to take themselves off instantly.</p>
+
+<p>Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her
+sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew
+he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she
+represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present
+child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in
+which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the
+absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying
+and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his
+waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person
+before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he
+had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle,
+who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would
+certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man
+the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned
+into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul
+in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to
+drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing,
+convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones.
+After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal
+evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> himself by his rides and
+his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on
+every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely,
+herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony
+throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day
+think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.</p>
+
+<p>Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had
+been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed
+upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained
+cold and hard,&mdash;for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point,
+the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just
+before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue,
+which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in
+the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Würzburg appendage off over his head.
+Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment,
+with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and
+say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in
+future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified
+tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned
+immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with
+too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all
+torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him,
+"and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly
+done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him,
+but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she
+had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair
+as an act of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children
+in high life.</p>
+
+<p>Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his
+long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping
+before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and
+thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off,
+the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing
+more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay
+thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and
+while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes
+himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with
+his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly
+and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then
+will the old man read the <i>Decretum</i> over again still more slowly, so as
+almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with
+indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it,
+make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness
+and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him
+thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy
+downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry
+cheeks,&mdash;then will he look a pretty long time after his departing
+darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over
+the address of the diploma at his will.</p>
+
+<p>Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>16. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above
+the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of
+discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf
+of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he
+shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and
+if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary
+partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he
+would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in
+his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.</p>
+
+<p>Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her
+his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna,
+he said not, as usual, <i>nolo episcopari</i>; he did not say he was hemmed
+round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that
+perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of
+fortune,&mdash;instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more
+common to brides,&mdash;he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told
+Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked
+what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the
+Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and
+Rabette, and all.</p>
+
+<p>But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through
+Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the
+arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the
+greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as
+entertaining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> <i>acteur</i> of the table, he had so much to do with
+conversing, <i>savoir vivre</i>, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in
+proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he
+was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers,
+chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting
+them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard
+fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's
+pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the
+feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague,
+and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume
+to himself the magnificent <i>winter crop</i> in Alban's sowed field as his
+own <i>summer crop</i>. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all
+the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the
+aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>
+
+<p>With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own
+hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a
+three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his
+entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some
+time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir,"
+replied coldly and gravely the <i>paradeur</i> of a Falterle by the side of
+our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well
+at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to
+scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a
+cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."</p>
+
+<p>What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+brothers-in-office!&mdash;the master of accomplishments with the motley
+scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow
+outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the
+waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a
+roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him,
+and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of
+candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle
+had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and
+every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were
+the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master
+wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> The former
+in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,&mdash;the one flapping up like
+a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with
+the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial
+root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his
+green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A
+magnificent set-off, I repeat!</p>
+
+<p>The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led
+forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But
+now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his
+napkin open first,&mdash;which became now, as it were, introductory programme
+and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "<i>Posément,
+Monsieur</i>," said he to the novice, "<i>il est messéant de déplier la
+serviette avant que les autres aient déplié les leurs</i>." After some
+minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one <i>à la
+Brittanière</i>, with rings. "<i>Il est mésseant, Monsieur</i>,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> said
+the master of accomplishments, "<i>de souffler sa soupe</i>." The
+Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from
+the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short,
+frightened into a dead calm.</p>
+
+<p>When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on
+the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced
+veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed
+more inwardly than outwardly.</p>
+
+<p>After the bomb, came in a pike <i>au four</i>, to which, as is well known,
+the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly
+give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher
+what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "<i>Pardonnez,
+Monsieur</i>," said his rival gourmand, "<i>c'est du brochet au four, mon
+cher Compte; mais il est mésseant de demander le nom de quelque mets
+qu'il soit,&mdash;on feint de le savoir</i>."</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced
+through the Magister's marrow and bone; the <i>instruments of passion</i>
+which lay in the cut-off head of the pike <i>au four</i>, as in an armory,
+continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he
+thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them,
+and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as
+he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs
+despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he
+was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with
+the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine,
+and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> him most
+lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him
+the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official
+brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and
+the pike <i>au four</i>, and could not help laughing up there on his planet,
+to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of
+brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken
+pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out
+of him every day as that other fellow raked in.</p>
+
+<p>We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this
+lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably
+delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a
+diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all
+diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and
+more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,&mdash;at
+which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the
+little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,&mdash;until at least with one word he
+had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's
+concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company
+how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for
+any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry
+soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer
+punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but
+quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he
+had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son;
+but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense
+for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like
+vines and bees. Besides,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of
+their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have
+satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by <i>opera
+supererogationis</i> in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than
+win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g.
+Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest
+achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a
+geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried
+on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith
+they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not
+this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself
+a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being
+children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin
+bow?</p>
+
+<p>But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very
+friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the
+magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but
+with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble
+Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard,
+clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the
+ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the
+life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the <i>frère terrible</i>, wherewith they
+kept him under,&mdash;but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his
+crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling;
+however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.</p>
+
+<p>Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all
+corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a
+favorable light upon his dancing and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> music scholars therein, as well as
+himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old,
+speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano
+has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of
+Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not
+yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which
+made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes,
+cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the
+circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on
+amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour
+making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets
+there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite
+our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider,
+ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle
+said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody,
+because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I,"
+that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he
+harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly,
+not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only
+honey (i. e. a little praise).</p>
+
+<p>"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he
+had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer
+shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister
+sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much
+for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with
+the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow;
+and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat
+cracking under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went
+slowly out.</p>
+
+<p>The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his
+Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom
+he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement
+was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the
+last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high
+things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the
+close, drowsy cradle of childhood,&mdash;he had sprung at once out of the
+warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,&mdash;he
+saw the <i>toga virilis</i> hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and
+said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"</p>
+
+<p>Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too
+easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation,
+resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of
+the fig-tree seeming <i>fruits</i> sprout forth, which are only the fleshy
+rinds of the <i>blossoms</i>!</p>
+
+<p>And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and
+exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,&mdash;just now
+must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his
+bosom,&mdash;he determined to pass through the coming years as through a
+white colonnade of monumental pillars,&mdash;already a mere Alumnus from the
+city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic
+author,&mdash;and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely
+accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father?
+Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and
+the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> his inner world into a sweltry
+mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,&mdash;rush
+into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again
+without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a
+night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered
+at the little pilgrim without a hat.</p>
+
+<p>But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party.
+This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching
+the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.</p>
+
+<p>The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of
+Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and
+enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins,
+wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but
+African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When
+the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common
+boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous
+system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed
+his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by
+chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and
+the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round
+by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer
+both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste&mdash;because
+she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on
+the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that
+stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping
+hands&mdash;demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta
+haughtily turned upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> him her splendid back, covered with ringlets;
+beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came
+back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he
+stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill
+himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a
+little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk
+with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the
+fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the
+whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled
+the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,&mdash;so that
+nothing more can be hung on that,&mdash;and grazed the side of his head. She
+instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down,
+bleeding, and was carried home.</p>
+
+<p>This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted
+up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her
+quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and
+the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy
+without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of
+anxiety, out through the village. A good genius&mdash;the yard-dog,
+Melak&mdash;had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the
+fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather
+that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who
+oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves,
+should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted
+reasons,&mdash;namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy,
+whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed,
+could not give him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog
+right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees
+except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these
+inversions,&mdash;during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and
+seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and
+every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,&mdash;he was found by his
+innocent mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in
+the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he
+had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a
+vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his
+overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in
+tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but
+merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the
+anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's
+situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then
+so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably
+Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied
+through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately,
+strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards
+Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender
+emotion.</p>
+
+<p>When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a
+little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his
+defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his
+countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling
+threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun.
+He placed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept
+his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a
+double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered
+fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,&mdash;the sign of
+the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.</p>
+
+<p>Verily, I have often formed the wish&mdash;and afterwards made a picture out
+of it&mdash;that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world,
+because no love moves us so deeply as <i>returning</i> love. It must touch
+Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely
+asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> they will
+tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer
+element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the
+distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain
+Immortals when they behold us under the violent <i>tempests</i> of life
+arrayed against each other on the <i>battle-field</i> of enmity, under double
+blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that
+nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/oend.jpg" width="400" height="83" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> I have already said that he was brought up there, under
+the Provincial Director, <i>Von Wehrfritz</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> With this Evangelist, as is well known, an angel is
+associated.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Compass.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Odious, or tabooed.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> To a German President of Finance, Vol. I. p. 296.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> For Boyle found in his experiments that ranunculi, mints,
+&amp;c., which he suffered to grow large in the water, developed the usual
+aromatic virtues.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> Some would rather hear this word than <i>breeches</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> The female Valisneria lies rolled up under the water, out
+of which it lifts its bud, to bloom in the open air; the male then
+loosens itself from the too short stalk and swims to her with its dry
+blossom-dust.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/rivetstart.jpg" width="550" height="140" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>THIRD JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Methods of the two Professional Gardeners in their
+Pedagogical Grafting-School.&mdash;Vindication of Vanity.&mdash;Dawn
+of Friendship.&mdash;Morning Star of Love.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>17. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/i.jpg" width="100" height="108" alt="I" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_3">If we open the two school-rooms, we shall see the Band-box-master, in
+the forenoon, sitting and brooding upon the two-yolked eggs of the
+<i>élève</i>, and the accomplishing master, in the afternoon, just as the
+cock-pigeon guards the nest the former part of the day, and the female
+the latter.</p></div>
+
+<p>Now Wehmeier, as well as his competitor, was fain to take possession of
+his pupil with wholly new instructions; but what were new to him were
+new to himself. Like most of the older schoolmasters, he knew&mdash;of
+astronomy, except the little that was found in the book of Joshua, and
+of physics, except the few errors which existed in his rather-forgotten
+than torn-up manuscript books, and of philosophy, except that of
+Gottsched, which required, however, a riper pupil, and of other real
+sciences&mdash;strictly speaking, nothing, except a little history. If
+ever&mdash;in the literary Sahara, to which the tormenting screw of
+school-lessons, without end, and the beggar's or cripple's wagon of a
+life without pay, that had been turned rather into dross than into ore,
+had exiled him&mdash;new methods<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> of teaching or new discoveries came to his
+ears (they never came to his eyes), he noted, at the moment, that they
+were his own, only with a shade of variation; and he concealed from no
+one the plagiarism. I heartily beg, however, all silken and powdered and
+curly-haired Princes' instructors, blame not too sorely my poor
+Wehmeier, so deeply overlaid with the heavy, thick strata of fate, for
+his subterranean optics and his crookedness of posture, but reckon his
+eight children and his eight school-hours and his approaching fifties in
+his life's grotto of Antiparos, and then decide whether the man can,
+under these circumstances, come out again into light?</p>
+
+<p>But yet of history he knew, as was said, something; and this he seized
+upon as pedagogical lucky-bone and Fortunatus's wishing-cap. Had he not
+already, in that epical, picturesque style of paraphrase,&mdash;whereby he
+could relate the smallest market-town history in such an interesting and
+fictitious way, (for whence will a good story-teller draw the thousand
+lesser but necessary touches but from his head?)&mdash;lectured out to his
+Albano Hübner's Biblical History, in a manner extremely touching? And
+which wept most during the delivery, teacher or scholar?</p>
+
+<p>Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike
+into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in
+the world,&mdash;the history of countries. But only the British and the
+French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the
+earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg
+princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat
+for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history,
+on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> most
+disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in
+Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in
+Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?</p>
+
+<p>The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses
+in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according
+to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the
+22d October,<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's
+and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the
+29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to
+the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is
+compelled to listen to the case.</p>
+
+<p>This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange.
+He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the
+rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us
+more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the
+heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives
+from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace
+for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works
+of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against
+every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning,
+walk along several<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen,
+ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within,
+although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,&mdash;the
+biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,&mdash;not the shadowy world of
+states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy
+family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with
+which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher,
+as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds
+of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and
+descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the
+whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that
+blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could
+he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality?
+Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the
+Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato
+and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was
+cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the
+eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard
+nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible
+effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so,
+from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting
+which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,&mdash;hair, moss,
+roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,&mdash;was hidden by
+the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like
+the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full
+of broken inscriptions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>18. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The reader is now curious about the afternoon, when the <i>élève</i> is sent
+into the polishing-mill of the Viennite, in order to know what sort of a
+polishing he gets there. It cannot but make him still more curious, when
+I repeat that Wehmeier, who, like other literati, resembled the elephant
+in clumsiness and sagacity, found nothing more agreeable to think
+of&mdash;and, therefore, to describe&mdash;in ancient history, than a great man,
+who had on little, as, for instance, Diogenes, or went barefoot, like
+Cato, or unshaven, like the philosophers; nay, he hit the very
+Mittel-Mark, and drew out for himself Frederick the Second's clothes,
+whereby he gained as much as Mr. Pagé in Paris, and carried <i>his</i>
+shirts, like the noble Saladin's, and with similar proclamations, on
+poles for show, and sketched, as a second <i>Scheiner</i>, the best map we
+have of the sun-spots of snuff on Frederick. Then he took these naked,
+rough colossi, and piled them together into one scale, and threw into
+the other the light, wainscoted figures, like Falterle and the nice
+Nuremberg Kinder-g&auml;rten of modern courts, and besought the scholar to
+take notice which way the swaying tongue of the balance would
+incline....</p>
+
+<p>I am not wholly on thy side here, Magister, since vigorous youths too
+easily, without any prompting, tear in pieces the thin plate of the
+ceremonial law, and often the platers, the head masters of ceremonies,
+into the bargain. For weaklings, the method is good.</p>
+
+<p>Now, when Albano came to the accomplishing master, he could but faintly,
+on account of the loud resonance of the previous lesson,&mdash;for children
+of a certain depth, like buildings of a certain size, give an
+<i>echo</i>,&mdash;apprehend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> what Falterle commanded; and only when he remained
+some days without the historical sensation was he more widely open to
+the lesser instructions, as gilded things cannot be silvered over till
+the gold is worn off. The misfortune was, too, that he had to go through
+his task-dances in the very next room to the study of the Director, who
+was there occupied with his own. It often happened that Wehrfritz, when
+Alban was as <i>distrait</i> and inattentive in the Anglaise as a partner in
+love, would cry out, while he was dictating in there, "In the name of
+the three devils, chassez!" Quite as many cases might one reckon in
+which, when the music-master, like a bass-drum, with everlasting
+exhortations glided away through adagio into piano, the man had to call
+out in there, with the strongest imaginable fortissimo, "Pianissimo,
+Satan! pianissimo!" Sometimes he was obliged to rise from his labors,
+when, in the fencing-lesson, all admonitions to "quart!" availed
+nothing, and open the door, and, grim with fury, say to him of Vienna,
+"For God's sake, sir, don't be a hare! Prick his leather soundly, if he
+doesn't mind!" Whereupon the courtly fencing-master would only gently
+encourage him to "quart thrust."</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, he learned much. In such early years one cannot rise above
+the finery nor the fine arts of a Falterle, who, besides, was reinforced
+with the magical advantage of having shone and taught in the forbidden
+metropolis. Only the loud stride and the boots were not to be taken from
+the pupil; but the shoulders soon grew horizontal, and the head
+perpendicular; and the oscillating fingers, together with the restless
+body, were steadied with Stahl's eye-holder. In general, men with a
+<i>liberal</i> soul in a finely-built body have already, without Falterle's
+espalier-wall and scissors, an agreeable shape and stature.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> Moreover,
+he felt toward the neat, friendly Falterle that holy <i>first love for
+men</i> wherewith a child's heart twines round all inmates of his home and
+village; and simply for this reason, that a lady could wind the Viennite
+about her ring-finger,&mdash;yes, inside of the gold ring itself,&mdash;and
+because he spoke and lied about the Knight of the Golden Fleece as about
+a king, and because he was the most agreeable creature that ever trod
+the earth.</p>
+
+<p>As I mean in my biographies to teach tolerance and even-handed justice
+toward all characters, I must here lead the way with a pattern of
+toleration, by remarking of Falterle, that his poor, thin soul had not
+the power to develop itself under the stone table of the laws of
+etiquette, and under the wooden yoke of an imposing station. To whom did
+the poor devil ever do any harm? Not even to ladies, for whom indeed he
+was always laboring before the looking-glass, like a copperplate
+engraver, upon his dear self, but only, like other sculptors, by this
+artistic work, to display pure beauties, not to mislead them. The
+sea-water of his life&mdash;for he is neither a millionnaire, nor even the
+greatest <i>savant</i> of the age, although he has read about among many
+circulating libraries&mdash;is sweetened by the water of beauty, wherein he
+hourly bathes. He swills and gormandizes scarcely at all. If he curses
+and swears, he does it in foreign languages, as the Papist makes his
+prayers, and flatters very few except himself.</p>
+
+<p>The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate vain persons much too
+violently; for such persons, after all, are more diseased in the head
+than in the will. I can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader,
+whether he ever, even when he was going about with an uncommonly vain
+feeling, remembers to have detected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> any deep qualms of conscience or
+discords in himself, which, however, were never wanting, when he lied
+very much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such occasions,
+experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking of his inner man in the
+cradle of state. Hence a vain man is as hard to cure as a gambler; but
+for this further reason,&mdash;most sins are occasional sermons and
+occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to
+the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word,
+cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness
+against himself, any more than he can play ninepins or fight a duel with
+himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter-Fair or
+New-Year's Day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal,
+margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life; many
+never at all,&mdash;for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost. On the
+contrary, one can praise and crown himself inwardly day and night,
+summer and winter, in every place,&mdash;in the pulpit, in the Prater, in the
+general's tent, on the back seat of a sleigh, in the princely chair, in
+any part of Germany,&mdash;for instance, in Weimar. What! and must one let
+this perennial balsam-plant, which continually perfumes the inner man,
+be plucked up or lopped off?</p>
+
+
+<h3>19. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>All these occupations and thorns were to Albano right good, sharp
+earthquake-conductors, since in his bosom already more subterranean
+storm-matter circulated than is needed to burst the thin wall of a man's
+chest. Now he began to get on deeper and deeper into the wild
+thunder-months of life. The longing to see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> Don Zesara caught new warmth
+from the Roman history, which lifted up on high before him Caesar's
+colossal image, and wrote under it, "Zesara." The veiled Linden-city was
+carried over by his fancy and set upon seven hills, and exalted to a
+Rome. A post-horn rang through his innermost being, like a Swiss Ranz
+des Vaches, which builds out into the ether all summits of our wishes in
+long and shining mountain-chains; and it blew for him the signal of a
+tent-striking, and all cities of the earth lay with open gates and with
+broad highways round about him. And when, at this period, on a cool,
+clear summer morning, he marched along metrically by the side of a
+regiment on its way to Pestitz, so long as he could hear the sound of
+the drums and fifes, then did his soul celebrate a Handel's Alexander's
+Feast; the past became audible,&mdash;the rattling of the triumphal cars, the
+movement of the Spartan bands and their flutes, and the clear trumpet of
+Fame,&mdash;and, as if at the sound of the last trumpets, his soul arose
+among none but glorified dead on the unbolted earth, and, with them,
+still marched onward.</p>
+
+<p>When History leads a noble youth to the plains of Marathon, and up to
+the Capitol, he would fain have at his side a friend,&mdash;a comrade,&mdash;a
+brother-in-arms, but no more than this,&mdash;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 Blumenbühl, not in the Linden-city, not in any place, but in his own
+bosom; and the name of that friend was&mdash;Roquairol.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 Pestitz, 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.</p>
+
+<p>The Viennite had long since eulogized before him the suicidal mad-cap
+Roquairol as a genius in learning,&mdash;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 sex, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>How must all this have won our friend's admiration for a youth whom he
+saw pass 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 <i>himself</i> 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 damnation, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and
+withal untruth itself, too&mdash;in spite of his aversion to Roquairol,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> took
+the letters with him, and was <i>heartily glad to do it</i> ("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,&mdash;but every
+letter <i>had delighted him</i>; 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
+documents relating to the case, for the catalogue of petals, which I for
+my own private use am stitching and gluing together, of Albano's
+flowering-time.</p>
+
+
+<h3>20. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> step became slower, his bright eye dreamy, his
+athlete-gymnastics less frequent,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>And now before such clear and sharp eyes the Isis-veil of Nature became
+transparent, and a living Goddess looked down into his heart with
+features full of soul. Ah, as if he had found his mother, so did he now
+find Nature,&mdash;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 <i>first</i> stirrings of human emotion
+as holy, as firstlings for the altar of God? 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 gods than by men; and the ideal foreruns the reality, as, with some
+trees, the tender <i>blossoms</i> anticipate the broad, rough <i>leaves</i>, in
+order that the latter may not set before the dusting and fructifying of
+the former.</p>
+
+<p>When, as often happened, Albano came home from his inner and outer
+roamings, at once intoxicated and thirsty,&mdash;with senses at the same time
+<i>shut</i> and <i>sharpened</i>, but dreaming like sleepers who feel the more
+painfully the putting out of the light,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> mould would have rounded the fluid mass
+into the loveliest form.</p>
+
+<p>Circumstances 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,&mdash;for he had the new names of the
+months, the orthography of Klopstock, and the Latin characters in German
+letters sooner in <i>his</i> letters than any one of us,&mdash;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 <i>dreams</i> which the <i>ruby</i><a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> of his
+glittering young life inspired with the exegetic <i>dream-books</i>, 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 circumstance; suffice it, that Albano, so
+situated,&mdash;the heaven of the poetic art open before him, the promised
+land of Romance spread out before his eyes,&mdash;resembled a planet,
+assailed by several whizzing comets, and blazing up with them into a
+common conflagration.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p>
+<p>But what further? The Vienna master&mdash;this I must still premise&mdash;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&mdash;unlike Solomon, who
+prayed for wisdom and received gold&mdash;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 passing, 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,&mdash;<i>Liana</i>, I think it was, if I read Hafenreffer's
+handwriting correctly,&mdash;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&mdash;to whom he only showed the coasts of Roquairol's isle of
+friendship afar off, but no point for landing&mdash;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?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>city</i> beauties as we do of <i>Homer's</i>, 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,&mdash;especially as her complexion and hands and hair were none
+of the softest, at least harder than Falterle's,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The shallow Viennite, who, if he spied a man of rank<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> 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,&mdash;in respect that he is a
+Legation's-Counsellor and Fee-Court-Provost,&mdash;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,&mdash;and all her charms become, indeed,
+through her father's tyranny, torments, but also all her torments
+become, through her own patience, charms....</p>
+
+<p>But, good Zesara, supposing now thou art compelled, daily, to hear all
+this,&mdash;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,&mdash;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;&mdash;good Zesara, I say, what if thou
+hearest all this in addition to thy romances, and that, too, of the
+sister of thy Roquairol;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> for every one, if it is only half practicable,
+loves to spin himself into one chrysalis with the sister of his
+friend,&mdash;and beside all this, of a maiden in the consecrated
+Linden-city, about which Don Gaspard, as the old Prussians<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> 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 passions 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,&mdash;i. e. books of
+linguists, of eclectics, upper-rabbins,&mdash;of ten wise men from the East
+and from Greece, and, by reason of the uncommonly dazzling
+<i>Epictetus'-lamps</i> which the said Decemvirate of wise men had lighted at
+the day-star of the wise ones,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/harpend.jpg" width="400" height="83" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> 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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> It used to be believed that a ruby gave pleasant dreams.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> Arnold's Ecclesiastical History of Prussia, Vol. I.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/barstart.jpg" width="550" height="138" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h2>FOURTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">High Style of Love.&mdash;The Gotha Pocket-Almanac.&mdash;Dreams on
+the Tower.&mdash;The Sacrament and the Thunder-Storm.&mdash;The
+Night-Journey into Elysium.&mdash;New Actors and Stages, and the
+Ultimatum of the School-Years.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>21. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/h.jpg" width="100" height="109" alt="H" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">How many blessed Adams of sixteen and a half years will be at this
+moment enjoying their siesta in the grass 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 space 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 cursèd one; and the young men of those cities, again, on their
+part, take passage in the arriving stage-coach, and go riding hopefully
+into his.</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> 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 Passion-week,
+hanging behind the veil, which thou liftest with trembling to adore it,
+when thou openest thy books of devotion,&mdash;the Romances,&mdash;and when thou
+findest therein the prayers which belong to thy saint. Even <i>I</i> find it
+hard not to do like thee and the ancients, and make a mystery of the
+name of thy guardian goddess,&mdash;concerning inner spiritual apparitions
+(for outer ones are bodily apparitions) the seer is glad to be silent
+nine days long;&mdash;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&mdash;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,&mdash;or stir the stack of salad in the
+blue dish with the long, wooden, miniature pitch-forks,&mdash;or how it can
+be that she weighs half a pound more in the sedan than a blue
+butterfly,&mdash;or how she can laugh loud (but that, however, she never did,
+my friend);&mdash;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 <i>fixed-star
+occultation</i>; 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> and that he would have given
+for any one single trace or relic of her&mdash;I mention only a thread-spool
+or a tambour-flower&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 glass 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 peacocks, whose jewelled plumage must be sheltered in nice and
+whitened apartments, whereas ours remain clean in duck-coops.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> 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 <i>head</i> visible, and Liana as a
+glorified child that, with its tender wings, flutters about a white
+cloud.</p>
+
+<p>How he longed for something, though it were only a fallen, faded rose
+of&mdash;silk from Pestitz; 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&mdash;lesson-mark; "for he had never
+yet seen one," he said. Falterle had one at this moment in his
+pocket,&mdash;the number 15, Liana's former age, was written upon it;&mdash;she
+might have written the number possibly;&mdash;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;&mdash;and finally he brought
+with him a novel of Madam Genlis, together with a Gotha pocket-almanac.
+These books of the blest&mdash;in comparison with which my own works and the
+Alexandrine Library and the blue library are only miserable
+<i>remittenda</i>&mdash;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, fag-ends of silk-ribbon as they do, for
+demarcation-lines and memoranda of readings,&mdash;and just the same
+fragrance (which Semler also praises in the books of alchemy), and which
+they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> seemed to have borrowed from the blossoms of Paradise. Ah, happy
+reader of the fairest book (I mean the Count), canst thou ask more?</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;but let me hasten on to the
+working of these <i>incunabula</i> of Liana, whose Dominical characters
+diffuse over a loving man nothing but bright, inner Sundays of the soul,
+and whose leaves resemble in sanctity 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Uranus, who does so with the greatest; and since he could not,
+without a blaze of shame on his cheek, think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> 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,&mdash;for Liana had been so too,&mdash;and his whole Vesuvius<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a>
+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?</p>
+
+
+<h3>22. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> 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 <i>another's</i>
+lips,&mdash;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&mdash;something quite original
+in the case; in <i>another's</i> name, he might, he thought, venture to give
+his deep pain a more passionate expression, for which, in his own name,
+before so many stoic classical heroes, he could not for shame muster up
+the courage. But in this way the classics could not touch him.</p>
+
+<p>The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass
+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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;O then arose his inner colosseum full of silent,
+godlike forms of spiritual antiques, and the torch-gleam of Fancy<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a>
+glanced round upon them like the play of a moving magic life,&mdash;and there
+he saw among the gods a <i>friend</i> and a <i>loved</i> one reposing, and he
+glowed and trembled.... Then the bells died away with a heavy groan, and
+became dumb,&mdash;he stepped back from the bright spring into the dark
+tower,&mdash;he fastened his eye<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> only on the empty, blue night before him,
+into which the distant earth sent up nothing save sometimes a butterfly
+blown out of its course, a swallow cruising by, or a pigeon hovering
+overhead,&mdash;the blue veil of Ether<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> fluttered in a thousand folds over
+veiled gods in the distance,&mdash;O then, then the cheated heart could not
+but exclaim, in its loneliness, Ah! where shall I find&mdash;where, in the
+wide regions of space, in this short life&mdash;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 <i>Friendship</i>. And when music, and moonlight, and spring
+and spring tears softly move him, then his heart dissolves, and he wants
+<i>Love</i>. And he who has never sought either is a thousand times poorer
+than he who has lost both.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> when he softly felt as if his
+purified, sanctified soul were now more worthy of that lovely one,&mdash;just
+then, the tempest, with all its playing war-machines and revolving
+cannons,<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> marched over from the Linden-city, and passed, 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 snatches 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,&mdash;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!...</p>
+
+<p>But the twelfth hour banished these spiritual apparitions and the
+tempest; Albano stepped out into a bluer, cooler, breezier sky,&mdash;and the
+glistening sun looked down with a friendly smile on the affrighted
+earth, whose bright<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> 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-assured
+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,&mdash;and never did a man enter upon a fairer one.</p>
+
+
+<h3>23. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Lilar</i>, 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 Pestitz, 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,&mdash;yes, her brother might haply be still walking round in the
+garden,&mdash;the June night was, besides, serene and magnificent. Ah, in
+short, he started.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 Pestitz 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 <i>her</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> 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 <i>red</i> buds, which, like unhappy beings, become too
+<i>pale</i> when they bloom out; but thou makest not, as yet, any such
+applications thereof as we do.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>ignes-fatui</i> 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> or Lilar,
+spread out below; he found at last in the wood an open alley.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+The magic circles of the mount rose ever smaller and smaller out of the
+leaves into the blossoms,&mdash;two naked children, among myrtles, had twined
+their arms caressingly about each other's bent head,&mdash;they were statues
+of Cupid and Psyche,&mdash;rosy night-butterflies were licking, with their
+short tongues, the honey-dew from the leaves, and the glowworms, like
+sparks struck off from the glow of evening, went trailing like gold
+threads around the rose-bushes; he climbed amid summits and roots behind
+the aromatic balustrade toward heaven; but the little spiral alley
+running round with him hung before the stars purple night-violets, and
+hid the deep gardens with orange summits; at length he sprang from the
+highest round of his Jacob's-ladder, with all his senses, out into an
+uncovered, living heaven; a light hill-top, only fringed with variegated
+flower-cups, received and cradled him under the stars, and a white altar
+gleamed brightly beside him in the moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>But gaze down, fiery man, with thy fresh heart, full of youth, on the
+magnificent, immeasurable, enchanted Lilar! A second twilight-world,
+such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out
+before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine
+walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon
+lingers now only on the groves and triumphal gates, and on the
+silver-dust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all
+waters and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm
+of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like
+Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands
+of our present world,&mdash;wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage,
+and all is one lovely, magic confusion. What mean those high, open doors
+or arches, and the pierced groves and the ruddy splendor behind them,
+and a white child sleeping among orange-lilies and gold-flowers, from
+whose cups delicate flames trickle,<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> as if angels had flown too near
+over them? The lightnings reveal swans, sleeping on the waves under
+clouds drunk with light, and their flaming trains blaze like gold after
+them in among the thick trees,<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> as goldfishes turn their burning
+backs out of the water,&mdash;and even around thy summit, Albano, the great
+eyes of the sunflowers turn on thee their fiery looks, as if kindled by
+the sparks of the glowworms.</p>
+
+<p>"And in this kingdom of light," thought Albano, trembling, "the still
+angel of my future hides himself and glorifies it, when he appears. O
+where dwellest thou, good Liana? In that white temple? or in the arbor
+between the rose-fields? or up there in the green Arcadian
+summer-house?" If love makes even pangs to be pleasures, and exalts the
+shadowy sphere of the earth into a starry sphere, O what an enchantment
+will it lend to delight! Albano could not possibly, in this outer and
+inner splendor, think of Liana as sick; he represented to himself just
+now only the blissful future, and with a yearning embrace knelt down at
+the altar; he looked toward the glittering garden, and pictured to
+himself how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> it would be when he should one day tread with <i>her</i> every
+island of this Eden,&mdash;when holy Nature should lay his and her hands in
+one another upon these altar-steps,&mdash;when he should sketch to her on the
+way the Hesperia of life, the pastoral land of first love, and then its
+holy exultation and its sweet tears, and how he should not then be able
+to look round into the eyes of that most tender heart, because he should
+already know that they were overflowing with bliss. Just then he saw, in
+the moonshine above the triumphal arches, two illuminated forms move
+like spirits; but his glowing soul went on with its painting, and he
+imagined to himself how, when the nightingales trilled in this Eden, he
+should look up to her and say, in a delirium of love, "O Liana, I bore
+thee long ago in my heart,&mdash;once upon that mountain, when thou wast
+sick."...</p>
+
+<p>This startled him, and he came to himself; he was indeed on the
+mountain,&mdash;but he had forgotten the sickness. Now, kneeling, he threw
+his arms around the cold stone, and prayed for her whom he so loved, and
+who, also, surely had prayed here; and his head sank, weeping and
+darkened, upon the altar. He heard human steps approaching down below on
+the winding hill, and, with trembling joy, he thought it might be his
+father; but he boldly remained on his knees. At last there stepped in
+across the flowery border a tall, bent old man, like the noble bishop of
+Spangenberg; his calm countenance smiled full of eternal love, and no
+pains appeared upon it, and it seemed to fear none. The old man, in mute
+gladness, pressed the youth's hands together as a sign that he should
+pray on, knelt down beside him, and that ecstasy to which frequent
+prayer transfigures one spread its saintly radiance over that form full
+of years. Singular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> was this union and this silence. The fragment of the
+moon, which was all that yet jutted above the earth, burned darklier,
+and at last went down; then the old man rose, and, with that easiness of
+transition which comes from being habituated to devotion, put questions
+about Albano's name and residence; after the answer, he merely said,
+"Pray on thy way to God, the all-gracious,&mdash;and go to sleep before the
+storm comes, my son!"</p>
+
+<p>Never can that voice and form pass away out of Albano's heart; the soul
+of the old man peered, like the sun in an annular eclipse, shining, full
+circle, out over the dark body, which strove to hide it with its
+earth-mould. Deeply struck, to the very roots of his nerves, Albano
+rose, and the broadening flashes of the lightning showed him now, down
+below near the enchanted garden, a second dark, entangled, horrible one,
+a sort of Tartarus to the Elysium. He departed with singular and
+conflicting emotions,&mdash;the future, and the beings therein, appeared to
+him, on his way, to stand very near, and already to run to and fro like
+theatre lights behind the transparent curtain,&mdash;and he longed for some
+weighty enterprise as a refreshment for his inflamed heart; but he had
+to rest his head, full of this heath-fire, on the pillow, and the high
+thunder, like a god of the night, mingled with its first claps in his
+dreams.</p>
+
+
+<h3>24. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>THE unknown old man lingered many days in Albano's soul, and would not
+stir. In fact, the channel of his life now needed a bend, to break the
+stress of the stream. Fate can educate men like him only by a change of
+circumstances, just as it can weak ones only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> by a continuance of the
+same. For if it went on much longer in this way, and the chandelier in
+his temple should, by inner earthquakes, be thrown into ever increasing
+vibrations, the consequence would be, at last, that no candle could any
+longer burn therein. What Imperial-Diet-grievances did not Wehrfritz and
+Hafenreffer already jointly present on the subject, when the shipmaster
+Blanchard, in Blumenbühl, went up with his aerostatic soap-bubbles, and
+Zesara could hardly, by almost the absolute despotism of the Director,
+be kept back from embarking! And how divine a thing does he not imagine
+it would be, not only to hurl down to the earth its iron rings and
+arrest warrants, and soar away, perpendicularly, above all its
+market-rubbish and boundary-trees and Hercules'-pillars, and sweep
+around it as a constellation, but also to hover above the magic Lilar
+and the hermetically-sealed Linden-city with devouring eyes, and to lift
+a whole, full, heavy world to his thirsty heart, by the handle of a
+single look!</p>
+
+<p>But fate broke the fall of this swift stream. Namely, as good luck would
+have it, the Blumenbühl church had this long time been daily threatening
+to tumble down,&mdash;and I was wishing the Whitsuntide lightning had gone in
+there, and had made ears and legs for the building committee,&mdash;when by
+still greater good luck the old Prince was taken sick. Now in the church
+was the hereditary sepulchre of the Prince, which could not conveniently
+serve, on the other hand, as the hereditary sepulchre of the church.</p>
+
+<p>About this time it must needs happen that the old Princess, with the
+Minister Froulay, passed through the village. The two had long since
+commissioned themselves as Imperial vicars, business-agents, and
+sceptre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> bearers of the State, because the feeble old gentleman had been
+glad to give up the amusements and burdens, the glitter and weight of
+the crown, and admit those two feudal guardians into the hereditary
+office of the sceptre. In short, the age of the church, together with
+that of the princely couple, decided the building of a new roofing and
+covering for the vault.</p>
+
+<p>The Provincial-Director was one of the inspecting committee, and invited
+the distinguished company to his house; among whom, the Provincial
+architect, Dian, and the Counsellor of Art, Fraischd&ouml;rfer, as artists,
+and the little princess as naturalist, are particularly to be noticed.</p>
+
+<p>The poor dancing-master got wind of the procession through a telescope,
+just as he was stretching his feet, full of <i>pas</i>, into a warm
+foot-bath. It will not gratify anybody, that the Vienna gentleman had
+but one thing in common with the old Magister,&mdash;what the Devil shares
+with the horse, namely, the foot, which measured its good foot and a
+half, Paris measure, and that, therefore, his double root, in the narrow
+forcing-pots of shoes, shot out into a fruit-bearing, knotty-stock, full
+of inoculating eyes, i. e. corns. To-day he would have cut these gordian
+knots in a foot-bath; but, as it was, he must, on occasion of such a
+visit,&mdash;although he had never stretched them,&mdash;put on his tightest
+children's shoes, for effect. Thus are men often caught with too tight
+shoes, as monkeys are with too heavy ones.</p>
+
+<p>Albano, on the contrary, stood in buskins. In general, every one who
+simply came from Pestitz, had, in his eyes, consecrated holy earth on
+his soles; and here he looked with the loving reverence of a village
+youth upon a somewhat oldish, but red-cheeked and tall-built princess,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+whose chin was bent up by time, and whose friendly face&mdash;perhaps, by way
+of hiding the many wrinkles&mdash;was buried deep in a whole bush of
+millinery. She kept this head moving to and fro with a smiling
+comparison, as of brother and sister, between him and Rabette; for
+mothers always look, in mothers, for the children first. He should have
+further known that he had before him a friend of Liana in the
+frizzle-headed <i>little</i> princess, who, although already of his age, yet
+with a friendly liveliness, which can never be subscribed to by the
+court-marshalship, looked up at all, and even took Rabette by the hand,
+and drew from her an indescribably good-natured and stiff smile. The
+formidable one of the party was to him the Minister, a man full of
+strong parts, both of body and soul, full of furious, murderous
+passions, only that they lay bound with flowery chains, and with respect
+to whom, although his hard face was written over only out of courtliness
+with the twelve friendly signs of the zodiac of love, it would not be
+specially apparent how one could be father and guide to the weak-nerved
+Liana, when the iron parts, of which man carries more in his blood than
+any other animal, had settled, not as in the case of G&ouml;tz of
+Berlichingen, into his hand, but into his brow and heart.</p>
+
+<p>I give merely a flying glance at the only member of the company who was
+intolerable to Albano,&mdash;the art-counsellor, Fraischd&ouml;rfer, who had
+thrown off his face, like the drapery of the ancients, into folds of
+simple and noble greatness. This man, I must explain, had wanted for
+many years to have our bashful little hero sit to him, even to the very
+pit of his stomach, in order to represent, whether in a crayon likeness
+or a medallion I know not, his face, and the broad, high, Plato-like
+breast shining out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> from his shirt-frills. But the bashful child played
+about himself with his hands and feet so lustily, that nothing could
+possibly be caught and copied except the naked face without the
+pedestal, the thorax. Before me, on the contrary, dear academy, must
+thou now for years keep thyself on the model-stand, like a stylite, and
+expose to my drawing-pen thy head and thy breast, together with its
+cubic contents, not to mention the groupings at all.</p>
+
+<p>He had, perhaps, to thank his noble form for it, that the beautifully
+built, straight-nosed, and magnificently slender Dian&mdash;with his raven
+hair and black, eagle eye, who in every pliant motion showed a higher
+freedom of carriage than is gained in ball-rooms and court-saloons&mdash;came
+up to him warmly, and, with very few glances, saw to the green bottom of
+the deep but clear sea of the young man, and discerned the pearl-banks
+there. Albano, with his too loud, vehement voice,&mdash;with his respectful
+but sharply-moving eyes,&mdash;with his rooted posture,&mdash;expressed an
+agreeable mixture of inward culture and ascendency with external rustic
+modesty and mildness, like a tulip-tree not as yet cut up for a
+tulip-bed,&mdash;a rural hermitage and log-house with golden furniture. He
+had the faults of youth in its recluseness; but men and winter radishes
+must be sowed <i>far apart</i>, in order that they may grow <i>large</i>: men and
+trees that stand near together have, it is true, a more slender and
+tapering trunk, but no power to brave the tempest, nor such a rich crown
+and branching as those that stand free. With the most unembarrassed
+heartiness, the architect disclosed to the glowing youth, "They should
+from this time forth see each other every week, since he was to come
+daily to oversee the building of the church."</p>
+
+<p>The whole Wehrfritz household is now peeping out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> after the majestic
+procession, even to the last disappearing chariot-wheel, and is, of
+course, eager to say three words upon the lavender-water of joy that
+leaves such a fragrance behind it, which the procession had sprinkled
+into all corners and upon all pieces of furniture. From the Master of
+exercises&mdash;who, with the compression-machines on his feet, stood only so
+far as the excrescences in Purgatory, but from there up to the crown of
+his head in heaven (because the affable Princess had remembered very
+well his five positions)&mdash;even to the modest Rabette, the eulogist of
+her victorious rival,&mdash;and even to Albina, who was agreeably impressed
+with such warm, motherly love in a Fürstinn toward the Princess,&mdash;and
+even to the Director, who looked back with pleasure on the nobly
+sustained blade- and anchor-proof of his foster-son and the universal
+probity of this converted portion of the great world, because the man
+never observed that Princes and Ministers, just as they have in their
+wardrobes mountain- and mining-habits, so also carry about in their
+dressing-chamber Directorate-dresses, furred gowns of justice,
+consistorial sheep-skins, and women's opera-dresses;&mdash;from all these,
+even to the Director, the glad echo swelled, to die away in Zesara with
+an alarm-cannon. His ambition took arms; his liberty-tree shot forth
+into blossoms; the standards of his youthful wishes were consecrated and
+flung to the breeze of heaven; and on the myrtle crown he covered a
+heavy helm with a glittering, high-waving, plumed crest....</p>
+
+<p>The following Cycle is composed merely for the purpose of showing how
+all this is to be taken.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>25. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>It is also my opinion that the antiphonious double choir of the two
+educational colleagues, Wehmeier and Falterle, had hitherto trained our
+Norman, as well as two similar gymnasiarchs, Governess England and
+domestic French instructress France, have actually educated the
+charity-school-girl Germany according to the best school-books, so that
+now we, in our turn, are in a condition to school the Poles, and, with
+the ferule, from the desk of our princely schools, to kantschu them down
+as much as is necessary.</p>
+
+<p>But now too much had waked up in Albano. He felt overswelling energies
+which found no teacher. His father, roving round through Italy, seemed
+to be neglecting him. That seat of the muses, Pestitz,&mdash;which now had
+<i>one</i> more muse added to its number,&mdash;seemed to be unjustly barred
+against him. Often he knew not how to stay away. Fancy, heart, blood,
+and ambition were at boiling heat. In such a case, as in every
+fermenting cask, nothing is more dangerous than an empty space, whether
+from a want of knowledge or of occupation.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dian filled up the cask.</i></p>
+
+<p>He came each week from the city, as if he had to arrange the hammer-work
+of the church, according to plans, as well as the building of its walls.
+A youth who sees his first Greek cannot, at the outset, rightly believe
+it at all; he takes him for a classic glorification,&mdash;a printed sheet
+out of Plutarch. And if his heart burns like that of my hero, and if his
+Greek is of Spartan descent, like Dian,&mdash;namely, an unconquered
+<i>Mainotte</i>, who has been brought up in the classic double choir of the
+&aelig;sthetic singing-schools in Atiniah (Athens) and Rome,&mdash;then is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> it
+natural that the inspired youth should stand every day in the dust-and
+rubbish-clouds of the falling church-walls, and wait to see his
+commander come forth from behind the cloudy pillar.</p>
+
+<p>Dian accompanied his beloved in his walks, often read half the night
+with him, and took him with him on the architectural journeys which he
+had constantly to make into the country. He introduced him with inspired
+reverence into the holy world of Homer and of Sophocles, and went with
+him among the loftier beings of this twin Prometheus, those nobly
+formed, completely developed men, yet unperverted by a partial
+provincial culture, who, like Solomon, had a time for everything
+human,&mdash;for laughing, weeping, eating, fearing, and hoping,&mdash;and who
+shunned merely rude immoderateness; who sacrificed on the altars of all
+gods, but on that of Nemesis first of all. And Dian, whose inner man was
+a whole, from which no member is torn away, no one swollen, and all
+fully grown, himself went round with his darling as such a Greek of
+Homer and Sophocles. While Wehmeier and the foster-parents were always
+running after him with a pulpit and a pew, at every passionate
+expression of anger, or desire, or exultation, he, on the contrary, with
+fair, liberal freedom, made room for him to unfold himself to his full
+breadth and height. He respected in the youth the St. Elmo's or St.
+Helena's fire, as he did frost in an old man: the heart of vigorous men,
+he thought, must, like a porcelain vase, in the beginning, be turned too
+large and too wide; in the furnace of the world it would soon enough
+shrink up to a proper size. I too require of youth, at first,
+intolerance, then, after some years, tolerance,&mdash;that as the stony, sour
+fruit of a strong young heart, this as the soft winter-fruit of an older
+head.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But while the Architect drew with him, and with him examined casts of
+the antiques and works of art, he at the same time made manifest most
+beautifully to the youth his love for the artistical <i>sign of the
+Balance</i> in man (who ought to be his own work of art), and his aversion
+to every paroxysm, which breaks the outward beauty as well as the inward
+into folds and wrinkles, and his desire to regulate his form and his
+heart after the lofty pattern of repose on the antiques.</p>
+
+<p>The Architect, as artists often do, and the Swiss still oftener,
+preserved European culture and rural <i>na&iuml;veté</i> and simplicity side by
+side, like his beloved profession, wherein, more than in other arts,
+beauty and surveying reason border upon each other; he therefore at
+first let Albano look in and listen at the window of the philosophical
+lecture-hall from without, standing in the open air. He led him, not
+into the stone-quarry, lime-pit, and timber-yard of metaphysics, but
+directly into the ready-made, beautiful oratory, formed of the materials
+thence collected, otherwise called Natural Theology. He did not let him
+forge and solder ring after ring of any iron chain of reasoning, but
+showed such a one to him as a deep-reaching well-chain, whereby Truth,
+sitting at the bottom, is to be drawn up; or as a chain hanging from
+heaven, whereby the lower gods (the philosophers) are to draw Jupiter
+down. In short, the <i>skeleton</i> and <i>muscle-preparation</i> of metaphysics
+he concealed in the <i>God-man</i> of religion. And so it should be (in the
+beginning); grammar is learned from language more easily than the latter
+from the former; criticism from works of art, the skeleton from the
+body, more easily than the reverse; although we always do reverse it.
+Unfortunate is it for the youth of our day, that they are obliged to
+shake the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> drops and the insects from the tree of knowledge, before the
+fruit.</p>
+
+<p>And now he boldly threw open to him all the chamber-doors of the
+philosophical schools, i. e. the three heavens; for in this youthful
+season one still takes the wick of every learned light of the world for
+asbestos, as Brahmins dress themselves in asbestos; and the masses of
+ice around the poles of our spiritual world represent, at this early
+age, like the actual ones in the visible world, cities and temples on
+azure-blue columns.</p>
+
+<p>Now when Albano had read himself to the flaming point upon some great
+idea or other, as Immortality or Deity, he had then to write upon it;
+because the Architect believed, and I too, that in the educational world
+nothing goes beyond writing,&mdash;not even reading and speaking; and that a
+man may read thirty years with less improvement than he would gain by
+writing a half. It is just in this way that we authors mount to such
+heights; hence it is that even the worst of us, if we hold out, become
+somewhat, at last, and write ourselves up from Schilda to Abdera, and
+from there away up to Grub Street.</p>
+
+<p>But what a glowing hour then came on for our darling! What are all
+Chinese lantern-festivals to the high festival for which an inflamed
+youth lights up all the chambers of his brain, and in this illumination
+throws out his first essays?</p>
+
+<p>In the forepart, and on the very threshold of the essay perhaps, Albano
+still crept along step by step, and made use merely of his head; but as
+he got further on, and his heart quivered with wings, and like a comet
+he must needs sweep along before only shimmering constellations of great
+truths, could he then restrain himself from imitating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> the rosy-red
+Flamingo, who, in his passage towards the sun, seems to paint himself
+into a flying brand, and to clothe himself in wings of fire? When at
+length he reached the practical application, verily every one was like
+the others; in each he formed and sowed an Arcadia full of human angels,
+who in three minutes could cross over on a Charon's pontoon thrown in
+for the purpose, and land in the Elysium which floated so near: in every
+one of these practical applications all men were saints, all saints
+beatified; all mornings blossoms, and all evenings fruit; Liana
+perfectly well, and he not far from it&mdash;her lover;&mdash;all nations ascended
+more easily the noonday heights; and he upon his own, like men upon
+mountains, saw everything good nearer to him. Ah! the whole boggy
+present, full of stumps and blood-suckers, had he kicked aside, and was
+now encircled only with floating green worlds, full of pastures, which
+the sun-ball of his head had projected into the ether.</p>
+
+<p>Blissful, blissful time! thou hast long since gone by! O, the years in
+which man reads and makes his first poems and systems, when the spirit
+creates and blesses its first worlds, and when, full of fresh
+morning-thoughts, it sees the first constellations of truth come up
+bringing an eternal splendor, and stand ever before the longing heart,
+which has enjoyed them, and to which time, by and by, offers only
+astronomical newspapers and refraction-tables on the morning-stars, only
+antiquated truths and rejuvenated lies! O, then was man, like a fresh,
+thirsty child, suckled and reared with the milk of wisdom; at a later
+period he is only cured with it, as a withered, sceptical, hectic
+patient! But thou canst, indeed, never come back again, glorious season
+of <i>first love</i> for the truth, and these sighs can only give me a
+warmer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> remembrance of thee; and if thou ever shouldst return, it
+certainly could not be down here in the low mine-shaft of life, where
+our morning splendor consists of the little flames that play upon the
+quartz crystals, and our sun is a mine-lamp,&mdash;no; but it may happen
+then, when death reveals us, and tears away from over the heads of the
+pale-yellow workmen the coffin-lid of the mine-shaft, and we now again
+stand as first men on a new, full earth, and under a fresh, immeasurable
+heaven!</p>
+
+<p>Into this golden age of his heart fell also his acquaintance with
+Rousseau and Shakespeare, of whom the former exalted him above his
+century, and the latter above this life. I will not say here how
+Shakespeare ruled, sovereign, in his heart,&mdash;not through the breathing
+of living characters, but by lifting him up out of the loud kingdom of
+earth into the silent realm of infinity. When one dips his head at night
+under water, there is an awful stillness round about him; into a similar
+supernatural stillness of the under-world does Shakespeare introduce us.</p>
+
+<p>What many schoolmasters may blame in Dian is this, that he gave the
+youth all books indiscriminately, without any exact course of reading.
+But Alban asked, in later years: "Is such a course anything but folly?
+Is it possible? For does Fate ever arrange the appearance of new books,
+or systems, or teachers, or outward circumstances, or conversations, so
+according to paragraphs, that one needs nothing more than to transcribe
+all that passes upon the memory, and he shall have the order into the
+bargain? Does not every head need and make its own? And does more depend
+on the order in which the meats follow each other, or on the digestion
+of them?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>26. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>While Dian was causing a nobler temple to go up in the heavens than the
+stone one in the village, the Princess, whose <i>castrum doloris</i> this was
+to be, died; they had, therefore, to deposit her remains for a time in
+the accommodations of a Pestitz church. This changed one or two thousand
+things. The Crown-prince of Hohenfliess, Luigi, must now, will he nill
+he, come back from Italy, to the princely chair, in which the old man,
+bent up with years, had, for a long time, diminutive and speechless,
+been rather lying than sitting,&mdash;although the Minister standing behind
+the princely arm-chair took off his figure and voice in a sufficiently
+lively manner. Don Gaspard, who had not listened to any of the previous
+letters of Albano, now despatched to him the following orders, which
+rushed like fiery wine through his veins: "On my way back from Italy we
+meet, in thy birthplace, <i>Isola Bella</i>. Thou wilt be sent for." Even
+readers who have not had a week's practice in folding and sealing
+letters of a diplomatic corps, will easily observe that the Knight of
+the Fleece is thinking to bring his son acquainted with the young
+prince, and to establish and insure their first Pestitz connections.</p>
+
+<p>But I beg the world now to measure the Paradise of a man, who after so
+long seafaring at last sees the long shores of the new world stretch out
+into the ocean. Was not life at this moment open to him in a hundred
+directions? Laurel-wreaths, ivy-wreaths, flower-wreaths, myrtle-wreaths,
+wheat-garlands,&mdash;all these crowns overhung the great gate of Pestitz and
+its house-doors. Thou brother, thou sister, (I mean Roquairol and
+Liana,) what a full, yearning soul was marching to meet you! and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> what a
+dreaming and innocent one! Homer and Sophocles, and the ancient history
+and Dian, and Rousseau, that magus of youth,&mdash;and Shakespeare and the
+British weeklies (wherein a higher and more human poesy speaks than in
+their abstract poems),&mdash;all these had left behind in the happy youth an
+everlasting light, an unparalleled purity, wings for every Mount Tabor,
+and the fairest but most difficult wishes. He resembled, not the urbane
+French, who, like ponds, reflect the hue of the nearest bank, but those
+loftier men, who, like the sea, wear the color of the boundless heavens.</p>
+
+<p>In fact, now was the ripest, best point of time for his change. Through
+Dian and his journeys, even Albano's <i>exterior</i> man had been trained to
+grace in fashionable saloons. Men, like bullets, go farthest when they
+are smoothest; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond-points
+enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is wounded, and even uncommon
+worth is an uncommon fault,&mdash;as <i>high</i> towers, for that very reason,
+appear <i>bent over</i>. Zesara learned, even outside the circle of country
+youngsters, a readiness of ideas and words, which formerly stood at his
+service only in a state of enthusiasm; for wit, generally a foe of the
+latter, was with him merely a servant and child thereof. He did not,
+like witty sucklings, coquette with all ideas, but he was either beset
+by them or not touched at all; hence came that silent, slow,
+unostentatious ripening of his power; he resembled mountains of a
+gradual ascent, which always yield more booty than those which rise
+abruptly. With great trees, the seed is smaller and in spring the
+blossoms later than in the case of small bushes.</p>
+
+<p>The time ere Gaspard's messenger came to take him away was to the
+detained youth an eternity, and the village<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> a prison; it shrivelled up
+to the household-buildings of a convent. The hidden plan of his life,
+written, however, by encaustic into his brain, was, as with all such
+young men, this, to be and do nothing more than&mdash;everything; that is to
+say, to bless, to glorify, and to enlighten at once himself and a
+country,&mdash;to be a Frederick II. upon the throne; in other words, a
+storm-cloud, which should contain thunders of excommunication for the
+sinner, electrical light for the deaf, blind, and lame, showers for the
+insects, and warm drops for thirsty flowers, hail for enemies, an
+attraction for everything, for leaves and dust, and a rainbow for the
+end. Now, as he could not succeed Frederick II., he proposes to be
+hereafter minister at least,&mdash;especially as Wehrfritz made so much out
+of this by-sceptre,&mdash;this offshoot and chip of the mother sceptre,&mdash;and
+in his spare hours a great poet and philosopher withal.</p>
+
+<p>I shall be delighted, Count, if thou shouldst become a second Frederick,
+the second and only; my book will profit by it and I myself mould my
+future thereby as a rare historiographer, compounded of Zenophon,
+Curtius, and Voltaire!</p>
+
+
+<h3>27. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Zesara will never forget the spring evening, on which he saw a passenger
+in a greatcoat,&mdash;a little limping and covered with brown
+travelling-paint, to which his white eyeballs formed a shining
+contrast,&mdash;wade across the shallow brook beside the high bridge, and
+how, further, the passenger took with him a watch-man's cane which the
+then Lieutenant of the Beggar's Police had just leaned against his
+house-door, a vicarious fellow-laborer, and handed the said cane, on his
+way, to a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> cripple, with the words: "Old man, I have nothing by me
+smaller than the stick. If anybody asks you about it, just tell them you
+are keeping guard in the village against the confounded beggar tribe,
+but have not eyes enough." At the same time our pilgrim reached out to a
+rector's little son, who needed it for about three minutes, his
+pocket-handkerchief.</p>
+
+<p>It was of course our old Librarian by title, Schoppe, whom Don Gaspard
+had despatched with the note of invitation for Isola Bella. Albano's
+delight was so great, that only some days later did the youth mistake
+the odd humorist, whereas the latter soon correctly weighed the light,
+ardent, still wildling. Did it not fare still worse with the old
+Provincial Director, who, merely because he rated the <i>body</i> politic of
+the Empire as high as if he were the installed <i>soul</i> therein, upon
+Schoppe's sallies against the constitution, came out in a patriotic
+fury: "Sir," said he, in an excited manner, "even if there were a flaw
+anywhere, still a true German would be bound to maintain a profound
+silence on the subject, unless he can help the matter, especially in
+such cursed times."</p>
+
+<p>The finest of all was, that, at Luigi's request, the Architect had to
+set out at the same time, for the purpose of fetching casts of antiques
+from Rome.</p>
+
+<p>And now march on, that soon ye may come back again, and we may at last
+for once fairly enter Pestitz! It may well be expected that thou, good
+child (I should rather say, wild-bee), wilt take thy flight from the
+rural honey-tree into the glass beehive of the city, with deeper pangs
+than thou hadst imagined beforehand,&mdash;has not even the old foster-father
+gone off on his journey without saying his farewell, only to escape
+thine?&mdash;and, as to thy good mother, it seems to her as if one of the
+angry Parc&aelig;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> were tearing a son from her breast, as if his tender
+love-bond, woven only of childish familiarity, would not stretch out
+into the far future,&mdash;and thy sister locks herself up in the attic, her
+rustic heart raging with fiery torments, and cannot say anything to
+thee, nor give thee anything, but a letter-case previously and privately
+worked by her with the silken circumscription: "Remember us!" and even
+on thy laurel-seeking head will the triumphal arch or rainbow of
+leave-taking, when thou passest under it, fling down heavy, heavy drops,
+(ah, they will continue to hang longer on the eyes that look after
+thee!) thy honest old teacher Wehmeier will pour out upon thee the last
+stream of his words and tears, and say, and thy tender heart will not
+smile at it: "He is a worn out, old fellow, and has now nothing before
+him but the hole (the grave); thou, on the contrary, art a fresh, young
+blood, full of languages and antiquities and magnificent, god-given
+talents,&mdash;of course he shall not live to see thee make a famous man, but
+his children well may; and these poor worms,&mdash;thou must one day adopt
+them, young master!"</p>
+
+<p>Thou pure soul, on every familiar house, on every dear garden and valley
+will sorrow, indeed, sharpen her clasp-knife, and tear open therewith
+softly gushing wounds in thy glowing, tender heart. What do I say? even
+from thy friendly morning- and evening-heights, the nunnery-gratings of
+thy holiest hopes, and from Liana herself, thou wilt seem to be stealing
+away.</p>
+
+<p>But cast thy weeping eyes over the broad, blue Italy, and dry them in
+the spring breezes. Life begins,&mdash;the signals for the martial exercises
+and tournaments of manly youth are given, and, in the midst of the
+Olympic battle-games, thou wilt hear the music of neighboring concert-
+and dancing-halls magnificently pealing around thee.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What phantasies are these I am playing here? What! is it not more than
+too well known to all of us, that he has been gone this long time, ever
+since the very first Jubilee-period,&mdash;yes, and come back again, and has
+already, ever since the second&mdash;and we are now counting the fourth&mdash;been
+sitting in company with the Librarian and the Lector, on horseback,
+before Pestitz, unable to get in, on account of the barricade of
+the&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/flowerend.jpg" width="400" height="79" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> In Catania, the veil of St. Agatha is the only antidote to
+Etna.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> Allusion to the torches, before which the Colosseum and
+the Antiques and the glaciers, which are both, are seen magically
+gleaming.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> As the Queen of Heaven, Juno is always, by the ancients,
+clothed in a blue veil.&mdash;<i>Hagedorn on Painting.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> An old machine that fires many shots at once.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> In Italy the stars look not silvery, but golden.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> In a tempestuous atmosphere, little flames are emitted by
+orange-lilies, gold-flowers, sunflowers, Indian pinks, &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> Probably on fluttering gold plates after the birds.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/3flowerstart.jpg" width="550" height="142" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>FIFTH JUBILEE?</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Grand-Entry.&mdash;Dr. Sphex.&mdash;The drumming Corpse.&mdash;The Letter of the
+Knight.&mdash;Retrogradation of the Dying-Day.&mdash;Julienne.&mdash;The still
+Good-Friday of Old Age.&mdash;The healthy and bashful hereditary
+Prince.&mdash;Roquairol.&mdash;The Blindness.&mdash;Sphex's Predilection for
+Tears.&mdash;The fatal Banquet.&mdash;the Doloroso of Love.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>28. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/w.jpg" width="100" height="105" alt="W" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">When he came to the fork of the road, of which the right prong points to
+Lilar, Albano, with a somewhat heavy heart, spurred his horse across,
+and flew up the hill, till the bright city, like an illuminated St.
+Peter's dome, blazed far and wide in this spring night of his fancies.
+It lay, like a giant, with its shoulders (the upper city) resting on the
+heights, and stretched its other half (the lower city) down into the
+valley. It was noon, and not a cloud in heaven; at noonday a city stands
+before you in full, white disk, whereas a village does not, until
+evening, come out of its first quarter into full light. It was well
+fortified, not by Rimpler or Vauban, but by a blooming palisade of
+lindens. The long wall of the palaces of the mountain-city gleamed from
+above a welcome to our Albano, and the statues, on their Italian roofs,
+directed themselves towards him as way-guides and criers of joy; over
+all the palaces ran the iron framework of the lightning-rods,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> like a
+throne-scaffolding of the thunder, with golden sceptre-points; down
+along the side of the mountain lay camped the lower city, by the side of
+the stream between shady avenues, with its gay fa&ccedil;ades towards the
+streets, and its white back turned toward Nature; carpenters were
+hammering away like a forge on the green-sward among the peeled trunks
+of trees, and the children were clattering round with the birch-bark;
+cloth-makers were stretching out green cloths like bird-nets in the sun;
+from the distance came white-covered carriers'-wagons jogging along the
+country-road, and by the sides of the way shorn sheep were grazing under
+the warm shadow of the rich, bright linden-blossoms,&mdash;and over all these
+groups the noonday chime of bells from the dear, familiar towers (those
+relics and light-houses that gleamed out of the dusk of his earlier
+days), floated like one all-embracing and animating soul, and called
+together the friendly throngs of people.</p></div>
+
+<p>Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the
+open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who
+knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be
+standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be
+unravelled,&mdash;where all household gods and household fates of his nearest
+future lie hid,&mdash;where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of
+Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching
+close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in
+the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of
+light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner
+mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of
+the best.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have
+happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were
+singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the
+passers below, and a building-orator,<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> on the ridgepole of a new
+house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his
+own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding;
+yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation
+of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the
+Muses,<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery
+eye to find his Roquairol,&mdash;after all this, when we reach his future
+residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.</p>
+
+<p>It came from the Land-physicus<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> Sphex, his future landlord, who is to
+resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his
+cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper
+city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are
+domiciled the students and the <i>city</i>. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex
+was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat
+upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's
+drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his
+drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had
+turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he
+soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but
+during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p><p>The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the
+house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to
+stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly,
+"Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor
+of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a
+picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the
+dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his
+rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on
+the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his
+foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had
+been sent after him,&mdash;fair reflections from the still land of youth,
+left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only
+concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be
+planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the
+goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the
+clare-obscure, made the forms of youth&mdash;many of them armed, many
+crowned, a troop of fates and graces&mdash;beset his heart, which had
+hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft
+and languid <i>for three minutes</i>; verily, to a youth, especially this
+one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring
+volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer,
+are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the
+physical.</p>
+
+<p>Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared
+his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired
+the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation
+to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son,
+who, with two others, named Boerhave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> and Galen, had hitherto been
+acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind
+a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some
+connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days
+he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?"
+asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked
+anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears,
+and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.</p>
+
+<p>The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary,
+prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old
+prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful
+event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz,
+and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with
+lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son,
+and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people
+had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the
+prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had
+his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death,
+postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving
+sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the
+case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his
+white teeth,<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that
+time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether
+a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much
+silk in a period of such political embezzlement.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> "But," replied
+Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs,
+like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still
+they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is
+generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no
+easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and
+corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal
+death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal
+graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children,
+the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new
+inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies,
+we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it
+does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal
+Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means,
+to announce."</p>
+
+<p>Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while,
+brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open,
+with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover;
+but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like
+a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was
+his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his
+head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the
+impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury
+to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to
+conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a
+flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner
+twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook
+his head still<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from
+the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap
+almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from
+this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other
+of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the
+intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to
+conceal.</p>
+
+<p>At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the
+tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the
+events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of
+the letter!</p>
+
+
+<h3>29. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was
+already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with
+three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and
+three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress,
+and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the
+pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well,
+and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti:
+"The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the
+less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which
+live on <i>fruits</i>, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there
+sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on
+<i>leaves</i>,&mdash;for instance, the leaf-lice,&mdash;cleave together nest-wise."
+Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart
+the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it.
+Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common,
+but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of
+bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of
+love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call
+starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too
+near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance
+of bodies.</p>
+
+<p>The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream
+through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with
+whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had
+already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures
+upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a
+treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the
+anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting
+the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly,
+simple, flabby man, named <i>Malt</i>, he had a year since, when certain
+symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on
+condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead.
+Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse
+daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a
+horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he
+allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor
+passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.</p>
+
+<p>As to the drum, the corpse is obliged&mdash;since he is full as hard of
+hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the
+very reason that he never hears one&mdash;to carry that round, strapped to
+him,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his
+employer and prosector has to censure in him.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> The Doctor now began
+to scold at him down below&mdash;Schoppe stood listening at the window&mdash;in
+the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of
+blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under
+your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose
+away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you
+have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can,
+and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in
+this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if
+they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks
+clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret
+of thy trouble with me,&mdash;there is no real blessing upon our grease,&mdash;and
+one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father,
+verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."</p>
+
+
+<h3>30. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs,
+when translated, thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a
+letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence
+of thy sister's asphyxias;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> it was written on Good Friday, and looked
+forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the
+event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of
+the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes
+some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain.
+I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful,
+armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the <i>jongleur</i> fast; but
+bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in
+Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old
+Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!</p>
+
+<p class="sig">"<span class="smcap">G. de C.</span>"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion,
+and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was
+denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see
+each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and
+smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand
+so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the
+melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and
+decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had
+carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that
+she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood
+contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What
+destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that
+voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and
+boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals.
+"Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> however, in this
+case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed
+terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced
+for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the
+most beloved.</p>
+
+<p>In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their
+household arrangements,&mdash;which, however, had never yet been able to
+efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of
+the Linden-city,&mdash;the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary
+prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day
+copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him
+there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the
+world a bill of fare <i>raisonné</i> of all the show-dishes in the gallery;
+but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over
+whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame
+would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly
+covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban,
+in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of
+his mother's,<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had
+no one been there.</p>
+
+<p>But the Princess Julienne was there, whom he (as we all do) still
+recognized right well as a Blumenbühl acquaintance, as she also did him.
+She was truly full of youthful charms, but one did not find these out
+till one had been for two days violently in love with her; that made her
+every minute afterward prettier, as in fact love is rather the father
+than the son of the goddess of grace, and his quiver the best casket of
+jewels and the richest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> toilet-box, and his bandage the best <i>mouchoir
+de Venus</i> and beauty-patch that I know.</p>
+
+<p>She was just sketching the gypsum-cast of a noble old head, which seemed
+to the Count as if it must have been drawn from the antique-cabinet of
+his memory, and toward which his swelling heart flowed out right
+lovingly; but he could not recall the original. At last Julienne, in
+despite of etiquette, said, looking up most kindly, "Ah, dear Augusti,
+my father lies dead in Lilar." The word Lilar suddenly colored, in
+Albano, the pale image of recollection,&mdash;perfectly like this white bust
+had the old man in the moonshine looked, who, in that poetical
+summer-night, pressed Zesara's hands together on the mountain for
+prayer, and said, "Go home to sleep, dear son, ere the storm comes." Now
+another would have inquired after the name of the bust, and then, and
+not till then, have disclosed the nocturnal history; but the Count, in
+his warmth, did merely the latter, after waiting a short time for the
+conversation to run out. Augusti, when Albano began the history&mdash;to
+<i>him</i> a foreign one&mdash;of his acquaintance with the original, was on
+thorns to interrupt him; but Julienne gave him a nod, to let him go on,
+and the youth true-heartedly communicated to the sympathizing soul the
+beautiful meeting, with a tenderness of emotion and fire, both of which
+increased when her eyes flowed over into her smiles. "It was my
+father,&mdash;that is his cast," said Julienne, weeping and glad. Albano,
+after his manner, clasped his hands together, with a sigh, before the
+bust, and said, "Thou noble, heartily-beloved form!" and his large eye
+gleamed with love and sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and
+she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life
+is truly only a longer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> <i>punishment of bearing arms</i> (as, according to
+the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are
+true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is
+there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female
+pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,&mdash;but
+the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the
+eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve
+times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and
+others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count
+(while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more
+brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more
+childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not
+possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut
+himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at
+Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever,
+and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),&mdash;and how she
+and Fr&auml;ulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the
+half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion
+to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber
+of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved;
+how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever
+slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every
+hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as
+one going to bed.</p>
+
+<p>We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again,
+like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the
+grave; and when, like flowers sleeping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> at evening, they become
+<i>undistinguishable</i>, and grow all alike, even before death makes them
+so.</p>
+
+<p>The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these
+funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation
+by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana.
+But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this
+friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in
+which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her
+bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of
+blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to
+portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.</p>
+
+<p>The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other
+through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other
+without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as
+the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but
+they loved each other intensely,&mdash;with eyes, lips, and hearts,&mdash;like two
+good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made
+it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same
+with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily
+imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once
+painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano,
+as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For
+Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates
+to the highest heavens in his innermost being!</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself
+without the fee-provost Hafenreffer),<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> have been able to observe
+anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in
+his face, and rapidity of utterance.</p>
+
+
+<h3>31. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Into the midst of these delineations and enjoyments the successor, or
+rather the <i>afterwinter</i> of the cold old man, Luigi, suddenly entered.
+With a flat, carved work of spongy face, on which nothing expressed
+itself but the everlasting discontent of life-prodigals, and with a
+little full-grown miniver<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> on his head (as forerunner of the
+wisdom-teeth), and with the unfruitful superfetation of a voluminous
+belly, he came up to Albano with the greatest courtliness, in which a
+flat frostiness towards all men stood prominent. He immediately began to
+dust about him with the bran of empty, rapid, disconnected questions,
+and was constantly in a hurry; for he suffered almost more ennui than he
+caused; as in general, there is no one with whom life drags so
+disagreeably as with him who tries to make it shorter. Luigi had run
+over the earth as quickly as through a powdering room, and had, as in
+such a room, become decently gray; the milk-vessels of his outer and
+inner man had, because they were to be converted into cream-pots and
+custard-cups, for that very reason, perverted themselves into
+poison-cups and goblets of sorrow. As often as I pass along before a
+painted prince's-suite in a corridor, I always fall upon my old project,
+and say, with entire conviction: "Could we only contrive for once, like
+the Spartans and all the older nations, to get a regent to the throne in
+a <i>healthy</i> state, then we should have a <i>good</i> one into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> bargain,
+and all would go well. But I know these are no times for such a thing.
+It is a sin, that only at torture do surgeons and physicians assist, not
+at joy, to point out nicely the degree of pleasure as they do of the
+rack, and to indicate the innocent conditions."</p>
+
+<p>Albano, a stranger in the company and in the eyes of this class of men,
+looked upon the gulf between himself and Luigi as much less deep than it
+was; it was merely annoying and uncomfortable to him, as it is to
+certain people, when, without their knowledge, a cat is in the chamber.
+The progress of moral enervation and refinement will yet so cleanse and
+equalize all our exteriors,&mdash;and according to the same law, indeed, by
+which <i>physical weakness</i> throws back the <i>eruptions of the skin</i> and
+drives them into the <i>nobler</i> parts,&mdash;that verily an angel and a satan
+will come at last to be distinguishable in nothing except in the heart.
+Alban had already brought with him from Wehrfritz, whom he always heard
+contending for the right of the province against the prince, an aversion
+to his successor; so much the more easily flamed up in him a moral
+indignation, when Luigi turned toward the pictures and drew aside the
+curtains or aprons from several of the most indecent, in order, not
+without taste and knowledge, to appraise their artistic worth. A copied
+Venus of Titian, lying upon a white cloth, was only the forerunner.
+Although the innocent hereditary prince made his <i>voyage pittoresque</i>
+through this gallery with the artistical coldness of a gallery inspector
+and anatomist, and sought more to show than to enrich his knowledge,
+still the inexperienced youth took it all up with a deaf and blind
+passionateness, which I know not how to vindicate in any way, not even
+by the presence of the princess, and so much the less, because in the
+first place she busily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> divided her soul only between the gypsum-bust
+and its copy, and because, secondly, in our day, ladies' watches and
+fans (if they are tasty) have pictures on them which Albano would want
+other fans to hide. The two flames of wrath and shame overspread his
+face with a glowing reflection; but his awkward honesty of scorn
+contrasted with the ease of the Lector, who with his cold tone, quite as
+precise as it was light, preserved independence and protected purity.
+"They please me not, one of them," he said, with severity: "I would give
+them all away for a single storm of Tempesta's." Luigi smiled at his
+scholar-like eye and feeling. When they stepped into the second
+picture-chamber, Albano heard the Princess going away. As this apartment
+threatened him with still more rent veils of the <i>un</i>holiest, he took
+his leave without special ceremony, and went back without the Lector,
+who had to-day to give a reading.</p>
+
+<p>Never did Schoppe grasp his throbbing hand more heartily than this time;
+the aspect of an abashed young man is almost fairer (especially rarer)
+than that of an abashed virgin; the former appears more tender and
+feminine, as the latter appears more strong and manly, by a mixture of
+the indignation of virtue. Schoppe, who, like Pope, Swift, Boileau,
+forced into combination a sacred reverence for the sex with cynicism of
+dress and language, emptied the greatest vials of wrath upon all
+libertinage, and fell like a satirical Bellona upon the best free
+people; this time, however, he rather took them under his protection,
+and said, "The whole tribe love the blush of shame in others decidedly,
+and defend it more willingly than shamelessness, just as (and on the
+same kind of grounds) blind persons prefer the <i>scarlet</i> color. One may
+liken them to <i>toads</i>, who set the costly toad-stone<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> (their heart) on
+no other cloth as they do upon a <i>red</i> one."</p>
+
+<p>The Lector&mdash;who with all his purity and correctness would, nevertheless,
+without hesitation, have helped a Scarron write his ode on the seat of a
+duchess&mdash;when he would treat the matter of the Count's flight, was at a
+loss what to make of it, when the latter sprinkled him with some
+rose-vinegar, and said, "The bad man's father is lying on the board, and
+one lies before his own iron brow: O, the bad man!" Certainly the
+physical and moral nearness of the two fair female hearts, and his love
+for them, had done most to excite the Count against Luigi's artistic
+cynicism. The Lector merely replied, "He would hear the same at the
+Minister's and everywhere; and his false delicacy would very soon
+surrender." "Do the saints," inquired Schoppe, "dwell only <i>upon</i> the
+palaces and not <i>in</i> them?" For Froulay's bore upon its platform a whole
+row of stone apostles; and on one corner stood a statue of Mary, which
+was to be seen from Sphex's house among nothing but roofs.</p>
+
+<p>Youthful Zesara! how does this marble Madonna chase the blood-waves
+through thy face, as if she were the sister of thy fairer one, or her
+tutelar and household goddess! But he took care not to hasten his
+entrance into this <i>Lararium</i> of his soul, namely, the delivery of his
+father's letter of introduction, by a single whisper, for fear of
+suspicion; so many missteps does the good man make in the very gentile
+fore-court of love; how shall he stand in the fore-court of the women,
+or get a footing in the dim Holy of Holies?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>32. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The Court now caused to be made known in writing (it could not speak for
+sorrow) that the dead Nestor had departed this life. I set aside here
+the lamentation of the city, together with the rejoicing of the same
+over the new perspective. The Land-physicus Sphex had to eviscerate the
+Regent like a mighty beast,&mdash;whereas we subjects are served up with all
+our viscera, like snipes and ground-sparrows, on the table of the worms.
+At evening, there reposed the pale one on his bed of state,&mdash;the
+princely hat and the whole electrical apparatus of the throne-thunder
+lay quite as still and cold beside him on a Tabouret; he had the
+suitable torches and corpse-watchers around him. These Swiss-guards of
+the dead (the sound of the word rings through me, and I at this moment
+see Liberty lying on her bed of state in the Alps, and the Swiss
+guarding her) consist, as is well known, of two regency-counsellors, two
+counsellors of the exchequer, and so on. One of the
+exchequer-counsellors was Captain Roquairol. It can be only touched upon
+here, in the way of interpolation, how this youth, who of financial
+matters understood little more than a treasury-counsellor in &mdash;&mdash;h,<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a>
+arose, nevertheless, to be a counsellor in war-matters there,&mdash;namely,
+against his own will, through old Froulay, who (in himself no very
+sentimental gentleman) was always reviving and retouching the youthful
+remembrances of the old Prince, because, in this tender mood, one could
+get from him by begging what one would. How odious and low! so can a
+poor prince have not a smile, not a tear, not a happy thought, out of
+which some court-mendicant, who sees it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> will not make a door-handle to
+open something for himself, or a dagger-handle to inflict a wound; not a
+sound can he utter which some forester and bugle-master of the chase
+shall not pervert to the purpose of a mouth-piece and tally-ho.</p>
+
+<p>Julienne, at nine o'clock in the evening, visited the only heart which,
+in the whole court, beat like hers and for hers,&mdash;her good Liana. The
+latter gladly offered her forehead to her commencing sick-headache, and
+sought only to feel and to still another's pain. The friends, who,
+before strangers' eyes, only displayed pleasantry, and before each other
+only a tender, enthusiastic seriousness, sank more and more deeply into
+this mood before the severe and religious lady of the Minister, who
+never found in Julienne so much soul as in the soft hour after weeping,
+as stock-gilliflowers begin to scent the air when they are sprinkled.
+Not the struggle, but the flight of pain, beautifies the person; hence
+the countenance of the dead is transfigured, because the agonies have
+cooled away. The maidens stood enthusiastically together at the window,
+the waxing moonlight of their fancy was made full moonlight by that of
+the outer world; they formed the nun's-plan to live together, and go in
+and out together for life. Often it seemed to them, in this still hour
+of emotion (and the thought made them shudder), as if the murmuring
+wings of departed souls swept by over them (it was only a couple of
+flies, who, with feet and wings, had caught a few tones on the harp of
+the Minister's lady); and Julienne thought most bitterly of her dead
+father in Lilar.</p>
+
+<p>At last she begged the sister of her soul to ride with her this night to
+Lilar, and to share and assuage the last and deepest woe of an orphan.
+She did it willingly;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> but the "yes" was hard to extort from the
+Minister's lady. I see the gentle forms step, from their long embrace in
+the carriage, out into the mourning chamber at Lilar,&mdash;Julienne, the
+smaller of the two, with quivering eyes and changing color; Liana, more
+pale with megrim and mourning, and milder and taller than her companion,
+having completed her growth in her twelfth year.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a></p>
+
+<p>Like supernatural beings the two maidens beamed upon Roquairol's soul,
+already burning in every corner. A single tear-drop had power to bring
+into this calcining oven boiling and desolation. Already this whole
+evening had he been glancing at the old man with fearful shudderings at
+the childish end of that faded spirit, which once had been as fiery as
+his own now was; and the longer he looked, so much the thicker
+smoke-clouds floated from the open crater of the grave over into his
+green-blooming life, and he heard therein a thundering, and he saw
+therein an iron hand glowing and threatening to grasp at human hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Amidst these grim dreams, which illuminated every inner stain of his
+being, and which sternly threatened him that a day would come, when, in
+his volcano too, there would remain nothing fruitful but the&mdash;ashes, the
+mournful maidens entered, who, on their way, had wept only over the face
+that had grown <i>cold</i>, and now wept still more heavily over the form
+that had grown <i>beautiful</i>; for the hand of death had effaced from it
+the lines of the last years,&mdash;the prominent chin, the fire-mounds of the
+passions, and so many pains underscored with wrinkles, and had, as it
+were, painted upon the earthly tabernacle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> the reflection of that fresh,
+still morning light which now invested the disrobed soul. But upon
+Julienne a black taffeta-plaster on the eyebrows, which had been left
+behind by a blow,&mdash;this sign of wounds made a more violent impression
+than all signs of healing: she observed only the tears, but not the
+words of Liana. "O, how beautifully he rests there!" "But why does he
+rest?" said her brother, with that voice, murmuring from his innermost
+being, which she recognized as coming from the amateur-stage; and
+grasped her hand with agitation, because he and she loved each other
+fervently, and his lava broke now through the thin crust: "for this
+reason,&mdash;because the heart is cut out of his breast, because the wheel
+is broken at the cistern, because the fire-wheel of rapture, the
+fountain-wheel of tears, moves therein no more!"</p>
+
+<p>This cruel allusion to the opening of the body wrought terribly on the
+sick Liana. She must needs avert her eyes from the covered breast,
+because the anguish cramped the breath in her lungs; and yet the wild
+man, desolating others as well as himself, who had hitherto been silent
+by the side of the stiff corpse-guard, went on with redoubled crushing:
+"Feel'st thou how painfully this cricket-ball of fate, this Ixion's
+wheel of the wishes, rolls within us? Only the breast without a heart is
+calm."</p>
+
+<p>At once Liana took a longer and more intense look at the corpse; an
+ice-cold edge, as if of death's scythe, cut through her burning
+brain,&mdash;the funeral torches (it seemed to her) burned dimmer and
+dimmer,&mdash;then she saw in the corner of the chamber a dark cloud playing
+and growing up;&mdash;then the cloud began to fly, and, full of gushing
+night, rushed over her eyes,&mdash;then the thick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> night struck deep roots
+into her wounded eyes, and the affrighted soul could only say, "Ah,
+brother, I am blind!"</p>
+
+<p>Only hard man, but no woman, will be able to conceive that an &aelig;sthetic
+pleasure at the murderous tragedy found its way into Roquairol's
+frightful anguish. Julienne left the dead, and her old sorrow, and, with
+the new one, flung herself around her neck, and moaned: "O my Liana, my
+Liana! Seest thou not yet? Do look up at me!" The distracted and
+distracting brother led on the sister, upon whose pale cheeks only
+single drops fell like hard, cold water, with the sharp question: "Does
+no destroying angel, with red wings, whiz through thy night; hurls he no
+yellow vipers at thy heart, and no sword-fish into thy network of
+nerves, in order that they may be entangled therein, and whet their
+saw-teeth in the wounds? I am happy in my pain; such thistles scratch us
+up,<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> according to good moralists, and smooth us down too. Thou
+anguish-stricken blind one, what say'st thou,&mdash;have I made thee truly
+miserable again?" "Madman!" said Julienne, "let her alone: thou art
+destroying her." "O, he is not to blame for that," said Liana; "the
+headache long since made it misty to my eyes."</p>
+
+<p>The friends took their departure in double darkness, and therein will I
+leave it with all its agonies. Then Liana begged her maiden to say
+nothing of it to her mother so little time before sleep, since it might,
+perhaps, go away in the night. But in vain; the Minister's lady was
+accustomed to close her day on the bosom and lips of her daughter. The
+latter now came in, led along, and sought her mother's heart with a
+groping, sidelong motion, and, in this beloved neighborhood, could no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+longer refrain from a softer weeping; then, indeed, all was betrayed and
+confessed. The mother first sent for the Doctor before she, with wet
+eyes and with her gentle arms around her, heard her afflicted daughter's
+story. Sphex came, examined the eyes and pulse, and made no more of it
+than a nervous prostration.</p>
+
+<p>The Minister, who had everywhere in the house leading-hounds with
+fine&mdash;ears, came in, upon being informed; and while Sphex stood by, he
+made, except long strides, nothing but this little note, "<i>Voyez,
+Madame, comme votre le Cain<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> joue son r&ocirc;le à merveille</i>."</p>
+
+<p>As soon as Sphex had gone out, Froulay let loose several
+billion-pounders and hand-grenades upon his lady. "Such," he observed,
+"are the consequences of your visionary scheme of education (to be sure
+his own, in respect to his son, had not turned out specially well). Why
+did you let the sick ninny go?" He would himself have still more gladly
+allowed it from courtly views; but men love to blame the faults which
+they have been saved the trouble of committing; in general, like
+head-cooks, they had rather apply the knife to the <i>white</i>- than to the
+<i>dark</i>-feathered fowl. "<i>Vous aimez, ce me semble, à anticiper le sort
+de cette reveuse un peu avant qu'il soit decidé de n&ocirc;tre.</i>"<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> Her
+silence only made him the more bitter. "<i>O, ce sied si bien à votre art
+cosmétique que de rendre aveugle et de l'&ecirc;tre, le dieu de l'amour s'y
+pr&ecirc;te de modèle.</i>" Wounded by this extreme severity,&mdash;especially as the
+Minister himself had chosen and commanded this very <i>cosmetic</i> education
+of Liana, against the maternal wishes, to gratify his political
+ones,&mdash;the mother had to go and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> hide and dry her wet eyes in her
+daughter's bosom. Married men and the latest literati regard themselves
+as flints, whose power of giving <i>light</i> is reckoned according to their
+<i>sharp corners</i>. Our forefathers ascribed to a diamond belt the power to
+kindle love between spouses. I also still find in jewels this power;
+only this stone (which appertains to the flint species) leaves one,
+after the marriage-compact, as cold and hard as it is itself. Probably
+Froulay's marriage-bond was one of such precious stone.</p>
+
+<p>But the lady only said, "Dear Minister, leave we that! only spare you
+the sick one." "<i>Voilà précisement ce qui f&ucirc;t votre affaire</i>," said he,
+laughing scornfully. In vain did Liana eloquently and touchingly pour
+out to him her mistaken yet moving convictions, (aimed at the wall,
+however,) and plead for her brother, which everlasting advocacy of all
+sorts of people (which proved too much) was her only failing;&mdash;all in
+vain, for his sympathy with an afflicted one consisted in nothing but
+fury against the tormentors, and his love toward Liana showed itself
+only in hatred of the same. "Peace, fool! But <i>Monsieur le Cain</i> comes
+not into my house, madam, till further orders!" Out of forbearance, I
+say nothing further to the old conjugal bully than go&mdash;to the devil, or
+at least to bed.</p>
+
+
+<h3>33. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The German public may still remember the <i>obligato-sheets</i> promised in
+the Introductory Programme, and ask me what has become of them. The
+foregoing Cycle was the first, most excellent Public; but see through
+the matter, how it is with obligato-sheets, and that perhaps as much
+history lies therein as in any one Cycle, however it may be called.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Count had not yet learned anything of Liana's misfortune, when he,
+with the others, went down to the dinner of the Doctor, who to-day was
+very hospitable. They found him seized with a most violent fit of
+laughter, his hands thrust into his sides, and his eyes bent over two
+little ointment vessels on the table. He stood up, and was quite
+serious. The fact was, he found in Reil's Archives of Physiology, that,
+according to Fourcroy and Vauquelin, tears dye violet-juice green, and
+therefore contain alkali. In order to prove the proposition and the
+tears, he had thrown himself into a chair, and laughed in right hearty
+earnest, so as afterward to cry and get a drop or two for the
+brine-gauge of the proposition; he would gladly have wrought himself
+into another kind of emotion, but he understood his own nature, and knew
+that nothing could be got out of it so,&mdash;not a drop.</p>
+
+<p>He left the guests alone a moment,&mdash;the lady was not yet to be
+seen,&mdash;Malt sat on an ottoman,&mdash;the children had satirical looks,&mdash;in
+short, Impudence dwelt in this house as in her temple. Ridicule had no
+effect upon the old man, and he only countermanded what displeased
+himself, not what displeased others.</p>
+
+<p>At length the rosy-cheeked wife of the physician flourished into the
+apartment,&mdash;as preparatory course or preamble of the dinner,&mdash;with three
+or four <i>esprits</i> or <i>feathers in her cap</i>,&mdash;with a dapple
+neck-apron,&mdash;in a red ball-dress, from which waltzing had taken out the
+color in which she had rouged,&mdash;and with a perforated fancy-fan. If I
+wished, I could be interested in her; for, touching these <i>esprits</i>
+(since the <i>esprit</i>, like the brain in Embrya, often sets itself upon
+the brain-pan, and there suns itself), she thought women and partridges
+were best served up at table with feathers on their heads;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> touching the
+fan, she meant to have it understood she had just come from a morning
+call (whereby she very clearly implied that ladies could no more go
+through the streets without their fan-stick than joiners without their
+rule); touching the rest, she knew the guest was a Count. Accordingly,
+it appears that she belongs to the honorables, who (for the most part),
+like rattlesnakes, are never better to be enjoyed than when one has
+previously put the head out of the way; but that we have still time
+enough to believe, when we come to understand her better.</p>
+
+<p>The beautiful Zesara was for her blind, deaf, dumb, destitute of smell,
+taste, feeling; but there are many women whom one cannot, with the
+greatest pains and tediousness, displease; Schoppe could do it more
+easily. Sphex, for his own personal predilections, made more out of a
+cell of fat in Malt than out of the whole cellular texture of a lady,
+even of his own; like all business people, he held women to be veritable
+<i>angels</i>, whom God had sent for the ministration of the saints (the
+business men).</p>
+
+<p>The dinner course began. Augusti, a delicate eater, enjoyed much, and
+took not only to the fine service, but to the torn napkins; the like of
+which he had often had in his lap at court, because there, in morals and
+in linen, rents are preferred to plasters. Soon, as usual, came forth
+even the outposts and first skirmishes of miserable dishes, the common
+prophets and forerunners of the best tit-bits, although at a hundred
+tables I have cursed them, that they did not, like good monthly
+magazines, give the best pieces first, and the most meagre last. The
+Doctor had already said to the three boys,&mdash;"Galen, Boerhave, Van
+Swieten, what is the polite way of sitting?" and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> three physicians
+had already shoved three right hands between the waistcoat buttons, and
+three left hands into the waistcoat pockets, and sat waiting, "bolt
+upright" when good chap-sager was brought in for the dessert. Sphex
+partly expressed pleasure in cheese, partly a horror of it, just as he
+found it in the way of his shop-business. He remarked, on one hand, how
+joiners, in their glue-pot, had no better glue than what stood here
+before them,&mdash;it had just that binding quality in a man,&mdash;yet he would
+rather, for his own individual self, with Dr. Junker, apply it
+externally, like arsenic; but he also confessed, on the other hand, that
+the chap-sager for the Lector was poison. "I would pledge myself for
+it," said he, "that you, if one could examine you, would be found
+hectic! the long fingers and the long neck speak in my favor, and
+particularly are white teeth, according to Camper, a bad sign. Persons,
+on the contrary, who have a set of teeth like my lady there may feel
+safe."</p>
+
+<p>Augusti smiled, and merely asked the Doctor's lady, at what time one
+could best gain access to the Minister.</p>
+
+<p>Such poisonous reflections, as well as cats'-dinners,<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> he gave out,
+not from satirical malice, but from mere indifference to others, whom,
+like an honest man, he never suffered in the least to sway him in his
+actions. With the liberty-cap of the doctor's hat on his head, he
+received, from his medical indispensableness, so many academic freedoms,
+that he, between his four house-walls, ate and acted not more freely
+than between the showy, bristling pale-work of the court. Did he ever
+there&mdash;I ask that&mdash;let a drop of sweet wine pass his lips without
+previously drawing out an Ephraimite, which did not itself outlive the
+probation-day, and hanging it in the glass,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> merely to prove before the
+court whether the Ephraimite therein did not grow black? And if the
+silver did so, was there not as good as a demonstration of the wine
+being oversmoked, and could not the physician have <i>applied</i> the whole
+right neatly, court, sweetness, blackening, poisoning, and oversmoking,
+if he had been the man to do it?</p>
+
+<p>The Lector's accidentally inquiring about the time of seeing the
+Minister was what Albano had to thank for saving him from first learning
+the painful misfortune in the house of the Minister, or in the presence
+of the blind girl herself. "You can," answered Sara, the Doctoress,
+"also despatch the servant; he will subscribe for you all; I, however,
+pity none as I do the daughter." Now broke loose a storm of questions
+about the unknown accident. "It is so," began the physician, sulkily;
+but soon (because he saw in some eyes water for his mill, and because he
+sought to roll off all medical blame from himself upon Captain
+Roquairol) he set himself as well as he could to pathetic detail, and
+lied almost like a sentimentalist. With an unobserved hint to the
+<i>affected</i> lady, he pushed an empty dish towards her as a lachrymatory,
+in order that nothing might be lost. From the eclipsed eyes of the
+vainly struggling youth, this first woe of his life snatched some great
+drops. "May recovery be possible?" asked Augusti, exceedingly troubled,
+on account of his connection with the family.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly; it is a mere affection of the nerves," replied Schoppe,
+briskly, "and nothing more." Whytt relates, that a lady who had too much
+acid in her stomach (in the <i>heart</i> it were still worse) saw everything
+in a <i>cloud</i>, as girls do at the approach of sick-headache. Sphex, who
+had lied only for the sake of pathos and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> alkali, and who was vexed that
+the Librarian should have been of his private opinion, answered just as
+if the latter had not spoken at all. "The highest degree of consumption,
+Mr. Lector, often winds up with blindness, and it were well, in this
+case, to prescribe for both. Meanwhile I am acquainted with a certain
+periodical nervous blindness. I had the case in a lady<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> whom I
+brought out of it merely by blood-letting, smoke of burnt coffee, and
+the evening fog from the water; this we are now trying again in the case
+of our nervous patient. A dutiful physician will, however, always wish
+the devil would take mother and brother."</p>
+
+<p>In other words, the return of Liana's periodical malady almost
+distracted him. Offences against his honor, his love, his sympathy,
+never wrought the Physicus into a heat; through all such he kept on his
+glazed frost surtout; but disturbances of his cures heated him even to
+the degree of flying to pieces; and so are we all a kind of
+Prince-Rupert's-drops, which can bear the hammer and never break, till
+one just breaks off the little thread point, and they fly into a
+thousand splinters; with Achilles, it was the heel, with Sphex, the
+medical D.'s ring-finger, with me, the writing-finger. The Doctor now
+shook out the contents of his heart, as some call their gall-bladder; he
+swore by all the devils he had done more for her than any and every
+physician,&mdash;he had, however, already foreseen that such a stupid
+education&mdash;merely to look well and pray and read and sing&mdash;would prove a
+cursed poor economy,&mdash;he had often longed to break the harmonica-bells
+and tambour-needles,<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a>&mdash;he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> had often called the attention of the
+mother, with sufficient distinctness and without indulgence, to Liana's
+so-called charms, and to her sensibility, her bright redness of cheeks,
+and velvet-soft skin; but had seemed to himself, by so doing, almost to
+gratify more than to distress her. The only thing that delighted him
+was, that the maiden had, some years before, caught a deadly sickness
+from the first holy sacrament, from which he had tried to keep her away,
+because he had already experienced, in the case of a fourth patient, the
+most melancholy consequences from this holy act.</p>
+
+<p>To the astonishment of every one my Count took part against all with
+Roquairol. Ah, thy first spring-storms were even now whirling round
+imprisoned in thy bosom, without a friendly hand to give them an outlet,
+and thou wouldst cover thy bloody grief! And wast thou not seeking a
+spirit full of flames, and eyes full of flames for thine own, and
+wouldst thou not rather have entered into brotherhood with a thundering
+hell-god than with an insipid pietistical saint, forever gnawing like a
+moth? Sharply he asks the Doctor, "What have you done with the Prince's
+heart?" "I have it not," said Sphex, startled; "it lies in
+<i>Tartarus</i>,<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> although it would have been more profitable to science
+had one been permitted to put it among one's preparations; it was large
+and very singular." He was thinking how often&mdash;when he could&mdash;he had, as
+an augur, during the dissection, secretly slipped aside one or another
+important member&mdash;as a princely or a cavalier-robber, <i>à la
+minutta</i>&mdash;for his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> study,&mdash;a honey-bag which he gladly cut out for
+himself with his anatomical honey-knife.</p>
+
+<p>"Has the young lady, then, an unhappy passion, or anything of the sort?"
+inquired Schoppe. "More than one," said Sphex; "cripples, idiots, young
+orphans, blind Methusalems,&mdash;all these passions she has. Sports and
+young gentlemen, I often say to the old lady, would be better for her
+health."</p>
+
+<p>But on this point, in the requirement of cheerfulness, I give in to him.
+Joy is the only universal tincture which I would prepare; it works
+uniformly as <i>antispasmodicum</i>, as <i>glutinans</i> and <i>astringens</i>. The oil
+of gladness serves as ointment for <i>burns</i> and <i>chills</i> at once. Spring,
+for example, is a spring-medicine; a country-party, an oyster-medicine;
+a recreation at the watering-places is, in itself, a glass of <i>bitters</i>;
+a ball is a <i>motion</i>; a carnival, a <i>course</i><a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> of medicine;&mdash;and hence
+the seat of the <i>blest</i> is at the same time the seat of the <i>immortals</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he had finally," the Doctor concluded,&mdash;"as they were people of
+rank,&mdash;prescribed a dose of <i>pride</i> (of the meadows), which manifests
+all the officinal healing powers of joy; taken in a stronger dose, it
+works fully as well as enjoyment itself, enlivens the pulse, steels the
+fibres, opens the pores, and chases the blood through the long venous
+labyrinth.<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> In the case of his weakly lady, such as they saw her
+there, he had used, he said, this medicament long ago by dresses and a
+doctor's rank, and had helped her to her legs thereby. But he would
+rather cure sixty common women than one distinguished one,&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> he
+should regret, as family physician, merely his receipts and medical
+opinions, in case, as he certainly believed, the fair Liana should go
+hence."</p>
+
+<p>The first question which Albano, who never missed anything that was
+said, put to Augusti on the way back from the Doctor's, was, What the
+Doctor's wife meant by the subscribing servant? He explained it. There
+is, namely, in Pestitz, as in Leipsic, an observance, that when a man
+dies or falls into any other misfortune, his family place a blank sheet
+of paper, with pen and ink, in the entrance-hall, in order that persons,
+who take and show a nearer interest, may send a lackey thither, to set
+their names on the paper as well as he knows how; this merchant-like
+indorsement of the nearer interest, this descending representative
+system by means of servants, who are generally, now-a-days, the
+telegraphs of our hearts, sweetens and alleviates for both cities great
+sorrow and sympathy through pen and ink.</p>
+
+<p>"What! is that it? O God!" said Alban, and grew unusually indignant, as
+if people were forcing servants upon him as chrysographs and
+business-agents of his feelings. "O ye egotistical jugglers! through the
+pen of scribbling lackeys do ye pour yourselves out? Lector, I would
+condole with Satan himself more warmly than thus!"</p>
+
+<p>Why is this veiled spirit so lively and loud? Ah, everything had moved
+him. Not merely lamentation over poor Liana, persecuted by all the
+nightly arrows of destiny, entered like iron into his open heart, but
+also amazement at the gloomy intermingling of fate with his young life.
+Roquairol's ever-recurring expression, "<i>Breast without a heart</i>,"
+sounded to him as if it must be familiar; at last the converse of the
+expression came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> to his thoughts, the word of the Sphinx on the island,
+"<i>Heart without a breast</i>." So, then, even this riddle was solved, and
+the place fixed, when he was to hear, contrary to every expectation, the
+prophecy of the loved one; but how incomprehensible,&mdash;incomprehensible!</p>
+
+<p>"O yes! Liana she is called, and no God shall change the name," said his
+innermost soul. For in earlier years even the most vigorous youth
+prefers, in maidens, interesting delicacy of health and a tender fulness
+of feeling and a moisture of the eye,&mdash;just as, in general, at Albano's
+age, one values the flood (later the ebb) of the eyes too highly,
+although, too often, like an over-rich inundation, they wash away the
+seed-corns of the best resolutions;&mdash;whereas, at a later period,
+(because he proposes to himself marriage and housekeeping,) he looks out
+rather for bright and sharp than after moist eyes, and for cold and
+healthy blood.</p>
+
+<p>As Albano, for the most part, drew down the fire from his internal
+clouds on the discharging chains of the harpsichord strings,&mdash;seldomer
+into the Hippocrene of poetry,&mdash;so did he now unconsciously make out of
+his inner <i>charivari</i> a passage on the harpsichord. I transpose his
+fantasy into my fancy in the following manner. On the softest
+minor-tones the blindness, with its long pains, passed by, and in the
+whispering-gallery of music he heard all the soft sighs of Liana
+repeated aloud. Then harder minor-tones led him down into Tartarus, to
+the grave and heart of the friendly old man who had once prayed with
+him, and then, in this spirit-hour, fell softly, like a dew-drop from
+heaven, the sound, Liana! With a thunder-clap of ecstasy he fell into
+the major-key, and asked himself, "This delicate, pure soul could fate
+promise to thy imperfect heart?" And when he answered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> himself, that she
+would perhaps love him, because she could not see him,&mdash;for first love
+is not vain; and when he saw her led by her gigantic brother, and when
+he thought of the high friendship which he would give and require of
+<i>him</i>; then did his fingers run over the keys in an exalting war-music,
+and the heavenly hours sounded before him, which he should enjoy, when
+his two eternal dreams should pass over livingly out of night into day,
+and when brother and sister should furnish at once, to his so youthful
+heart, a loved one and a friend. Here his inner and outer storms softly
+died away, and the evenly-balanced <i>temperament</i> of the instrument
+became that of the player....</p>
+
+<p>But a soul like his is more easily appeased with sorrow than with joy.
+As if the reality had already arrived, he pressed on still further;
+indescribably fair and unearthly, he saw Liana's image trembling in her
+cup of sorrow; for the crown of thorns easily ennobles a head to a
+Christ's head, and the blood of an undeserved wound is a redness on the
+cheek of the inner man, and the soul which has suffered too much is
+easily loved too much. The tender Liana appeared to him as already spun
+into the funeral veil for the Flora of the second world, as the tender
+limbs of the bee-nymph lie transparently folded over the little
+breast,&mdash;the white form of snow, which had once, in his dream, melted
+away on his heart, opened the bright little cloud again, and looked,
+blind and weeping, upon the earth, and said, "Albano, I shall die before
+I have seen thee."&mdash;"And even if thou shouldst never see me," said the
+dying heart in his breast, "yet will I still love thee. And even if thou
+shouldst soon pass away, Liana, still I gladly choose sorrow, and walk
+faithfully with thee till thou art in heaven."... Heaven<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> and hell had
+both at once drawn aside their curtains before him,&mdash;only a few notes,
+and those the same as before, and only the highest, and that only
+interruptedly and faintly, could he any longer strike; and at last his
+hands sank down, and he began to weep, but without too severe pangs,&mdash;as
+the storm which has unburdened itself of its lightnings and thunders
+stands now over the earth only as a soft, diffused rain.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/flowerend.jpg" width="400" height="79" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> One who dedicated a new house (somewhat as we name a
+ship). The <i>glass fire-bucket</i> which <i>quenched the inner conflagration</i>
+was probably the wine-glass or beer-tumbler.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> Collegians.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> Provincial Physician.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> According to Camper, hectic patients have very white and
+fair teeth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Derham (in his Physico-Theology, 1750) observes that the
+deaf hear best under a noise; e. g. one hard of hearing, under the sound
+of bells; a deaf housewife, under the drumming of the house-servant.
+Hence when princes and ministers, who for the most part hear badly, are
+passing through the country, kettle-drums are beat and cannon fired, so
+that they can hear the people more easily.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> In whose wall the lady with the souvenir sits.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> A kind of gray fur.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> Baireuth.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> This precocious completion of growth I have observed in
+many distinguished women, just as if these Psyches should resemble
+butterflies, which do not grow after coming out of the chrysalis state.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Cloth is roughened with thistles, i.e. scratched up, in
+order to the better shearing of it afterwards.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> A distinguished actor of tragedy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> He means here their divorce, which was only deferred by
+the mutual wish to keep Liana.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> Poor dinners, just as cat-silver is an inferior
+metal.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> A weak-nerved lady (I know not whether it is the same) who
+had much religion, fancy, and suffering, became, as she tells me, blind
+in the same way, and was cured in the same way.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> The eternal pricking of the sensitive finger-nerves by
+knitting, tambour, and other needles, perhaps as much as the touching of
+the harmonica-bells, makes one, by stimulating, weak in the nerves.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> Tartarus is the melancholy part of Lilar.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> Kursus&mdash;corso.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> Pride of the meadows quickens the circulation of the blood
+even to frenzy. This whole observation on the pharmaceutic value of
+pride of the meadows is taken from Tissot's "Traité sur les Nerfs."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/shieldstart.jpg" width="550" height="131" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>SIXTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">The Ten Persecutions of the Reader.&mdash;Liana's Eastern
+Room.&mdash;Disputation upon Patience.&mdash;The Picturesque Cure.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>34. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/p.jpg" width="100" height="112" alt="P" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">Postulates&mdash;apothegms&mdash;philosophems&mdash;Erasmian adages&mdash;observations of
+Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Lavater, do I in one week invent in countless
+numbers, more than I can in six months get rid of by bringing them into
+my biographical <i>petits soupés</i> as episode-dishes. Thus does the
+lottery-mintage of my <i>unprinted</i> manuscripts swell higher and higher
+every day, the more extracts and winnings I deal out to my reader
+therefrom in print. In this way I creep out of the world without having,
+while in it, said anything. Lavater takes a more rational course; he
+lets the whole lottery-wheel, filled with treasures, under the title of
+manuscripts (just as we, inversely, despatch manuscripts to the
+publishers by mail under the title of printed matter) circulate even
+among the <i>literati</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>But why shall I not do the same, and let at least one or two lymphatic
+veins of my water-treasure leap up and run out? I limit myself to ten
+persecutions of the reader,&mdash;calling my ten aphorisms thus, merely
+because I imagine the readers to be martyrs of their opinions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> and
+myself the Regent who converts them by force. The following aphorism, if
+one reckons the foregoing as the first persecution, is, I hope, the</p>
+
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Second.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>Nothing sifts and winnows our preferences and partialities better than
+an imitation of the same by others. For a genius there are no sharper
+polishing-machines and grinding-disks at hand than his apes. If,
+further, every one of us could see running along beside him a duplicate
+of himself, a complete Archimimus<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> and repeater in complimenting,
+taking off the hat, dancing, speaking, scolding, bragging, &amp;c.; by
+Heaven! such an exact repeating-work of our discords would make quite
+other people out of me and other people than we are at present. The
+first and least step which we should take toward reflection and virtue
+would be this, that we should find our bodily methodology, e. g. our
+walk, dress, dialect, our oaths, looks, favorite dishes, &amp;c., no better
+than those of all others, but just the same. Princes have the good
+fortune that all courtiers around them station themselves as faithful
+supernumerary copyists and pier-mirrors of <i>their</i> selves, and propose
+to improve them by this Helot-mimicry. But they seldom attain their good
+end, because the Prince,&mdash;and that were also to be feared of me and the
+reader,&mdash;like the principle of <i>non-distinguendum</i>, does not believe in
+any real twins, but imagines that in morals, as in catoptrics, every
+mirror and mock rainbow shows everything <i>inverted</i>.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Third.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>It is easier and handier for men to flatter than to praise.</p>
+
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Fourth.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>In the centuries before us humanity appears to us to be growing up; in
+those which come after us, to be fading away; in our own, to burst forth
+in glorious bloom: thus do the clouds, only when in our zenith, seem to
+move straight forward, those in front of us come up from the horizon,
+the others behind us sail downward with fore-shortened forms.</p>
+
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Fifth.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes then
+cease.<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a></p>
+
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Sixth.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>The old age of women is sadder and more solitary than that of men;
+spare, therefore, in them their years, their sorrows, and their sex! In
+fact, life often resembles the trap-tree with its spines directed
+upward, on which the bear easily clambers up to the honey-bait, but from
+which he can slide down again only under severe stings.</p>
+
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Seventh.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>Have compassion on Poverty, but a hundred times more on Impoverishment!
+Only the former, not the latter, makes nations and individuals better.</p>
+
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Eighth.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's.</p>
+
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Ninth.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>When two persons, in suddenly turning a corner, knock<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> their heads
+together, each begins anxiously to apologize, and thinks only the other
+feels the pain and that he himself has all the blame. (Only I excuse
+myself without any embarrassment, for the very reason that I know, by my
+persecutions, how the other party thinks.) Would to God we did not
+invert this in the case of moral offences!</p>
+
+<h4><i><span class="smcap">Last Persecution of the Reader.</span></i></h4>
+
+<p>Deluded and darkened man, living on from the mourning veil to the
+corpse-veil, thinks there is no further evil beyond that which he has
+immediately to overcome; and forgets that after the victory the new
+situation brings a new struggle. Hence, as before swift ships there
+swims a hill of water and a corresponding billowy abyss glides along
+close behind, so always before us is there a mountain, which we hope to
+climb, and behind us still a deep valley out of which we seem to have
+ascended.</p>
+
+<p>Thus does the reader vainly hope now, after having stood out ten
+persecutions, to ride into the haven of the story, and there to
+lead a peaceable life, free from the troubled one of my
+characters; but can any spiritual or worldly arm, then, protect
+him against scattered similes,&mdash;against hemispherical
+headaches,&mdash;whimsies,&mdash;reviews,&mdash;curtain-lectures,&mdash;rainy
+months,&mdash;or in fact honey-moons, which come in at the end of
+every volume?&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Now for our History! In the evening Albano and Augusti went with the
+paternal letter of credit to the Minister's. The frostiness and pride of
+that individual the Lector endeavored, on their way, to varnish over by
+praising his laboriousness and discernment. With a knocking at his heart
+the Count seized the door-knocker to the heaven- or hell-gate of his
+future destiny. In the antechamber&mdash;that higher servant's apartment and
+<i>Limbus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> infantum et patrum</i>&mdash;there were still people enough, for
+Froulay regarded an antechamber as a stage, which must never be empty,
+and on which, as in the Jewish temple, according to the Rabbins, for
+those who kneel and pray, it is never too close. The Minister's lady was
+not present as a patient here, merely because she was looking after one
+of her own elsewhere. The Minister also was not here,&mdash;because he made
+few ceremonies, and only demanded uncommonly many,&mdash;but in his
+working-cabinet; he had heretofore had his head under the warm
+throne-canopy and taken a deep bite into the forbidden apple of the
+Empire, therefore he willingly made a sacrifice (not <i>to</i> others, but
+<i>of</i> others), and let himself, as a saintly statue, be hung round with
+votive limbs, without having to bestir his own, and, like St. Franciscus
+at Oporto, with letters of thanks and petitions which he never opens.</p>
+
+<p>Froulay came, and was&mdash;as ever, <i>aside</i> from business&mdash;as courteous as a
+Persian. For Augusti was his home friend,&mdash;i. e. the Minister's lady was
+<i>his</i> home-friend,&mdash;and Albano was not a good person to run against;
+because one had occasion for his foster-father in the votes of the
+Province, and because the youth by a peculiar and proper pride of his
+own commanded men. There is a certain noble pride through which merits
+shine brighter than through modesty. Froulay had not the most
+comfortable part before him; for the Court of Haarhaar was as
+disaffected toward the Knight of the Fleece, as he was toward it;<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a>
+but Haarhaar was to be without doubt (according to all Italian
+<i>surgical</i> reports) and in a few years<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> (according to all <i>nosological</i>
+ones) the heir of his inheritance and throne. Now the bad thing about it
+was, that the Minister, who, like a good Christian, looked mainly to the
+future, had to creep along between the German Herr von Bouverot, on the
+one hand, who was secretly a creature of Haarhaar, and the demands of
+the present moment, on the other.</p>
+
+<p>He received the Count, I said, in an uncommonly obliging manner, as well
+as the Lector, and disclosed to the two that he must present to them his
+lady, who desired their acquaintance. He sent word to her, but, without
+waiting an answer, conducted them both into her apartment. Now was it to
+the youth as if the heavy door of a still and holy temple turned on its
+hinges. Even I too, at this moment, during their passage through the
+rooms, share so in his foolishness that I fall into full as great
+anxiety, as if I went in behind them. When we entered the eastern room,
+which was extended out at pleasure by picturesque paper-tapestry into a
+latticed arbor of woodbine, there sat merely the Minister's lady, who
+received us pleasantly, with firm and cold reserve in look and tone. Her
+severely closed and faintly-marked lips mutely spoke a seriousness which
+is the gift of a good heart, and a stillness which is the ornament of
+beauty,&mdash;as many wings, only when they are folded, shower down
+peacocks'-eyes,&mdash;and her eye gleamed with the good-will of reason; but
+the eyelids had been, by stern years, drawn deeply in, with a sickly
+expression, over the mild sight. Ah, as oftentimes between newly-married
+people a dividing sword was laid, so did Froulay grind daily at a
+three-edged one which separated him and her! Singularly did the impure
+roil on his face contrast with the aftersummer serenity on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> hers,
+although before witnesses, as it seemed, he took away the irony from his
+courteousness towards her, and kept hatred, as others do love, only for
+solitude.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately this nut-tree, which threw an unwholesome, frosty nut-shadow
+on the whole flowerage of love and poetry, soon transplanted itself back
+again among more congenial guests. The Minister's lady, after the first
+expressions of courtesy, directed herself more to the Lector, whose
+correct, civilian's measure accorded entirely with her religious one;
+especially as only he could ask and condole with her about Liana. She
+replied, that this room of Liana's had been left exactly as it was the
+evening the blindness came on, in order that, when she recovered, it
+might remain for her a pleasant remembrancer, or a mournful one for
+others, if she did not. O, deeply moved Albano, if every absence
+glorifies, how much more must it do so with so many traces of the
+beloved object's presence! I confess, except a loved one, I know of
+nothing lovelier than her sitting-room in her absence.</p>
+
+<p>On Liana's work-table lay a sketched outline of a Christ's head near the
+open Messiah,&mdash;a folded walking-veil, together with the green
+walking-fan, with inscribed wishes of female friends,&mdash;some cut-out
+envelopes,&mdash;the gossiping letter of one of Froulay's tenants,&mdash;a whole
+lacquerwork sheep-fold, with wagon, stalls, and house, with whose
+Lilliputian Arcadia she had proposed to please Dian's children,<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a>&mdash;a
+plucked leaf from the thinning album of a female friend, which she had
+trimmed with an India-ink flower border and then planted full of fair
+wishes, of which fate had robbed her own life. Ah, beautiful heart, how
+fondly would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> I sketch and hand round something like a tabular view of
+all the little mosaic of thy lightsome past, had the fee-provost entered
+more intimately into these matters! But what moves me and the Count more
+deeply is a framed embroidery, on which her needle, like an
+ingrafting-knife, had, on that dark day, ingrafted a rose with two buds,
+and which wanted nothing more but the thorns. O, <i>these</i> had destiny
+only too fully developed on thy roses of joy, and then pressed them so
+deeply through thy breast even to the heart!</p>
+
+<p>At no hour of his life was Albano's love so tender and holy as at this,
+or his sympathy so fervent. Fortunately, the Minister's lady was all the
+time looking out of the window into the garden, and did not perceive his
+emotion. At last she went on to point out Liana's harmonica, which stood
+near; then was his heart too full and visible; he started with the hasty
+words, <i>he had never yet heard one</i>, and stepped before it. Ah, he was
+fain to touch something whereon her finger had so often rested. He laid
+his hand, as upon a sacred thing, on those prayer-bells which had so
+often trembled under hers for pious thoughts; but they gave him no
+answer, till the Lector, a connoisseur in the A B C as in the technology
+of all arts, gave him in three words the indispensable instructions. Now
+did he drink into his soul, full of sighs and struggles, the first
+tri-clang, the first plaintive syllables of that mother-tongue of the
+pining breast,&mdash;ah, of those <i>mutes'-bells</i> which the inner man shakes
+in his hand, because he has no tongue! and his veins beat wildly like
+wings which wafted him up from the ground, and bore him to a higher
+prospect than that which opens into the last joy or the last agony. For
+in strong men great pains and joys become overlooking heights of the
+whole road of life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I know not whether many readers will believe the fault <i>possible</i>, which
+he now <i>actually</i> committed. The Minister's wife, in the course
+of conversation, had very naturally&mdash;<i>apropos</i> of Liana and
+Roquairol&mdash;fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary
+to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be
+broken in childhood or the heart in old age. Ah, she and her daughter
+themselves knelt, indeed, full of patience, before fate, whether loading
+or armed; although the mother's was a pious patience, which looked more
+to Heaven than to the wound, Liana's a loving patience, which resigns
+itself to new sorrows as to old sicknesses, as a queen does on
+coronation-day to the pains and friction of her heavy jewelry, and like
+a child that sweetly sleeps away and more sweetly dreams away his scars.
+But Zesara, who like a wolf fled the very clanking of a chain, and new,
+exasperated, against everything of the kind, from the light carcanets
+and chains of knighthood even to the heavy harbor-chains which obstruct
+the passage of youth out into the laboring sea, could not restrain
+himself, especially with that heart of his so full of emotions, from
+saying, in too great warmth: "Man must defend himself; sooner would I,
+in a free struggle, empty all my veins on the stirring battle-field than
+shed one drop from them bound to the rack."&mdash;"Patience," said the
+Minister's lady, who was full of it, "contends and conquers also, only
+in the heart."&mdash;"Dear Count," said Augusti, alluding not merely to
+Arria,<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> "the women must always say to the men, 'It does not hurt!'"</p>
+
+<p>I have not till now had an opportunity to make known this fault of
+Albano, that he never spoke his opinion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> more freely and strongly than
+just then when he had reason to fear losing one or two heavens of his
+life by the stake; in cases of less danger he could be more yielding.
+Although, therefore, he observed that the Minister's lady was painfully
+reminded thereby of the muscular, but also hard-grasping, hand of her
+wild son,&mdash;or much rather <i>for the very reason</i> that he observed it, and
+because he proposed to be armor-bearer to this future friend,&mdash;he stuck
+to his opinion, threw all instruments for breaking in the young manly
+will out of the school-rooms into the street, and said, in his strongly
+relieved style: "The Goths preferred never to send their children to
+school, in order that they might remain lions. Even if maidens must be
+soaked in milk a day before planting them out in the civil world, boys,
+however, must be stuck, like apricots, with the stony shell in the
+earth, because they will soon enough throw off and forsake the stone by
+their rooting and growth."&mdash;The Lector, with his fine openness,&mdash;a
+crystal vase with golden edge,&mdash;remarked, with a gentle reprimand of
+Alban's impetuosity, that at least the way in which they had severally
+adduced their proofs was one of those very proofs themselves; and women
+needed and showed more patience with persons, and we more with things.</p>
+
+<p>The Minister's wife, who imagined herself listening more to her son than
+to his friend, was silent, and stepped nearer to the window. Amid these
+war-troubles the evening had wheeled her resplendent moon up over the
+eastern mountains, and the streams of her light flowed in at this
+moment, from all quarters, through the whole garden that lay stretched
+out before the eastern room, and lay in its broad alleys and
+flower-circles, when all at once a little round house appeared through
+upshooting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> water-jets, kindled into triumphal arches by the moon-light,
+and stood, even to its Italian trellised roof, all in a blaze. With soft
+emotion, the Minister's lady said: "On that water-house stands my Liana;
+she is trying the evaporation of the fountain; the physician promises
+himself much therefrom. And Providence grant it!"</p>
+
+<p>But the agitated Zesara, with all his sharp eyes, could not, however, in
+the full dazzling light of the level moon, and behind the quivering
+nunnery-grate of confined silver-or lymphatic-veins, individualize
+anything at this moment from the glimmering Eden, except an
+undistinguishable, still, white form. But it was enough for a weeping
+and burning heart. "Thou angel of my youthful dreams," thought he, "may
+it be thou! I greet thee with a thousand woes and joys. Ah! can there
+then be sorrows in thee, thou heavenly soul!" And it came over him, that
+if she were here in the room, with her afflicted and enchanting form,
+she would melt his whole being with sympathy, and he could now have cast
+off the embrace of the brother, by whose hand fate had closed her soft
+eyes in that long dream.</p>
+
+<p>The stifling air of the most painful sympathy caused him to look away,
+and turn round, and fasten on the open Messiah those eyes whose drops he
+would not show; but the recollection that he was repeating her last
+reading-pleasure made them fall only hotter and thicker. Suddenly
+something darkening, which fluttered down before the window like a
+falling raven, directed his look again to Liana, over whom stood a fully
+illuminated little cloud, as if it were a risen or descending saintly
+halo. Immortals seemed to dwell thereupon as on Ossian's clouds,
+awaiting their sister; and when she at length moved and slowly sank down
+into the water-house, seemed it not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> then as if her garment of flesh
+were passing into the earth, and her peaceful spirit into the cloud?</p>
+
+<p>Here Augusti, as the mother had to follow the returning invalid into the
+sick-chamber, gave him the hint for departure, which he took willingly;
+his love contented itself for the present with solitude, and with the
+hope of another meeting. Young love and young birds need, in the
+beginning, only to be <i>warmed</i> by <i>covering</i>, and not till later to be
+<i>nourished</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But a paraclete or comforter whispered softly in the ear of the youth's
+heart as they departed: to-morrow thou wilt see her only a few steps
+from thee in the garden! And that is very easily brought about; he has
+only, at evening-twilight to-morrow, when the evening-walker makes use
+of her eye-medicine, to repair to the alley, and from among the leaves
+look freely up into the magic countenance, and then drink in the whole
+doctrine of felicity in one paragraph, one passage, breath, moment;&mdash;but
+what a prospect!</p>
+
+<p>The Count begged the Lector not to sit long with the busy Minister. When
+they found him again, he hardly&mdash;behind a pile of public
+documents&mdash;remembered, after considerable (perhaps counterfeited)
+thought, that they had been there, and deeply regretted that they were
+going away. Ah, the comforter is whispering all the evening and all
+night,&mdash;To-morrow, Albano!</p>
+
+
+<h3>35. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>As the juggling night threw our Albano from one side and vision to the
+other,&mdash;for not the near past but the near future wearies us with
+rehearsals of our waking acts, with dreams,&mdash;how glad he was, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+morning, that his fairest future had not yet gone by. Two very
+Eulenspiegelish wishes often lodge in man: I often form the wish with my
+whole heart, that some real joy of mine, e. g. a master-work, a
+pleasure-journey, &amp;c., might yet at last have an end; and, secondly, the
+wish above referred to, that one or another pleasure might stay away a
+little longer.</p>
+
+<p>The evening came with the greatest pleasure of all, when Zesara, like Le
+Gentil starting for the East Indies, set off for the eastern park of the
+Minister, to observe the transit of his evening star Venus; but only
+through the moon. Before the lighted windows of the palace he stopped
+among the people, and reflected, whether it were quite allowable thus to
+run into the garden; but really, had he been turned back, his thirsting
+heart would have carried him in through a whole Clerus and Diplomatic
+Congress posted before the gate. Boldly he strode along through the
+noisy palace before a barricade of tackled carriages, turned the iron
+lattice-gate, and stepped hastily into the nearest leafy avenue. Here,
+attended by a torch-dance of gleaming hopes, he went to and fro, but his
+eye was a telescope, and his ear was a hearing-trumpet. The green avenue
+wound up over the garden till it grew into another near the bath-house;
+into this he entered so as not to meet the blind one, or rather her
+attendant.</p>
+
+<p>But nothing came. To be sure he had not, like the moon,&mdash;as was, indeed,
+to have been expected of him,&mdash;come a half-hour too late, but in fact a
+half-hour too early. The moon, that star which leads wise men full of
+incense to the adoration, at last let fall broad, long, silver-leaves,
+like festive tapestry, into Liana's eastern room,&mdash;the Madonna on the
+palace was arrayed in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> halo and nun's-veil of her rays,&mdash;the
+Minister's wife stood already at the window,&mdash;Nature played the
+larghetto<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> of an enchanted evening in deeper and deeper
+strains,&mdash;when Albano caught nothing further except a smaller one, made
+up of mere tones, which came from the bath-house, the pleasure-seat of
+all his wishes, and which, dying, would fain breathe its last with the
+spring-day. But he could not guess who played it. One might have
+inferred that it was Roquairol, merely because he afterward, as I shall
+relate, according to the April-like nature of his musical temperament,
+sprang up out of pianissimo into a too wild fortissimo. The brother,
+exiled by his father, could at least in the bath-house see and console
+his dear sister, and show her his love and his penitence; although his
+stormy repentance makes a second necessary, and at last became only a
+more pious repetition of his fault.</p>
+
+<p>Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every
+world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the
+sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the
+larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high
+waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art)
+dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with
+a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to
+the Selam-cipher, signify <i>hopes</i>; but really one after another was
+short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his
+perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,&mdash;he kept plucking
+away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening
+windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was
+impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the
+bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance,
+when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo,
+and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of
+sparkling silver. Albano looked out....</p>
+
+<p>Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering
+water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage
+before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly
+beautiful form! As Grecian gods stand and look unearthly before the
+torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad
+glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw
+irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation
+and no effort had as yet cast a wave,&mdash;and the thin, tender,
+scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,&mdash;and the face like a perfect
+pearl, oval and white,&mdash;and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the
+May-flowers over her heart,&mdash;and the delicate grace's-proportions,
+which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,&mdash;and the ideal
+stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a
+finger upon the balustrade, as if the Psyche only floated over the
+lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,&mdash;and the large
+blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such
+inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in
+distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow!</p>
+
+<p>Thou too fortunate man!&mdash;to whom the only visible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> goddess, Beauty,
+appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her
+heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,&mdash;the past
+fades away,&mdash;the near tones seem to steal from the depth of
+distance,&mdash;the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with
+splendor the mortal breast!</p>
+
+<p>Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty
+heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or
+later?&mdash;and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow?</p>
+
+<p>For Liana&mdash;into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle
+through&mdash;was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its
+own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she
+thought a linden-top concealed it;&mdash;and this uncertain inclination so
+suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick
+pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and
+pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why
+from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away?
+And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her
+companion, and&mdash;O God! she knows not where they stand."</p>
+
+<p>But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely
+on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon
+the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor
+of the next life.</p>
+
+<p>A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the
+distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with
+single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana,
+and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so
+that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> down, and Albano started
+back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face,
+upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink,
+tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling
+tones of the brother and of the nightingale,&mdash;the eyelids quivered
+oftener over the gleaming eyes,&mdash;and at last the gleam became a quiet
+tear,&mdash;it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which
+the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs,
+though unwounded, weep.</p>
+
+<p>There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always
+begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment,
+in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir
+itself,&mdash;that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink
+of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,&mdash;kneel
+before her,&mdash;tell her thy whole heart;&mdash;what though thou then art lost
+forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!&mdash;and then cool
+and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he
+thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah!
+before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good
+spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be
+silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."</p>
+
+<p>Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall,
+and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As
+he passed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half
+latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure
+Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a shining
+lily<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> from the next world, which, to herself, is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> a sign that she is
+soon to pass thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling
+the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest
+veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last
+had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and
+then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now shines
+to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O,
+at some future time after yet many years, when this <i>glowing</i>
+rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and
+magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it,
+glimmer after thee as a <i>white</i> rose-parterre of memory!</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/oend.jpg" width="400" height="83" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> The title of a man, among the Romans, who walked behind
+the corpse and acted out the looks and character which the deceased had
+when living.&mdash;<i>Pers.</i>, Sat. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> As Solomon says, "Desire shall fail."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> It had formerly refused to give the Spanish knight the
+hand of the Princess; but I have had the promise of satisfactory
+documents on this weighty article.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> Dian's family reside at Lilar.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> Roman Arria, who stabbed herself to show her Poetus how to
+die.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> A movement in music a little more than two degrees quicker
+than adagio.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> It used to be believed that a lily lying in the
+singing-seats signified the death of the person to whom it belonged.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/hornstart.jpg" width="550" height="137" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>SEVENTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Albano's Peculiarity.&mdash;The intricate Interlacings of
+Politics.&mdash;The Herostratus of Gaming-Tables.&mdash;Paternal
+"Mandatum sine Clausula."&mdash;Good Society.&mdash;Mr. Von
+Bouverot.&mdash;Liana's Spiritual and Bodily Presence.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>36. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/i.jpg" width="100" height="108" alt="I" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_3">If the Feudal-Provost Von Hafenreffer had no existence except as a
+creature of my fancy, I should certainly proceed with my history, and
+tell the world, as matter of fact (and the whole romance-writing set
+would go to the death upon it<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a>), that Albano was sitting there the
+next morning, blind and deaf, behind the broad bandage which the
+bandage-maker Cupid had bound before his eyes,&mdash;that he had not been
+able to count more than <i>five</i>, except at evening, when he cast up the
+strokes of the clock, in order, afterward, to run in a magic circle
+round the Froulay water-house, like one who sets out to <i>charm the fire</i>
+which glides snake-like after him,&mdash;that he had, through those two
+blow-holes<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> wherewith sentimental whales blubber right out in
+bookstores, spouted out considerable streams,&mdash;for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> the rest, had never
+looked at another book (except some leaves in the book of Nature), nor
+at another human being (except a blind man),&mdash;"and to this my surgeon's
+certificate of erotic wound-fevers (I would say at the conclusion of my
+lies) Nature manifestly sets her privy seal."</p></div>
+
+<p>That she does not, says Hafenreffer; these are nothing but confounded
+lies; the case is quite otherwise, thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Zesara never stole a second time into Froulay's garden; a proud blush of
+shame darted over him at the very thought of the painful blush with
+which he should come in contact, for the first time, with a mistrustful
+or inquiring eye.</p>
+
+<p>But in this wise the dear soul remained hid from him until her recovery,
+as the May-month did from her; and he silently tormented himself with
+reckonings up of her sufferings and doubts of her cure. He was ashamed
+to be taking any pleasure during her period of sadness, and forbade
+himself the enjoyment of spring and the visiting of Lilar: ah! he knew
+too, full well, that the loving spring and Lilar, where she had received
+so many joys and the last wound, would make his heart too ungovernable
+and too full.</p>
+
+<p>His thirst for knowledge and worth, his pride, which bade him stand in a
+glorious light with his father and his two friends, impelled him onward
+in his career. With all his native fire he threw himself upon
+jurisprudence, and took no longer any other walks than between the
+lecture-room and his study-chamber. To this zeal he was driven by a
+characteristic passion for completeness; everything imperfect was to him
+almost a physical horror; he was shocked at defective collections,
+broken sets<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> of monthly magazines, lawsuits left to sleep, libraries,
+because he could never read them out, people who died as aspirants for
+office, or in the midst of building-plans, or without a rounded system
+of thought, or as journeymen clothiers' boys or shoemakers' apprentices,
+and even Augusti's flute-playing, which he only took up <i>by the way</i>. It
+was the same energy which made him hold the bridle of Psyche's winged
+horse tight, and stick the rowel of the spur into him; even when a child
+he had experimented on this kind of force, in the holding of his breath,
+or in the painful pressure of a sore spot,&mdash;and, by Heaven! he now,
+figuratively, did both again. There dwelt in him a mighty will, which
+merely said to the serving-company of impulses, Let it be! Such a will
+is not stoicism, which rules merely over internal <i>malefactors</i>, or
+<i>knaves</i>, or <i>prisoners of war</i>, or <i>children</i>, but it is that genially
+energetic spirit, which conditions and binds the healthy <i>savages</i> of
+our bosoms, and which says more royally to itself, than the Spanish
+regent to others, I, the king!</p>
+
+<p>Ah, of course (how could his warm soul do otherwise?) he often stood, at
+midnight, before the breezy window, and looked tearfully at the white
+Madonna of the ministerial palace, silvered by the pure moon. Yes, in
+the daytime, he often sketched in his souvenir (it happened to be a
+fountain and a form behind it, nothing more), or he read in the Messiah
+(naturally going on with the canto which he had already begun at the
+house of the Minister's lady), or he informed himself about nervous
+maladies, (was he, perhaps, with all his studying, guarded against
+them?) or he let the fire of his fingers run over the strings,&mdash;nay, he
+would have plucked nothing but roses, although with thorns, had this
+been their blooming season.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And this sighing, stifled soul must shut itself up! O, he began already
+to fear every key of the harpsichord would become a stylus, the
+instrument itself a box of letters, and all actions treacherously
+legible words. For he must keep silent. The first young love, like that
+of business people (those of the Electorate of Saxony excepted), needs
+no instruments of speech, at most only a portable inkstand and pen. Only
+worldly people, who repeat their declarations of love quite as often as
+the players, are in a situation&mdash;and on similar grounds&mdash;to publish
+them, just as the players do. But in the holier season of life the image
+of the most beloved soul is hung, not in the parlor and antechamber, but
+in the dim, silent oratory: only with loved ones do we speak of loved
+ones. Ah, it was with reluctance that he even heard others speak of his
+saint; and he often stole (with the altar of incense in his bosom) out
+of the room where people were carrying round for her a censer more full
+of coal-smoke than of frankincense.</p>
+
+
+<h3>37. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>They were expecting every day in Pestitz the return of the German
+gentleman M. de Bouverot, who had been in Haarhaar, putting the last
+retouching hand to the almost sketched marriage contract between Luigi
+and a Haarhaar princess, Isabella. Augusti was not partial to him, and
+even said Bouverot had no <i>honn&ecirc;teté</i>;<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> and related the following,
+but with the soft irony of a man of the world:</p>
+
+<p>Some years before, Bouverot had been sent by the court of Haarhaar<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a>
+to the Pope at Rome, in relation to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> certain canonical difficulties;
+just at the time when Luigi also made the princely procession to Rome,
+together with his Romish indictions.<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> Now Haarhaar, which in truth
+already went <i>chapeau-bas</i> with the princely hat of Hohenfliess, and had
+every possible officinal prospect of wearing it, would not, for this
+very reason, present the appearance of looking with cold eyes on the
+extinction of the race of Hohenfliess, the more, as the very male
+support of the line, Luigi, even in his first years, was not a hero of
+any great nervous significance. Nay, it must needs be a matter of some
+consequence to the court of Haarhaar that the good thin autumn-flowerage
+should return, if possible, <i>otherwise</i> than it went out; and even on
+such grounds it privily instructed the German gentleman to
+rule and watch over all his pleasures and pains as <i>ma&icirc;tre de
+plaisirs</i>,&mdash;especially with <i>ma&icirc;tresses de plaisirs</i>,&mdash;in such a manner
+as to give perfect satisfaction in this respect. Meanwhile, if our
+princely abiturient<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> had started pure as a fœtus, unhappily he was
+brought back ground down to a <i>punctum saliens</i>, especially as, by
+sundry caprioles and other leaps through the hoop of pleasure, he was
+spoiled for the leap into the knight's saddle. It may be possible that
+the German gentleman was too sanguine in his expectations of the
+rejuvenescence of the Prince; yes, he may have imitated the
+youth-restoring, wondrous essence of the Marquis d'Aymar,<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a> whereby an
+innocent old lady, who anointed herself with the elixir more than her
+years required, was, through the excessive renovation, reduced to a
+little child. In short, by this crusade under the Knight of the Cross,
+Bouverot, the princely seat of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> Hohenfliess&mdash;as is often the consequence
+of crusades&mdash;will be left open at the proper time, and Haarhaar will
+seat itself thereon.</p>
+
+<p>I confess reluctantly that Albano, in the beginning,&mdash;because, with all
+his sharp-sightedness, his purity was quite as great,&mdash;comprehended the
+fact only confusedly; but when he did get the idea, it was to him
+<i>pharmaceutic</i> manna, as it was to Schoppe <i>Israelitish</i>. "The Knight of
+the Cross," said the latter, "beareth not his cross in vain,&mdash;it does
+him quite as much service as one daubed on the houses in Italy does to
+them: not a soul may do on either of them what even in Rome may be done
+before every antechamber."</p>
+
+<p>Not long after that our three friends were going out into the street
+just at the hour when the noisy carriages rolled along to tea and play,
+when a litter was carried by before them with the seat <i>backward</i>,
+whereupon, however, a man was sitting. "Holy Father!" cried Schoppe, "in
+there sits, bodily, Cephisio, from Rome, who must sometime or other give
+me a sound drubbing."&mdash;"Softly, softly!" said Augusti, "that is the
+German gentleman; Cephisio is his Arcadian name."<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a>&mdash;"Well, I rejoice
+so much the more that I once in my life had a hearty, downright set-to
+with the red-nose," said he, turning round and accompanying the litter,
+with his arms thrust under it, for almost ten paces, in order to get a
+better view of the caged bird, before the latter snatched-to the
+curtains. Albano caught a glimpse within the litter, as it passed
+swiftly along, only of a sharp eye drawn like a dagger, and a
+red-glowing nose-bud.</p>
+
+<p>Schoppe came back and related the transactions in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> Rome. He said,
+against all mortal sinners, blood-guilty men, and imps of iniquity he
+bore no such bitter and grim wrath as against professional bankers,
+<i>croupiers</i>,<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> and <i>Grecs</i>; if he had a canker-worm-iron wherewith he
+might scrape away this vermin from the earth, or a cochineal-mill
+wherewith he might grind them to powder, he would do it most cordially.
+"O heavens!" he then broke out, "had I in fact my foot just stretched
+out over the curling, coiling worm-stalk (and though that foot had the
+gout in it), I would gladly dash it down upon them, and tread out the
+vile filth." But what he could, he did. Being his own travelling
+servant, and a decoy-spider, darting to and fro through all Europe, he
+had full often the pleasure of getting these faro-leaf-caterpillars and
+leaf-sappers under his thumb,&mdash;of becoming their pretended
+associate,&mdash;learning their tactics,&mdash;and then rolling some fire-wheel or
+other into their hissing snakes'-hole. I am not intimately instructed
+whether it is known in Leipsic who the ringleader was that, a short time
+since, at the fair, played a mock-police with mimic-constables, and
+broke up a bank;&mdash;at least the bankers were altogether out on the
+subject, because they were expecting the real police the next day, and
+were begging for some indulgences and <i>il</i>legal-benefits; but I am in a
+condition here to name the thief-catcher: it was Schoppe. The spoils he
+applied mostly to the purpose of running new mines under the
+faro-tables.</p>
+
+<p>With Cephisio he had played his cards otherwise. He stepped up before
+his bank, and looked on for some minutes, and at last presented a card
+with a shield-louis-d'or. It won, and he showed behind the card a long
+roll<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> of louis. Bouverot would not pay this roll. "He had not seen
+anything," he said. "What is your <i>croupier</i> sitting there for, then?"
+said Schoppe, and pronounced them swindlers, if they did not pay. To
+escape greater damage, they paid him his winnings. He took the money
+coldly, and departed, with these words to the Pointeurs: "Gentlemen, I
+assure you, you are playing here with finished cheats; but they have
+paid me only because I knew them." Amidst the increasing stiffness and
+paleness of the partners he turned, and slowly, with his
+broad-shouldered, compact figure, and his knotty cudgel, walked away
+unscathed.</p>
+
+<p>Augusti wished from his heart&mdash;for the persecution's sake&mdash;that Bouverot
+might not know the Librarian again. They found at home an invitation
+from the Minister to tea and supper. "The poor daughter!" said Augusti;
+"for the sake of this Bouverot, the half-blind one must go to-morrow to
+the table." Meanwhile, our youth will then surely see her again at last,
+and only a spring-day separates him from the dearest object! If Augusti
+is right, then my observation fits in here, that a good sound villain is
+always the motive-pike which sets the still, quaker-like carp-tribe in
+the pond to swimming; the hidden pock-matter, which brings cold children
+at once to life.</p>
+
+
+<h3>38. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Liana's eyes healed, but only slowly: Nature would not lead her at once
+out of her sombre prison into the sun; she could now, like the
+philosophers, just recognize light rather than forms. Nevertheless, the
+Minister issued cabinet orders that she should day after to-morrow play
+on the harmonica, appear at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> <i>souper</i>, and even make the salad, and
+thereby mask her blindness. He sometimes commanded impossible things, in
+order to meet with as much disobedience as his anger needed for the
+purpose of venting itself in punishment. Certain people keep themselves
+all day long full of vexation beforehand for some coming event or other,
+like urinal phosphate, which always boils under the microscope, or
+forges, wherein every day fire breaks out.</p>
+
+<p>The Minister's lady pronounced her soft, firm, No. About the harmonica
+she said she had asked the Doctor, in his name, who had strictly
+forbidden it; and the rest was an impossibility. Here he could already,
+he felt so like it, be angry at several things, especially at the asking
+of the Doctor, which, however, had not yet taken place; he grew mad
+enough, and swore he should act according to <i>his own</i> principles, and
+devil a bit did he care for <i>other</i> people's.</p>
+
+<p>This <i>principle</i> was in the present case the German gentleman. That is
+to say, the above-mentioned anecdote&mdash;Bouverot's guardianship of the
+hereditary Prince on his travels, or the design of the thing&mdash;had at
+both courts come to be the common talk in assemblies and at tables, and
+was hidden only from the Prince Luigi; for on thrones, there are almost
+no mysteries to any one excepting him (hardly his wife) who sits
+thereupon, as in whispering-galleries the people in distant corners hear
+everything aloud, only not he who stands in the middle. The German
+gentleman was, therefore, in the Hohenfliess system, the important
+port-vein and pulmonary artery wherewith even Froulay would water
+himself. The latter is obliged throughout to serve the present and the
+future, or two masters, of whom the one of Haarhaar might very soon be
+his.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Bouverot was attached not merely to Froulay the minister, but to Froulay
+the father; a man like him, who causes to be sent after him from Italy a
+whole cabinet of Art, and whose acquaintance with the arts has so long
+knit together even him and the Prince, must know how to prize a Madonna
+of such carnation as Liana, and of the Romish school, and, what is more,
+who, detached from the canvas, moved as a full, breathing rose. As to
+marrying the rose, that he could not propose to himself, because he was
+a German Herr.</p>
+
+<p>He had not seen her since his Italian tour,&mdash;nor had the Count
+either,&mdash;to both the Minister wished to show her as a round pearl of
+special whiteness and figure. Froulay had&mdash;which after all happens
+oftener than we imagine&mdash;quite as much vanity as pride; the latter to
+repel blame, the former to court praise. But I should have now to write
+a tournament-chronicle to tell posterity the half of all his raging and
+racing and lance-thrusts, in a fight wherein he served under the banners
+of enmity, vanity, and avarice. He was no more to be hunted to death
+than a wolf. All weapons were alike to him, and he was ever taking
+sharper and more poisonous ones. In the old <i>judicial</i> duels between man
+and wife, the man stood commonly up to his stomach in a pit, in order to
+bring his strength down to a level with the woman's, and she struck at
+him with a stone tied up in a veil; but in the <i>matrimonial</i> duels the
+man seems to stand in the free air and the woman in the earth, and she
+often has only the <i>veil</i> without the stone.</p>
+
+<p>In this combat there stepped between the two a shining peace-angel who
+caught the wounds, namely, Liana. The daughter, who had an enthusiastic
+love for her mother, and the womanly reverence for the stronger sex
+toward her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> father, and who suffered so endlessly under their strifes,
+fell upon her mother's neck and begged her to allow her what her father
+demanded; she would certainly do everything so as not to excite
+observation; she would take the greatest pains and practise herself
+specially beforehand,&mdash;ah, he would otherwise only be still more unkind
+to her poor brother,&mdash;this discord, merely on her account, was so
+painful to her, and perhaps more injurious than playing on the
+harmonica.</p>
+
+<p>"My child, thou knowest," said the mother, for now she <i>had</i> asked,
+"what the physician said yesterday against the harmonica; the rest is at
+thine own risk!" Liana kissed her joyfully. She must needs be led to her
+father, that she might make known to him aloud the gladness of her
+obedience. "I thank you, and be hanged," said he, softly; "it is simply
+your cursed duty." She left him with her joy dissipated to atoms, but
+without any great pangs; she was already accustomed to this.</p>
+
+
+<h3>39. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The Lector, while they were yet on their way to the Minister's, begged
+Albano to moderate the fire of his assertions and his pantomimes. He
+made known to him only so much of the family-jar as was necessary, in
+order that he might not, by a mistaken idea of her restoration, throw
+Liana into embarrassment. As they entered the card-room, everything was
+already in full blaze.</p>
+
+<p>As, at this time, no one is presented to him, I must do it; they are
+disciples (at least <i>twelfth</i> disciples) of the Minister.</p>
+
+<p>And first, I introduce to thee the holy President of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> Justice, Von
+Landrok, a good apothecary's-balance of Themis, which weighs out
+scruples, and wherein no false weights lie; but what is quite as bad,
+much smut, rubbish, and rust. Those at the ombre-table near by are the
+lords and ladies of Vey, Fl&ouml;l, and Kob, sleek, fine souls, like minerals
+in cabinets, polished off on the show-side, but on the concealed base
+still jagged and scratching.</p>
+
+<p>Go with me to the entrance of the next apartment; here I have to present
+to thee the young but fat canon Von Meiler, who, in order to line and
+stuff out and pad his inner man with a thick, warm, outer one, needs to
+fleece no more peasants yearly than the number of linden-trees the
+Russian peels for his bark-shoes, namely, one hundred and fifty.</p>
+
+<p>The apartment into which thou art looking I present to thee as a
+fly-glass full of courtiers, who, in order to enter into the <i>kingdom of
+heaven</i>, have become not merely <i>children</i>, but in fact <i>embryons</i> of
+four weeks, who, as is well known, look like flies; if Swift desires of
+his servants nothing more than the <i>shutting-to</i> of the doors, these
+wish nothing of their employer and bread-provider but the <i>leaving-open</i>
+of the same.</p>
+
+<p>I have the honor to set before thee yonder&mdash;it is he who is not
+playing&mdash;the holy Church-Counsellor, Sch&auml;pe, who would fain be chief
+chaplain to the court; a soft scoundrel, who soaks and softens the
+seed-corns of the divine and human word, like melon-seed (they are
+thereby to spring up sooner in the heart), so long in sugared wine, that
+they rot in it; a spiritual lord who never in his life <i>offered</i> any
+other prayers than the two which he always refuses, the <i>fourth</i> and
+<i>fifth</i>.<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+<p>But the Lector will soon name to thee, at the window, every one of the
+lords and dames, coldly, gently, and without pantomime. At present the
+Minister himself conducts thee to a gentleman, one of the players, with
+a cross on, who drinks water with saltpetre, and is continually licking
+his dry mouth; it is <i>Bouverot</i>,&mdash;he is just rising in thy presence;
+examine the cold, but impudent and cutting, sharply-ground eye, whose
+corners resemble a pair of open tinman's-shears, or a trap set,&mdash;the red
+nose, and the hard, lipless mouth, whose reddish crab's-claw, worn off
+by whetting, pinches together,&mdash;the cocked-up chin, and the whole
+stocky, firm figure. Albano does not surprise him; he has already seen
+all men, and he inquires about no one.</p>
+
+<p>The Minister refreshed the youth, whose inner being was one snarl, with
+the promise that at supper he would present to him his daughter. He
+offered him a game; but Alban replied, with a too youthful accent, he
+never played.</p>
+
+<p>He could now roam round through the lanes of the card-tables, and survey
+whatever he wished. In such a case one posts himself, if there is no one
+of the company whom he can endure, exactly before or beside the face he
+detests the most, in order inwardly to lash himself into vexation at
+every word and every feature of the countenance. Albano might have had
+many visages in his eye which were, at least in a small degree,
+intolerable, and by which he might have stationed himself;&mdash;nay, no
+sufficient reasons could have been assigned why he should not have given
+his whole attention to a certain chaffy, dried up paste-eel, a weakling
+full of impertinence, who was observing through an eye-glass the card
+constellations as they came up, while Albano could extend the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> feelers
+of his optic nerves even to the spots on the cards in the second
+apartment;&mdash;there would, indeed, have been no reasons, had not the
+German gentleman been there; before him he must place himself; of him he
+knew the most and the worst; he stood in distant connection with
+Schoppe, even with Liana. Furies! in the neighborhood of certain faces
+the pinions of the soul crumple up and mew themselves as swans' and
+pigeons' feathers are crushed before eagles' quills; it was as
+uncomfortable and close for all the innocent feelings in such a roomy
+breast as Albano's, as it is to a flock of pigeons into whose cote some
+one has thrown the tail of a polecat.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot disguise the fact, he muttered and growled inwardly at all the
+man did and had,&mdash;whether it was his having fingers whose points were
+finely shaved for the faro-game, and whose nails had been somewhat
+peeled off by an altogether worse game of <i>hazard</i> yet,&mdash;or his looking
+occasionally through the hair of his eyebrows,&mdash;or (only once) squashing
+a fly by a sudden snapping to of his lips like a fly-trap,&mdash;or his
+uttering now a line of German and now of French, which I expect of good
+circles, whereas only low people never bring out a German word, except a
+few, such as <i>Lansquenet</i>,<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> <i>canif</i> (kneif), <i>birambrot</i> (bier am
+brod), excepted. Suffice it, he thought always of Schoppe's fine
+expression: "There are men and times at which and with whom nothing
+could be more refreshing to an honest man than&mdash;to give them a sound
+drubbing." Duelling is quite as good, thought the Count.</p>
+
+<p>However, Schoppe must here be justified by an authority. Namely, the
+author himself, otherwise such a soft, warm swan-skin, could never stand
+behind card-table-chairs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> without becoming a complete game-cock, and
+spreading out his scratching, bristly wing the wider the longer he idly
+looked on; the reason is this, that in general one finds only those
+people more and more tolerable and better upon acquaintance, with whom
+one pursues and purposes the same kind of objects.</p>
+
+<p>Albano wished heartily he had his brother-in-arms Schoppe with him now;
+he went often, it is true, to Augusti to vent himself; but <i>he</i> always
+sought to pacify him; yes, by keeping himself constantly engaged with
+the church-counsellor, he cut off from him the opportunity of betraying
+his youthful, inexperienced soul to listeners. Moreover, the Lector
+chose afterward for half an hour&mdash;what familiar friends often do in the
+absence of familiar female friends&mdash;the latter (namely, absence).</p>
+
+<p>The Count stood some time behind Bouverot's seat, and looked into a
+Chinese mirror, japanned on the inside with grotesque figures, and
+changed his position constantly, till he brought Cephisio's face to
+appear therein right beside a painted dragon, just by way of
+comparison;&mdash;all this went on, interrupted, however, by constantly
+increasing heart-beatings for Liana, when the servants opened the doors
+to the supper-hall; and now his heart thumped even to pain, and his
+form, already so blooming with youth, hung all full of the roses of
+happy and modest confusion.</p>
+
+
+<h3>40. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>With beating heart and burning cheek he made his way into the midst of
+the motley promenading throng with some old lady or other, who, in her
+vanity, misunderstood him, and at once hung on his arm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> like a
+spring-bracelet, and who got nothing from him but&mdash;answers. With flying
+and piercing glances he stepped into the bright hall, which seemed as if
+it were made of crystallized light, and into the sea of heads. He was
+just making some answer when he caught, in the tumult behind him, the
+low words, "I certainly hear my brother,"&mdash;and immediately the still
+lower refutation, "It is my Count." He turned round; between the Lector
+and her mother stood the dear Liana, a modest, timid, pale-red angel, in
+a black silk dress, over which ran only the glittering spring-frost of a
+silver chain, and with a light ribbon in her blond hair. The mother
+presented her to him, and the tender cheek bloomed more redly,&mdash;for she
+had, indeed, confounded the similar voices of the guest and the
+brother,&mdash;and she cast down those beautiful eyes which could see
+nothing. Ah, Albano, how violently thy heart trembles now that the past
+has become present, the moonlit night a spring morning; and this still
+form, now so near thee, works far more mightily than in any dream! She
+was too holy in his sight for him to have been able to utter a lie
+before her about the apparent recovery; he preferred silence;&mdash;and thus
+the warmest friend of her life came to her the first time only veiled
+and dumb.</p>
+
+<p>The Lector soon led her away to her seat under the second lustre;
+opposite her sat her mother (probably, for this reason, that the good,
+unconscious daughter, who surely could not always be letting her eyelids
+fall, might raise them with friendliness and propriety towards a beloved
+being); the German gentleman, as an acquaintance, seated himself,
+without further ceremony, on her right, Augusti on her left,&mdash;Zesara, as
+Count, came far up above beside the highest lady.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Deuse take it! that is, unfortunately, so often my own case! I assert
+the upper seat of honor,&mdash;and observe, a mile below me, the daughter,
+but, like a myops, only half of her, and can bring about nothing the
+whole evening. Do pray transpose me without any scruples down beside
+her,&mdash;you have to deal with nothing more than a puffed-up man,&mdash;why, on
+earth, as in the heavens, must, then, the largest planets be placed
+exactly the farthest from their sun?</p>
+
+<p>I now draw my readers to the Minister's table, not to show them the
+ministerial pomp ingrafted upon avarice, or his dance of honor hemmed in
+between the parallel lines of etiquette, or even his family arms, which
+were carried round on every chafing-dish and salt-cellar, and with the
+ice and mustard,&mdash;enough for us to know the ubiquity of the insignia
+upon his flower-pots, shirts, bed-clothes, dog's cravats, and all his
+thoughts; but the reader shall just now look only at my hero.</p>
+
+<p>He is very prominent. Upon such a new-comer, people, in a
+residence-city, have already, before he has fairly given the driver his
+drinking-money, got all possible light of nature and revelation;
+nineteen of the company were fastened upon him as his moral odometers.
+The boldness of his nature and his rank made up with him for worldly
+tact, which was missed nowhere except in this, that he never took sides
+except in the very strongest manner, and always ran off into general and
+cosmopolitan observations. But see, I pray you!&mdash;O, I wish Liana could
+see it,&mdash;how the rosy glow and the fresh green of his healthiness shines
+among the yellow sicklings of the age, out of whom, as from ships on the
+African coast of youth, all the pitch that held them together had run
+out,&mdash;and how the cheek-redness of spiritual health, a tender,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+ever-returning suffusion (from anxiety about Liana) graces him, whereas
+most of the world's people at the table seem, like cotton wool, to take
+all colors more easily than <i>red</i>!</p>
+
+<p>He looked and listened, against the salvation-laws of visiting, too much
+to Liana. She ate, under the heightened redness of a fear of mistaking,
+only sparingly, but without embarrassment; the Lector, with easy hand,
+barred up against her the smallest road to error. What astonished him
+was, that she covered such a sensitive and easily weeping heart with
+such an unembarrassed cheerfulness of countenance and conversation.
+Young man! <i>that</i> is, with the most delicate maidens, free from pangs of
+love, no covering and disguise, but an enjoying of the moment and
+habitual courtesy! She retained so considerately (what she had probably
+learned beforehand) the relative rank of the familiar voices, that she
+never directed her answer to the wrong place. She, however, looked often
+to her mother with full eyes, and smiled then still more serenely, not,
+however, for the purpose of deceiving, but from real, hearty love.</p>
+
+<p>Touching her salad, the best and most fit to be a prince's table-guest
+among my female readers, who had seen her mix it, would have taken
+several fork-loads thereof. Uncommonly charming was it, when, growing
+more earnest and red, she drew off her glove before the blue, celestial
+hemisphere of glass; with white hands and supple arms, without a silken
+fold, worked away in the green, between the blue of the glass and the
+black of the silk; considerately felt for the vinegar-and oil-castors,
+and poured out as much as her practice (and the deciphered advice of the
+Lector,&mdash;at least so it seems to me) directed. By heavens! the dressing
+is, in this case, the salad; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> the vain Minister, who had no
+understanding of pictures, had a great eye for things that would make
+good pictures.</p>
+
+<p>The mother seemed scarcely to look at the leaf-mixing. To the Count, the
+Minister's lady seemed to-day to have only good-breeding and no pious
+strictness; but he did not yet sufficiently know those polished women,
+who have refinement without wit, sensibility without fire, clearness
+without coldness; who borrow of the snail his feelers, his softness, his
+coolness, and his dumb gait, and who demand and deserve more confidence
+than they obtain.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment came in Cephisio, like an angel among three men in the
+fiery furnace, but a dark angel. To the Count, his contiguity of seat,
+and every word he addressed to Liana, was already a crucifixion,&mdash;only
+to pass with a look from her to him was an agony, little different from
+that which I should have, if I had spent a day at Dresden in the antique
+Olympus of ancient gods, and then, on going out, should fall into a
+refectory full of swollen monks, or into a naturalist's cabinet full of
+stuffed malefactors' skins and bottled embryo-spiders. However he was
+pacified&mdash;in my opinion, only deceived&mdash;by one thing, that the German
+gentleman did not blaze away in lyrics beside her, was neither in heaven
+nor out of his head, but in his head, and quite composed and very
+polite. There are no pigeons, Count,&mdash;ask the farmers,&mdash;which the hawks
+oftener pounce upon than the <i>glossy white</i> ones!</p>
+
+<p>The German gentleman now produced a snuff-box, with a neat picture of
+Lilar, and asked Liana how it pleased her; he liked the sentimentality
+of it particularly.</p>
+
+<p>The Lector was terrified, leaned forward toward the box-piece, and threw
+out a few opinions beforehand which should guide the half-blind one in
+forming her own; but after she had passed it two or three times
+obliquely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> against the lights and near before her eyes, she was able to
+express an original opinion herself, that the child illuminated by the
+half-sunken sun, who is drawn aloft by a flower-chain under the
+triumphal arch, was, to her feelings, "so very lovely." Here&mdash;and I have
+observed the same case in a half-blind lady of powerful fancy and
+receptive sense of art&mdash;the effort and the artistic sense, or the
+spiritual eye, came to meet the bodily half-way. The box, as well as its
+snuff, was presented farther on, and came down along to the Counsellor
+of Arts, Fraischd&ouml;rfer, upon whom the new Prince's love of the arts and
+the favorite's knowledge in them now placed new crowns; he found fault
+with nothing but the white of the blossoms. "Spring," said he, "is, by
+reason of its wearisome whiteness, a mere monochrome; I have visited
+Lilar only in autumn." "There is the nightingale's song, too, which we
+of course cannot paint, but yet we can hear it," said Liana, cheerfully;
+he was her teacher, and now, in the technology of painting, even her
+father's. Over all her acquisitions and inner fruits and blossoms the
+rose of silence had been painted; to that her tyrannical father had
+entirely accustomed her, and especially before men, in whom she always
+revered copied fathers.</p>
+
+<p>When the landscape came to Albano, and he held before him in miniature
+that spring night when Lilar and the noble old man appeared to him so
+enchantingly,&mdash;and as he touched what the dear soul had handled,&mdash;and
+now in his own soul all accordant strings trembled,&mdash;just then the Devil
+struck again a dissonant chord of the seventh:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The Prince, gracious sir," said the Minister to the German gentleman,
+"was yesterday buried in private; only eight days hence we have the
+public interment. We are obliged to hasten, because the suspension of
+the court-mourning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> lasts until the inauguration, on <i>ascension-day</i>, is
+gone by." I am too much excited to express myself upon the eternal
+master of ceremonies, Froulay, who would have raised a lantern-tax in
+the sun, and bridge-toll before park-bridges and asses'-bridges; but
+Albano, dazzled by so many side-lights and glancing rays,&mdash;reminded of
+Liana's sorrow over the old man, of his birthday, of the heart without a
+breast, and of the madness of the world,&mdash;was not in a condition,
+however much he had intended appearing in gentleness and lambs' clothes
+before Froulay, to keep the latter on; but he must needs (and louder
+than he meant), in opposition to his next neighbor, the Church
+Counsellor, Sch&auml;pe, with too great youthful exasperation (not lessened
+by the eager listening of Liana for the brotherly voice) declare himself
+against many things,&mdash;against the everlasting dead sham-life of
+men,&mdash;against the ceremonial haughtiness of a soulless form,&mdash;against
+this starving on love merely from making false shows of it;&mdash;ah, his
+whole heart burned on his lip!</p>
+
+<p>The honest Sch&auml;pe, whom I just now called a scoundrel, took, with
+several expressions of countenance, Albano's part. But I do not by any
+means, friend Albano!&mdash;thou hast yet to learn for the first time that
+men, in respect to ceremonies, modes, and laws, like a flock of sheep,
+will, in a body, provided the bell-wether can only be got to leap over a
+pole, continue to leap carefully over the same place when the pole has
+been taken away;&mdash;and the most and highest leaps, in the state, are
+those we make without the pole. But a youth would be an ordinary one who
+should love civil life very early, however certain it is that he and we
+all judge too bitterly the faults of every office which we do not
+ourselves hold.</p>
+
+<p>The company listened in silence, and, out of politeness, only inwardly
+admired; on Liana fell a tender seriousness.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They rose,&mdash;the closeness vanished,&mdash;so did his zeal;&mdash;but, whether it
+came from the speaking, or the contemplation of the loved object, or
+from a youthful over-leaping of the hedges of visiting-propriety,&mdash;(it
+arose not, however, from want of manners),&mdash;the fact is not to be denied
+(and I do my best, too, to give it exactly) that the Count left the poor
+old lady who had been escorted in by him,&mdash;Hafenreffer himself knows not
+her name,&mdash;left her standing, and, I believe unconsciously, took Liana
+under his escort. Ah, her! What shall I say of the magic nearness of the
+dreamed-of soul,&mdash;of the light resting of her hand, felt only by the arm
+of the inner man, not of the outer,&mdash;of the shortness of the heavenly
+way, which should have been at least as long as Frederick Street?
+Verily, he himself said nothing,&mdash;he thought merely of the abominable
+Inhibitorial-room, where their separation must take place,&mdash;he trembled
+at every effort to speak. "You have, perhaps," said Liana, lightly and
+openly, who loved to hear the friendly voice, especially after the warm
+discourse, "already visited our Lilar?"&mdash;"Truly not; but have you?" he
+said, too much confused. "My mother and I have made it our favorite home
+every spring."</p>
+
+<p>Now were they in the parting-chamber. Alas! there and thus he stood with
+her, who saw nothing, for some seconds immovable, and looked straight
+before him, wanting to say something, till he was aroused by her mother,
+who was eagerly seeking, for her affection, which the whole evening had
+been nourishing, a sequestered hour on her daughter's heart,&mdash;and so all
+was over, for both vanished like apparitions.</p>
+
+<p>But Alban was as a man who is deserted by a glorious dream, and who all
+the morning is so inwardly blest, but remembers the dream no more. And
+yet, stands not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> Lilar open to him, and will he not surely see it, so
+soon as ever Liana can see it too?</p>
+
+<p>Never was he more gentle. The attentive Lector, in this warm, fruitful
+seed-time, threw in some good seed. He said, as they looked out together
+into the moonlit night, Albano had this evening hardly brought forward
+anything but thorny and exaggerated truths, which only imbitter, but do
+not enlighten. At another time the Count would have asked him whether he
+should have carried himself like Froulay and Bouverot, who, with all
+possible tolerance, presented theses and antitheses to each other, like
+an academical respondent and opponent, who previously prepare in concert
+logical wounds and plasters of equal length;&mdash;but to-day he was very
+kindly disposed towards him. Augusti had so delicately and
+affectionately cared for mother and daughter,&mdash;he had, without
+blackening or whitewashing, said much good, but nothing hastily, and his
+expositions had been calmly listened to: he had neither flattered nor
+offended. Albano, therefore, replied, softly: "But it is surely better
+to imbitter, dear Augusti, than to put to sleep. And to whom shall I
+then say the truth but to those who have it not nor any faith in it?
+Surely not to others." "One can speak any truth," said he, "but one
+cannot reckon as truth every mode and mood in which he speaks it."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" said Albano, and looked up; beneath the starry heaven stood the
+marble Madonna of the palace, like a patron saint, softly
+illuminated,&mdash;and he thought of her sister,<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a>&mdash;and of Lilar,&mdash;and of
+spring,&mdash;and of many dreams,&mdash;and how full his heart was of eternal
+love, and that he had as yet no friend and no loved one.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> Lit. "Let themselves be struck dead thereupon," i. e. lay
+their life that it was so. We have a vulgarism: "I'll be shot if it's
+not so."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> <i>Blase-l&ouml;cher</i>, mouth-pieces.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> <i>Honn&ecirc;teté</i> entirely excludes, in the higher classes,
+murder; <i>dés honn&ecirc;teté</i>, lying, &amp;c., except in a <i>certain</i> degree.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> This court is Catholic, but the country Lutheran; and to
+this latter confession that of Hohenfliess also subscribes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> Or convocations every fifteen years.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> A departing graduate.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> See Count Lamberg's Day-book of a Man of the World.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> Whoever goes to the Academy of the Arcadians, takes an
+Arcadian name.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> One who watches the card and takes up the money at the
+bank.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> Give us our daily bread, and forgive us our debts.&mdash;[?
+<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> Lanzknecht.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> Liana.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/rivetstart.jpg" width="550" height="140" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>EIGHTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Le petit Lever of Dr. Sphex.&mdash;Path to
+Lilar.&mdash;Woodland-Bridge.&mdash;The Morning in
+Arcadia.&mdash;Chariton.&mdash;Liana's Letter and Psalm of
+Gratitude.&mdash;Sentimental Journey through a Garden.&mdash;The
+Flute-Dell.&mdash;Concerning the Reality of the Ideal.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>41. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/i.jpg" width="100" height="108" alt="I" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_3">I sat up all last night till towards morning,&mdash;for I cannot suffer any
+strange <i>déchiffreur</i> in the case,&mdash;in order to cipher out the Jubilee
+to the very last word, so enchained was I by its charms; I hope,
+however, as the mere thin leaf-skeleton from Hafenreffer's hand has
+already done so much, that now, when I run through its veins with
+sap-colors and glossy green, the leaf will do absolute miracles.</p></div>
+
+<p>With the Count it had been troubled weather since last evening. For the
+patient, modest form which he had seen shone, like the purpose of a
+great deed, before all the images of his soul; and in his dreams, and
+before he sank to slumber, her gentle voice became the Philomela of a
+spring-night. Withal, he heard them continually talking about her,
+especially the Doctor, who every morning announced further progress of
+the ocular cure, and at last placed Liana's setting out for Lilar nearer
+and nearer. To hear of a loved one, however, even the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> indifferent
+thing, is far mightier than to think of her. He heard further, that her
+brother, since the murder of her eyes, had withdrawn entirely from the
+city, in which he would not again appear except on a so-called
+festive-steed at the Prince's funeral;&mdash;and around this Eden, or rather
+around its creatress, so high a garden-wall had been run, and he went
+round the wall and found no gate.</p>
+
+<p>I know nothing more odious than this; but in what residence-city is it
+otherwise? If I ever wrote a Romance (of which there is no probability),
+one thing I affirm openly, there is nothing which I would so sedulously
+shun as a residence-city, and a heroine in it saintly enough for a
+canoness. For the conjunction of the upper planets is more easily
+brought about than that of the upper class of lovers. Does <i>he</i> wish to
+speak alone with <i>her</i> at Court or at tea or in her family, there stands
+the Court, the tea-party, the family close by;&mdash;will he meet her in the
+park, she rides, like the Chinese couriers, double, because we give a
+consciousness to maidens, as nature gives all important organs,
+duplicate, just as we give good wine double bottom;&mdash;will he meet her at
+least accidentally in the street, then there stalks along behind her (if
+the street lies in Dresden), a sour servant as her plague-vinegar,
+soul-keeper, <i>curator sexus</i>, <i>chevalier d'honneur</i>, genius of Socrates,
+contradictor, and Pestilentiary. In the country, on the other hand, the
+parson's daughter takes a run (that is all), because the evening is so
+heavenly, about the fields of the parsonage, and the candidate needs do
+nothing more than put on his boots. Really, among people of rank, the
+mantle of (erotic) love seems in the beginning to be a Dr. Faust's
+mantle, which swears to soar over everything, whereas it merely covers
+over everything; only, at last, there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> stands a Schreckhorn, a Mount
+Pilate, and a Jungfrau, before one's nose.</p>
+
+<p>Blessed hero! On Friday came the Lector, and reported, that on Monday
+the illustrious deceased&mdash;namely, his empty coffin&mdash;is to be buried, and
+Roquairol rides the festive-steed,&mdash;and Liana is almost well, for she
+goes with the Minister's lady to-morrow to Lilar, in all probability to
+escape some sad black-bordered notes of condolence,&mdash;and, on the
+following ascension-day comes the consecration and masquerade....</p>
+
+<p>Blessed hero! I repeat. For hitherto what hast thou possessed of the
+blooming vale of Tempe, except the barren heights whereon thou stood'st
+looking down into the enchantment?</p>
+
+
+<h3>42. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>On the May-Saturday-evening, at 7 o'clock, every vapor disappeared from
+the sky, and the brightly departing sun went to meet a glorious Sunday.
+Albano, who then, at length, meant to visit the unseen Lilar, was, on
+the evening before, as sacredly happy as if he were celebrating
+confession eve before the first holy supper;&mdash;his sleep was one constant
+ecstasy and awaking, and in every dream a mimic Sunday morning rose, and
+the future became the dark prelude of the present.</p>
+
+<p>Early on Sunday he was about to sally forth, when he had to pass by the
+half-glass door of the Doctor. "Sir Count, one moment!" cried he. When
+he entered, the Doctor said, "Directly, dear Sir Count!" and went on
+with what he was about. To the painters, who, in future centuries, will
+draw from me as they have hitherto from Homer, I present the following
+group of the Doctor as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> a treasure; he lay on his left side; Galen was
+smoothing down his father's back with a little scratch-brush, while
+Boerhave stood near him with a broad comb, and kept dragging that
+instrument perpendicularly (not obliquely) through the hair. He always
+said he knew nothing that cheered him up so, and was such a good
+aperient, as brush and comb. Before the bed stood Van Swieten in a thick
+fur, which the correctioner had to wear when the weather was warm and
+his behavior bad, in order that he might, thus arrayed, be laughed at,
+as well as half roasted.</p>
+
+<p>Two girls stood waiting there in full Sunday gala, and were thinking of
+going out into the country to see a parson's daughter, and to the
+village church; these he first mauled, limb by limb, with the hammer of
+the law. He loved to make his children antipodes of Romish defendants,
+who appear in rags and tatters, and so he set them in the pillory, all
+ruffled and tasselled, especially before strangers. The Count had
+already this long time, on the red children's account, been standing
+with his face turned toward the open window; he could not, however,
+refrain from saying, in Latin, "Were he his child, he would long ago
+have made way with himself; he knew nothing more degrading than to be
+scolded in finery." "It takes so much the deeper hold," said Sphex, in
+German, and fired only these few farewell shots after the girls: "You
+are a pair of geese, and will do nothing in church but just cackle about
+your rags and tags; why don't you mind the parson? He is an ass, but he
+preaches well enough for you she-asses; in the evening do you tell me
+every word of the sermon."</p>
+
+<p>"Here is a laxative drink, Sir Count, which, as you are going to Lilar,
+I beg you to give the Architect's lady for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> her little toads; but don't
+take it ill!" By the deuse! that is what precisely those people most
+frequently say, who, themselves, never take anything ill. The
+Count,&mdash;who at another time would have contemptuously turned his back
+upon him,&mdash;now blushing and silent before the preserver of his Liana,
+put it into his pocket, because, too, it was for the children of his
+beloved Dian, to whose spouse he wished to bear greetings and news.</p>
+
+
+<h3>43. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Lilar is not, like so many princely gardens, a torn-out leaf
+of a Hirschfeld,&mdash;a dead landscape-figurant and mimic- and
+miniature-park,&mdash;one of those show-dishes which are now served up and
+sketched at every court, of ruins, wildernesses, and woodland-cottages,
+but Lilar is the <i>lusus natur&aelig;</i> and bucolic poem of the romantic and
+sometimes juggling fancy of the old Prince. We shall soon enter in a
+body behind our hero, but only into <i>Elysium</i>. <i>Tartarus</i> is something
+entirely different, and the second part of Lilar. This separation of the
+contrasts I praise even more than all. I have long wanted to go into a
+better garden than the common chameleonic ones are, where one hands you
+China and Italy, summer-house and charnel-house, hermitage and palace,
+poverty and riches (as in the cities and hearts of the proprietors), all
+on one dish, and where day and night, without an aurora, without a
+mezzotinto, are placed side by side. Lilar, on the contrary,&mdash;where the
+Elysium justifies its happy name by connected pleasure-tents and
+pleasure-groves, as the Tartarus does its gloomy one, by lonesome,
+veiled horrors,&mdash;<i>that</i> is drawn right out of my heart.</p>
+
+<p>But where is our youth now going with his dreams?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> He is yet on the
+romantic road that leads into Lilar, properly the first garden-walk of
+the same. He strolled along an embowered road, which gently rose over
+hills, with open orchards, and into yellow-blooming grounds, and which,
+like the Rhine, now forced its way through green, ivy-clad rocks, and
+now opened its flying, smiling shores behind the twigs. Now the white
+benches under jessamine bushes and the white country-seats became more
+frequent; he drew nearer, and the nightingales and canary-birds<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> of
+Lilar came roving along, like birds announcing land. The morning blew
+fresh through the spring, and the indented foliage yet held fast its
+light, ethereal drops. A carrier lay sleeping on his rack-wagon, which
+the beasts, browsing right and left, safely drew along the smooth road.
+Albano heard, in the Sunday stillness, not the war-cry of oppressive
+labor, but the peace-bells of the towers: in the morning chime the
+future speaks, as in evening chimes the past; and at this golden age of
+the day there stood, also, a golden age in his fresh bosom.</p>
+
+<p>Now the fork-tailed chimney-swallows began to quiver with their purple
+breasts over the heavenly blue of the wild germanders, announcing the
+approach of our dwellings as well as their own; when his road seemed
+about to pass through an old, open, ruined castle, overhung with rich,
+thick leaves, like scales, at whose entrance, or egress, a red arm,
+pointing aside with the white inscription, "Way out of Tartarus into
+Elysium," stretched out toward a neighboring thicket.</p>
+
+<p>His heart rose within him at this double nearness of such opposite days.
+With long steps he pressed on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> toward the Elysian wood, which seemed to
+be cut off from him by a broad ditch. But he soon came out of the
+bush-work before a green bridge, which flung its arch like a giant
+serpent across the ditch, not, however, on the earth, but among the
+summits of the trees. It bore him in through a blooming wilderness of
+oaks, firs, silver-poplars, fruit-trees, and lindens. Then it brought
+him out into the open country, and now Lilar, from the east, flung, over
+the wide-extending spikes of grain, the splendor of a high golden ball
+to meet him. The bridge sank gently with him again into fragrant,
+glimmering broom, and beneath and beside him sang and fluttered
+canary-birds, thrushes, finches, and nightingales, while the well-fed
+brood slept under the covert of the bridge. At last, after passing an
+arched avenue, it came up again to the light, and now he saw the
+blooming mountain cupola with the white altar, whereon he had knelt on a
+night of his youth; and farther to the south behind him, the veil and
+dividing-wall of Tartarus, a high-reared wood; and as he stepped onward,
+Elysium opened upon him more broadly,&mdash;a lane of small houses with
+Italian roofs full of little trees, smiled joyfully and familiarly upon
+the sight out of the green world-map of dells, groves, paths, lakes; and
+in the east five triumphal gates opened passages into a wide-extending
+plain, waving on like a green-glistening sea, and in the west five
+others stood opposite to them with opened lands and mountains.</p>
+
+<p>As Albano passed down along the slowly-descending sweep of the bridge,
+there came forth into view, now blazing fountains, now red beds, now new
+gardens enfolded in the great one, and every step created the Eden anew.
+Full of awe he stepped out, as upon a hallowed soil, on the consecrated
+earth of the old Prince and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> <i>pious father</i><a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> and Dian and Liana;
+his wild course was arrested, and entangled, as if by an earthquake; the
+pure paradise seemed made merely for Liana's pure soul; and now for the
+first time a timid question about the propriety of his hasty journey,
+and the loving fear of meeting for the first time her healed eye, made
+his happy bosom grow uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>But how festal, how living, is all around him! On the waters which gleam
+through the groves swans are gliding; the pheasant stalks away into the
+bushes, deer peep curiously behind him out of the wood through which he
+has come, and white and black pigeons run busily under the gates, and on
+the western hills hang bleating sheep by the side of reposing lambs;
+even the breast of the turtle-dove in some hidden valley trembles with
+the <i>languido</i> of love. He strode through a long, high-bushed
+rose-field, that seemed a settlement and plantation of hedge-sparrows
+and nightingales, which hopped out of the bushes on the growing
+grass-banks, and ran out in vain after little worms; and the lark sailed
+away on high over this second world, made for the more innocent of God's
+creatures, and sank behind the gates into the grain-fields.</p>
+
+<p>Intoxicate thyself more and more, good youth, and link thy flowers into
+a chain as closely as the boy toward whom thou art hastening. For,
+overhead, on the Italian roof, before whose balustrade-breastwork
+silver-poplars, girdled about with broad vine-leaves, played, and which,
+in the spring-night, he had taken for a bower in roses,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> stood a
+blooming boy bent forward, who was letting down a chain of marigolds,
+and kept fastening on new rings to the too short green cable. "My name
+is Pollux," he answered briskly to Alban's soft question, "but my sister
+is named Helena,<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a> but my little brother is named Echion." "And thy
+father?" "He is not here now, he is away off there in Rome; just go in
+to mother Chariton, I am coming immediately." On what fairer day, in
+what fairer place, with what fairer hearts could he come into the holy
+family of the beloved Dian, than on this morning, and with this mood?</p>
+
+<p>He went into the bright, laughing house, which was full of windows and
+green Venetian blinds. When he entered into the spring-room he found
+Chariton, a young, slender woman, looking almost like a girl of
+seventeen,<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> with the little Echion at her breast, defending herself
+against the sickly and excitable Helena, who, standing in a chair under
+the window, kept swinging in a many-leaved sling of a vine-branch, and
+trying to girdle and blind therewith the eyes of her mother. With
+charming confusion, wishing at once to rise, with her left hand to
+remove the leafy fetters without tearing, and to cover up the suckling
+more closely, she stepped forward, inclining her head, to meet the
+beautiful youth, with childlike friendliness and warmth, but with
+infinite shyness, not on account of the rank indicated by his dress, but
+because he was a man, and looked so noble, even like her Greek. He told
+her, with an enchanting love, which, perhaps, she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> had never seen so
+magnificently pictured, on his strong countenance, his name, and the
+gratitude which his heart kept in store for her husband, and the news
+and greetings which he had brought from him. How the innocent fire
+blazed out of the dark eyes of the timid creature! "Was then my lord,"
+so she called her husband, "very well and happy?" And so she began now,
+unembarrassed as a child, a long examination all about her husband.</p>
+
+<p>Pollux came dancing in with his long chain. Alban playfully took out the
+Doctor's medicine from his pocket, and said, "This is what you are to
+take." "Must I drink it right down, mother?" said the hero. Here she
+inquired quite as naively after the detailed prescriptions of the
+Doctor, until the little suckling at her breast rebelled, and drove her
+into a by-room to sit over the cradle. She excused herself, and said the
+little one must go to sleep, because she was going to walk with Liana,
+for whom she was looking every minute.</p>
+
+<p>Children love powerful faces. Alban was at once the favorite of children
+and dogs, only he could never act with the little jumping troop, on the
+childish playground, when grown spectators were in the boxes.</p>
+
+<p>"I can do a good many things!" said Pollux. "And I can read, sir!"
+rejoined Helena to her brother. "But then only in German; but I can read
+Latin letters splendidly, you!" replied the little man to her, and ran
+round through the room after readings and specimens; but in vain. "Man,
+wait a little!" said he, and ran up-stairs into Liana's chamber, and
+brought one of Liana's letters.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>43<sup>a</sup>. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Albano knew not that Liana had the upper&mdash;so bloomingly shaded&mdash;chamber
+reserved for her own private use, wherein she frequently&mdash;especially
+when her mother remained behind in the city&mdash;drew, wrote, and read. The
+childlike Chariton, inspired with the love-draught of friendship, did
+not know at all how she could possibly so much as show her warmth of
+kindness to the fair, affectionate friend: ah, what was a chamber? Now
+into this always open room came the children, whom Liana sometimes heard
+read; and thus was Pollux able on the present occasion to fetch out of
+the solitary room the sheet which she had written this morning.</p>
+
+<p>While Albano, during the errand, sat so alone in the keeping-room of the
+far-off friend of his youth, near <i>his</i> still, pale daughter, who looked
+now at him and now at a toy sheep-fold, as well known to him as Liana's
+eastern chamber, when the morning breeze swept in the glorious hum
+through the cool window, especially when, in the light cut-work of the
+floor the Chinese shadows of the vine and poplar foliage crinkled into
+each other, and when, at length, Chariton began to sing the suckling to
+sleep with a quicker, louder lullaby, which sounded to him like her
+echoing sigh after the fair land of her youth; then was his full heart,
+which had been already so stirred by all the events of the morning,
+wondrously moved, and&mdash;especially by the flickering sham-fight of the
+shadows&mdash;almost to tears; and the child looked up more and more
+meaningly into his face.</p>
+
+<p>Then came Pollux back with his two quarto leaves, and now set himself at
+once to his lesson. The very first page<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> composed the melody to Alban's
+inner songs; but he could neither guess the authoress nor the date of
+the letter, except further along, by a desultory sort of reading to and
+fro. The leaves belonged to previous ones; not so much as a grain of
+writing-sand evinced their recent birth (for Liana was too courtly to
+use any); further, all the names were disguised; that is to say,
+Julienne, to whom they were directed, had unfortunately in Argenson's
+<i>bureau de décachetage</i>, where she resided, i.e. at court, demanded them
+in cipher, and she accordingly took the name of Elisa; Roquairol was
+called Charles, and Liana her little Linda. Linda, as will be well
+remembered, is the baptismal name of the young Countess of Romeiro, with
+whom the Princess on the day of that (for Roquairol) so bloody
+masquerade had established an eternal heart- and letter-alliance; Liana,
+to whose pure, poetic eyes every noble woman became a blessed saint and
+heroine, the opaque jewel a bright, pure, transparent one, loved the
+high Countess as if with the heart of her brother and her female friend
+at once, and the gentle soul named herself, unconscious of her worth,
+only the little Linda of her Elisa.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did Albano recognize the delicate running-hand; Julienne loved the
+French language even to its letters, but Liana's resembled not the
+scrawled Gallic protocols, but the neatly-rounded handwriting of the
+English.</p>
+
+<p>Here is her leaf at last. O thou lovely being! how long have I thirsted
+for the first sounds of thy refreshing soul!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="sig">
+"Sunday Morning.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"... But to-day, Elisa, I am so profoundly happy, and the
+evening-mist is transformed to an aurora in heaven. I ought
+not to give thee yesterday's work at all.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> I was too much
+troubled. But might not my dear mother, who had come hither
+merely for my sake, become thereby still sicker, whatever
+appearances of tolerable health she might, for that very
+reason, assume with me? And then came thy form, beloved one,
+and all thy sorrow and the painful neighborhood,<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a> and our
+last evening here. O how reproachfully did all that pass
+before my heavy heart! So, as we stopped before the house of
+dear Chariton, and she kissed my mother's hand with tears of
+joy; then was I so weak that I too turned aside and shed
+tears, but other tears,&mdash;I wept for the rejoicing one
+herself, who indeed could not know whether at that hour her
+precious friend in Rome might not be sick or dying.</p>
+
+<p>"But now the dark, gray mist is wholly blown away from the
+flower-garden of thy little Linda, and all the blossoms of
+life shine in their pure, high colors before her. After
+midnight my mother's headache passed almost entirely away,
+and she was still sleeping so sweetly this morning. O, what
+were my feelings then! Soon after five o'clock I went down
+into the garden and shrunk back at the splendor which burned
+in the dew and between the leaves; the sun was just looking
+in under the triumphal gates,&mdash;all the lakes sparkled in a
+broad fire,&mdash;a gleaming haze floated like a saintly halo
+around the edge of the earth which the heaven touched,&mdash;and
+a high waving and singing streamed through the splendor of
+morn.</p>
+
+<p>"And into this unlocked world I had come back restored and
+so happy. I wanted continually to cry out: 'I have thee
+again, thou bright sun! and you, ye lovely flowers! and ye
+proud mountains, ye have not changed! and ye are green
+again, and, like me, renewed, ye sweet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> scented trees!' I
+floated, as if transfigured, in an endless felicity, Elisa,
+weak, but light and free; I had, so it seemed to me, put off
+this burdensome clay under the earth and kept only the
+beating heart, and in my enraptured bosom warm
+tear-fountains gushed down, as if over flowers, and covered
+them with brightness.</p>
+
+<p>"'Ah, God!' said I, trembling at the very greatness of my
+joy, 'was it then a mere sleep, that immovable repose of
+mother?' and I must needs (smile on!) before I went further,
+go up to her again. I crept breathless to the bedside, bent
+listeningly over her, and my good mother opened slowly her
+still gently dozing eyes, looked upon me languidly but
+affectionately, and closed them again without stirring, and
+gave me only her dear hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Now could I right blissfully return to my garden; I bore,
+however, a morning-greeting to the ever-cheerful Chariton,
+and told her that I might be found on the broad way to the
+<i>altar</i>,<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a> if I should be wanted for anything. Ah, Elisa,
+what feelings then were mine! And why had I not thee by the
+hand, and why could not my distressed Charles see that his
+sister was so happy? As, after a warm rain, the evening-red
+and the liquid sunlight run from all the gold-green hills,
+so stood a quivering splendor over my whole inner being and
+over my past, and everywhere lay bright tears of joy. A
+sweet gnawing consumed away my heart as if to death, and all
+was so near to me and so dear! I could have answered the
+whispering aspen and thanked the spring-breezes which fanned
+so coolingly my hot eye! The sun had laid itself with a
+motherly warmth on my heart, and brooded over us all,&mdash;the
+cold flower, the naked young bird, the stiff butterfly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> and
+every creature. Ah, such should man be too, thought I; and I
+took the sandy path, and spared the life of the poor little
+blade of grass and the flower that peeped so lovingly, which
+truly breathe and wake like us. I drove not away the thirsty
+white butterflies and pigeons which stood beside each other
+and bent down from the moist turf to drink. O, I could have
+stroked the waves ... this creation is truly so precious and
+from God's hand, and every the smallest-shaped heart has
+surely its blood and a longing, and into every little
+eye-point under the leaf the whole sun and a little spring
+enter and abide!</p>
+
+<p>"I leaned, a little exhausted, under the first triumphal
+arch, ere I ascended to the altar, and looked out into the
+glimmering landscape full of villages and orchards and
+hills; and the glistening dew, and the ringing of the
+village-bells, and the chime of the herd-bells, and the
+floating of the birds over all, filled me with peace and
+light. Yes, in such peace and seclusion and serenity will I
+spend my fleeting life, thought I: does not the little
+Sad-cloak persuade me, who, before my eyes, with his wings
+torn by autumn, nevertheless flutters again around his
+flowers; and does not the night-butterfly admonish me, who
+clings, chilled, to the hard statue, and cannot soar to the
+blossoms of day? Therefore will I never stir from my mother;
+only let the precious Elisa stay with us as long as her
+Linda lives, and call her noble friend soon,<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> that I may
+see and heartily love her!</p>
+
+<p>"I went up the green-shaded mountain, but with pain: joy
+weakens me so much. Think of me, Elisa: I shall some time
+die of a great joy or of a great, all too great woe! The
+spiral path to the altar was painted with the hues of the
+blossom-dust, and overhead, not colored<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> and stationary, but
+shifting, burning rainbows quivered through the twigs of the
+mountain. Why stood I to-day in a splendor such as I never
+knew before?<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> And when the morning breeze fanned and
+lifted me, and when I dipped myself deeper into the blue
+heaven, then said I, 'Now thou art in Elysium.' Then it was
+to me as if a voice said, 'This is the earthly Elysium, and
+thou art not yet sanctified for the other.' O, how ardently
+did I then form the purpose to disentangle myself from so
+many faults, and especially to renounce that too hasty
+imagination of offence, which I may indeed conceal from
+others, but through which I nevertheless injure them. And
+then I prayed at the altar, and thanked the Eternal
+Goodness, and wept unconsciously; perhaps too much, but yet
+without my eyes smarting.</p>
+
+<p>"At last I wrote the poem of thanks which I append to this,
+and which I will put into verse, if the <i>pious father</i>
+approves.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>"<span class="smcap">Poem of Thanks.</span></h4>
+
+<p>"'Do I then gaze again with blessed eyes into thy blooming world, thou
+All-loving One, and weep again, because I am happy? Why did I then fear?
+When I went under the earth in the darkness like the dead, and caught
+only a distant sound of the loved ones and of spring above me, why was
+my feeble heart in fear that there was no more hope for life and light?
+For thou wast by me in the darkness, and didst lead me up out of the
+vault into thy spring; and around me stood thy joyous children, and the
+serene heavens, and all my smiling loved ones! O, I will now hope more
+steadfastly! Continue thou to break off from the sick plant all rank
+flowers, that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> rest may more fully ripen! Thou dost indeed lead thy
+human creatures into thy heaven and to thyself over a long mountain; and
+they go through the storms of life along the mountain, only
+overshadowed, not smitten, by the clouds, and only our eye grows wet.
+But when I come to thee, when Death again throws his dark cloud over me,
+and draws me away from all that I love into the deeper cavern, and thou,
+All-gracious, settest me free once more, and bearest me into thy
+spring,&mdash;into a still fairer one than this, which is itself so
+magnificent,&mdash;will then my frail heart, near thy judgment-seat, beat as
+gladly as to-day, and will the mortal bosom dare to breathe in thy
+ethereal spring? O, make me pure in this earthly one, and let me live
+here, as if I were already walking in thy heaven!'"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>If even you, ye friends, who have never seen her, are yet won and
+touched by the patient, pure form, which can resignedly rejoice that the
+storm-cloud has, after all, only sent down rain-drops upon it, and no
+hailstones, how must she then have agitated the deeply-moved heart of
+her friend! He felt a consecration of his whole being, just as if Virtue
+came down incarnate in this shape from heaven, to hallow him with her
+smile, and then flew back in a shining path, and he followed, inspired
+and exalted, in her track.</p>
+
+<p>He urged the boy instantly to carry back the leaves, in order to spare
+her and himself&mdash;as she might appear any moment&mdash;the most painful of
+surprises; yet he firmly resolved&mdash;cost what it might&mdash;to be true, and
+confess to her, this very day, what he had done.</p>
+
+<p>The little fellow ran up stairs and down again, remained a long time
+before the door, and came in with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> Liana by the hand, who was dressed in
+white, with a black veil. She looked in and around a little perplexed,
+as she with both hands pushed back the veil from her friendly face; but
+she heard Chariton's lullaby. She did not know him till he spoke; and
+then her whole beautiful being reddened like an illuminated landscape
+after an evening shower: she had the pleasure, she said, of knowing his
+father. Probably she knew the son still better by Julienne's and
+Augusti's pictures, and on more congenial sides; her sisterly heart was
+certainly moved, too, by his brotherly voice; for the charm, and even
+preferableness, of resemblance and copy is so great, that one who looks
+like even an indifferent person becomes more dear to us, like the echo
+of an empty sound, merely because, in this case as in the imitative art,
+the past and absent, shining through the fancy, become a present.</p>
+
+<p>The gradually lowering tone of the mother's lullaby announced the
+sinking of the infant to slumber, and at last the diminuendo died away,
+and Chariton, with glistening eyes, ran to take Liana's hand. A frank
+and serene friendship bloomed between the innocent hearts, and held them
+entwined, as the vine does the neighboring poplars. Chariton related to
+her what Albano had related, with a reliance upon her most fervent
+sympathy. Liana listened to her friend with eager attention; but that
+was quite as much as if she were looking at the historical source itself
+that was so near at hand.</p>
+
+
+<h3>44. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>At last they began a journey through the garden. Pollux very
+reluctantly, and only after Liana's promise to draw him a horse again
+to-day, stayed behind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> as patron-saint of the cradle. Alban said, to the
+extreme joy of the Architect's wife, who could now show the beautiful
+man everything, that he had seen but little of Lilar yet. How
+bewitchingly the two forms, linked in friendship, walked before him side
+by side! Chariton, although a matron, yet of a Grecian slenderness,
+fluttered along as a younger sister beside the lily-form of her somewhat
+taller Liana. The former seemed, according to the classification of the
+landscape-painters, nature in motion; Liana, nature in repose. As he
+joined Liana again, by whose left hand Helena was running along,&mdash;the
+mother on the right,&mdash;he found her softly-descending profile
+indescribably touching, and around the mouth he recognized lines which
+sorrow had drawn, the scars of returning days; while the lovely maiden,
+on the sunny side of the front face, as in her easy conversation,
+manifested a free, benignant cheerfulness, which Albano, who had never
+knocked at the school-room door of any young ladies' academy, found it
+hard to reconcile with her tearful poetry. O, if the tear of woman
+passes away lightly, so flutters away still more lightly woman's smile;
+and the latter, still oftener than the former, is only appearance!</p>
+
+<p>He tried, from a longing of the thirsty heart, to catch the little one's
+hand, but she hung with both upon Liana's left; presently, however, she
+skipped away, and plucked three iris-flowers,&mdash;which, like her,
+resembled butterflies,&mdash;and gave one to her mother, and two to Liana,
+with the words, "Give <i>him</i> one too!" And Liana handed it to him,
+lifting her friendly face upon him as she did so with that holy
+maiden-look which is bright and attentive, but not searching, expressive
+of childlike sympathy without giving and demanding. Nevertheless,
+several times during the day did she let those holy eyes sink down;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> but
+what compelled her to it was, that on Zesara's rocky face, softened
+though it was by love, there rested a physiognomical right of the
+stronger: he seemed to look upon a shy soul with a hundred eyes, and his
+two true ones blazed as warmly, although quite as purely, as the sun's
+eye in the ether.</p>
+
+<p>The iris-flowers have this peculiarity, that one smells them, another
+not; only to these three beings in one did the cups open themselves
+equally wide, and they rejoiced long over this community of enjoyment.
+Helena ran forward and disappeared behind a low bush; she sat on a
+child's bench by a child's table, awaiting, with a smile, the grown
+people. The good old Prince had low moss-benches, little garden-chairs,
+little table- and pot-orangeries, and the like, placed everywhere, for
+the children, about the resting-places of their elders; for he loved to
+draw these refreshing open flowers of humanity near to his heart! "One
+wishes so often," said Liana, "to live in the patriarchal time, or in
+Arcadia, or in Otaheite; children are, indeed,&mdash;do you not believe
+so?&mdash;everywhere the same, and one has already in them what only the most
+remote time and the most remote region can insure." He indeed believed
+it, and gladly; but he kept asking himself, How can such an unstained
+Aphrodite be born out of the dead sea of a court, as pure dew and rain
+arise out of the briny water of the ocean?</p>
+
+<p>While speaking, she occasionally drew an uncommonly graceful&mdash;how shall
+I write it&mdash;<i>H'm!</i> after her words, which, although a grammatical
+blunder at court, betrayed an unspeakable good nature; but I describe
+it, not in order that all my fair readers may let this attractive
+interjection be heard the very next Sunday.</p>
+
+<p>"The same," replied Albano,&mdash;but he meant it well,&mdash;"holds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> of the
+animals: the swan yonder is like the one in Paradise." She took it just
+as it was meant; but the reason was the pious Father Spener, her
+teacher; for at Albano's question touching Lilar's abundance of
+beautiful and gentle creatures, she answered: "The old Lord loved these
+creatures with a real tenderness, and they could often bring him even to
+tears. The pious Father thinks so too; he says, since they do everything
+at God's behest by instinct, accordingly it seems to him, when he
+contemplates the care of the parents for their young, just as if the
+Infinitely Gracious One were doing it all himself." They ascended now a
+half-shaded bridge, over a long water-mirror hung round with quivering
+poplars, wherein Liana's emblem, namely, a swan, slept on the
+water-rings, the bent neck beautifully nestled on the back, the head
+upon the wing, and gently wafted more by the breezes than by the waves.
+"So reposes the innocent soul!" said Alban, and thought, perhaps, of
+Liana, but without the courage to confess it. "And thus it awakes!"
+Liana added with emotion, as this white magnified dove slowly raised its
+head from the wing; for she thought of her mother's waking on this very
+day.</p>
+
+<p>Chariton, as if all made up of salient points, was continually turning
+to Liana, and asking: "Shall we go this way? or in through there? or out
+through here? If my lord were only here! he knows all about it." She
+would gladly have led him round every fount and every flower, and looked
+into the youth's face as lovingly as into that of her friend. Liana said
+to her, on the cross way at the bridge: "I think the flute-dell yonder,
+with the gleaming gold ball, will perhaps be pleasantest, especially for
+a lover of music; and, besides, they will look for me there, when they
+bring the harp to my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> mother." She had promised to come back to her as
+soon as that arrived. She shunned every path toward the south, where
+Tartarus frowned behind its high curtain.</p>
+
+<p>Liana spoke now of the contest between painting and music, and of
+Herder's charming official report of this strife. She, although a votary
+of the pencil, gave in her vote, as was natural to the female and the
+lyric heart, entirely for tones, and Albano, although a good pianist,
+was rather for colors, "This magnificent landscape," said Albano, "is in
+fact a picture, and so is every fair human form." "Were I blind," said
+Chariton, naively, "then I should not see my lovely Liana." She replied:
+"My teacher, the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischd&ouml;rfer, also set painting
+above music. But to me, when I hear music, it is as if I heard <i>a loud
+past</i> or <i>a loud future</i>. Music has something holy; unlike the other
+arts, it cannot paint anything but what is good."<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> Verily, she was
+herself a moral church-music, the angel-stop in the organ. The pure
+Albano felt, by her side, the necessity and the existence of a yet
+tenderer purity; and it seemed to him as if a man might injure, even
+unconsciously, a soul like this, whose understanding was hardly anything
+more than a finer feeling,&mdash;as window-glasses of pure transparency are
+often broken, because they appear as if they were not. He turned round
+mechanically, because he was always one step in advance, and not only
+the blooming Lilar, but also Liana's full form, shone at once and
+transfigured into his soul. To clasp her to his heart was not now his
+yearning, but to snatch this being, who had so often suffered, from
+every flame; to rush for her, sword in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> hand, upon her foe, to bear her
+mightily through the deep, cold hell-floods of life;&mdash;that would have
+illuminated his existence.</p>
+
+
+<h3>45. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped
+from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when
+Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with
+her into a pathless oak-grove;&mdash;she looked upon him so contentedly and
+open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of
+being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the
+words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial
+Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting
+eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's
+breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with
+the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola
+Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning
+had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears.
+Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,&mdash;but like an
+angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been
+compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain
+address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!</p>
+
+<p>They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion
+never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye
+was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,&mdash;into that
+resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> gone round freely,
+without sleep. Chariton&mdash;from her earnestness much more busy&mdash;had, after
+a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let
+certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the
+blooming veil, which retired as they approached;&mdash;and Albano beheld now
+the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one
+in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before
+him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the
+higher terrace,&mdash;everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs,
+from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down
+below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which
+wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and
+mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains
+placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver
+rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold
+globe beside the sun,&mdash;the last mirror of his dying evening-glance.
+"Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually
+repeating.</p>
+
+<p>Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered
+with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey
+the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high
+pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an
+auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height,
+behind a statue of a Muse,&mdash;for the Nine Muses beamed from the green
+Tempe,&mdash;seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My
+brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile
+with the knitting-work which she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> had taken from her friend, "wishes
+very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its
+holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from
+embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your <i>Charles</i>
+like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did
+not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.</p>
+
+<p>All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and
+out of the bowers,&mdash;more and more continually joined them,&mdash;they
+quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,&mdash;at last
+flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared
+toward heaven;&mdash;they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps,
+and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue
+spring,&mdash;and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted
+on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of
+May,&mdash;and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering
+rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.</p>
+
+<p>Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar
+to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her
+eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as
+the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid
+summer-night;&mdash;but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the
+sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,&mdash;certainly not against sun
+and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated
+form, played&mdash;a sublime contrast to himself&mdash;with the ringlets of the
+little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big
+tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and
+asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other
+ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the
+dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more
+strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.</p>
+
+<p>A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the
+vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of
+raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of
+his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,&mdash;by heaven, I must
+say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with
+trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been
+in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it
+all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder
+history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept
+saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said
+Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with
+heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the
+agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely
+to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read
+anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up
+soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this
+heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou,
+this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel
+among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> so
+hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for
+once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the
+sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and
+hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with
+the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love
+in their hearts,&mdash;if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust
+each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry
+months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the
+other,&mdash;"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life,
+before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like
+thee!"&mdash;O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!</p>
+
+<p>The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was
+working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters
+and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something
+violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he
+had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled
+occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and
+stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange!
+how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the
+outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he
+could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his
+father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the
+gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path,
+and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the
+heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and
+perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> along after
+them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the
+awakened strings as from an Æolian harp, and bore them onward with it;
+and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of
+swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale
+continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and
+hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his
+ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked
+over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the
+distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping.
+And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!</p>
+
+<p>But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the
+loved objects only <i>in</i>, and not <i>on</i>, your bosoms, am I not, like the
+Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble
+sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the <i>Archimime</i>,
+who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your
+soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead
+of a past, has only given a future,&mdash;wilt thou not one day say to me, I
+should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies,
+for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it
+not been for these Phœnix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished
+lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then
+caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me
+than with the rest of you?</p>
+
+<p>Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really
+live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in <i>memory</i>, or
+beforehand in <i>hope</i>, you would, therefore, rather have the present day
+without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of
+time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of
+the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the
+middle; but as to the past and the future,&mdash;neither of which can any man
+live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our
+heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,&mdash;you
+will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in
+order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.</p>
+
+<p>By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so
+that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and
+then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso
+would fain translate <i>poetic</i> dreams into waking reality<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> is more
+foolish than the North American, who realizes his <i>nightly</i> ones: he
+proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew
+into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch,
+bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us
+one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our
+present ideals,&mdash;as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love
+here below,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner
+becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but <i>then</i>&mdash;no, for the Then
+of the life hereafter, this little <i>Now</i>, has no voice; but if, I say,
+here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral
+life, and every dream a day,&mdash;ah, even then would desire still remain
+enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a
+higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;&mdash;in <i>Arcadia</i> we
+should pine after <i>Utopia</i>; and on every sun we should see an
+unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should&mdash;sigh as we
+do here!</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/flowerend.jpg" width="400" height="79" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> They have a whole room for winter quarters, of which in
+summer the windows are merely thrown open.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> Such was the general title of the secluded Emeritus, the
+court preacher, Spener, who resided there, and who was related to the
+noble old pious Spener, not only on the paternal side, but also on the
+spiritual.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> They had these names as twins.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> The grammar seems to require "a still almost maidenly
+looking woman of seventeen years," but the translator did not dare to
+think Jean Paul could have meant that, consistently with the ages of the
+three children, though, as an Oriental, Chariton may have married <i>very</i>
+young.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> The Tartarus with Julienne's father's heart.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> Such is the name of that mount which Albano
+found in the well-known spring night.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> Linda de Romeiro.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> The reason is, that after her recovery she was still
+short-sighted, and to a short-sighted person the dew is so much the more
+brilliant.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> This proposition, that pure music, without text, cannot
+represent anything immoral, deserves to be more investigated and
+developed by me.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> It cannot be objected to me, that in fact the scenes of my
+book have been actually experienced, and that no one would wish to
+experience any better; for in the representation of fancy reality
+assumes new charms, charms with which every other faded present
+magically glimmers through the memory. I appeal here to the sensations
+of the very characters who figure in <i>Titan</i>, whether they would not in
+my book&mdash;in case they should ever light upon it&mdash;find in the pictured
+scenes, which, however, are their own, a higher enchantment, which has
+gone from the real, and which, to be sure, might produce such an
+effect&mdash;but altogether illusorily&mdash;that my characters could wish to live
+<i>their own life</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/barstart.jpg" width="550" height="138" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>NINTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Pleasure of Court-Mourning.&mdash;The Burial.&mdash;Roquairol.&mdash;Letter
+to him.&mdash;The Seven last Words in the Water.&mdash;The Swearing of
+Allegiance.&mdash;Masquerade.&mdash;Puppet Masquerade.&mdash;The Head in
+the Air, Tartarus, the Spirit-Voice, the Friend, the
+Catacomb, and the two united Men.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>46. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/r.jpg" width="100" height="107" alt="R" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in
+the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his
+Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of
+reality into his web,&mdash;namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the
+state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend.</p></div>
+
+<p>This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely
+coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been
+made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two
+first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as
+virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its
+end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal-
+and prefiguring-burial of the illustrious deceased, the old pious Father
+Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in
+order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> run-down
+wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper
+his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without
+speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and
+evening-offering of friendship.</p>
+
+<p>Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to
+talk a long while,&mdash;all Pestitz societies were auxiliary funeral
+societies, and full of burial-marshals,&mdash;every scaffolding of the
+neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or
+an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary,
+rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,&mdash;the Lector had
+already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off
+winter-garb, and found it to fit,&mdash;the court-marshal had not a minute's
+rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come
+to him now before its time,&mdash;the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold
+Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely
+pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in
+heaven himself as was the illustrious deceased,&mdash;the women had risen
+from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy
+<i>drapery-paintresses</i> a long chain of coats and of their wearers
+probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their
+husbands.</p>
+
+<p>Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved
+the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings,
+Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The
+mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus,
+and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon
+be ready to be stretched<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a
+half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female
+crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the
+Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into
+Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's,
+and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one
+can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it."
+"You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said
+she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the
+Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano,
+caught and stopped her.</p>
+
+<p>Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away
+themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away
+therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle
+and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her <i>lazy
+Jack</i><a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a> of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things,
+either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a
+<i>clothes'-rod</i> of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she
+looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done
+in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count
+had she an eye,&mdash;under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good
+physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most
+physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the
+face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.</p>
+
+<p>Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> the walk or
+<i>gang</i> was a press-gang,<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a> the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a
+bird-net,<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a> and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to
+be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers,
+and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the
+universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your
+eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What
+interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In
+the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from
+monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make
+leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they
+drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their
+merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should
+spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to
+have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like
+the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra,
+they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she
+replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the
+mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back
+with astonishment.) "Black?&mdash;black is a travelling-color, and
+bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color;
+and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the
+Jews in Morocco,<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a> shall appear in black.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span></p><p>"Pestalozzi, madam&mdash;but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe
+turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap
+it during the procession, so as to catch something of the muffled
+funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he
+might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi
+remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress,
+posture, image-worship, superstition, and love for charlatans, approach
+daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi,
+that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy,
+and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and
+caricatures, but also this very black of joy."</p>
+
+<p>Among the children,&mdash;of whom the uneducated alone were not
+ill-bred,&mdash;Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most
+prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which
+they were engraving on their bread and butter; and Galen showed his
+satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have
+made Mama have!"</p>
+
+<p>The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she
+offered to go in, assuring her he would not let her pass till she
+surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have
+got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough.
+He continued:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes
+one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead
+Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the
+Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more
+than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> and a Jewish
+king<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a> it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more
+than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should
+permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the
+closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,<a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a> he
+had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds,
+answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a <i>Droit d'Aubaine</i>,
+a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed
+clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No,
+madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by
+their dying, as Marcion<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a> asserted of Christ's journey to hell, bring
+up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out
+of hell into the heaven of the new administration.</p>
+
+<p>"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but
+consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought
+crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a
+sale for them;&mdash;an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy
+consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his
+predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is
+not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once
+strikes the whole metropolis,&mdash;even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only
+one word more, love: I assure you there is nothing coming yet but the
+company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse,
+which might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been
+previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order
+that the procession may have no other <i>pensées</i> than <i>Anglaises</i><a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a>....
+O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of
+equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many
+people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."</p>
+
+<p>But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's
+thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of
+Cypselus<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> into the family vault, so much the more indignant became
+his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark
+chain. He praised them for opening the <i>bal masqué</i> of the new
+administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves
+for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the
+allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything
+easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the
+Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything,
+not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with
+pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on
+the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even
+the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four
+points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he
+found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside
+down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once
+into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be
+led along and held up on both sides.</p>
+
+
+<h3>47. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To
+the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the
+dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells,
+opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his
+blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing
+more loudly than all&mdash;one will hardly guess what&mdash;proclaimed before him
+the partings of life,&mdash;namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the
+funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all
+earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our
+hearts,&mdash;he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable
+three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first
+act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and
+bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.</p>
+
+<p>As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in
+summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to
+himself in <i>his</i> season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener
+and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for
+in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only
+in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form;
+before the tired, older man, in Gothic.</p>
+
+<p>Schoppe generally began with <i>comic</i> humor, and ended<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> with <i>tragic</i>; so
+also now did the empty mourning-chest, the crape of the horses, their
+emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German
+Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an
+eminence, to which the contemplation of a multitude of men at once
+always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and
+laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal,
+tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed
+frenzy of mankind, and his own too.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol,
+on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides.
+A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of
+all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under
+the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in
+which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of
+passion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his
+father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory
+rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart,
+and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good
+Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How
+painfully does the noble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and
+graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is
+right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's
+hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a
+close <i>bonsoir</i>, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon
+me,&mdash;we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and
+we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and
+kicking,&mdash;and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and
+trailing his long crape,"&mdash;in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious
+mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the
+Librarian.</p>
+
+<p>All at once Schoppe, out of patience with this general emotion, said:
+"What a masquerade for the sake of a mask! Rag and tag for a piece of
+rag-paper! Throw a man quietly into his hole, and call nobody to see. I
+always admire London and Paris, where they toll no alarm-bells, nor set
+the neighborhood stirring, when the undertaker carries one, who has
+fallen asleep, to bed." "No, no," said Zesara, full of capacity for
+grief, "I admire it not: to whomsoever the holy dead are of no
+consequence, to him the living are so too;&mdash;no, I will gladly let my
+heart break into one tear after another, if I can only still remember
+the dear being."</p>
+
+<p>O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before
+which the coffin of the coffin passed by, there stood a bronze statue of
+the old man on horseback, who saw pass by below him the unsaddled
+mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was
+stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle,
+which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the
+forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than
+any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily
+man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how
+our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as <i>absent</i>, so soon as it
+is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the
+players on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>But had not the gray hermit, Spener, laid upon the sunken breast of that
+deeper hermit a double youth?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> O, in this frosty hour of pomp and
+pageantry, counts not the faithful Julienne every tone of the funeral
+bell with the beads of her tears,&mdash;that poor daughter whom sickness has
+exempted from the ceremonials, not from pain, who now has lost her <i>last
+but one</i>, perhaps her <i>last</i> relative, since her brother is hardly one?
+And will not Liana, in her Elysium, guess the farce of sorrow which is
+acted so near to her over behind the high trees in Tartarus? And if she
+suspects anything, O how profoundly will she mourn!</p>
+
+<p>All this the noble youth heard in his soul, and he thirsted hotly after
+the friendship of the heart: it was to him as if its mountain- and
+life-air floated down from eternity, and blew the grave-dust away from
+his life-path, and he saw, up yonder, the Genius place his inverted
+torch upon the cold bosom, not to extinguish the immortal life, but to
+enkindle the immortal love.</p>
+
+<p>He could not now do otherwise than go forth into the open air, and, amid
+the flying tones of spring and the deep, hollow murmur of the receding
+dead march, write the following words to Liana's brother, in which he
+said to him, after a youthful style, Be my friend!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>
+"<span class="smcap">To Charles.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"Stranger! At this hour, when, in the dead sea and through
+our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of men and
+their bridge-posts appear to us <i>broken</i>, a true heart puts
+a question to thee frankly, and let thine answer it
+willingly and in truth!</p>
+
+<p>"Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee,
+stranger, and hast thou thy friend? Do thy wishes and nerves
+and days grow together with his, like the four cedars on
+Lebanon, which can bear nothing around them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> but eagles?
+Hast thou two hearts and four arms, and livest thou twice
+over, as if immortal, in the battling world? Or standest
+thou solitary and alone upon a frosty, dumb, slender,
+glacier-point, having no human being to whom thou canst show
+the Alps of creation, and with the heavens arching far above
+thee and abysses yawning below? When thy birthday comes,
+hast thou no being to shake thy hand, and look thee in the
+eye and say, We still cleave together faster than ever?</p>
+
+<p>"Stranger: if thou hast had no friend, hast thou deserved
+one? When spring kindled into life, and opened all her
+honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the hundred gates
+of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bitterly looked up and
+begged of God a heart for thine? O when, at evening, the sun
+went down like a mountain, and his flames departed from the
+earth, and now only his red breath floated upward to the
+silvery stars, hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of
+friendship which sank together on battle-fields, like stars
+of one constellation, stealing forth through the bloody
+clouds out of the old world, like giants; and didst thou
+think of <i>this</i>,&mdash;how imperishably they loved each other,
+and thou, like me, wast alone? And, solitary one, when
+night&mdash;that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid
+climes, <i>toils</i> and <i>travels</i>&mdash;reveals her cold suns above
+thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the
+distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, and
+immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feelest, upon
+the cold earth, that thy heart beats against no breast but
+only thine own,&mdash;O beloved! weepest thou then, and most
+bitterly?</p>
+
+<p>"Charles, often have I reckoned up, on my birthday, the
+increasing years,&mdash;the feathers in the broad wing of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>
+time,&mdash;and thought upon the sounding flight of youth: then I
+stretched my hand far out after a friend, who should stick
+by me in the Charon's skiff wherein we are born, when the
+seasons of life's year glide by along the shore before me,
+with their flowers and leaves and fruits, and when, on the
+long stream, the human race shoots downward in its thousand
+cradles and coffins.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, it is not the gay, variegated shore that flies by, but
+man and his stream: forever bloom the seasons in the gardens
+up and down along the shore; only <i>we</i> sweep by once for all
+before the garden, and never return.</p>
+
+<p>"But our friend goes too. O, if thou at this hour of death's
+juggleries art contemplating the pale Prince, with the
+images of youth on his breast, and thinking of the gray
+friend who secretly bewails him in Tartarus, then will thy
+heart dissolve, and in soft, warm flames run round through
+thy bosom, and softly say: 'I will love, and then die, and
+then love&mdash;O Almighty, show me the soul which longs and
+languishes like mine!'</p>
+
+<p>"If thou say'st that, if thou art thus, then come to my
+heart: I am as thou. Grasp my hand, and hold it till it
+withers. I have seen thy form to-day, and on it the marks of
+life's wounds: hasten to me; I will bleed and struggle at
+thy side. I have long and early sought and loved thee. Like
+two streams will we mingle and grow, and bear our burdens,
+and dry up together. Like silver in the furnace, we will run
+together with glowing light, and all slags shall lie cast
+out around the pure shimmering metal. Laugh not, then, any
+longer so grimly, to think what <i>ignes-fatui</i> men are; like
+<i>ignes-fatui we</i> burn and fly away in the rainy storm of
+time. And then, when time is gone by, we find each other
+again, and it will be again in the spring.</p>
+
+<p class="sig">
+"<span class="smcap">Albano de Cesara.</span>"<br />
+</p>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>48. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>How gloriously,&mdash;before all the beating veins of the inner man, like
+those of the outer in old age, have stiffened into gristle, and all the
+vessels have become inflexible and earthy, and the moral pulse, like the
+physical, hardly makes sixty strokes in a minute, and before the shy old
+fool, at every emotion, reserves a piece of his nature which he keeps
+cold and dry, and which is to wait for another occasion, as sprinkled
+raspberry leaves always remain dry on the rough side,&mdash;how gloriously, I
+say, before this period of espionage, does a youth, especially an
+Albano, step along his path, how freely, boldly, and exultingly! and
+seeks with equal confidence the friend and the foe, and closes with him,
+to fight either for him or against him!</p>
+
+<p>Let this excuse Albano's fiery letter! The next day he received from
+Roquairol this answer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I am as thou. On ascension-evening I will seek thee among
+the masks.</p>
+
+<p class="sig">
+"<span class="smcap">Charles.</span>"<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The redness of mortification rushed over the Count's face at this
+artificial postponement of the acquaintance; he felt that, after such a
+tone from the heart, <i>he</i> would have immediately, without a dead interim
+of five days, and without an <i>homage-day masquerade</i> in a double sense,
+gone to his friend and become his. But now he swore no longer to run to
+meet him, but only to wait for him. However, the roused indignation soon
+subsided, and he began to invent fairer and fairer mitigations for the
+first leaf of the so-long-sought favorite. Charles might certainly, e.
+g. not wish to mix up the holy time of the first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> recognition with this
+bustle of taking the allegiance-oath,&mdash;or that first suicidal masquerade
+might have made every succeeding one an inspiring era of a new second
+life,&mdash;or he knew, perhaps, in fact, about Albano's birthday,&mdash;or,
+finally, this glowing spirit chose to run or fly on his own track.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, his note made the Count reproach himself for his own letter,
+as if it had been a sin against his Schoppe; he held it to be a sin, in
+one friendship, to yearn after another; but thou mistakest, fair soul!
+Friendship has steps which lead up on the throne of God, through all
+spirits, even to the Infinite: only love is satiable, and, like truth,
+admits no three degrees of comparison; and a single being fills its
+heart. Moreover, Albano and Schoppe, in such a mutual metempsychosis of
+their ideas, and such a near relationship of their pride and nobility,
+held each other far more dear than they showed to each other. For, as
+Schoppe, in fact, showed nothing, one could love him in return only with
+the finger on the lip, but, perhaps, so much the more strongly. Albano
+was a burning-hot concave mirror, which has its object near, and
+represents it erect behind itself; Schoppe one which holds the object
+far off, and throws an inverted image of it into the air.</p>
+
+<p>On the evening before his birthday, and the day of allegiance, Albano
+stood alone at his window, and pondered his past,&mdash;for a last day is
+more solemn than a first: on the 31st of December I reckon up three
+hundred and sixty-five days and their fates; on the first of January I
+think of nothing, because, in fact, the whole future is transparent, or
+may be all out in five minutes;&mdash;while the vesper-bell pealed over the
+fast-closing twentieth year of his life, and the vesper-hour rose within
+him, he measured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> the <i>abside-line</i><a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a> of his moral being, and looked
+up at the towering pile of the approaching morrow, which hung full
+either of spring-showers or hailstones. Never yet had he so tenderly
+surveyed the circle of his beloved beings, or glanced through the open
+doors of futurity, as at this time.</p>
+
+<p>But the fair hour was spoiled by Malt, who burst in with the information
+that the limping gentleman had leaped overboard. From the dormer-window
+might be seen a returning village funeral-procession, conglomerated
+around the spot on the bank where Schoppe had plunged in. With frightful
+wildness&mdash;for in Albano indignation was next-door neighbor to terror and
+pain&mdash;he dragged along with him, as he flew to the rescue, the lazy
+provincial physician, and even threatened him with hard words; for Sphex
+was going to wait for a carriage, and meanwhile represent to himself the
+possible cases of too late preparations for a rescue, and besides,
+perhaps, cherished a hope of serving up Schoppe, on the anatomical
+table, as Doctor's-feast of science.</p>
+
+<p>The youth ran out with him,&mdash;through corn-fields, amidst tears and
+amidst curses,&mdash;with alternate clenched fist and outspread palm, and his
+eye grew more and more dim and dizzy, and his heart hotter and hotter,
+the nearer they approached the dark circle. At last they could not only
+see the Librarian, but also hear him; in good case he turned towards
+them his curly head from among the reeds, and, occasionally, as he was
+haranguing the mourning-retinue, he flung up, in a fiery manner, his
+hairy arm above the water-plants.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span></p>
+<p>Of course the case stood thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>His sorites, as long as he lived, was the following: "He had come into
+the world, not feet foremost, but head foremost, and, accordingly,
+carried his head and nose high and lofty,<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> because he could not help
+it. Now he knew of no more genuine freedom than health;&mdash;every malady
+shuts up and warps the soul, and the earth is, merely for that
+reason, a universal block-house, <i>la salpetrière</i> and house of
+bruises;<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a>&mdash;whoso made use of an oyster-snail-viper medicine was
+himself a slimy, snaky, sticking viper, oyster, snail, and therefore the
+ever-free savages killed their invalids, and the vigorous Spartans gave
+no patient an office, least of all the crown;&mdash;and strength was
+especially necessary, in our degenerate days, in order to maul qualified
+subjects, because, to his certain knowledge, the fist with some
+substance in it was the best plaintiff's plea and <i>actio ex lege
+diffamari</i> which a citizen could institute."</p>
+
+<p>Therefore he bathed summer and winter in ice-cold water, just as he, for
+the same reason, kept himself temperate in all things.</p>
+
+<p>Now, then, in this odious May-weather, he had merely, in his gray
+hussar-cloak,&mdash;at home, his night-gown,&mdash;and with shoes down at the
+heel, gone to the water-side; he had previously stripped himself at the
+house so as to be ready as soon as he should arrive at the bank. The
+mourning-company, who saw him go at his swift pace down to the water,
+and at last throw off everything and leap in, could not but believe the
+man meant to drown himself, and ran in a body to his bathing-place, not
+to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> let him do it. "Do not drown himself!" cried the mourning-company of
+blacks, while yet afar off. He just let them come on till he could
+discourse the matter to them somewhat nearer, in the following wise:&mdash;"I
+am yet open to conviction; I can hear reason, good folk, though I am
+already standing up to my neck in the water; but suffer yourselves to be
+correctly informed in this case, dear <i>Cherstens</i> generally, for so
+Christians were called in the time of Charles. I am a poor
+Sacramentarian, and can hardly recollect what I have hitherto lived on,
+it was so bloody-desperate little. Whatever I have undertaken in this
+world, no blessing went with it, but it was all crab's-track backwards
+and forward. I set up, in Vienna, a neat little magazine of snipes'
+dung, but I made nothing out of it for want of snipes. I took hold on
+the other end, and hawked about in Carlsbad, for the lords and great
+ones, who are accustomed to set a picture upon every old stool and piece
+of trumpery, fine engravings for waste-paper and privy purposes, in
+order that, instead of the mere printed paper, they might have something
+tasty for consumption; but the whole set was left, a dead loss, on my
+hands, because the manner was too hard and not ideal enough. In London I
+prepared ready-made speeches (for I am a <i>litterateur</i>) to be used by
+men who are hanged, and yet would fain have something to say for
+themselves: I offered them to the richest parliamentary orators, and
+even knaves of booksellers, but came near having to use the speeches for
+myself. I would gladly have got my living by vomiting,<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a> but that
+requires funds. I tried once to get a settlement as note-stand to a
+count's regiment,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> because it looks stupid enough on drill- and
+parade-days to see every one with a musical flap hanging on his
+shoulder, from which his next neighbor behind plays. I offered for a
+trifle to wear all the musicalia on my own person, and stand before them
+with the notes; but the first-lieutenant (who is at once in the regency
+and in the treasury) thought it would make the fifers laugh when they
+came to blow. Thus has it fared with me from time immemorial, dear
+Cherstens&mdash;but don't trample about on my precious cloak there! As ill
+luck would have it, I entered into wedlock with a lady of Vienna, who
+was endowed with melted seals;<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a> her name was <i>Pr&aelig;numerantia
+Elementaria Philanthropia</i>;<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a> you don't know what this means in
+German,&mdash;a real hell-broom, who chased me, all heated, like a hunted
+stag, into the reeds here. Cherstens, I should defame myself in the
+water, were I to come out plainly with the whole story of our woful
+condition;<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a> ... in short, my Philanthropia before marriage was soft
+as the spines of a new-born hedge-hog, but in the nuptial state, when
+the foliage was off, I saw, as on trees in winter, one raven's- and
+devil's-nest after another. She was all the time dressing herself and
+dressing herself, till it was time to undress; when a fault in me or the
+children had been removed, she would still continue to scold a little,
+as one continues to vomit, when the emetic and everything is out; she
+indulged me preciously little, and had I had a Fontanel<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a> she would
+have reproached me for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> fresh pea which I should have been obliged
+every day to put into it; in short, we two pulled opposite ways,&mdash;the
+linch-pin of love came out in the struggle, and I came with the
+forward-wheels down into the water here, and my Pr&aelig;numerantia stays with
+the hind-wheels at home. See, my women, this is why I do violence to
+myself&mdash;besides, the gnawing-man<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a> would have, at any rate, caught me
+by the throat; but behold yourselves in me as in a mirror! For when a
+man who is a <i>litterateur</i>, and therefore, as you yet know by the case
+of Fichte, goes about as instituted overseer, schoolmaster, and mentor
+of the human race, leaps overboard before his wife's face, and lets his
+Ephorie and tutorship go, you may conclude from this of what your own
+husbands, who cannot measure themselves with me at all in learning, are
+capable, in case you are such Pr&aelig;numerantias, Elementarias, and
+Philanthropias as unfortunately you have the appearance of being. But,"
+he concluded suddenly, as he saw Albano and the Doctor, "clear
+yourselves away; I am going to drown myself!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, dear Schoppe!" said Albano. Schoppe blushed at his situation. "It
+must be a clown," said the retiring funeral retinue. "What child's
+foolery is this, then?" asked Sphex, resenting Albano's former passion
+and the anatomical misshot, and derived satisfaction from telling the
+story of the latter's rage. Schoppe knew how heartily the noble youth
+loved him, and he would not say anything, because he was ashamed, but he
+swore to himself (in the grotesque style to which he was accustomed even
+in soliloquy) very shortly to let him into his breast-cavern, and show
+him hanging therein a whole, wild heart full of love.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>49. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The blue day on which an ascension, a rendering of allegiance, and a
+birthday were to be celebrated already stood over Pestitz, after having
+cast off its morning-red,&mdash;two horses were already harbingers of four,
+the lowly coach-box, of the highest,&mdash;the country nobility already went
+down, uncomfortably frizzled, into the rooms of the inn, and scolded at
+being cheated out of the fairest weather for heath-cock coupling,
+and the city nobility, yet unpowdered, spoke of the day, but
+without real earnestness,&mdash;the court-micrometer,<a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a> the
+court-marshal, was surrounded by all his quartermasters,&mdash;the
+court-transit-instruments,<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> the courtiers, instead of their
+half-holiday, when they work only in the afternoon, had a whole
+working-day, and were already standing at the wash-table,&mdash;the
+allegiance-preacher, Sch&auml;pe, believed almost every word of his
+discourse, because he had read it too many times over, and the nearness
+of publication infused emotion into him,&mdash;there was no longer a domino
+to be had for the evening, except among the Jews,&mdash;when a man alighted
+at the door of the Doctor's house, who among all others was the most
+honest and hearty about the allegiance, the Director Wehrfritz. There
+were a son and a father in each other's arms, a fiery youth and a fiery
+man. Albano seemed to him no longer to be the old Albano, but&mdash;warmer
+than ever. He brought with him from "his women," as he called them,
+congratulatory letters and birthday presents; he himself made not much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+of the birthday or forgot it, and Albano had only celebrated it a little
+just after waking. These festivals belong more to the other sex, who
+gladly toy with times and seasons in the way of loving and giving.</p>
+
+<p>The Titular Librarian marched out to a village, named Klosterdorf, where
+the Mayor with his family, after an ancient custom, had to imitate the
+Prince with his, and so, as commissioner, drive in the allegiance of the
+neighboring circle; this, Schoppe said, he still was pleased with, but
+the other worked too fatally on his inwards. The Director, dazzled by
+the prospects of the day, and posted in the front with an official
+speech to the chivalry, fell into a quarrel with Schoppe. "The Exchequer
+and the Court," said he, "have been, of course, from time immemorial,
+such as they are; but the Princes, dear sir, are good; they are
+themselves sucked dry, and then they seem to be the suckers."
+"Somewhat," rejoined Schoppe, "as the death-vampyres only give out blood
+from themselves, while they appear to take it; but I make up for that
+again by attributing wholly to the Regents, besides the sins of others,
+the merits, victories, and sacrifices of others also; herein they are
+the pelicans, who shed a blood for their children which really at a
+distance seems to be their own."</p>
+
+<p>All went off: Schoppe, out into the country; Wehrfritz, to church with
+the procession; Albano, into a spectator's-box in the allegiance-hall;
+for he would not in any wise be stuck into the train of the Prince, not
+even as embroidery. Soon the noisy stream of pomp came sounding back
+into the hall. The chivalry, the spirituality, and the cities mounted
+the stage, where the oath was to be taken. In the court-yard of the
+castle one foot stood upon another, and a needle might, to be sure, have
+reached the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> ground, but no one could do so, to pick it up; everybody
+looked up at the balcony, and cursed before he <i>swore</i>. The Prince, too,
+stayed not away; the throne, that graduated and paraphrased princely
+seat, stood open, and Fraischd&ouml;rfer had decorated it with beautiful
+mythological and heraldic shoulder-pieces and appendages.</p>
+
+<p>Opposite the Count bloomed the court-dames, and below them a rose and a
+lily, Julienne and Liana. As one lifts his eye from the stiff frosty
+landscape of winter to the blue breathing heavens which looked down upon
+our spring evenings, and wherein the light summer clouds floated and the
+rainbow stood, so did he glance over the shining snow-light of the court
+at the lovely Grace of spring, around whom remembrances hung, like
+flowers, and who now stood so far aloof, so cut off, so imprisoned in
+the heavy finery of the court! Only through her friend, who sits beside
+her, was she gently melted and harmonized with the dazzling present.</p>
+
+<p>Now began fine official speeches, the longest being made by the old
+Minister, the shortest by Wehrfritz: the Prince let the warm eulogies
+glide over his December-visage without thawing it down,&mdash;a mistaken
+indifference! For the praise of the Minister, as well as of other
+court-servants, may yet help him with posterity, since, according to
+Bacon, no praise is of more consequence than that which servants give,
+because they surely know their master best.</p>
+
+<p>Then the Upper-Secretary, Heiderscheid, read Luigi's genealogical table,
+and illuminated the hollow family-tree, together with its dryness, and
+the last pale green twig; with sunken eyes Julienne heard this amid the
+<i>vivat</i> of the people, and Albano, never subdued by <i>one</i> thought alone,
+saw her eyes, and could not, however intently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> the Regent listened,
+avoid the funeral picture, how, one day, and that very soon, this
+extinguished man would bear down after him the name of his whole race
+into the vault; he saw them carving the inverted arms and hanging the
+shield upside down, and heard the shovels strike against the helmet and
+fling the earth after the coffin. Gloomy idea! the tender sister would
+certainly have wept, had she only been alone!</p>
+
+<p>At last the turn came to those, to whom it never comes first, although
+they are the only ones who have a hearty meaning in such ceremonies.
+Heiderscheid stepped out on the balcony, and caused the noisy swarming
+multitude to stretch out the forefinger and thumb, and repeat the oath
+after him. The mass, always fascinated, shouted their <i>vivat</i>; in the
+dazzled eyes gleamed the confident expectation of a better regency and
+love for the unknown individual. The Count, whom a multitude generally
+made enthusiastic, as it did Schoppe melancholy, glowed with the
+inspiration of brotherly love and thirst for achievement; he saw
+princes, like omnipotent ones, holding sway on their eminences, and saw
+the blooming provinces and the gay cities of a wisely-ruled land spread
+out before him; he represented to himself how he, were he a prince,
+could, with the electric sparkling of the sceptre-point, dart, with an
+animating shock, into millions of united hearts at once, whereas he
+could now, with so great difficulty, scarcely kindle a few of the
+nearest; he saw his throne, as a mountain in morning light, pouring out,
+instead of lava, navigable streams through the lands, and breaking the
+storms, with a hum of harvests and festivals around its feet; he thought
+to himself how far, from such a high place, he could send light abroad,
+like a moon, which does not hide the sun by day, but, from her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+elevation, flings his distant brightness into the night,&mdash;and how he
+would, instead of only defending, <i>create</i> and <i>educate</i> freedom, and be
+a regent for the sake of forming self-regents.<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a> "But why am I not
+one?" said he mournfully.</p>
+
+<p>Noble youth! do thy estates, then, furnish thee no subjects? But just so
+does the lesser prince believe he would govern a duchy quite otherwise,
+and the higher one believes the same in regard to a kingdom, and so does
+the highest, in regard to universal monarchy.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, all through this singular uneasy day, wild perspectives of
+youth passed to and fro before him, and the old spirit-voice, which he
+was going to meet to-day, repeated in him the dark exhortation, Take the
+crown! Wehrfritz came back in the evening with a red face from the fiery
+allegiance-banquet, and Albano took an agitated leave of him, as if of
+the ebb and calm of life&mdash;his childish youth; for to-day he launched out
+deeper into its waves. Schoppe came back and wanted to have him before
+the sight-hole of his show-box, wherein he slid through the
+vicariate-allegiance-swearing in Klosterdorf, in a series of comic
+pictures; but these contrasted too severely with higher ones, and gave
+little pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>At night Albano put on his beautiful, serious character-mask, that of a
+knight-templar,&mdash;for a comic one his form, and almost his mood, was too
+great;&mdash;the latter was made still more solemn by this funeral dress of a
+whole murdered knightly order. After he had caused to be described to
+him once more the awful paths of Tartarus, and the burial-place of the
+Prince's heart, to avoid mistaking of the way in the night, he went
+forth, about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> ten o'clock, with a high-heaving bosom, which the
+night-larv&aelig;<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> of fancy, together with friendship and love and the
+whole future, conspired to excite.</p>
+
+
+<h3>50. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Albano stepped, for the first time, into the inverted puppet-world of a
+masquerade, as into a dancing realm of the dead. The black forms, the
+slit masks, the strange eyes, gleaming as out of night behind them,
+which, as in that mouldering Sultan in the coffin, alone remained
+alive,&mdash;the mingling and mimicking of all ranks, the flying and
+ring-running of the clinking dance, and his own solitude under the
+mask,&mdash;all this translated him, with his Shakespearian frame of spirit,
+into an enchanted and ghostly island full of juggleries, chimeras, and
+metamorphoses. Ah, this is the bloody scaffold, was his first thought,
+where the brother of thy Liana rent his young life, like a
+mourning-garment; and he looked fearfully round, as if he feared
+Roquairol might again attempt death.</p>
+
+<p>Among the masks he found no one under which he could suppose him to be;
+this meaningless cousinship of standing parts, footmen, butchers, Moors,
+ancestors, &amp;c.,&mdash;these could not conceal any loved one of Albano's.
+Lonesomely and inquisitively he paced up and down behind the rows of the
+Anglaise; and more than ten eyes, which glistened opposite in the
+annular eclipse of the lace mask,&mdash;for women, from their
+open-heartedness, do not love masks, but are fond of showing
+themselves,&mdash;followed the powerfully and pliantly built form, which,
+with the bold helm and plume, with the crossed white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> mantle and the
+gleaming mail on his breast, seemed to bring a knight out of the heroic
+age.</p>
+
+<p>At last a masked lady, who was chatting between unmasked ones, came up
+to him with long steps and large feet, and boldly grasped his hand as if
+for a dance. He was extremely embarrassed at the boldness of the
+summons, and about the choice of an answer; it is valor precisely that
+loves to marry itself to gallantry, as the Damascene blade, besides
+hardness, possesses a perpetual fragrance; but the lady only wrote in
+his hand his initials, with the interrogation-mark after them,&mdash;"<i>v.
+C.?</i>" and after the Yes, the charming one said, softly, "Do you not
+remember me? the master of exercises, Von Falterle?" Albano testified,
+notwithstanding his dislike of the part, a real joy at finding again a
+companion of his youth. He asked which mask was Captain Roquairol;
+Falterle assured him he had not yet arrived.</p>
+
+<p>By this time&mdash;as the footmen, the butchers, Falterle, &amp;c., were only the
+snow-drops of this masquerade-spring&mdash;better flowers&mdash;violets,
+forget-me-nots, and primroses&mdash;had sprung up or come in. For one such
+forget-me-not I see a churl entering, puffed out behind and before, and
+convex like a burning-glass, who now opened the back-door and shook out
+confects from his hump-back, and then the front-door and produced
+sausages. Hafenreffer, however, writes me the invention has once before
+appeared at a masquerade in Vienna. Then came a company of German
+play-cards, which shuffled and played out and took each other; a fine
+emblem of atheism, which exhibits it wholly free from the absurdity
+wherewith men have so loved to disfigure it! Mr. Von Augusti appeared
+also, but in simple dress and domino; he became (incomprehensibly to the
+Count) very soon the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> polar-star of the dancers, and the controlling
+Cartesian vortex of the dancing-school.</p>
+
+<p>With what miserable, black ammunition-biscuit and beggar's-bread of
+enjoyment these people get along! thought Albano, to whom, all day long,
+his dreams, those Jupiter's-doves, had been bringing ambrosia. And how
+pale and stale is their fire, their fancy, and their speech, he thought
+too. Verily, a life down in a gloomy glacier-chasm! for he imagined
+everybody must speak and feel as intensely and ardently as he.</p>
+
+<p>Now came a limping man, with a great glass-chest on his belly; of course
+it was easy to recognize the Librarian; he had on&mdash;either because he
+sent too late, or would not pay, for a domino&mdash;something black, which he
+had borrowed of a mourning-cloak lender, and was covered from
+shoulder-blade to shin-bone with awful masks, which he, with many
+finger-signs, offered mostly to those people who played their parts
+behind the opposite kind, e. g. short-nosed ones to long noses. He was
+waiting for the beginning of a hop Anglaise, the notes for which stood
+just on the hand-organ of his chest; then he, too, began; he had therein
+an excellent puppet-masquerade which had been planed out by Bestelmaier,
+and now he set the little masks to hopping parallel with the great ones.
+His object was a comparative anatomy of the two masquerades, and the
+parallelism was melancholy. Besides, he had rigged it all out with
+by-work: little dumb persons swung their little bells in the chest; a
+tolerably grown-up child rocked the cradle of an inanimate doll, with
+which the little fool still played; a mechanic was working away at his
+speaking machine, by which he was going to show the world how far mere
+mechanism could go toward giving life to puppets; a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> live, white
+mouse<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> sprang out by a little chain, and would have upset many of
+the club, if he could have broken it; a starling, buried-alive, a true
+first Greek comedy and school for scandal in miniature, was practising
+upon the dancing-company the death-blow of the tongue with perfect
+freedom and without distinction; a looking-glass-wall mimicked the
+living scenes of the chest so deceptively, that every one took the
+images for true puppets.</p>
+
+<p>The point of this comico-tragic dagger came home directly enough upon
+Albano, as, besides, the hopping wax-figure-cabinet of the great
+masquerade seemed to double the solitude of man, and to separate two
+selves by four faces; but Schoppe went further.</p>
+
+<p>In his glass case stood a faro-bank, and by it a little man, who cut out
+the masked banker in black paper, but into a likeness of the German
+gentleman; this picture he carried into the card-chamber, where a
+bank-keeping mask&mdash;most certainly Cephisio&mdash;must needs hear and see him.
+The banker looked at him some time inquiringly. Another, dressed wholly
+in black, with a dying expression, which represented the <i>Hippocratica
+facies</i>,<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> did the same. Albano looked towards it with a fiery
+glance, because it occurred to him it might be Roquairol, for it had his
+stature and torch-like eye. The pale mask lost much, and kept redoubling
+its loss; at that it drank out of a quill immoderate draughts of
+Champagne wine. The Lector came up; Schoppe kept on playing before the
+eyes that crowded round; the pale mask looked steadily and sternly at
+the Count. Schoppe took off his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> own before Bouverot; but there was
+another under it; he pulled this off; it disclosed an under-mask of the
+under-mask; he carried on the process to the fifth root;&mdash;at last his
+own rough face came forth, but bronzed with gold-beater's skin and
+distorted, as it turned towards Bouverot, with an almost frightful glaze
+and smile.</p>
+
+<p>The pale mask itself seemed to start, and hastened with long strides off
+into the dancing-hall; it threw itself wildly into the wildest of the
+dance. This, too, confirmed Albano's conjecture, as well as its great
+defying hat, which seemed to him a crown, because he prized nothing more
+highly about manly attire than fur, cloak, and hat.</p>
+
+<p>More and more fingers continually drew the letters "<i>v. C.</i>" in his
+hand, and he nodded composedly. The time surrounded him with manifold
+dramas, and everywhere he stood between theatre-curtains. As with uneasy
+head and heart he stepped to the window, to see whether he should soon
+have moonshine for his night-walk, he saw a heavy hearse, flanked by
+torches, move along across the market, which was conveying a manor-lord
+to his family-vault; and the undisturbed night-watchman called out,
+behind the creeping dead man, the beginning of the spirit-hour and of a
+birth-hour, which is precious to us. Could his smitten heart refrain
+from saying to him how sharply Death, the hard, solid, insoluble, with
+its glacier-air, sweeps through the warm scenes of life, and leaves
+behind it all over which it breathes stiff and snow-white? Could he help
+thinking of the cold young sister, whose voice now awaited him in
+Tartarus? And as Schoppe, with his puppet-parody, came to him, and he
+pointed out to him the street, and the latter said: "Bon! Friend Death
+sits<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> on his game-wagon, and glances quietly up, as if the friend would
+say, 'Bon! only dance on; I make my return trip, and carry you too to
+your place and spot,'"&mdash;how close must it have been to him under his
+sultry visor! At this second the pale mask came, with others, to the
+window; he opened his glowing face for coolness; a hasty draught of
+wine, and still more his fancy, showed him the world in burning
+surfaces; the mask surveyed him closely, with a dark, uncertain glow of
+the eye, which he at last could no longer bear, because it might as well
+have been kindled by hatred as by love, just as the spots on the sun
+seem now like abysses and now like mountains.</p>
+
+<p>Eleven o'clock had gone by; he suddenly disappeared from the hot looks
+and the crushing throng, and betook himself on his way to the heart
+without a breast.</p>
+
+
+<h3>51. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks
+(mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand,
+&amp;c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the
+tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no
+servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy
+catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of
+others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than
+the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be
+murdered than shamed before his father.</p>
+
+<p>How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward
+toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars,
+stood erect before thee!&mdash;Beneath<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> the heavens there is no terror, only
+under the earth!&mdash;Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on
+Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and butterflies. In the distance
+fiery prongs grew out of the earth and moved along;&mdash;it was the hearse
+with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which
+leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward
+the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had
+met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey
+(probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro.</p>
+
+<p>He passed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed
+down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of
+peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward
+Elysium,&mdash;a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some
+windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were
+continually seizing and vanishing.</p>
+
+<p>Impetuously Albano ran down a stairway darkened with hangings, and came
+upon an old battle-field,&mdash;a gloomy waste with a black wall, of which
+the monotony was broken only by white gypsum heads, which stood in the
+earth as if they were on the point of sinking or of resurrection; a
+tower full of blind gates and blind windows stood in the midst, and the
+solitary clock talked with itself therein, and, with its iron rod
+swaying to and fro, seemed fain to divide the wave of time, which ever
+tended to run together again: it struck three quarters to twelve, and
+deep in the wood the echo murmured as if in sleep, and softly spake once
+more to fleeting man of fleeting time. The road ran in an eternal circle
+round about the churchyard wall, without coming to a gate. Alban must,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>
+according to his information, seek a spot in the wall where it roared
+and reeled under him.</p>
+
+<p>At last he stepped upon a stone which sank with him; then a section of
+the wall fell down; and a tangled wood, full of clumps of trees, whose
+stems twined together into bush-work, intercepted every beam of the
+moon. As he looked round him under the gate, there hung over the shadowy
+stairway a pale head like a bust of the murder-field, and passed down
+without a body, and the bloodless dead seemed to awake and run after
+it;&mdash;the cold hellstone<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a> of horror contracted his heart: he stood:
+the death's-head hovered immovable over the last step!</p>
+
+<p>All at once his heart sucked in warm blood again; he turned toward the
+misshapen wood with drawn sword, because he was bearing along his life
+in his hand near armed Death. He followed in the darkness of the
+moss-green towers the roar of the subterranean flood and the rocking of
+the ground. Unfortunately he looked round again, and there stood the
+death's-head behind him still, but high in the air on the trunk of a
+giant. The extreme of horror always drove him with compressed eyes full
+upon a phantom; he called twice through the echoing wood, "Who's there?"
+But when, at this moment, a second head seemed all at once to stand
+beside the first, then his hand clove, frozen, to the ice-cold key of
+the gate of the world of the dead, and he tore it away bleeding.</p>
+
+<p>He fled, and plunged through thicker and thicker twigs, till at last he
+came out into an open garden and into the splendor of the moon; here, ah
+here, when he saw the holy, immortal heavens and the rich stars in the
+north gleaming again, which never rise nor set, the pole-star and
+Friederich's-Ehre,<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a> the Bear and the Serpent,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> and Charles's Wain
+and Cassiop&aelig;a, which looked down upon him mildly, as if with the bright
+winking eyes of eternal spirits, then his spirit asked itself, "Who can
+lay hands on me? I am a spirit among spirits"; and the courage of
+immortality beat again in his warm breast.</p>
+
+<p>But what a singular garden! Great and little flowerless beds, full of
+yew, rue, and rosemary, divided it among them; a circle of weeping
+birches drooped like a funeral train around the mute spot; under the
+garden murmured the buried brook, and in the middle stood a white altar,
+near which lay a man.</p>
+
+<p>Albano was strengthened by the appearance of the common dress and the
+mechanic's bundle on which the sleeper rested; he stepped quite close to
+him, and read the golden inscription of the altar: "Take my last
+offering, all-gracious one!" The heart of the Prince must here be
+mouldering in the altar.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, after these rigid scenes, it soothed his soul even to tears to find
+here human words and a human sleep, and the remembrance of God; but as
+he looked with emotion at the sleeper, suddenly that sister's voice
+which he had heard on Isola Bella said softly in his ear, "I give thee
+Linda de Romeiro." "Ah, good God!" he cried, and turned round; and there
+was nothing on either side of him, and he held himself up by the corner
+of the altar. "I give thee Linda de Romeiro," it said again; frightfully
+the thought seized him, that the hovering death's-head might be speaking
+near him, and he shook the sound sleeper, who woke not, and shook and
+called still more violently, when the voice spake for a third time.</p>
+
+<p>"What?" said the drowsy man, "directly! What will he?&mdash;you?" and raised
+himself reluctantly and with a yawn; but at the sight of the naked sword
+fell down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> on his knees, and said: "Mercy! I will, indeed, give up all!"</p>
+
+<p>"Zesara!" a cry came from the wood,&mdash;"Zesara, where art thou?" and he
+heard his own voice; but now he boldly called back, "At the altar!" A
+black form rushed out, with a white mask in hand, and hesitated in the
+moonlight before the armed one. Then at length Albano recognized the
+brother of Liana, for whom he had so long panted; he flung his sword
+behind him, and ran to meet him. Roquairol stood before him mute, pale,
+and with a sublime repose on his countenance. Albano continued to stand
+near him, and said with emotion, "Hast thou been seeking me, Charles?"
+Roquairol nodded silently, and had tears in his eyes, and opened his
+arms. Ah, then could the blissful man, with all the flames and tears of
+love fall upon the long-loved soul, and he kept saying incessantly, "Now
+we have each other! now we have each other!" And more and more
+passionately he embraced him, as the pillar of his future, and melted
+into tears, because now, indeed, the buried love of so many years and so
+many choked up fountains of the poor heart could at once gush forth.
+Roquairol, trembling, only clasped him to himself gently with one arm,
+and said, but without passion, "I am a dying man, and that is my face,"
+holding forth the yellow death-mask; "but I have my Albano, and will die
+on his bosom."</p>
+
+<p>Wildly they twined around each other; the sap of life, Love, ran through
+them with a creative power; the ground over the rolling, subterranean
+flood shook more violently; and the starry heaven, with the white, magic
+breath of its trembling stars, floated around the magic glow.</p>
+
+<p>Ah ye happy ones!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>52. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Some men are born fast friends; their first finding of each other is
+only a second, and they then, like those who have been long parted,
+bring to each other not only a future, but a past also;&mdash;this latter our
+happy ones demanded of one another impatiently. Roquairol answered
+Alban's question, How he came hither, in a fiery manner: "He had been
+following him this whole evening,&mdash;he had gazed at him at the window
+during the funeral pomp with such a painful longing, and had almost been
+constrained to fly and embrace him,&mdash;he had already, but a moment ago,
+stood close by him, and at his question, 'Who's there?' immediately
+taken off his mask." Now did Albano's fallen arm strike again tensely
+through the thin magic-lantern show of ghostly fear, as he now
+learned that the two-headed giant had grown entirely out of an
+optically-magnifying, mistaken notion of the distance of a form which
+was so near, and the death's-head had forfeited its body on the stairway
+only by the dark curtains and its black dress; even the hard
+spirit-scene at the altar seemed to him now less insuperable through the
+rich gain of living love.</p>
+
+<p>Roquairol asked him what woe or joy had driven him hither at midnight to
+a <i>Moravian</i> churchyard, and whither he had sent the man with the sword.
+Albano did not know that Moravians reposed here; and, moreover, he had
+not observed that the sword, probably from fear of its being used, had
+been stolen. He answered, "My dead sister was fain to speak with me at
+the altar; and she has spoken"; but he feared to say more of this. Then
+Roquairol's countenance suddenly changed; he stared at him, and demanded
+confirmation and explanation; during<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> this he looked into the air as if
+he would draw faces from it by his looks, and said monotonously, fixing
+his eyes, however, on Albano the while, "Dead one, dead one, speak
+again!" But only the death-flood went on speaking under them, and
+nothing more. But he threw himself before the altar on his knees, and
+said in measured tone, and yet with trembling lips: "Fly open,
+spirit-gate, and show thy transparent world. I fear not you, the
+transparent ones; I become one of you, when you appear, and walk with
+you, and become an apparition myself." "O my good one, forbear," Albano
+entreated, not only from piety, but from love also; for an accident, a
+night-bird shooting over, might, indeed, kill them by horror: this
+horror stood, too, not far from them; for on the illuminated side of the
+weeping birches stepped out a white, majestic old form. But when
+Roquairol, frantic with wine and fancy, reached out the dying mask into
+the air, and said, turning toward the grave of the heart, "Take this
+face, if thou hast none, old man, and look at me from behind it!" Alban
+seized him; the white form stepped back with bowed head and folded arms
+into the branches; the round tower on the battle-field struck the hour,
+and the dreamy region, murmuring, struck a response.</p>
+
+<p>"Come to my warm heart, thou passionate soul. O that I were permitted to
+receive thee on my very birthday, at my very birth-hour!" This sound
+melted at once the ever-changing man, and he hung upon him with wet eyes
+of joy, and said: "And to keep me even till our dying hours! O look not
+upon me, thou unchangeable, because I appear so wavering and broken; in
+the waves of life man breaks and crinkles as the staff flickers in the
+water, but the essential being stands nevertheless firm as the staff. I
+will follow thee into other parts of Tartarus; but still relate the
+history."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To give this history amounted to opening a <i>sanctum sanctorum</i> of the
+inner man, or even a coffin to the light of day; but do you believe that
+Albano bethought himself a minute? or would you yourselves? We are all
+better, franker, warmer friends than we know and show; only let the
+right spirit meet you,&mdash;such a one as thirsting Love ever
+demands,&mdash;pure, large, clear, and tender and warm,&mdash;and you give him
+everything, and love him without measure, because he is without fault.
+Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his
+whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did
+not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his
+whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the
+rainy season;&mdash;hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad
+motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained,
+was a stream with waterfalls.</p>
+
+<p>Charles led him into the so-called catacomb, while he listened to the
+ghost-story of Isola Bella, which, however, from having been exhausted
+by the former, he heard with diminished fear. A dreary, charred vale,
+full of sunken shafts, basked gray in the moonshine; out of the wood
+crept forth the death-flood below their feet, and leaped down a stony
+stairway into the catacombs. The two followed it on another that ran by
+its side. The entrance bore as frontispiece an old dial-plate, of which
+the lightning had once struck away the hour <i>one</i>. "One?" said Albano;
+"singular!&mdash;just our coming hour!"</p>
+
+<p>How adventurously does the catacomb now wind onward! The long
+death-flood murmurs obscurely far in through the darkness, and glimmers
+at times under the silvery stream which the moonlight sends in through
+the shaft-openings; immovable creatures&mdash;horses, dogs, birds&mdash;stand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+drinking on the dark bank, that is to say, their stuffed skins; small
+gravestones, worn smooth by time, with a few names and limbs, are the
+pavement; on a brighter niche we read that a nun was immured here; in
+another stands the petrified skeleton of a miner, who was buried alive,
+with gilded ribs and thighs; in scattered spots were black paper hearts
+of men shot by the arquebuse, and heaped-up nosegays of poor sinners;
+the rod which had whipped a forgiven penitent to death, a glass bust
+with a phosphorus point in the water, chrisom-cloths<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a> and other
+children's clothes and playthings, and a dwarf skeleton.</p>
+
+<p>As the explanatory words of Roquairol, whose life-path always ran down
+into vaults and out over graves, beat out life more and more thin and
+transparent before him, Zesara, after his manner, at once shaking his
+head, heaving forward his breast, stamping in the sand, and cursing
+(which he easily did in terror and in strong emotion), broke out with
+the words: "By the Devil! thou crushest my breast and thine own. It is
+not so! Are we not together? Have I not thy warm, living hand? Burns not
+within us the fire of immortality? Burnt-out coals are these bones, and
+nothing more; and the heavenly flame which has consumed them has again
+seized upon other fuel, and blazes on. O," he added, as if comforted,
+and stepped into the brook and looked through the opening of the shaft
+up to the rich moon, which streamed down from heaven, and his great eyes
+filled with splendor,&mdash;"O, there is a heaven and an immortality; we
+remain not in the dark hole of life; we, too, sweep through the ether
+like thee, thou shining world!"</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span></p>
+<p>"Ah, thou glorious one," said Charles, whose soul consisted of souls, "I
+will now bring thee to a more cheerful place." They had hardly gone
+eight steps, when it darkened behind them, and a sword, flung in
+overhead, came perpendicularly down, and struck with its point in the
+sand under the waves. "O thou infernal devil up there!" cried the
+infuriate Roquairol; but Albano was softened at the thought of the iron
+virgin<a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a> of the death-hour, who had folded her sharp arms together so
+near him. They clasped each other more warmly, and went silent and sad
+towards a low music and a grave-mound. They seated themselves upon it
+opposite an avenue which formed a right angle with the tormenting
+catacomb, lined with green moss, and of which crumbled sparks of rotten
+wood pointed out the extent. It lost itself in an open gate, and a
+prospect of Elysium, of which only the white summits of some
+silver-poplars were distinguishable, and in the distance was seen the
+spring redness of midnight blooming in the heavens, and two stars
+twinkling overhead. The gate, however, was grated, and guarded by a
+skeleton with an Æolian harp in his hand, which seemed to strike upon it
+the thin minor tones which the draught of wind just now wafted into the
+cavern.</p>
+
+<p>"Here," said Charles, at the beautiful spot, and made more curious by
+the deadly fling of Albano's sword, "finish your narrative of to-day!"
+Albano reported to him candidly the word which the sister's voice had
+spoken: "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." In the tumult of his inner being
+he thought not of the anecdote, that she was the very one for whom
+Charles when a boy had proposed to die. "Romeiro?" he started up. "Be
+still! She? O thou mocking executioner, Fate! Why she, and to-day?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> Ah,
+Albano, for her I early braved death," he continued, weeping, and sank
+upon his breast, "and that is what has made my heart so bad, because I
+have lost her. Do thou only take her, for thou art a pure spirit; the
+glorious shape which appeared to thee on the sea, so she looks, or now
+still fairer. Ah, Albano!" This noble youth trembled at the complicated
+plot, and at the destiny, and said: "No, no, thou dear Charles, thou
+thinkest falsely about everything."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly it was as if all the constellations rang, and a melodious
+spirit-choir thronged in through the gate. Albano was startled.
+"Nothing; let be," said Charles. "It is not the skeleton; the <i>pious
+father</i> is walking in the <i>flute-dell</i>, and is just drawing out his
+flutes, because he prays. But how sayest thou, I think falsely of
+everything?" "How?" repeated Albano, and could not, in the magic circle
+of these echoes, which all-powerfully brought back to him that Sunday
+morning, either think or speak. For did not the silver-poplars wave to
+and fro against the stars, and rosy clouds lie couched about the
+heavens, and did not the whole Elysium pass openly by with the sounds
+which had floated through it, with the tears which had besprinkled it,
+and with the dreams which no heart forgets, and with the holy form which
+eternally abides in his breast? And now he held so fast the hand of her
+brother; so near was he to love and friendship, those two foci in the
+ellipse of life's pathway; impetuously he embraced the brother, with the
+words: "By Heaven, I say to thee, she whom thou hast just named concerns
+me not, and never will."</p>
+
+<p>"But, Albano, thou dost not surely know her yet?" said Charles, pursuing
+his inquiries, perhaps, too hardly; for the noble youth beside him was
+too bashful and too<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> steadfast to unlock the sanctuary of wishes to the
+kinsman of his loved one; to a stranger he could have done it much more
+easily. "O torment me not," he answered sensitively; but he added more
+softly, "Believe me, I pray you believe me, this first time, my good
+brother!" Charles yielded full as seldom as he; and although swallowing
+the inquisitive tone, and speaking in a right loving one, nevertheless
+said this: "By my bliss, I'll do it, and with joy; a heart must have
+been heartily loved and divinely blessed which can renounce such a one."
+Ah, does Albano, then, know that! He only leaned silently, with his
+fiery cheek full of roses, on Liana's brother, shunning scrutiny for
+shame; but when the expiring calls of the flute-dell gathered together
+like sighs in his breast, and reminded him too often how that Sunday
+morning closed, how Liana stole away, and how he looked after her with
+dim, wet eyes from the altar; then, although his heart did not break,
+his eye broke into tears, and he wept violently, but silently, on his
+first friend.</p>
+
+<p>Then, with mute souls, they turned homeward, and looked thoughtfully
+toward the long, vanishing ways of the future; and when they parted,
+they well felt that they loved each other right heartily, that is, right
+bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>On the morrow the pious father lay prostrate under a shock which was
+more blissful than mournful; for he said he had in the night seen his
+friend, the deceased Prince, walking, clad in white, through Tartarus.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/harpend.jpg" width="400" height="83" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> [<i>Fauler Heinz.</i>] Or Athanor, a chemical stove, which
+works on for a long time without poking. [Corresponding to our air-tight
+stove. <i>Athanor</i>, from the Greek, <i>undying</i>?&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> The translator had to resort to the Scotch to help him get
+this pun into English.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> Ezek. xiii. 18: "Woe to the women that sew pillows to all
+arm-holes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature, to hunt
+souls!"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> According to Lempriere.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> Sanhedrim, c. 2, Misch. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> Cic. ad Quirit. post redit, c. 3.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> His sect represented Christ's journey to hell as having
+released all the wicked from that region, but not Abraham, Enoch, the
+prophets, &amp;c.&mdash;Tertul. adv. Marcion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> A title given to black colors.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> The Corinthian, who was hidden from his enemies in a
+chest of cedar, ivory, and gold, richly adorned with figures in relief,
+and at last expelled the usurpers and mounted the throne.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a> The line which is drawn from the aphelion to the
+perihelion, the two apsides, or the nearest and farthest points of a
+planet's distance from the sun.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> A child coming into the world face foremost cannot
+afterward bend its head forward.&mdash;<i>The Mother of a Family</i>, Vol. V.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> The name of the Invalid Hospital in Copenhagen.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> In Darwin's Zo&ouml;nomy, page 529, the case is adduced of a
+man who did this before spectators. In Paris another did the same by
+swallowing air.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> In Vienna there was an Institute which made new
+sealing-wax out of old, and endowed poor persons with the proceeds.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> Such was the tasteless name by which Basedow was going to
+baptize a daughter, in memory of the appearing of an elementary work by
+subscription. See Schlichtegroll's Necrology.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> <i>Wehestande</i>, a parody of <i>Ehestande</i>, wedded state.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a> An issue.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> A name given in some places to the consumption.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a> A micrometer consists of fine threads stretched across in
+the telescope, which serve to measure the smallest distance.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> The transit-instrument, or culminatory, observes when a
+star has reached the highest point in its course.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> Autarchs; for monarchs or sole-rulers are etymologically
+distinguished from self-rulers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a> Ghosts of the dead.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> Does he allude to the frightful white form, in my "vision
+of annihilation"?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> A phrase applied to the form of a dying man. [Properly
+a distemper which gives one a deathly look. See Bailey's
+Dictionary.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>]</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> The <i>lapis infernalis</i>, or silver cautery.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> Frederick's Honor.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a> Linen cloths smeared with aromatic ointment, anciently
+placed on the heads of children just born or baptized.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> An allusion to a well-known instrument of the
+Inquisition.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/3flowerstart.jpg" width="550" height="142" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>TENTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Roquairol's Advocatus Diaboli.<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a>&mdash;The Festival Day of
+Friendship.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>53. CYCLE.<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a></h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/n.jpg" width="100" height="105" alt="N" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth,
+should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter
+as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life,
+when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung
+round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like
+gentle <i>goddesses</i>, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years,
+they summon us, like stern <i>gods</i>, with commands! And at this period
+Friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as
+later, in a narrow Gothic chapel.</p></div>
+
+<p>Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with
+islands and ships; he had his whole breast full of friendship and youth,
+and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had
+rebounded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously
+upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched
+him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul
+and his whole life&mdash;(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into
+his heart); all models of friendship among the ancients he was fain to
+copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his
+being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a
+double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.</p>
+
+<p>When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,&mdash;which
+was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the
+spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of
+night,&mdash;and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery
+smoke-column of an Ætna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see
+the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the
+more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who,
+after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote
+island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the
+baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life,
+comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom
+we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any
+moment play again the give-away game with the human form.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the
+disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped
+for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course,
+a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's
+tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as
+on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> the Hippocratic face of
+the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was
+occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a
+chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet
+hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the glasshouse of a run-down
+hour-glass, and the washing-and the writing-table stood open, on which
+latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or
+writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the
+ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers
+on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left
+ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like butterflies on the
+window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet
+there, much less a Cycle.</p>
+
+<p>Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one
+loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of
+tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house
+in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one
+in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a
+spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an
+infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was
+still something noble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an
+imitator of what he eulogized.</p>
+
+<p>As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green
+garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the
+warm air of friendship and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once
+into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states
+of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was
+a second Russia, which harbors all climates,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> from France even to Nova
+Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he
+was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could
+throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it
+sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The
+girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and
+city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was
+vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who
+pronounced everything correctly.&mdash;Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften
+instead of Juchten, Fünfzig instead of Füfzig, and Barbieren (the <i>r</i> in
+which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),&mdash;Roquairol was a
+free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and
+spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time
+an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed
+that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of
+speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one
+another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the
+Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite
+and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several
+departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent
+masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts
+merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have
+to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order
+that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pestitz
+representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano,
+rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of
+life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;&mdash;friendship has its
+deceptions as well as love;&mdash;and often, when he had long looked upon
+this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and
+proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon <i>his</i> wavering
+soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose
+fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the noble one move him
+even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say
+to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I
+lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and
+decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and
+repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came&mdash;the
+momentous day for both&mdash;when he did it. How could he ever have resisted
+<i>Fancy</i>, when he only resisted <i>by and through</i> Fancy? I do him half
+injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Roquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the higher youth of our
+times are so early and richly overhung with the roses of joy that, like
+the inhabitants of spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by
+put under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose-sirup and
+bathe themselves in rose-oil,<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a> until nothing more is left them
+thereof for a stimulus except the thorns, so are most of them&mdash;and often
+the very same ones&mdash;stuffed full in the beginning, by their
+philanthropic teachers, with the <i>fruits</i> of knowledge, so that they
+come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, then the cider and
+perry thereof, until at last they ruin themselves with the brandy made
+of that. Now if, in addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy
+that makes their life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> a naphtha-soil, out of which every step draws
+fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences are thrown, and the
+consumption become still greater. For these burnt-out prodigals of life
+there is then no new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no
+old one entire and fresh; a dried-up future, full of arrogance, disgust
+with life, unbelief and contradiction, lies round about them. Only the
+wing of fancy still continues to quiver on their corpse.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Charles! Thou didst still more! Not merely truths, but feelings
+also, he anticipated. All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to
+which Love and Friendship and Nature exalt the heart, all these he went
+through in poems earlier than in life, as play-actor and theatre-poet
+earlier than as man, earlier on the sunny side of fancy than on the
+stormy side of reality; hence, when they at last appeared, living, in
+his breast, he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill them,
+and stuff them well for the refrigeratory of future remembrance. The
+unhappy love for Linda de Romeiro, which, at a later period, would
+perhaps have steeled him, opened thus early all the veins of his heart,
+and bathed it warmly in its own blood; he plunged into good and bad
+dissipations and amours, and afterward represented on paper or on the
+stage everything that he repented or blessed; and every representation
+made him grow more and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun
+by ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy
+sensibilities; but they were simply a new luxury, a tonic, at best; and
+precisely in proportion to their height did the road run down the more
+abruptly into the slough of the unholiest ones. As in the dramatic poet
+angelically pure and filthy scenes stand in conjunction and close
+succession,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> so in his life; he foddered, as in Surinam, his hogs with
+pine-apples; like the elder giants, he had soaring wings and creeping
+snakes'-feet.<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a></p>
+
+<p>Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one
+of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when
+she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings.
+But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and
+strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread
+every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first
+threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors,
+which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full
+of these eagles. They love you not, though they think so; because, like
+the blest in Mahomet's paradise, instead of their lost arms of love,
+they have only wings of fancy. They are like great streams, warm only
+along the shore, and in the middle cold.</p>
+
+<p>Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran through the alternation
+between ether and slime more and more rapidly, till he mixed them both.
+His blossoms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the Ideal, which,
+however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start with horror, but
+believe it,&mdash;he sometimes plunged on purpose into sins and torments, in
+order, down there, by the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into
+himself more deeply the oath of reformation; somewhat as the physicians,
+Darwin and Sydenham, assert that <i>strengthening</i> remedies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> (Peruvian
+bark, steel, opium) work more powerfully when <i>weakening</i> ones
+(bleeding, emetics, &amp;c.) have been previously prescribed.</p>
+
+<p>External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow
+of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he
+been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and
+a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason
+the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some
+occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a> &amp;c. But the
+lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more
+vain and bold.</p>
+
+<p>So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,&mdash;hunting like
+an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart,
+whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable
+of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth
+assimilated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able
+much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the
+true language of passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate
+dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided
+against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and
+indispensable&mdash;hearts and joys and truths&mdash;melted down and floated
+about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything
+which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking
+round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his
+resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of
+the <i>tuning-hammer</i>, and not of the <i>tuning-fork</i>, of the finest
+morality; and, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> midst of the roar of passion, standing in the
+bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his
+madness, and gives warning of it.</p>
+
+<p>Only <i>one</i> good angel had not flown with the rest,&mdash;Friendship. His so
+often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but
+friendship it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto
+loved as a friend,&mdash;so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now
+Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace!</p>
+
+<p>In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with
+himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the
+country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose
+rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men&mdash;and he&mdash;are like the
+fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the
+morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at
+midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the
+sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a
+great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of
+lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread
+wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to
+Albano, when the whole girandole<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a> of his faculties and feelings
+burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of
+flasks.</p>
+
+<p>But do you know the medicine of example, the healing power of
+admiration, and of that soul-strengthener, reverence? "It is shameful of
+me," said Roquairol, "when he is so credulous and open and honest. No, I
+will deceive the whole world, only not his soul!" Such natures would
+fain make good their devastation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> of humanity by being true to one.
+Humanity is a constellation, in which <i>one</i> star often describes half
+the figure.</p>
+
+<p>From this hour forth, his resolution of the heartiest confession and
+atonement stood fixed; and Alban, before whom life had not yet run down
+into a jelly of corruption, but was capable of being analyzed as a sound
+and well-defined organism, and who did not, like Charles, complain that
+nothing would take right hold of him, but everything played round him
+like air,&mdash;<i>he</i> it was who was to bring back youth to his sick wishes,
+and with the help of the pure youth's unwavering perceptions and the
+danger of losing his friendship, Roquairol proposed forcing himself to
+keep with <i>him</i> the word of fruit-bearing repentance, which to himself
+he had too often broken.</p>
+
+<p>Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.</p>
+
+
+<h3>54. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Once Albano came early in the forenoon to the Captain, when the latter
+was usually, according to his own expression, "a fag-end of a
+yesterday's candle stuck on thorns"; but to-day he stood working away
+blusteringly at the piano-forte and writing-desk by turns; and, like a
+dried-up infusorial animal, was already, even at this early hour, the
+same old, busy creature, because wine enough had been poured upon him,
+that is to say, a good deal. Full of rapture, he ran to meet the welcome
+friend. Albano brought him from Falterle the childish leaves of
+love&mdash;for the Master of Exercises had not had the heart to throw them
+into the fire&mdash;which he had written from Blumenbühl to the unknown
+heart. Charles would have been moved on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> subject almost to tears,
+had he not already been so before the arrival. The Count had to stay
+there all day, and neglect everything; it was his first day of
+irregularity; it was comic to see how the otherwise unfettered youth,
+subservient, however, to a long habit of daily exertions, struggled
+against the short calm, in which he should sail no ship, as against a
+sin.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, it was heavenly; the low-lying day of childhood, which once
+clothed him with wings, when the house was full of guests, and he,
+wherever he wanted to be, came up again above the horizon; the
+conversation played and made gifts with everything which exalts and
+enriches us; all his faculties were unchained and in ecstatic dance. Men
+of genius have as many festal days as others do working days, and hence
+it is that they can hardly endure a trivial and commonplace<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a>
+intercalary-day, and especially on such days of youth! When Charles
+conjured before him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe,
+Klinger, Schiller, and life saw itself colossally represented in the
+poetic magnifying-mirror, then did all the sleeping giants of his inner
+world rise up; his father came and his future, even his friend stood
+forth there as in new relief, out of that shining, fantastic time of
+childhood, when he had dreamed of him beforehand in these characters;
+and in the internal procession of heroes, even the cloud that floated
+through the heavens and the guard-troop marching away across the market
+were incorporated. His friend appeared to him far greater than he was,
+because, like all youths, he still believed of actors and poets, that,
+like miners, they always received into their bodies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> the metals in which
+they labored. How often they both said, in that favorite metaphor of the
+young man, "Life is a dream," and only became thereby more glad and
+wide-awake! The old man says it differently. And the dark gate of death,
+to which Charles so loved to lead the way, became before the youth's eye
+a glass door, behind which lay the bright, golden age of the belated
+heart in immeasurable meadows.</p>
+
+<p>Maidens, I own,&mdash;as their conversations are more fragmentary,
+matter-of-fact, and less intoxicating,&mdash;instead of such an Eden-park, go
+for a spruce Dutch garden, well trimmed with crab's-shears and
+lady-scissors, which is furnished them every day in the afternoon by the
+black hour, which serves up to them on the coffee- or tea-table, the
+small black-board<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a> of some evil reports, a couple of new shawls
+sitting by, a well-bred man who passes by with a will or marriage
+certificate, and finally the hope of the domestic report. Come back to
+our young men!</p>
+
+<p>Towards evening the Captain received a red billet. "Very well!" said he
+to the woman who brought it, and nodded. "You'll get nothing out of
+that, madam," said he, turning toward Albano. "Brother, guard only
+against married women. Just snap once, for a joke, at one of their red
+beauty-patches; instantly they dart their fish-hooks into your
+nape.<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> Seven of these hooks, such as you see here, have made a
+lodgement in mine alone." The innocent child Albano! He took it for
+something morally great to assert at once the friendship of seven
+married ladies, and would gladly have been in Charles's case; he could
+not see the mischief of it,&mdash;that these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> female friends, like the
+Romans, love to clip the wings of victory (namely, of ourselves), so
+that the Divinity may not fly any farther.</p>
+
+<p>On a fine day, nothing is so fine as its sunset. The Count proposed to
+ride out into the evening twilight, and on the hill to look at the sun.
+They trotted through the streets; Charles pulled off his great cocked-up
+hat, now before a fine nose, now before a great pair of eyes, now
+before transparent forelocks. They flew into the Linden avenue,
+which was festally decked with a motley wain-scoting of female
+street-<i>sitters</i>.<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> A tall woman, with piercing, fiery eyes, in a red
+shawl and yellow dress, strode through the female flower-bed, towering
+like the flower-goddess: it was the authoress of the red note; she was,
+however, more attentive to the beautiful Count than to her friend. On
+all walls and trees bloomed the rose-espalier of the evening redness.
+They blustered up the white road toward Blumenbühl; on both sides the
+gold-green sea of spring heaved its living waves; a feathered world went
+rowing about therein, and the birds dove down deep among the flowers;
+behind the friends blazed the sun, and before them lay the heights of
+Blumenbühl, all rosy-red. Having reached the eminence, they turned their
+horses toward the sun, which reposed behind the cupolas and
+smoke-columns of the proudly burning city, in distant, bright gardens.
+In wondrous nearness lay the illuminated earth round about them, and
+Albano could see the white statues on Liana's roof blush like life under
+the blooming clouds. He drove his horse close to his companion's, to lay
+his hand on Charles's shoulder; and thus they beheld in silence how the
+lovely sun laid down his golden cloud-crown, and, with the fluttering
+foliage-breath<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> around his hot brow, descended into the sea. And when it
+grew dusky on the earth, and a glow lighted up the heavens, and Albano
+leaned across and drew his friend over to his burning heart, then rose
+the evening-chime in Blumenbühl. "And down below there," said Charles,
+with soft voice, and turned thither, "lies thy peaceful Blumenbühl, like
+a still churchyard of thy childhood's days. How happy are children,
+Albano,&mdash;ah, how happy are children!" "Are not we so?" answered he, with
+tears of joy. "Charles, how often have I stood on high places, in
+evenings like this, and fervently stretched out my childish hands after
+thee and after the world. Now indeed I have it all. Truly, thou art not
+right." But he, sick with the murmur and ringing-in-his-ears of long
+past times, remained deaf to the word, and said, "Only our cradle-songs,
+only those cradle-songs, sounding back on the memory, soothe the soul to
+slumber, when it has wept itself hot."</p>
+
+<p>More silently and slowly they rode back. Albano bore a new world of love
+and bliss in his bosom; and the youth,&mdash;not yet a debtor to the past,
+but a guest of the present,&mdash;sweetly unbent by the long Jubilee of the
+day, sank into clear-obscure dreams, like a towering bird of prey
+hanging silent on pinions open with ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p>"We will stay all night at Ratto's," said Charles, when they reached the
+city.</p>
+
+
+<h3>55. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>They alighted down in Ratto's Italian Cellar. The house seemed to the
+Count at first, after the contemplation of broad nature, like a fragment
+of rock rolled upon it,&mdash;although every story, indeed, groans under<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>
+architectural burdens,&mdash;but the heavy feeling of subterranean
+confinement<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a> soon forgot itself, and singular was the sound that
+came down into the Italian vault of the rattling of carriages overhead.
+The Captain bespoke a <i>punch royal</i>. If he goes on so in his
+good fire-regulation, and always has a full cask at home as
+extinguishing-apparatus, and his hose-pipes well proved, then my book
+cannot be touched by the objection, that, as in Grandison, too much tea
+is consumed; more likely is it that too much strong drink will be
+absorbed.</p>
+
+<p>Schoppe was sitting in the Italian souterrain. He loved not the Captain,
+because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were
+heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy
+guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings." Charles paid him back his
+dislike; the hottest waves of his enthusiasm immediately bristled up in
+ice-peaks before the Titular Librarian's face. Only not to-day! He drank
+so amply of king's-punch,&mdash;whereof a couple of glasses might have burnt
+through all the heads of Briareus or of the Lernean serpent,&mdash;that he
+then said everything, even pious things. "By heavens!" said he, healing
+himself in this Bethesda-pool by&mdash;drawing from it, "since it is all
+fiddle-faddle about this growing better, one should obfuscate
+himself<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a> with a shot, in order that the baited spirit may once for
+all go free from its wounds and sins." "From sins?" said Schoppe; "lice
+and tape-worms of the better sort will by all means emigrate from my
+territory, when I grow cold; but the worst of them my inner man will
+certainly carry up with it. By the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> hangman! who tells you, then, that
+this whole churchyard of poor sinners here below shall at once march
+home as an invisible church full of martyrs and Socrateses, and every
+Bedlam come out a high-light lodge? I was thinking to-day of the next
+world, when I saw a woman in the market with five little pigs, every one
+of which she would fain drive before her with a string tied to its leg,
+but which shot off from her and from each other like wisps of electric
+light; now, said I, we, with our few faculties and wishes, which this
+cultivating age sets out <i>in quintuplo</i>, fare already as pitifully as
+the woman with her drove; but when we get ten or more new farrows by the
+rope, as the second world, like an America, must surely bring new
+objects and wishes, how will the Ephorus<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a> manage his office there? I
+prepare myself to expect there greater indescribable distresses, feudal
+crimes and oppositions." But Roquairol was in his red blaze; he exalted
+himself far above Schoppe and above himself, and denied immortality
+plumply, by way of parodying Schoppe. "An individual man," said he,
+"could hardly, on his own account alone, believe in immortality; but
+when he sees the masses, he has pity, and holds it worth the while, and
+believes the second world is a <i>monte testaceo</i> of human potsherds. Man
+cannot come nearer to God and the Devil hereafter than he does already
+here; like a tavern-sign, his <i>reverse</i> is painted just like his
+<i>obverse</i>. But we need the fictitious future for a present; when we
+hover ever so still above our slime, we yet are continually flapping,
+like carps lying still, with poetic fins and wings. Hence we must needs
+dress up the future paradise so gloriously that only gods shall fit into
+it, but, just as in princes' gardens, no dogs. Mere trumpery! We<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> cut
+out for ourselves glorified bodies, which resemble soldiers'-coats;
+<i>pockets</i> and <i>buttonholes</i> are wanting; what pleasure can they hold,
+then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano,
+what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even
+freaks of humor.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux.
+He put on his cravat,&mdash;he had been sitting there <i>à la Hamlet</i>,&mdash;and
+said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused,
+still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps.</p>
+
+<p>In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring,
+overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven!
+drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked
+round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as
+slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing
+with them.</p>
+
+<p>Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly
+into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and
+then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his
+friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily
+bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a
+calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting
+through. He was now, after the analogy of the fire-eaters, a
+fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The
+latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer:
+"<i>Redeem the time</i>, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life
+all you can: <i>that</i> is time. To this end the best shops of the times,
+the apothecaries', require<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> that a man, after <i>punch royal</i>, shall go to
+bed and sweat immoderately."</p>
+
+<p>Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,&mdash;when
+the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in
+Derbyshire-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,&mdash;when from the
+Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner
+being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the
+proudest (only not the tenderest one),&mdash;and when, like Adam in the state
+of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such
+crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but
+from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,&mdash;then
+did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the
+unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic,
+credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking
+<i>na&iuml;ve</i> and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon
+that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he
+was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.</p>
+
+<p>"Come out o' doors,&mdash;out o' doors!" said Charles; and that had long been
+Albano's wish. It struck one, as they saw, on the narrow cellar-stairs,
+the stars of the spring heaven overhead glistening down through the
+entrance of the shaft. How freshly flowed the inhaled night over the hot
+lips! How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of
+stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How
+was the fiery eye of Albano refreshed and expanded by the giant masses
+of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the
+transparent mantle of night! Zephyrs, the butterflies of day, fluttered
+already about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> their dear flowers, and sucked from the blossoms, and
+brought in incense for the morning; a sleep-drunken lark soared
+occasionally into the still heavens with a loud day in her throat; over
+the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose
+jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the
+purple pennons of Aurora, as she sailed toward morning. With an exalting
+power the thought seized the youth, that this very minute was measuring
+millions of little and long lives, and the walk of the sap-caterpillar
+and the flight of the sun, and that this very same time was being lived
+through by the worm and God, from worlds to worlds, through the
+universe. "O God!" he exclaimed, "how glorious it is to exist!"</p>
+
+<p>Charles merely clung, with the drooping, heavy feathers of the
+night-bird, to the cheerful constellations around him. "Happy for thee,"
+said he, "that thou canst be thus, and that the sphinx in thy bosom
+still sleeps. Thou knowest not what I am about to do. I knew a wretch
+who could portray her right well. In the cavern of man's breast, said
+he, lies a monster on its four claws, with upturned Madonna's face, and
+looks round smiling, for a time, and so does man too. Suddenly it
+springs up, buries its claws into the breast, rends it with lion's-tail
+and hard wings, and roots and rushes and roars, and everywhere blood
+runs down the torn cavern of the breast. All at once it stretches itself
+out again, bloody, and smiles away again with the fair Madonna's face.
+O, he looked all bloodless, the wretch! because the beast so fed upon
+him and thirstily lapped at his heart."</p>
+
+<p>"Horrible!" said Albano; "and yet I do not quite understand thee." The
+moon at this moment lifted herself up, together with a flock of clouds
+that lay darkly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> camped along her sides, and she drew a storm-wind after
+her, which drove them among the stars. Charles went on more wildly: "In
+the beginning, the wretch found it as yet good: he had as yet sound
+pains and pleasures, real sins and virtues; but as the monster smiled
+and tore faster and faster, and he continued to alternate more and more
+rapidly between pleasure and pain, good and evil; and when blasphemies
+and obscene images crept into his prayers, and he could neither convert
+nor harden himself; then did he lie there, in a dreary exhaustion of
+bleeding, in the tepid, gray, dry mist-banks of life, and thus was dying
+all the time he lived.&mdash;Why weepest thou? Knowest thou that wretch?"
+"No," said Albano, mildly. "I am he!" "Thou? Terrible God, not thou!"
+"O, it is I; and though thou despisest me, thou wilt be what I ... No,
+my innocent one, I say it not. See, even now the sphinx rises again. O
+pray with me, help me, that I may not be obliged to sin,&mdash;only not be
+obliged! I must drink, I must debauch, I must be a hypocrite,&mdash;I am a
+hypocrite at this moment." Zesara saw the rigid eye, the pale, shattered
+face, and, in a rage of love, shook him with both arms, and stammered,
+with deep emotion, "By the Almighty! this is not true! thou art indeed
+so tender and pale and unhappy and innocent."</p>
+
+<p>"Rosy-cheek," said Charles, "I seem to thee pure and bright as yonder
+orb; but she too, like me, casts a long shadow up toward heaven." Zesara
+let go of him, took a long look toward the sublime, dark Tartarus,
+encompassing Elysium like a funeral train, and pressed away bitter
+tears, which flowed at the remembrance how he had found therein his
+first friend, who was now melting away at his side. Just then the
+night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the
+wood-caterpillar, and Albano<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> pointed silently to the crashing tree.
+Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee
+to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair
+stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.</p>
+
+<p>This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears;
+a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with
+his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild
+self, and every selfish thought. Softly he laid himself on his friend's
+bosom, and with magical, low words, and full of humility, and without
+fiery images, told him his whole heart; and that it was not wicked, but
+only unhappy and weak, and that he ought to have been as heartily
+sincere towards him, who thought too well of him, as towards God; and
+that he swore, by the hour of death, to be such as he,&mdash;to confess to
+him everything, always,&mdash;to become holy through him. "Ah, I have only
+been loved so very little!" he concluded. And Albano, the
+love-intoxicated, glowing man, the good man, who knew by his own
+experience the sacred excesses and exaggerations of remorse, and took
+these confessions to be such, came back, inspired, to the old covenant
+with unmeasured love. "Thou art an ardent man!" said Charles; "why do
+men, then, always lie frozen together on each other's breasts, as on
+Mount Bernard,<a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a> with rigid eye, with stiffened arms? O why camest
+thou to me so late? I had been another creature. Why came she<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a> so
+early? In the village down below there, at the narrow, lowly
+church-door,&mdash;there I first saw her through whom my life became a
+mummy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> Verily, I am speaking now with composure. They carried along
+before me, as I went out to walk, a corpse-like white youth on a bier
+into Tartarus: it was only a statue, but it was the emblem of my future.
+An evil genius said to me, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee.' She
+stood at the church-door, surrounded by people of the congregation, who
+wondered at the boldness with which she took up, in her two hands, a
+silver-gray, tongue-darting snake, and dandled it. Like a daring
+goddess, she bent her firm, smooth brow, her dark eye, and the
+rose-blossoms of her countenance upon the adder's head, which Nature had
+trodden flat, and played with it close to her breast. 'Cleopatra!' said
+I, although a boy. She, too, even then, understood it, looked up calmly
+and coldly from the snake, and gave it back, and turned round. O, on my
+young breast she flung the chilling, life-gnawing viper. But, truly, it
+is now all gone by, and I speak calmly. Only in the hours, Albano, when
+my bloody clothes of that night, which my sister has laid up, come
+before my eyes, then I suffer once more, and ask, 'Poor, well-meaning
+boy! wherefore didst thou then grow older?' But, as I said, it is all
+over now. To thee, only to thee, may a better genius say, 'Love the fair
+one whom I show thee!'"</p>
+
+<p>But what a world of thoughts now flew at once into Albano's mind! "He
+continues to torment himself," thought he, "with the old jealousy about
+Romeiro. I will open heart to heart, and tell the good brother that it
+is indeed his sister I love, and that eternally." His cheeks glowed, his
+heart flamed, he stood, priest-like, before the altar of friendship,
+with the fairest offering, sincerity. "O Charles," said he, "now,
+perhaps, she might be otherwise disposed towards thee. My father is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>
+travelling with her, and thou wilt see her." He took his hand, and went
+with him more quickly up to a dark group of trees, to unfold, in the
+shadow, his tenderly blushing soul. "Take my most precious secret," he
+began, "but speak not of it,&mdash;not even with me. Dost thou not guess it,
+my first brother? The soul that I have loved, as long as I have loved
+thee?"&mdash;softly, very softly he added,&mdash;"thy sister?" and sank on his
+lips to kiss away the first sounds.</p>
+
+<p>But Charles, in the tumult of rapture and of love, like an earth at the
+up-coming of Spring, could not contain himself; he pressed him to
+himself; he let him go; he embraced him again; he wept for bliss; he
+shut to Albano's eyes, and said, as if he had found his sister anew,
+"Brother!" In vain did Albano seek to stifle, with his hand, every other
+syllable on his lips. He began to paint to the excited youth&mdash;who, amid
+the secluded and poetic book-world, had acquired a higher tenderness
+than the actual intercourse of society teaches&mdash;the portrait of Liana;
+how she did and suffered; how she watched and pleaded for him, and even
+impoverished herself to wipe out his debts; how she never severely
+blamed, but only mildly entreated him, and all that, not from artificial
+patience, but from genuine, ardent love; and how this, after all, made
+up hardly the accessories of her picture. In this purer inspiration than
+the foregoing evening had granted him, what crowned his bliss was, that
+he could love his sister, among all beings, the most intensely and the
+most disinterestedly, and with a love the most free from poetic luxury
+and caprice. Really strengthened by the feeling that he could, for once,
+exult with a pure and holy affection, he lifted once more in freedom his
+disengaged hands, hitherto, like Milo's, jammed and caught in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> the tree
+of happiness and life, which he would fain have torn open; he breathed
+fresh, living air and courage, and the plan of his inner perfection was
+now gracefully rounded by new good fortune and a consciousness full of
+fair objects.</p>
+
+<p>The moon stood high in heaven, the clouds had been driven away, and
+never did the morning-star rise brighter on two human beings.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/flowerend.jpg" width="400" height="79" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a> At the canonization of a saint, the <i>Devil</i> was heard by
+<i>attorney</i>, in the shape of objections to the act. Jean Paul, with a
+slight variation of the sense of the old title, hints a converse process
+in Roquairol's case, making the better angel show cause why sentence of
+<i>damnation</i> should not be absolutely pronounced against him.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> Here began Jean Paul's second volume of the Titan.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> Ottar of Roses.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> The above description of Roquairol reminds one of a
+German <i>Sinn-spruch</i> on sensuality, from the Persian:&mdash;
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Make his reason serve his passions,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That is what man never should;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>To the Devil's kitchen, angels</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i2"><i>Never carry wood</i>."<br /></span>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> Simon's Christian Antiquities. Mursinna, &amp;c., p. 143.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a> Branch candlestick.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> Schlendrians,&mdash;of a slow fellow,&mdash;corresponding to our
+<i>old fogy</i>.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> Or Black-book.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> Allusion to the mode of angling for frogs with a bit of
+red cloth.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a> Spazier-sitzerinnen,&mdash;not <i>g&auml;ngerinnen</i>, i. e.
+street-walkers.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> <i>Zwinger</i> means, originally, the narrow space between
+town-walls and town.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> Literally, press something before his brow.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> Overseer, a Laced&aelig;monian officer.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> Strangers who are frozen are placed by the monks,
+unburied, beside each other, each leaning on the next one's breast.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a> Linda de Romeiro.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/shieldstart.jpg" width="550" height="131" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>ELEVENTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Embroidery.&mdash;Anglaise.&mdash;Cereus Serpens.&mdash;Musical Fantasies.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>56. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/j.jpg" width="100" height="107" alt="J" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_3">Joyfully did Roquairol, on the first evening when he knew his father had
+gone a journey, bear to his friend the invitation to go with him to his
+mother. Albano blushed charmingly for the first time, at the thought of
+that fiery night which had wrung from him the oldest mystery; for
+hitherto neither of them, in the common hours of life, had retouched the
+sacred subject. Only the Captain could easily and willingly speak of
+Linda as well as of every other loss.</p></div>
+
+<p>Liana always beheld her brother&mdash;the creator and ruling spirit of her
+softest hours&mdash;with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to
+get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book
+in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She
+and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately
+relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the
+Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the
+visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern
+chamber, from which he had seen, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> the first time, the dear maiden,
+only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns!
+The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her,
+after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling
+of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire,
+of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent
+consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of
+Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical,
+strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the
+flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten
+years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden;
+afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually
+at once thirteen and seventeen years old.</p>
+
+<p>Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting
+because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be
+avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious
+spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground
+to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and
+warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and
+brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet <i>proudly</i>,
+but so <i>affectionately</i>, that true pair of eyes!</p>
+
+<p>And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,&mdash;whose continuance
+is often, on <i>men's</i> faces, but not on <i>maidens'</i>, the title-vignette of
+falsehood,&mdash;she received our noble youth, but not him alone.</p>
+
+<p>She seated herself at the embroidery-frame; and the mother soon launched
+the Count out into the cool, high sea of general conversation, into
+which only occasionally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> the son threw up a green, warm island. Alban
+looked on to see how Liana made her mosaic flower-pieces grow; how the
+little white hand lay on the black satin ground (Froulay's <i>thorax</i> is
+to wear the flowers on his birthday), and how her pure brow, over which
+the curly hair transparently waved, bent forward, and how her face, when
+she spoke, or when she looked after new colors of silk, lifted itself
+up, animated with the higher glow of industry in the eye and on the
+cheek. Charles sometimes hastily stretched out his hand towards her. She
+willingly reached hers across; he laid it between his two, and turned it
+over, looked into the palm, pressed it with both hands, and the brother
+and sister smiled upon each other affectionately. And each time Albano
+turned from his conversation with the mother, and true-heartedly smiled
+with them. But poor hero! It is of itself a Herculean labor to sit idly
+by where fine work is going on, such as embroidery, miniature painting,
+&amp;c.; but above all, with a spirit like thine, which has so many sails,
+together with a couple of storms in behind, to lie inactively at anchor
+beside the embroidery-frame, and not to be, say, a spinning Hercules
+(that were easy), but only one that sees spinning,&mdash;and that, too, in
+the presence of a great spring and sunset out of doors,&mdash;and, in
+addition to all this, in the company of a mother, so chary of her words
+(in fact, before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to
+introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter),&mdash;these are sore
+things.</p>
+
+<p>He looked down sharply at the embroidered Flora. "Nothing pains me so
+much," said he,&mdash;for he always philosophized, and everything useless on
+the earth troubled him grievously,&mdash;"as that so many thousand artificial
+ornaments should be created in vain in the world, without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> a single eye
+ever meeting and enjoying them. It will touch me very nearly if this
+green leaflet here is not especially observed." With the same sorrow
+over fruitless, unenjoyed plantings of labor, he often shut his eyes
+upon wall-paper foliage, upon worked flowers, upon architectural
+decorations. Liana might have taken it as a painter's censure of the
+overladen stitch-garden, which, merely out of love for her father, she
+was sowing so full,&mdash;for Froulay, born in the days when they still
+trimmed the gold-lace with clothes, rather than the reverse, was fond of
+buttoning a little silk herbary round his body,&mdash;but she only smiled,
+and said, "Well, the little leaf has surely escaped that evil destiny:
+it <i>is</i> observed."</p>
+
+<p>"What matters a thing's being forgotten and useless?" said Roquairol,
+taking up the word, full of indifference to the Lector, who was just
+entering, and full of indifference to the opinion of his mother, to
+whom, as well as to his father, only the entreaties of his sister
+sometimes made him submissive. "Enough that a thing <i>is</i>. The birds sing
+and the stars move in majesty over the wildernesses, and no man sees the
+splendor. In fact, everywhere, in and out of man, more passes unseen
+than seen. Nature draws out of endless seas, and without exhausting
+them; we, too, are a nature, and should draw and pour out, and not be
+always anxiously reckoning upon the profit, for watering purposes, of
+every transient shower and rainbow. Just keep on embroidering, sister!"
+he concluded, ironically.</p>
+
+<p>"The Princess comes to-day!" said the Lector, and, delighted with the
+prospect, Liana kissed her mother's hand. She looked up often and
+confidentially from her embroidery at the courtier, who seemed to be
+very intimate, but who, as a refined man, was full as much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> respected
+and as respectful as if he were there for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>The announcement of the Princess set the Captain into a charming state
+of easy good-humor; a female part was to him as necessary for society as
+to the French for an opera, and the presence of a lady helped him as
+much in teaching, as the absence of a button did Kant.<a name="FNanchor_135_135" id="FNanchor_135_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_135_135" class="fnanchor">[135]</a> By way of
+drawing his sister off from the flowers, he removed the red veil from a
+statue on the card-table, and threw it, like a little red dawn, over the
+lilies on the face of the embroideress; just then the door opened and
+Julienne entered. Liana, trying to remove the veil, in her haste to
+welcome her, entangled herself in the little red dawn. Albano
+mechanically reached out to her his hand to relieve her of the veil, and
+she gave it to him, and a dear, full look besides. O how his enraptured
+eye shone!</p>
+
+<p>Julienne brought with her a train of <i>jeux d'esprit</i>. The Captain, who,
+like a pyrotechnist, could give his fire all forms and colors,
+reinforced her with his; and his sister sowed, as it were, the flowers
+with which the zephyrettes of raillery could play. Julienne almost said
+no to yes, and yes to no; only toward the Minister's lady was she
+serious and submissive,&mdash;a sign that, on her arena of disputation, among
+the grains of sand particles of golden sand still lay, whereas for
+philosophers the arena is the prize and the ground,&mdash;at once the
+battle-field, the <i>Champ de Mars</i>, and the <i>Champs Elysées</i>. Upon the
+Count she fixed her passionate gaze as boldly as only princesses may
+venture to and love to; and when he returned the glance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> of her brown
+eye, she cast it down; but she remembered him, from her old visit in
+Blumenbühl, and inquired after his friends. He now entered with pleasure
+upon something that was as ardent as his own soul,&mdash;encomiums. It is
+against the finest politeness to praise or blame persons with
+warmth,&mdash;things one may. While he portrayed with grateful remembrance
+his sister Rabette, Julienne became so earnestly and deeply absorbed in
+his eye, that she started, and asked the Lector about the steps of the
+<i>Anglaise</i> which he had led at the masquerade. When he had done his best
+to give an idea of it, she said she had not understood a word of what he
+had been saying; one must, after all, execute it.</p>
+
+<p>And herewith I suddenly introduce my fair readers in a body to a
+domestic ball of two couples. See the two sisters-in-soul, side by side,
+like two wings on <i>one</i> dove, harmoniously flutter up and down. Albano
+had expected Julienne would form a contrast, by nimble and sprightly
+fluttering, to the still, hovering movement of her friend; but both
+undulated lightly, like waves, by and through each other, and there was
+not a motion too much nor too swift.</p>
+
+<p>Hence I have so often wished that maidens might always dance exactly
+like the Graces and the Hours,&mdash;that is to say, only with one another,
+not with us gentlemen. The present union of the female wave-line with
+the masculine swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does
+not remarkably beautify the dance.</p>
+
+<p>Liana assumed a new ethereal form, somewhat as an angel while flying
+back into heaven lays aside his graceful earthly one. The dancing-floor
+is to woman's beauty what the horse's back is to ours; on both the
+mutual enchantment unfolds itself, and only a rider can match a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> dancing
+maiden. Fortunate Albano! thou who hardly dar'st take the finger-points
+of Liana's offered hand in thine! thou gettest enough. And only look at
+this friendly maiden, whose eyes and lips Charis so smilingly brightens
+for the dance, and who yet, on the other hand, appears so touchingly,
+because she is a little pale! How different from those capricious or
+inflexible step-sisters, who, with half a Cato of Utica on the wrinkled
+or tightly stretched face, hop, fall back, and slip round. Julienne
+flies joyfully to and fro; and it is hard to say before whose eyes she
+loves to flutter best, Liana's or Albano's.</p>
+
+<p>When it was done, Julienne wanted to begin over again. Liana looked at
+her mother, and immediately begged her friend rather for a cooling off.
+A mere pretext! A female friend loves to be alone with a female friend;
+the two loved each other before people only with a veil upon their
+hearts, and longed for the dark arbor where it might fall off. Liana had
+a real loving impatience, till she could, with her duplicate-soul, her
+twin-heart, snatch moments free from witnesses in the garden of evening
+and May. They came back changed and full of tender seriousness. The
+lovely beings were perhaps as like each other in their innermost souls
+and in stillness as in the dance, and more so than they seemed.</p>
+
+<p>And thus passed with our youth a fair-starred evening! Pardon him,
+however, that he grasped and pressed this nosegay so close as to feel
+some of the thorns. His heart, whose love grew painfully near another,
+could not help finding this other, where there was no sign of response,
+at once <i>higher</i> and <i>farther</i> off. Her love was love of man,&mdash;her smile
+was meant for every kind eye,&mdash;she was so cheerful. In Lilar she easily
+passed into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> emotion and general contemplations; not so here,&mdash;of course
+she would look right sympathetically upon her wildly loving brother,
+who, since that confession-night, had twined himself as if with
+oak-roots around the darling; but her half-blind love for the brother
+might indeed be only, in the deceiving light of reflection, shining upon
+<i>his</i> friend. All this the modest one said to himself. But what he had
+enjoyed in full measure of ecstasy was the increasing, clear, tender,
+steadfast love of his soul's-brother.</p>
+
+
+<h3>57. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>As to Liana's secret inclination and Zesara's prospects I shall never
+once institute any conjectures, although I might erase them again before
+printing. I remember what came of it, when I and others, on a former
+occasion, covered over with our hands Hafenreffer's official reports
+upon matters of consequence, and undertook to unfold at length, by pure
+fancy, how things might have gone on;&mdash;it was of no use! And naturally
+enough; for women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, many <i>doors</i>
+and few <i>windows</i>, and it is easier to <i>get</i> into their hearts than to
+<i>look</i> into them. Particularly maidens', I mean; since women,
+physiognomically and morally, are more strongly marked and boldly
+developed, I would rather undertake to guess at and so portray ten
+mothers than two daughters. The bodily portrait-painters make the same
+complaint.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever observes the influence of night, will find that the doubts and
+anxieties which he had contracted the evening previous about the heroine
+of his life it has, for the most part, completely killed by the time it
+gets to be towards morning. Albano, in the spring morning, opened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> his
+eyes upon life as in a triumphal car, and the fresh steeds stamped
+before it, and he could only let them have the reins.</p>
+
+<p>He alighted with his friend at Liana's after a few years, that is, days;
+the Minister had not yet come back. Heavens! how new and bloomingly
+young was her form, and yet how unchanged her demeanor! Why is it,
+thought he, that I can get only her motions, not all her features, by
+heart? Why can I not imprint this face, even to the least smile, like a
+holy antique, cleanly and deeply upon my brain, that so it may float
+before me in eternal presence? For this reason, my dear: young and
+beautiful forms are the very ones which are hard for the memory as for
+the pencil; and coarse, old, masculine ones easier for both. Again he
+filled himself with joys and sighs by looking at her,&mdash;and these were
+increased by the nearness of the garden, wherein June with his evening
+splendor lay encamped. O, if only <i>one</i> moment could come to him, in
+which his whole soul might speak its inspiration! Out of doors there lay
+the young, fiery spring, basking, like an Antinoüs, in the garden, and
+the moon, impatient for the fair June-night, stood already under the
+gate of the east, and found the living day and the lingering sun still
+in the field. But the mother refused to the asking look of Liana the
+sight of sunset,&mdash;"on account of the unwholesome <i>Serein</i>."<a name="FNanchor_136_136" id="FNanchor_136_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_136_136" class="fnanchor">[136]</a> Albano,
+with his heart full of manly blood, thought this maternal barrier around
+a child's health very small.</p>
+
+<p>The hour for shutting gates upon to-day's Eden would have struck for him
+the next minute, had it not been for the Captain and the <i>Cereus
+serpens</i>.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span></p>
+<p>The Captain came running down from the Italian roof, and announced that
+the Cereus would bloom this evening at ten o'clock, the gardener said,
+and he should stay there. "And thou too," he said to Albano. All that
+the double limitations of forbearing tenderness toward sister and friend
+would allow he lovingly set at stake, for the sake of pleasing the
+latter. Liana herself begged him to wait for the blooming; she was so
+delighted to find it was so near! Her soul hung upon flowers, like bees
+and dew. Already had her friend, the pious Spener, who fixed an
+enraptured eye upon these living arabesques of God's throne, made her a
+friend to these mute, ever-sleeping children of the Infinite; but still
+more had her own maidenly and her suffering heart done it. Have you
+never met tender, female souls, into whose blossoming time fate had
+thrown cold clouds, and who now, like Rousseau, sought other flowers
+than those of joy, and who wearied themselves with stooping, in valleys
+and on rocks, to gather and to forget, and to fly from the dead <i>Pomona</i>
+to the young <i>Flora</i>? The thorough-bass and Latin, wherewith <i>Hermes</i>
+proposes to divert maidens, must yield here to the broad, variegated
+hieroglyphics of Nature, the rich study of Botany.</p>
+
+<p>A nameless tenderness for Liana came into Albano's soul at the little
+four-seated supper-table; it seemed to him as if he were now nearer to
+her, and a relative; and yet he comprehended not his kinswoman, when,
+from every serious mood into which her mother sank, she strove to win
+her back with pleasantries. Out of doors the nightingales were calling
+man into the lovely night; and no one pined more to be abroad than he.</p>
+
+<p>For the soul's eyes, the <i>blue</i> of heaven is what the <i>green</i> of earth
+is to the bodily eyes, namely, an inward strengthening.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> When Zesara, at
+length, came free and clear out of the fetters of the room,&mdash;out of this
+spiritual house-arrest into the free realm of heaven, and beneath all
+the stars and on the magic Olympus of statues, at which he had so often
+longingly looked up,&mdash;then did his forcibly contracted breast
+elastically expand: how the constellations of life moved to meet each
+other in brighter forms; how did spring and night sit enthroned!</p>
+
+<p>The old gardener, who, simply from a grateful attachment to "the
+good-souled, condescending Fr&auml;ulein," had, with rare pains, forced these
+early blossoms from the <i>Cereus serpens</i>, stood up there already,
+apparently as an observer of the flowers, but in fact as an expectant of
+the greatest praise, with a brown, indented, pitted, and serious face,
+which did not challenge praise with a single smile.</p>
+
+<p>Liana thanked the gardener before she came to the blossoms; then she
+praised them and his pains. The old man merely waited for every other
+one of the company to be astonished also; then he went drowsily off to
+bed, with a firm faith that Liana would to-morrow remember him in such a
+way as to make him contented.</p>
+
+<p>The exotic beads of nectar-fragrance which hung in five white calyxes,
+crowned as it were with brown leaf-work, seized the fancy. The odors
+from the spring of a hotter clime drew it away into remote dreams. Liana
+only stroked with a soft finger, as one glides over eyelids, the little
+incense-vases, without touching with predatory hand the full little
+garden of tender stamina which crowded together in the cup. "How lovely,
+how very tender!" said she, with childlike happiness. "What a cluster of
+five little evening stars! Why come they only by night,&mdash;the dear, shy
+little flowers?" Charles seemed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> to be on the point of breaking one. "O
+let it live!" she begged; "to-morrow they will all have died of
+themselves. Charles! thus does so much else fade," she added, in a lower
+tone. "Everything!" said he, sharply. But the mother, against Liana's
+will, had heard it. "Such death-thoughts," said she, "I love not in
+youth; they lame its wings." "And then," replied Liana, with a
+maiden-like turning of the tables, "it just stays with us, that's all,
+like the crane in Kleist's fable, whose wings they broke, so that he
+could not travel with the rest into the warm land."</p>
+
+<p>This gay, motley veil of deep earnestness was not transparent enough for
+our friend. But by and by the good maiden took pains to look just as the
+careful mother wished. The benumbing lily which the earth wears on her
+breast, the moon; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens;
+and the city, with its pierced-work of night-lights; and the high,
+majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white
+lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and
+the nightingales singing out of distant gardens;&mdash;did not all this stir
+omnipotently every heart, till it would fain confess with tears its
+longing? And the softest heart of all which beat at this moment below
+the stars, could it have succeeded in wholly veiling itself? Almost! She
+had accustomed herself, before her mother, to dry away with her eye, so
+to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall.</p>
+
+<p>Singular was her appearance, the next minute, to the Count. The mother
+was speaking with her son; Liana stood, far from the latter, with face
+turned half aside, and a little discolored by the moon, near a white
+statue of the holy Virgin, and looking out into the night. All at once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>
+she looked upon him and smiled, just as if a living being had appeared
+to her in the abyss of ether, and her lip would speak. Earthly form more
+exalted and touching had never before met his eyes; the balustrade by
+which he held swayed to and fro (but it was he himself who shook it),
+and his whole soul cried, "To-day, now, I love the heavenly one with the
+highest, the deepest love I have felt." So he also said lately, and so
+will he say oftener: can man, with the innumerable waves of love,
+institute measurements of altitude, and point to that one which has
+mounted the highest? Thus does man, whereever he may be standing, always
+imagine himself standing in the centre of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, at this moment he was again surprised, but it was with an "Ah!"
+Liana went to her mother, and when <i>she</i> felt in the hand of her darling
+a slight shudder, she importuned her to go out of the night-air, and
+would not give over till she left with her the magic spot.</p>
+
+<p>The friends stayed behind. According to Albano's reckoning, it would
+not, of course, have been too much, if, in this frank time, wherein our
+holier thoughts, hidden by the common light of day, reveal themselves
+like stars, they had all lingered on the roof till toward morning. The
+two walked for a time up and down in silence. At last the incense-altar
+of the five flowers held them fast. Albano clasped accidentally the
+neighboring statue with both hands, and said: "On high places, one wants
+to throw something down,&mdash;even himself oftentimes; and I, too, would
+fain throw myself off into the world, into far-distant lands, as often
+as I gaze into the nightly redness yonder, and as often as I come under
+orangery-blossoms, as under these. Brother, how is it with thee? The
+heavens and the earth open out so broadly: why, then,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> must the spirit
+so creep into itself?" "Just so do I feel," said he; "and in the head,
+generally, has the spirit more room than in the heart." But here, by a
+delicate guess, he arrived, through agreeably circuitous routes, at the
+accidental discovery of the reason why his sister had hurried down so
+soon.</p>
+
+<p>"Even to obstinacy," said he, "she pushes her care for her mother. The
+last time, when she observed that mother saw her grow pale under the
+dance, she immediately ceased. To me alone she shows her whole heart,
+and every drop of blood, and all innocent tears therein; especially does
+she believe something in respect to the future, which she anxiously
+conceals from mother." "She smiled to herself just before she went
+away," said Albano, and drew Charles's hand over his eyes, "as if she
+saw up there a being from the veiled world." "Didst thou too see that?"
+replied Charles. "And then did her lip stir? O friend, God knows what
+infatuates her; but this is certain, she firmly believes she is to die
+next year." Albano would not let him speak further. Too intensely
+excited, he pressed himself to his friend's breast; his heart beat
+wildly, and he said: "O brother, remain always my friend!"</p>
+
+<p>They went down. In the apartment which adjoined Liana's they found her
+piano-forte open. Now that was just what the Count had missed. In
+passion&mdash;even in mere fire of the brain&mdash;one grasps not so much at the
+pen as at the string; and in that state alone does musical fantasying
+succeed better than poetic. Albano, thanking, meanwhile, the muse of
+sweet sounds that there were forty-four transitions,<a name="FNanchor_137_137" id="FNanchor_137_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_137_137" class="fnanchor">[137]</a> seated himself
+at the keys, with the intention now to beat a musical fire-drum, and
+roar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span> like a storm into the still ashes, and drive out a clear,
+sparkling swarm of tones. He did it, too, and well enough, and better
+and better; but the instrument struggled, rebelled. It was built for a
+female hand, and would only speak in female tones, with lute-plaints, as
+a woman with a friend of her own sex.</p>
+
+<p>Charles had never heard him play so, and was astonished at such fulness.
+But the reason was, the Lector was not there; before certain
+persons&mdash;and he was one of them&mdash;the playing hand freezes, so that one
+only labors and lumbers to and fro in a pair of leaden gloves; and,
+secondly, before a multitude it is easier playing than before one,
+because the latter stands definitely before the soul, the former floats
+vaguely. And, besides all that, blessed Albano, thou knowest who hears
+thee. The morning air of hope flutters around thee in tones,&mdash;the wild
+life of youth stalks with vigorous limbs and loud strides up and down
+before thee,&mdash;the moonlight, undesecrated by any gross earthly light,
+hallows the sounding apartment. Liana's last songs lie open before thee,
+and the advancing moonshine will let thee read them soon,&mdash;and the
+nightingale in the mother's neighboring chamber contends with thy tones,
+as if summoned by the Tuba to the field.</p>
+
+<p>Liana came in with her mother, not till late, because the heavy din of
+tones had something in it hard and painful to both. He could see the two
+sitting sidewise at the lower window, and how Liana held her mother's
+hand. Charles, after his manner, walked up and down with long steps, and
+sometimes stood still near him. Albano, in this nearness of the still
+soul, soon came out of the wilderness of harmony into simple moonlit
+passages, where only a few tones moved delicately like graces, and quite
+as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> lightly linked as they. The artistical hurly-burly of unharmonious
+<i>ignes fatui</i> is only the forerunner of the melodious Charites; and
+these alone insinuate themselves into the softer souls. It seemed to
+him&mdash;the illusion was complete&mdash;as if he were speaking aloud with Liana;
+and when the tones, like lovers, went on ever repeating the same thing
+from heartiness and zest, did he not mean Liana, and say to her, "How I
+love thee! O how I love thee!" Did he not ask her, "Why mournest thou?
+why weepest thou?" And did he not say to her, "Look into this mute
+heart, and fly not from it, O pure, innocent one, my own!"</p>
+
+<p>How did the good youth blush, when suddenly the caressing friend placed
+his hands over <i>his</i> friend's eyes, which hitherto, unseen in the
+darkness, had been overflowing for love! Charles stepped warmly to his
+sister, and she, of her own accord, took his hand and said words of
+love. Then Albano took refuge in the murmuring wilderness of sounds,
+until his eyes were dried enough for the leave-taking by lamp-light; by
+slow degrees he let the cradle of our heart cease rocking, and closed so
+mildly and faintly, and was silent for a little while, and then slowly
+rose. O, in this mute, young bosom lived every blessed thing which the
+most glorious love can bestow!</p>
+
+<p>They parted seriously. No one spoke of the music. Liana seemed
+transfigured. Albano dared not, in this spirit-hour of the heart, with
+an eye which had so recently calmed itself, rest long upon her mild blue
+ones. Her deeply touched soul expressed itself, as maidens are wont, to
+her brother only, and that by a more ardent embrace. And from the holy
+youth she could not, in parting,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> conceal the tone and the look, which
+he will never forget.</p>
+
+<p>That night he awoke often, and knew not what it was that so blissfully
+rocked his being. Ah! it was the tone whose echo rang through his
+slumber, and the dear eye which still looked upon him in his dreams.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_135_135" id="Footnote_135_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_135_135"><span class="label">[135]</span></a> He is said, in teaching, to have always looked at the
+spot on a student's coat where the button was gone; and was embarrassed
+when it was sewed on again.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_136_136" id="Footnote_136_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_136_136"><span class="label">[136]</span></a> The evening hour, which people in southern countries shun
+so much.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137_137" id="Footnote_137_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_137_137"><span class="label">[137]</span></a> From one key to another.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span></p>
+<h2>TWELFTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Froulay's Birthday and Projects.&mdash;Extra-Leaf.&mdash;Babette.&mdash;The
+Harmonica.&mdash;Night.&mdash;The pious Father.&mdash;The wondrous
+Stairway.&mdash;The Apparition.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>58. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/h.jpg" width="100" height="109" alt="H" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">Happy Albano! thou wouldst not have remained so, hadst thou, on the
+birthday of the Minister, heard what he then proposed!</p></div>
+
+<p>Already, for a considerable time, had Froulay been full of noticeable,
+stormy signs, and might any moment, one must needs fear, let the
+thunderbolt fly from him; that is to say, he was gay and mild. Thus,
+also, in the case of phlegmatic children, does great liveliness threaten
+an eruption of the chicken-pox. As he was a father and a despot,&mdash;(the
+Greeks had for both only the one word, despot,)&mdash;so was it expected of
+him, as connubial storm-maker,<a name="FNanchor_138_138" id="FNanchor_138_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_138_138" class="fnanchor">[138]</a> that he would provide the usual
+storms and foul weather for his family. Connubial storm-material for the
+mere <i>troubling</i> of marriage can never be wanting, when one considers
+how little is required even for its dissolution; for instance, among
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> Jews, merely that the woman scream too loud, burn the dinner, leave
+her shoes in the place for the man's, &amp;c. Beside all this, there was
+much in the present case about which there was a good chance to thunder;
+e. g. Liana, upon whom one might visit the misdemeanor of the brother,
+because he obstinately stayed away and begged for no grace. One always
+loves to let his indignation loose upon wife, daughter, and son at once,
+and would rather be a land-rain than a transient shower; one child can
+more easily imbitter than sweeten a whole family.</p>
+
+<p>But Froulay still continued the smiling John. Nay, did he not&mdash;I have
+the proofs&mdash;carry it so far, that when, on one occasion, his daughter,
+in taking leave of the Princess, fell upon her neck,&mdash;instead of
+representing to her, with flashing eyes, how one must only accept, not
+reciprocate, familiarities with superiors, and must take care not to
+forget one's self precisely then, when <i>they</i> do forget themselves,&mdash;and
+instead of sternly asking whether she had ever seen him, in his warmest
+love toward the Prince, offend against <i>the Dehors</i>,&mdash;instead, I say, of
+doing this, and hailing and storming the while, did he not merely break
+out that once into the fair words: "Child, thou art too affectionate
+toward thy distinguished friend; ask thy mother; she knows, too, what
+friendly <i>liaisons</i> are"?</p>
+
+<p>Only Liana&mdash;although so often deceived by these calms&mdash;was full of
+unutterable hope and joy at the domestic peace, and believed in its
+permanence, especially as the paternal birthday was so near, that
+Olympiad and normal period upon which and by which the house reckoned so
+largely. During the whole year the Minister had been looking out for
+this day, in order, in the morning, when the congratulations came, not
+to forget<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> to make believe he had forgotten it, but to be astonished on
+the subject,&mdash;all owing to business, he said; and at evening, when the
+guests came,&mdash;on account of business he never dined, he said, to
+astonish <i>them</i>. He was alternately the worshipper and image-breaker of
+etiquette, ministerial and opposition party thereof, as his vanity
+dictated.</p>
+
+<p>Liana importuned her brother, till he promised to do something to please
+his father; he composed, for the purpose, a family-piece, in which he
+introduced the whole confession-night between himself and Albano, only
+he converted Albano into a sister. Liana gladly studied this part also
+for the birthday, although she had to deliver the blooming vest.</p>
+
+<p>The Minister, contrary to expectation, accepted the vest, the Captain
+and his hand-bill for the evening's performance, graciously; for he was
+wont, on former occasions, like some other fathers, to growl the louder
+the more his children stroked him. He danced away like a Polack right
+merrily with his family, and stuck the rod<a name="FNanchor_139_139" id="FNanchor_139_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_139_139" class="fnanchor">[139]</a> behind the fur. Nothing
+worse at this moment revolved in his head than the question, where it
+would be best to open the amateur theatre, whether in the <i>Salon de
+Lecture</i> or in the <i>Salon des bains domestiques</i>; for the two halls were
+entirely distinguished from one another, and from the other chambers, by
+their names.</p>
+
+<p>The day came. Albano, whose invitation Charles had to extort, because
+the Minister, out of pride, hated his pride, brought with him,
+unfortunately, in his soul, the tone which Liana had given him the last
+time to carry home with him. His hope had hitherto lived upon this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>
+tone. O blame him not for it! The airy nothing of a sigh bears often a
+pastoral world or an orcus on its ephemeron's-wing. Everything weighty
+may, like a rock, be placed on a point, whereupon a child's finger can
+set it in rotation.</p>
+
+<p>But the tone had died away. Liana knew no other way than that, in the
+visiting congregation,&mdash;of whose moral pneumatophobia,<a name="FNanchor_140_140" id="FNanchor_140_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_140_140" class="fnanchor">[140]</a> after all,
+she was not aware in its full extent,&mdash;one should hide every religious
+emotion behind the church fan. Boxes, pit, and farthing gallery were,
+almost at the usual play-hour, set off and filled out with Gratulantes,
+all fit to be canons. The German gentleman was made particularly
+prominent by the rich and insolent ostentation of his circumstances. Of
+the visiting-company-lane it can, in passing, only be observed, that in
+it, as in the antiphlogistic system, <i>oxygen</i><a name="FNanchor_141_141" id="FNanchor_141_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_141_141" class="fnanchor">[141]</a> played the chief
+part, which, however, was given out less by the lungs than by the heart.</p>
+
+<p>When the curtain rose, and Roquairol made that night of forgiveness and
+ecstasy pass by again in a still more glowing form than it had actually
+had; when this dreamy imitation seemed the first appearance of the
+actual reality, how hotly and deeply did he burn himself thereby into
+his friend's soul! (Good Albano! This art of being his own <i>revenant</i>,
+his own ghost, his mock- and mimic-self, and of counterfeiting the
+splendid edition of his own life, should have left thee smaller hopes!)
+The Count must needs, in this most grave society that ever sate around
+him, break out into an unseemly weeping. And why did Charles put
+Albano's words, of that memorable night, into the mouth of Liana, so
+bewitchingly interesting in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> her emotion, and thus make his love,
+wrought upon by so many charms, grow even to anguish?</p>
+
+<p>The German gentleman himself gave to Liana, that white swan, floating,
+tinged with rosy redness, through the evening glow of Phœbus, several
+loud, and to the Count annoying signs of approbation. The Minister was
+chiefly glad that all this happened in his honor, and that the point of
+the last act was still going to throw a very special epigrammatic
+laurel-wreath on his crown.</p>
+
+<p>He got the wreath. The pair of children were very favorably criticised
+by the Erlangen literary gazette<a name="FNanchor_142_142" id="FNanchor_142_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_142_142" class="fnanchor">[142]</a> of spectators, and by the
+belles-lettres review, and covered over with crowns,&mdash;with noble
+martyrs' crowns. The German gentleman had and used the public right of
+ushering in the Coronation, and the Coronation-car. Base man! why should
+thy beetle's-eyes be permitted to creep gnawingly over the holy roses
+which emotion and sisterly love plants on Liana's cheeks? But how much
+gayer still was the old gentleman,&mdash;so much so that he flirted with the
+oldest ladies,&mdash;when he saw the knight bring out magnificently into full
+daylight his interest in Liana, not fantastically or sentimentally, but
+by still and steady advances and marked attention, by jokes and glances
+and sly addresses, and at last by something decisive! That is to say,
+the German gentleman drew the old man into a cabinet, and both came back
+out of it vehemently animated.</p>
+
+<p>The lovely Liana, withdrawn into her own heart, fled from the upas-tree
+of the laurel away to her comforting mother. Liana had preserved, in the
+midst of the stormy mill-races of daily <i>assemblées</i>, a low voice and a
+delicate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> ear, and the tumult had driven her inward, and left her almost
+shy.</p>
+
+<p>The fair soul seldom guessed anything, except a fair soul: she so easily
+divined her like; with such difficulty her counterpart. Bouverot's
+advances seemed to her the usual forward and side steps of manly
+courtesy; and his knightly celibacy did not allow her entirely to
+understand him. Do not the lilies of innocence bloom earlier than the
+roses of shame, as the purple color, in the beginning, only dyes pale,
+and not till afterward puts on the red glow, when it lies before the
+sun? She kept herself this evening near her mother, because she
+perceived in her an unwonted seriousness. When Froulay had taken off
+from his head the birthday garland, wherein were planted more thorns and
+stalks than flowers,&mdash;when he had taken off the crown of thorns, and
+stood in his night-cap amidst his family,&mdash;he addressed himself to the
+business whereupon he had been thinking all the evening. "My little
+dove," said he to his daughter, borrowing a good expression from the
+Bastile,<a name="FNanchor_143_143" id="FNanchor_143_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_143_143" class="fnanchor">[143]</a>&mdash;"my little dove, leave me and <i>Guillemette</i> alone." He
+now laid bare his upper teeth by a characteristic grin, and said he had,
+as he hoped, something agreeable to communicate to her. "You know," he
+continued, "what I owe to the German gentleman." He meant not thanks,
+but money and consideration.</p>
+
+<p>We love to dwell upon it as a matter of great praise in the family of
+the Quintii,<a name="FNanchor_144_144" id="FNanchor_144_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_144_144" class="fnanchor">[144]</a> that they never possessed gold: I adduce&mdash;without
+arraying a thousand other families of whom the same is to be sworn&mdash;only
+Froulay's. Certain families, like antimony, have no chemical affinity
+whatever with that metal, however much they might wish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> it; certainly
+Froulay wished it: he looked very much to his interest (to nothing
+else), he willingly (although only in cases of collision) set conscience
+and honor aside; but he got no further than to great outlays and great
+projects, simply because he sought money, not as the end and aim of his
+ambition, but only as the means of ambition and enterprise. Even for
+some pictures which Bouverot had purchased for the Prince in Italy he
+still owed that individual the purchase-shilling which he had taken out
+of the treasury. By his bonds as if by circulars, he stood in
+widely-extended connections. He would gladly have transposed his
+marriage contract into a bond, and had, with his lady, at least that
+most intimate community&mdash;of goods; for, under present circumstances,
+divorce and bankruptcy stood in neighborly relations to each other; but,
+as was said, many men, with the best talons,&mdash;like the eagle of the
+Romish king,<a name="FNanchor_145_145" id="FNanchor_145_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_145_145" class="fnanchor">[145]</a>&mdash;have nothing in them.</p>
+
+<p>He continued: "Now, perhaps, this <i>géne</i> will cease. Have you hitherto
+made any observations upon him?" She shook her head. "I have," he
+replied, "for a long time, and such as were really consoling to
+me,&mdash;<i>j'avais le nez bon quant à cela</i>,&mdash;he has a real liking for my
+Liana."</p>
+
+<p>The Minister's lady here could draw no inference, and begged him, with
+disguised astonishment, to come to the <i>agreeable</i> matter. Comically on
+his face did the show of friendship wrestle with the expectation that he
+should be under the necessity immediately of being exasperated. He
+replied: "Is not <i>this</i> an agreeable matter? The knight means it in
+earnest. He wished now to be privately<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> espoused to her; after three
+years he retires from the order, and her fortune is made. <i>Vous &ecirc;tes, je
+l'espere, pour cette fois, un peu sur mes inter&ecirc;ts, ils sont les
+v&ocirc;tres.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Her maternal heart, so suddenly and deeply wounded, wept, and could
+hardly be concealed. "Herr von Froulay!" said she, when she had composed
+herself a little; "I do not disguise my astonishment. Such a disparity
+in years, in tastes, in religion."<a name="FNanchor_146_146" id="FNanchor_146_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_146_146" class="fnanchor">[146]</a></p>
+
+<p>"That is the knight's affair, not ours," he replied, refreshed by her
+angry confusedness, and, like the weather, in his coldness threw only
+fine, sharp snow, no hail. "As to Liana's heart, I beg you just to sound
+that." "O, that innocent heart? You are mocking!" "<i>Posito!</i> so much the
+more gladly will the <i>innocent</i> heart reconcile itself to make her
+father's fortune, if she is not the greatest egotist. I should never
+love to constrain an obedient daughter." "<i>N'epuiséz pas ce chapitre;
+mon cœur est en presse.</i> It will cost her her life, which already
+hangs by such frail threads." This allusion always struck the fire of
+wrath from his flint. "<i>Tant mieux</i>," said he; "then it will never go
+further than an engagement! I had almost said&mdash;<i>Sacre!</i> and who is to
+blame for that? So it fares with me at the hands of the Captain too,&mdash;in
+the beginning my children promise everything, then they turn out
+nothing. But, madam," he said, swiftly and venomously collecting
+himself; and, instead of compressing his lips and teeth, merely pinching
+moderately the auditory organs of a sleeping lap-dog; "you alone indeed
+know, by your influence upon Liana, how to dress and redress everything.
+Perhaps she belongs to you by a still prior claim than to me. I am not
+then compromitted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> with the knight. The advantages I detail no further."
+His breast was here already warmed under the vulture-skin of rage.</p>
+
+<p>But the noble lady now indignantly rose, and said: "Herr von Froulay!
+hitherto I have not spoken of myself. Never will I counsel or
+countenance or consent to it,&mdash;I will do the opposite. Herr von Bouverot
+is not worthy of my Liana."</p>
+
+<p>The Minister, during this speech, had several times unnecessarily
+snapped-to the snuffers over the wax candles, and only beheaded the
+point of the flame; the fixed air of wrath now colored the roses of his
+lips (as the chemical does botanical ones) blue. "<i>Bon!</i>" he replied, "I
+travel; you can reflect on the subject,&mdash;but I give my word of honor,
+that I never consent to any other match; and though it were (whereupon
+he looked at the lady ironically) still more considerable<a name="FNanchor_147_147" id="FNanchor_147_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_147_147" class="fnanchor">[147]</a> than the
+one just projected,&mdash;either the maiden obeys or she suffers, <i>decidéz</i>!
+<i>Mais je me fie à l'amour que vous portéz au pere et à la fille; vous
+nous rendréz tous ass&ecirc;z contens.</i>" And then he went forth, not like a
+tempest, but like a rainbow, which he manufactured out of the eighth
+color only, namely, the black, and that with his eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>After some days of resentment with the mother and the daughter, he rode,
+as Luigi's business-agent, to Haarhaar to see the princely bride. The
+oppressed mother confided to her oldest and only friend, the Lector, the
+sad secret. The two had now a pure relation of friendship toward one
+another, which, in France, in consequence of the higher respect for
+women, is more common. In the first years of the ministerial forced
+marriage, which dawned not with morning dew, but with morning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> frost,
+perhaps the hawk-moth<a name="FNanchor_148_148" id="FNanchor_148_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_148_148" class="fnanchor">[148]</a> Cupid fluttered after them; but by and by
+children drove away this sphinx. The wife is often forgotten when she
+becomes the mother. She, therefore, with her characteristic cool and
+clear strength, took all that was ambiguous in her relation to Augusti
+forever out of the way; and he made her firmness more easy by his own,
+because he, with more love of honor than of women, grew not more red at
+any kind of braided-work than at that of a basket,<a name="FNanchor_149_149" id="FNanchor_149_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_149_149" class="fnanchor">[149]</a> and erroneously
+believed that a man who receives it, has as much to be ashamed of as a
+woman who does.</p>
+
+<p>The Lector could foresee that she would also, after her divorce,&mdash;which
+she postponed only for Liana's sake,&mdash;remain single, if only for this
+reason, in order not to deprive her daughter of an allodial estate,
+Klosterdorf, for the reservation of which she had now for one and twenty
+years exposed herself to the battering-ram and scythe-chariot and
+blunderbuss of the old Minister. Whether she was not even silently
+intending her dear Liana for a man so firm and tender, who differed from
+her in nothing but in a worldly coolness toward positive religion, is
+another and more delicate question. Such a reciprocal gift were worthy
+such a mother and friend, who must know from her heart, that combined
+feelings of tenderness and honor prepare for a loved soul a surer bliss
+than the love which genius offers, that alternation of flying heat and
+flying cold,&mdash;that fire which, like the electric, always twice
+destroys,&mdash;in the stroke and in the rebound. The Lector himself started
+not that question; for he never made rash, unsafe plans; and what one
+would have been more so than that of such a connection,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> in his poverty,
+or with such a father-in-law, in a country where, as in the Electorate
+of Saxony, a statute, so beneficial (for parents), can countermand even
+a marriage of many years' standing, which has been concluded without
+parental consent?</p>
+
+<p>With moist eyes the Minister's lady showed him the new storm-clouds,
+which had again descended upon her and her Liana. She could build upon
+his fine eye for the world, upon his dumb lip and upon his ready hand
+for business. He said, as ever, he had foreseen all this; but proved to
+her that Bouverot, if only from avarice, would never exchange his
+knightly cross for the wedding-ring, whatever designs he might cherish
+with regard to Liana. He gave her to surmise, so far as a tender regard
+to her sore relations would tolerate, to what degree of readiness for
+compliance with Bouverot's wishes the very frailty of Liana's life might
+allure the Minister, in order to harvest it before it had done blooming.
+For Froulay could much more nimbly swallow demands against honor than
+injuries done to his vanity, as the victim of hydrophobia can much more
+easily get down solid morsels than fluids. Yet all this did not sound so
+immorally hard to the Minister's lady as readers of the middling classes
+might imagine; I appeal to the more sensible among the higher.</p>
+
+<p>Augusti and the Minister's lady saw that something must certainly be
+done for Liana during the Minister's absence; and both wonderfully
+coincided in their project. Liana must go into the country this pleasant
+season,&mdash;she must muster up health for the wars that were in
+prospect,&mdash;she must be put out of the way of the knight's visits, which
+now the birthday would multiply fourfold,&mdash;even the Minister must have
+nothing to object to the place. And where can this be? Simply under the
+roof<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> of the Director Wehrfritz, who cannot endure the German gentleman,
+because he knows his poisonous relation to the Prince. But of course
+there are first still other mountains to be climbed than that which lies
+on the way to Blumenbühl.</p>
+
+<p>The reader himself must now get over a low one; and that is a short
+comico-tragic Extra-leaf upon</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">The Green-Market of Daughters.</span></h4>
+
+<p>The following is certain: every owner of a very beautiful or very rich
+daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt under his roof, which to himself is
+of no service, and which he must put to its first use after it has long
+lain idle, by selling it to a <i>Regent</i>.<a name="FNanchor_150_150" id="FNanchor_150_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_150_150" class="fnanchor">[150]</a> Strictly and commercially
+speaking, daughters are not an article of trade; for the parental grand
+adventurers no one can confound with those female dealers in second-hand
+frippery, and stall-women, whose transit-business one does not love to
+name; but a stock, with which one gains in a South Sea, or a clod,
+wherewith one transfers symbolically (<i>scortatione</i>) real estate. "<i>Je
+ne vends que mes paysages et donne les figures par dessus le
+marche</i>,"<a name="FNanchor_151_151" id="FNanchor_151_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_151_151" class="fnanchor">[151]</a> said Claude Lorraine, like a father,&mdash;and could easily
+say it, because he had the figures painted in his landscapes by
+<i>others</i>;&mdash;even so in the purchase or marriage-contract only the
+knightly seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them is
+thrown into the bargain. Even so, higher up, is a princess merely a
+blooming twig, which a princely sponsor plucks off and carries home, not
+for the sake of the <i>fruits</i>, but because a <i>bee-swarm</i> of lands and
+people has attached itself thereto.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span></p><p>If a father, like our Minister, has not much, then he can pawn his
+children, as the Egyptians did their parents (namely, the mummies of
+them), as mortgages and hand-pledges or imperial pawns, which are not
+redeemed.</p>
+
+<p>At present the mercantile order, which formerly dealt only in foreign
+products, has got possession of this branch of commerce also; methinks,
+however, they might find room enough in their lower vaults to be selfish
+and damned, without going up stairs to the daughter. In Guinea only the
+nobility can trade; with us they are cut off and debarred from almost
+all trade, except the small trade in daughters, and the few other things
+which grow on their own estates; hence is it that they hold so fast to
+this liberty of trade, and that the noblesse seem here to be a Hanse
+alliance for this delicate branch of business; so that one may, in some
+manner, compare the high standing<a name="FNanchor_152_152" id="FNanchor_152_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_152_152" class="fnanchor">[152]</a> of this class with the <i>higher</i>
+one (in a literal sense) which marketable people in Rome were obliged to
+mount<a name="FNanchor_153_153" id="FNanchor_153_153"></a><a href="#Footnote_153_153" class="fnanchor">[153]</a> in order to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>It is a common objection of young and (so-called) sensitive hearts, that
+this sort of transaction very much constrains, or in fact crushes love;
+whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation for it as this very
+thing. For when the bargain is once concluded and entered by the
+bookkeeper (the parson) in the ledger, then does the time truly come on
+when the daughter can consider and provide for her heart, namely, the
+fair season after marriage, which is universally assumed in France and
+Italy, and is gradually coming to be in Germany also, as the more
+suitable time for a female heart to choose freely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> among the host of
+men; her state then, like the Venetian, grows out of a commercial into a
+conquering one. The husband himself, too, is quite as little interrupted
+afterward as beforehand in his love by this short business transaction;
+all is, that now&mdash;as in Nuremberg every Jew is followed by an old
+woman&mdash;close upon the heels of our bridegroom a young one is seen. Nay,
+often, the nuptial tradesman conceives an inclination even for the
+article which he has carried home with him,&mdash;which is an uncommon piece
+of good fortune; and as Moses Mendelssohn, with his bundle of silken
+wares under his arm, thought out his <i>letters</i> upon the <i>affections</i>, so
+do better men, amidst their business, meditate love-letters on this
+branch of trade, and deal with the virgin&mdash;as merchants in Messina<a name="FNanchor_154_154" id="FNanchor_154_154"></a><a href="#Footnote_154_154" class="fnanchor">[154]</a>
+do with the holy virgin&mdash;in Co.; but of course such profitable
+connections of love with business must always be rare birds, and are
+little to be counted upon.</p>
+
+<p>The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with
+children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make
+something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to
+prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show
+of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous
+leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of
+apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal
+liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your
+daughters <i>friendship</i> for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage,
+exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in
+the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or
+do you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for
+training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself?
+You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves
+educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy
+inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to <i>them</i>;
+and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and
+but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under
+the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale
+as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier
+period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the
+gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being?</p>
+
+<p>If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they
+afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what
+is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole
+heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly <i>your own</i>; <i>your</i> glory and
+aggrandizement, <i>your</i> feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy
+with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your
+silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage;
+for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a
+death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial
+merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them
+sinners,<a name="FNanchor_155_155" id="FNanchor_155_155"></a><a href="#Footnote_155_155" class="fnanchor">[155]</a> in order not to be yourselves robbers?</p>
+
+<p>Tell me not that marriages of inclination often turn out ill, and forced
+marriages often well enough, as may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> seen in the instance of the
+Moravians, the old Germans, and Orientals. Name me rather all barbaric
+times and nations, in which&mdash;for both indeed only reckon the man, never
+the wife&mdash;a happy marriage means nothing more than a happy husband. No
+one stands by near enough to hear and to count a woman's sighs; the
+unheard pang becomes at last speechless; new wounds weaken the bleeding
+of the oldest. Further: the ill-luck of fancy-marriages is chargeable
+upon your very opposition to them, and your war against the married
+couple. Still further: every forced marriage is, in fact, for the most
+part, half a marriage of fancy. Finally: the best marriages are in the
+middling class, where the bond is more apt to be love; and the worst in
+the higher, where it is more a mercenary motive; and as often as in
+these classes a prince should choose merely with his heart, he would get
+a heart, and never lose nor betray it.</p>
+
+<p>Now, then, what sort of a hand is that into which you so often force the
+fairest, finest, richest, but rebellious one? Commonly, a black, old,
+withered, greedy fist. For decrepit, rich, or aspiring libertines have
+too much of the connoisseur, too much satiety and freedom, to steal any
+other than the most splendid creatures; the less perfect fall into the
+hands and homes of mere lovers and amateurs. But how base is a man, who,
+abandoned of his own character, backed merely by the despotic edict of a
+stranger, paying for his fortune with a stolen one, can now drag away
+the unprotected soul from the yearning eyes of a weeping love into a
+long, cold life, and clasp her to his arms as against the edges of
+frosty swords, and therein so near to his eye see her bleed and grow
+pale and quiver! The man of honor even gives with a blush, but he takes
+not with a blush; and the better<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> lion, the beast, spares woman;<a name="FNanchor_156_156" id="FNanchor_156_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_156_156" class="fnanchor">[156]</a>
+but these soul-buyers extort from constrained beings at last even the
+testimony of free-will.</p>
+
+<p>Mother of the poor heart, which thou wilt bless by misfortune, hear me!
+Suppose thy daughter should harden herself against the misery which is
+forced upon her, hast thou not reduced her rich dream of life to empty
+sleep, and taken out of it love's islands of the blest, and all that
+bloomed thereon; the fair days when one roamed over them, and the
+perpetual happy retrospect of them when they already lie with their
+blooming peaks low in the horizon? Mother, if this happy time was ever
+in thy breast, then snatch it not from thy daughter; and if it was
+barbarously torn from thee, then think of thy bitter pang, and bequeath
+it not!</p>
+
+<p>Suppose, further, she makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now
+what she might have been to its darling; and whether she does not then
+deserve anything better than to gratify a jailer, locked in with her
+forever by one shutting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well
+as this; thou wilt heap a double disaster upon thy soul,&mdash;the long agony
+of thy daughter, and the growing coldness of her husband, who by and by
+comes to feel and resent refusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time
+when man first needs the morning-sun,&mdash;namely, youth. O, sooner make all
+other seasons of the day of life cloudy; they are all alike, the third
+and the fourth and fifth decades; only at sunrise let it not rain into
+life; only this one never returning, irredeemable time darken not!</p>
+
+<p>But how, if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely joys, relations, a
+happy marriage, hopes, a whole posterity, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> thy plans and commands,
+but the very being herself<a name="FNanchor_157_157" id="FNanchor_157_157"></a><a href="#Footnote_157_157" class="fnanchor">[157]</a> whom thou constrainest? Who can justify
+thee, or dry thy tears, when thy best daughter,&mdash;for she is the very one
+who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, as the monks of La
+Trappe see their cloister burn down, without one of them breaking the
+vow of silence,<a name="FNanchor_158_158" id="FNanchor_158_158"></a><a href="#Footnote_158_158" class="fnanchor">[158]</a>&mdash;when she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and
+half in the shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and pale;
+when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last can no longer conceal
+anything from thee, but for years bears round the paleness and the pangs
+of decline in the very orient of life; and when thou canst not console
+her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience cannot suppress
+the name of infanticide; and when at last the worn-out victim lies there
+under thy tears, and the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young,
+so faint, and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complaining, with
+languishing and longing looks, with painfully confused and conflicting
+emotions, sinks with her blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of
+death,&mdash;O guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed her in, who
+will comfort thee? But I would call every guiltless one, and show her
+the bitter dying, and ask her, Shall thy child also perish thus?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span></p>
+<h3>59. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>It was a romantic day for Zesara, even outwardly; sun-sparks and
+rain-drops played dazzlingly through the heavens. He had received a
+letter from his father, dated at Madrid, which stamped at last the black
+seal of certainty on the threatened death of his sister, and in which
+there was nothing agreeable but the intelligence that Don Gaspard, with
+the Countess of Romeiro, whose guardianship he was now concluding, would
+travel in autumn (the Italian spring) to Italy. Two tones had been, in
+his life, stolen away from the musical scale of love; he had never known
+by experience what it was to love a brother or a sister. The coincidence
+of her death-night with that night in Tartarus, this whole clawing into
+the holy images and wishes of his heart, stirred up his spirit, and he
+felt with indignation how impotently a whole assailing world might seek
+to remove Liana's image from his soul; and again he painfully felt, that
+this very Liana herself believed in her near decline.</p>
+
+<p>In this situation was he found by an unexpected invitation from the
+Minister's lady herself,&mdash;sun-sparks and rain-drops played in his heaven
+also. He flew; in the antechamber stood the angel who broke the six
+apocalyptic seals,&mdash;Rabette. She had run to meet him from a bashfulness
+before company, and had embraced him sooner than he her. How gladly did
+he look into the familiar, honest face! with tears he heard the name of
+brother, when he had lost a sister to-day!</p>
+
+<p>The reason of her appearance was this: when the Director was at the
+Minister's lady's the last time, the latter had, with easy, disguised
+hand, opened her house to his daughter, "for the sake of a knowledge of
+empty city<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> life, and for change,"&mdash;in order that she might hereafter
+venture to knock at <i>his</i> door on her own daughter's behalf. He said he
+would "forward the female wild deer to her with pleasure, and all
+possible despatch." And as in Blumenbühl Rabette had answered him No,
+then Yes, then No, then Yes, and had held with her mother, even before
+midnight, an imperial-exchequer-revision, a mint-probation-day about
+everything which a human being from the country can wear in the city,
+she packed up there and unpacked here.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, I am afraid in there," said she to Albano; "they are all too
+clever, and I am now so stupid!" He found beside the domestic trio the
+Princess also, and the little Helena from Lilar, that lovely medallion
+of a fine day to his stirred heart. Indescribably was he smitten with
+Liana's womanly advances to Rabette, as if he shared her with her. With
+courtesy and tenderness, a mildness also, which was without falsehood or
+pride, came to the help of the embarrassed playmate, on whose face the
+inborn gayety and eloquence of nature now singularly contrasted with her
+artificial dumb gravity. Charles, with his ready familiarity, was more
+in a condition to entangle than to extricate her; only Liana gave to her
+soul and tongue, if only by the embroidery-frame, a free field; Rabette
+could write with the embroidering needle, no illuminated and initial
+letters, indeed, but still a good running-hand.</p>
+
+<p>She gave&mdash;turning her face toward her brother's, in order to pluck
+courage therefrom&mdash;a clear report of the dangerous road and upsets,
+laughing all the while, after the manner of the people when they are
+telling their mishaps. Her brother was to her, at the company's expense,
+both company and world; upon him alone streamed forth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> her warmth and
+speech. She said she could from her chamber see him "play on the
+harpsichord." Liana immediately led both thither. How richly and
+sublimely, beyond Rabette's demands upon city-life, was the maidenly
+<i>hospitium</i> set out, from the tulip (not a blooming one, but a
+work-basket of Liana's,&mdash;although every tulip is such a basket for the
+finger of spring) even to the piano-forte, of which she, of course, for
+the present can use no more than seven treble-keys for half a waltz?
+Five moderate trunks of clothes&mdash;for therewith she thought to come out,
+and show the city that the country too could wear clothes&mdash;represented
+to him in their well-known flower-pieces and tin bands the old
+impressions (<i>incunabula</i>) of his earliest days of life; and to-day
+every trace of the old season of love refreshed him. She made him look
+for his windows, from one of which the Librarian was fixing a hard gaze
+on a paving-stone in the street to see how often he could hit it by
+spitting.</p>
+
+<p>Here alone, in the presence only of the brother, Liana spoke more loudly
+to the sister the word of friendship, and assured her how happy she
+meant to make her, and how sincere she was in all that she promised. O
+look not into the flame of the pure, religious, sisterly love with any
+yellow eye of jealousy! Can you not comprehend that this fair soul even
+now distributes its rich flames among all sisterly hearts, until love
+concentrates them into <i>one</i> sun; as, according to the ancients, the
+scattered lightnings of night gather themselves in the morning into one
+solid solar orb? She was, everywhere, an eye for every heart; like a
+mother, she never once forgot the little in the great; and she poured
+out (let no one deny me the privilege of printing this minute example)
+for little Helena the cup of coffee, which the Doctor forbade,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> half
+full of cream, in order that it might be without strength or harm.</p>
+
+<p>The impatient Princess had already looked ten times toward the heavens,
+through which now beams of light, now rain-columns flew, till at length
+out of the consumed cloud-snow the broad fields of blue grew up, and
+Julienne could lead out the delighted young people into the garden, to
+the annoyance of the Minister's lady, who did not like to expose Liana
+to the <i>Serein</i>,&mdash;five or six blasts of the evening-wind, and the wading
+through rain-water that stood a nineteenth of a line<a name="FNanchor_159_159" id="FNanchor_159_159"></a><a href="#Footnote_159_159" class="fnanchor">[159]</a> deep. She
+herself stayed behind. How new-born, glistening, and inviting was all
+down below! The larks soared out of the distant fields like tones, and
+warbled near over the garden,&mdash;in all the leaves hung stars, and the
+evening air threw the liquid jewelry, the trembling earrings, from the
+blossoms down upon the flowers, and bore sweet incense to meet the bees.
+The Idyl of the year, Spring, parcelled its sweet pastoral land among
+the young souls. Albano took his sister's hand, but he listened vacantly
+to her intelligence from home. Liana went far in advance with the
+Princess, and bathed herself in the open heavens of confidential
+communion.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Julienne stood still, chatting playfully with her, in order to
+let the Count come up, and to inquire after letters from Don Gaspard,
+and after tidings of the Countess Romeiro. He communicated, with glowing
+countenance, the contents of to-day's letter. In Julienne's physiognomy
+there was a smile almost of raillery. To the intelligence of Linda's
+intended journey she replied: "That is just herself; she will fain learn
+everything,&mdash;travel over everything. I wager she climbs up <i>on</i> Mont<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>
+Blanc and <i>into</i> Vesuvius. Liana and I call her, for this reason, the
+Titaness." How graciously did Liana listen, with her eyes wholly on her
+female friend! "You are not acquainted with her?" she inquired of the
+tortured one. He answered, emphatically, in the negative. Roquairol came
+up; "<i>Passéz, Monsieur</i>," said she, making room, and giving him a sign
+to move on. Liana looked very earnestly after. "<i>La voici!</i>" said
+Julienne, letting the cover of a likeness spring up, by a pressure, on a
+ring of her little hand. Good youth! it was exactly the form which
+arose, that magic night, out of Lago Maggiore, sent to thee by the
+spirits! "She is hit there, exactly," said she to the agitated man.
+"Very," said he, confusedly. She did not investigate this
+contradictory<a name="FNanchor_160_160" id="FNanchor_160_160"></a><a href="#Footnote_160_160" class="fnanchor">[160]</a> "very"; but Liana looked at him; "very&mdash;beautifully
+and boldly!" he continued; "but I do not love boldness in women." "O,
+one can readily believe that of men!" replied Julienne; "no hostile
+power loves it in the other party."</p>
+
+<p>They passed along now through the chestnut avenue by the holy spot where
+Albano had seen, for the first time, the bride of his hopes shining and
+suffering behind the water-jets. O it was here that he would gladly,
+with that soul of his painfully excited by the mutual reaction of
+wonderful circumstances, have knelt down before the still angel so near
+him! The tender Julienne perceived that she had to spare an agitated
+heart; after a tolerably loud silence, she said, in a serious tone: "A
+lovely evening,&mdash;we'll go to the water-house. There is where Liana was
+cured, Count! The fountains must leap, too." "O the fountains!" said
+Albano, and looked with indescribable emotion upon Liana. She thought,
+however,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> he meant those in the flute-dell. Helena cried out behind for
+them to wait, and came tripping along after with two little hands full
+of dewy auriculas, which she had plucked, and gave them all to Liana,
+expecting from her, as collatress of benefices, the flower-distribution.
+"The little one, too, still thinks of the beautiful Sunday at Lilar,"
+said Liana. She gave the Princess one or two, and Helena nodded; and
+when Liana looked at her, she nodded again, as a sign the Count should
+have something too: "More yet!" she cried, when he had got some; and the
+more Liana gave, the more did the child cry, "More,"&mdash;as children are
+wont to do, in the hyperboles of their tendency to the infinite.</p>
+
+<p>They went over a green bridge, and came into a neat room. Instead of the
+piano-forte formerly there, stood a glass chapel of the goddess of
+music, a harmonica. The Captain screwed in behind a tapestry-door, and
+immediately all the confined spring-waters shot up outside with silvery
+wings toward heaven. O how the sprinkled world burned as they stepped
+out on the top!</p>
+
+<p>Why wast thou, my Albano, just at this hour not entirely happy? Why,
+then, do pains pierce through all our unions,&mdash;and why does the heart,
+like its veins, bleed most richly when it is heated? Above them lay the
+still, wounded heavens in the bandage of a long, white mass of cloud;
+the evening sun stood as yet behind the palace, but on both sides of it
+his purple mantle of clouds floated in broad folds away across the sky;
+and if one turned round toward the east to the mountains of Blumenbühl,
+green living flames streamed upward, and, like golden birds, the <i>ignes
+fatui</i> danced through the moist twigs and on the eastern windows, but
+the fountains still threw their white silver into the gold.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then the sun swam forth, with red hot breast, drawing golden circles in
+the clouds, and the arching water-shoots burned bright. Julienne bent
+upon Albano&mdash;near whom she had constantly remained, as if by way of
+atonement&mdash;a hearty look, as if he were her brother, and Charles said to
+Liana, "Sister, thy evening song!" "With all my heart," said she; for
+she was right glad of the opportunity to withdraw herself, with the
+melancholy seriousness of her enjoyment, and down below in the solitary
+room to utter aloud, on the harmonica-bells, all that which rapture and
+the eyes bury in silence.</p>
+
+<p>She went down; the melodious requiem of the day went up,&mdash;the zephyr of
+sound, the harmonica, flew, waving, over the garden-blossoms,&mdash;and the
+tones cradled themselves on the thin lilies of the up-growing water, and
+the silver lilies burst aloft for pleasure, and from the brightness of
+the sun, into flamy blossoms, and over yonder reposed mother sun in a
+blue pasture, and looked greatly and tenderly upon her human children.
+Canst thou, then, hold thy heart, Albano, so that it shall remain
+concealed with its joys and sorrows, when thou hearest the peaceful
+virgin walking in the moonlight of tones? O when the tone which trickles
+down in the ether announces to her the early wasting away of her life,
+and when the soft, long-drawn melodies flow away from her like the
+rose-oil of many crushed days; dost thou not think of that, Albano? How
+the human creature plays! The little Helena flings up auriculas at the
+flashing water-veins, in order that she may dash one of them with the
+spray of the intercepted jet, and the youth Zesara bends far over the
+balustrade, and lets the stream of water leap off from his sloping hand
+upon his hot face and eye, in order to cool and conceal himself. The
+fiery veil was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> snatched from him by his sister; Rabette was one of
+those persons whom this musical tremor gnaws upon even physically, just
+as, on the other hand, the Captain was little affected by the harmonica,
+and indeed was always least moved when others were most so; there were
+no pains with which the innocent girl was less familiar than with sweet
+ones; the bitter-sweet melancholy into which she sank away in the idle
+solitude of Sundays, she and others had scolded at as mere sullenness.
+At this moment she felt all at once, with a blush, her stout heart
+seized, whirled round, and scalded through as by hot whirlpools. Besides
+it had to-day already been swayed to and fro by the meeting with her
+brother again, the leaving of her mother, and her confused bashfulness
+before strangers, and even by the sight of the sunny-red mountain of
+Blumenbühl. In vain did the fresh brown eyes and the overripe full lip
+battle against the uprending pain; the hot springs tore their way
+through, and the blooming face with the strong chin grew red and full of
+tears. Painfully ashamed, and dreading to be taken for a child,
+especially as all her companions' emotions had remained invisible, she
+pressed her handkerchief over her burning face, and said to her brother,
+"I must go away, I am not well, I shall choke,"&mdash;and ran down to the
+gentle Liana.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, thou needest only carry thither thy shy pangs! Liana turned, and
+saw her hastily and violently drying her eyes. Ah, hers too were indeed
+full. When Rabette saw it, she said, courageously, "I absolutely cannot
+hear it,&mdash;I must scream,&mdash;I am really ashamed of myself." "O thou dear
+heart," cried Liana, joyfully falling upon her neck, "be not ashamed,
+and look into my eye! Sister, come to me, as often as thou art troubled;
+I will gladly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> weep with thy soul, and dry thy eye even sooner than my
+own." There was an overmastering enchantment in these tones,&mdash;in these
+looks of love, because Liana fancied she was mourning over some eclipsed
+star or other of her life. And never did trembling gratitude embrace
+more freshly and youthfully a venerated heart than did Rabette Liana.</p>
+
+<p>And now came Albano. Awakened by the dying away of the cradle-song, he
+had hurried after her, leaving all the cold and other drops unwiped from
+his fiery cheeks. "What ails thee, sister?" he asked, hastily. Liana,
+still lingering in the embrace and the inspiration, answered quickly,
+"You have a good sister; I will love her as her brother does." The sweet
+words of the so deeply affected souls and the fiery storm of his being
+carried him away, and he clasped the embracing ones and pressed the
+sisterly hearts to each other and kissed his sister; when, at the sight
+of Liana's confused bending aside of her head, he was terrified and
+flamed up crimson.</p>
+
+<p>He must needs fly. With these wild agitations he could not stay in the
+presence of Liana, and before the cold, mirroring glances of the
+company. But the night was to be as wonderful as the day; he hastened
+with live looks, that appeared like angry ones, out of the city to the
+Titaness, Nature, who at once calms and exalts us. He went along by
+exposed mill-wheels, about which the stream wound itself in foam. The
+evening clouds stretched themselves out like giants at rest, and basked
+in the ruddy dawn of America, and the storm swept among them, and the
+fiery Briareuses started up; night built the triumphal-arch of the
+milky-way, and the giants marched gloomily under. And in every element
+Nature, like a storm-bird, beat her rustling wings.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Albano lay, without knowing it, on the woodland bridge of Lilar, under
+which the wind-streams went roaring through. He glowed like the clouds
+with the lingering tinges of <i>his</i> sun; his inner wings were, like those
+of the ostrich, full of spines, and wounded while they lifted him; the
+romantic spiritual day, the letter of his father, Liana's tearful eyes,
+his boldness, and then his bliss and remorse about it, and now the
+sublime night-world on all sides round about him, passed to and fro
+within him and shook his young heart; he touched with his fiery cheek
+the moistened tree-tops, and did not cool himself, and he was near to
+that sounding, flying heart, the nightingale, and yet hardly heard her.
+Like a sun, his heart goes through his pale thoughts, and quenches on
+its path one constellation after another. On the earth and in the
+heavens, in the past and in the future, stood before Albano only one
+form; "Liana," said his heart, "Liana," said all nature.</p>
+
+<p>He went down the bridge and up the western triumphal-arch, and the
+glimmering Lilar lay before him in repose. Lo! there he saw the old
+"pious father" on the balustrade of the arch, fast asleep. But how
+different was the revered form from the picture of it which he had
+shaped to himself according to that of the deceased Prince. The white
+locks, flowing richly down under the Quaker hat, the femininely and
+poetically rounded brow, the arched nose and the youthful lip, which
+even in late life had not yet withered, and the childlikeness of the
+soft face, announced a heart which, in the evening-twilight of age,
+takes its rest and looks toward the stars. How lonely is the holy sleep!
+The Death-angel has conducted man out of the light world into the dark
+hermitage built over it; his friends stand without near the cell;
+within, the hermit talks with himself, and his darkness grows<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> brighter
+and brighter, and jewels and pastures and whole spring-days gleam out at
+last,&mdash;and all is clear and broad! Albano stood before the sleep with an
+earnest soul, which contemplates life and its riddles;&mdash;not only the
+incoming and the outgoing of life are hidden with a manifold veil, but
+even the short path itself; as around Egyptian temples, so around the
+greatest of all temples sphinxes lie, and, reversing the case as it was
+with the sphinx, he only solves the riddle who dies.</p>
+
+<p>The old man spoke, behind the speech-grating of sleep, with dead ones
+who had journeyed with him over the morning meadows of youth, and
+addressed with heavy lip the dead Prince and his spouse. How sublimely
+did the curtain of the venerable countenance, pictured over with a long
+life, hang down before the pastoral world of youth dancing behind it,
+and how touchingly did the gray form roam round with its youthful crown
+in the cold evening dew of life, taking it for morning-dew, and looking
+toward the east, and toward the sun! The youth ventured only to touch
+lovingly a lock of the old man; he meant to leave him, in order not to
+alarm him with a strange form, before the rising moon should have
+touched his eyelids and awakened him. Only he would first crown the
+teacher of his loved one with the twigs of a neighboring laurel. When he
+came back from it, the moon had already penetrated with her radiance
+through the great eyelids, and the old man opened them before the
+exalted youth, who, with the glowing rosy moon of his countenance,
+glorified by the moon overhead, stood before him like a genius with the
+crown. "Justus!" cried the old man, "is it thou?" He took him for the
+old Prince, who, with just such blooming cheeks and open eyes, had
+passed before him in the under-world of dreams.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But he soon came back out of the dreamy Elysium into the botanical, and
+knew even Albano's name. The Count, with open mien, grasped his hands,
+and said to him how long and profoundly he had respected him. Spener
+answered in few and quiet words, as old men do who have seen everything
+on the earth so often. The glory of the moonlight flowed down now on the
+tall form, and the quietly open eye was illumined,&mdash;an eye which not so
+much penetrates as lets everything penetrate it. The almost cold
+stillness of the features, the youthful gait of the tall form, which
+bore its years upright as a crown upon the head, not as a burden upon
+the back, more as flowers than as fruit, the singular mixture of former
+manly ardor and of womanly tenderness,&mdash;all this called up before Albano
+the image of a prophet of the Eastern land. That broad stream which came
+roaring down through the alps of youth, glides now calmly and smoothly
+through its pastures; but throw rocks before it, and again it starts up
+roaring.</p>
+
+<p>The old man looked upon the youthful youth, the oftener the more warmly.
+In our days youth is, in young men, a bodily and spiritual beauty at
+once. He invited him to accompany him this beautiful night to his quiet
+cottage, which stands overhead there near the church-spire, that looks
+down from above into flute-dell. On the singular, mazy paths which they
+now took, Lilar was transformed to Albano's eyes into a new world; like
+flying silver clouds of night, the glimmering beauties were continually
+shifting and arranging themselves together into new groups, and
+occasionally the two companions penetrated through exotic shrubbery with
+lively-colored blossoms and wondrous odors. The pious father asked him
+with interest about his former and present life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They came to the opening of a dark passage into the earth. Spener, in a
+friendly manner, took Albano's right hand, and said this way led <i>up</i> to
+his mountain-abode. But soon it seemed to go downward. The stream of the
+vale, the Rosana, sounded even in here, but only single drops of
+moonlight trickled through scattered mountain openings overspun with
+twigs. The excavation extended farther downward; still more remotely
+murmured the water in the vale. And yet a nightingale sang a lay that
+grew nearer and nearer. Albano was composed and silent. Everywhere they
+went along before narrow gates of splendor which only a star of heaven
+seemed to fling in. They descended now to a distant, illuminated magic
+bower of bright red and poisonous dark flowers, arched over at once with
+little peaked leaves and great broad foliage; and a confusing white
+light, partly sprinkled about by the living rays that gushed in, and
+partly flying off from the lilies only as white dust, drew the eye into
+an intoxicating whirl. Zesara entered with a dazzled eye, and as he
+looked to the right, in the direction of the fire that rained in, he
+found Spener's eye sharply fixed upon something to the left; he looked
+thither, and saw an old man, entirely like the deceased Prince, dart by
+and stalk into a side cavern; his hand quivered with affright, so did
+Spener's,&mdash;the latter pressed hastily on downward; and at last there
+glistened a blue, starry opening: they stepped out....</p>
+
+<p>Heavens! a new starry arch; a pale sun moves through the stars, and they
+swim, as in play, after him,&mdash;below reposes an enraptured earth full of
+glitter and flowers; its mountains run gleaming away up toward the arch
+of heaven, and bend over toward Sirius; and through the unknown land
+delights glide, like dreams over which man weeps for joy.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What is that? Am I on or under the earth?" said Albano, astounded; and
+his wandering eye fled for refuge to the face of a living man,&mdash;"I saw a
+dead man." Much more affectionately than before, the old man answered,
+"This is Lilar; behind us is my little house!" He explained the
+mechanical illusion<a name="FNanchor_161_161" id="FNanchor_161_161"></a><a href="#Footnote_161_161" class="fnanchor">[161]</a> of the descent. "Here, now, have I stood so
+many thousand times, and feasted myself with so fervent a heart on the
+works of God. How looked the form, my son?" "Like the dead Prince," said
+Alban. In a startled, but almost commanding tone, Spener said, with a
+low voice, "Be silent, like me, until his time,&mdash;it was not he. Thy
+salvation and the salvation of many hangs thereon. Go no more to-day
+through the passage."</p>
+
+<p>Albano, half-angered by all the experience of this singular day, said,
+"Well, then, I go back through Tartarus. But what means the ghostly
+creation that everywhere pursues me?" "Thou hast," said the old man,
+lovingly and refreshingly, laying a finger on the youth's brow, "nothing
+but invisible friends about thee,&mdash;and cast thyself everywhere upon God.
+There are a great many Christians who say, God is near or far off, that
+his wisdom and his goodness appear quite specially in one age or
+another,&mdash;truly that is idle deception; is he not the unchangeable,
+eternal Love, and does he not love and bless us at one hour just as much
+as at another?" As we ought, properly, to call the eclipse of the sun an
+eclipse of the earth, so it is man who is obscured, never the Infinite;
+but we are like the people who look at the obscuration of the sun in the
+water, and then, when the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> water trembles, cry out, "See how the
+glorious sun struggles!"</p>
+
+<p>Albano stepped into the solitude of the old man's neatly ordered
+dwelling, only with heaviness, because, in the hot ashes of his volcano,
+every feeling put forth and throve the more luxuriantly. Spener
+pointed over from his mountain-ridge to the little so-called
+"Thunderhouse,"<a name="FNanchor_162_162" id="FNanchor_162_162"></a><a href="#Footnote_162_162" class="fnanchor">[162]</a> and advised him to occupy it this summer. Albano
+took his leave at length, but his agitated heart was a sea, in which the
+morning sun is glowingly still half reflected, and into which, at
+evening, a lead-colored storm dips, and which swells glistening under
+the storm. He looked up from below at the old man, who was looking after
+him; but he would hardly have wondered to-day if <i>he</i> had either sunk or
+ascended. With indignant and spirited resolutions, to stake and
+sacrifice his life for his love, at which cold hands were grasping, he
+strode without any fear through Tartarus, which, by the magnifying
+mirror of night, was distorted into a black giant armament: thus is the
+spirit-world only a region of our inner world, and <i>I</i> fear only
+<i>myself</i>. When he stood before the altar of the heart in the dumb night,
+where nothing was audible but the thoughts, then did the bold spirit
+advise him repeatedly to call upon the dead old man, and swear aloud by
+his heart, full of dust; but when he looked up to the fair heavens, his
+heart was consecrated, and only prayed, "O good God, give me Liana!"</p>
+
+<p>It grew dark; the clouds, which he had taken for the shining mountains
+of a new earth, stretching away into the heavens, had reached the moon,
+and overshadowed it with darkness.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_138_138" id="Footnote_138_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_138_138"><span class="label">[138]</span></a> <i>Tempestiarii</i>, or Storm-makers, was a name given, in the
+Middle Ages, to the master-wizards who could conjure up foul weather.
+Weather-prayers were used in the churches against them, and other
+wizard-masters called in to counteract the former.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_139_139" id="Footnote_139_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_139_139"><span class="label">[139]</span></a> The Polish dancer always carries a rod under the
+fur-dress, wherewith his partner is excused by a blow or two, when she
+makes a misstep.&mdash;<i>Upper Siles. Monthly Mag.</i>, July, 1788.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_140_140" id="Footnote_140_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_140_140"><span class="label">[140]</span></a> Dread of spirits.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_141_141" id="Footnote_141_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_141_141"><span class="label">[141]</span></a> The German for this is <i>sauer-stoff</i> (sour-stuff).&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_142_142" id="Footnote_142_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_142_142"><span class="label">[142]</span></a> A noted review in Richter's day, published at Erlangen
+near Nuremberg.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_143_143" id="Footnote_143_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_143_143"><span class="label">[143]</span></a> Thus did the turnkeys name their prisoners.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_144_144" id="Footnote_144_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_144_144"><span class="label">[144]</span></a> Alexand. ab Al., v. 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_145_145" id="Footnote_145_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_145_145"><span class="label">[145]</span></a> To distinguish himself from the eagle of the Emperor, who
+holds something in both claws.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146_146" id="Footnote_146_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_146_146"><span class="label">[146]</span></a> Bouverot was a Catholic.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_147_147" id="Footnote_147_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_147_147"><span class="label">[147]</span></a> He meant one with the poor Lector.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_148_148" id="Footnote_148_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_148_148"><span class="label">[148]</span></a> Literally, "twilight-bird."&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_149_149" id="Footnote_149_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_149_149"><span class="label">[149]</span></a> To <i>get the basket</i> means a refusal.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_150_150" id="Footnote_150_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_150_150"><span class="label">[150]</span></a> I do not mean (as perhaps may appear from the <i>selling</i>)
+Pitt the Minister, but Pitt the Diamond, which the father of the present
+Pitt traded away to the Duke Regent of France, and for whose splinters
+he got twelve thousand ducats into the bargain.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_151_151" id="Footnote_151_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_151_151"><span class="label">[151]</span></a> I sell only my landscapes, and throw in the figures.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_152_152" id="Footnote_152_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_152_152"><span class="label">[152]</span></a> <i>Stand</i>, in German, has the double meaning of an <i>estate</i>
+and a <i>stand</i>.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_153_153" id="Footnote_153_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor_153_153"><span class="label">[153]</span></a> Plaut. Bacch., Act 4, Scen. 7, 4, 16, 17.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_154_154" id="Footnote_154_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor_154_154"><span class="label">[154]</span></a> Seventh Part of the new Collection of Travels.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_155_155" id="Footnote_155_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor_155_155"><span class="label">[155]</span></a> I speak more particularly of the daughters, because they
+are the most frequent and greatest victims; the sons are bloodless
+mass-offerings.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_156_156" id="Footnote_156_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor_156_156"><span class="label">[156]</span></a> Pliny, Nat. Hist., VIII. 16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_157_157" id="Footnote_157_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor_157_157"><span class="label">[157]</span></a> And this is quite probable. Dr. Edward Hill reckoned that
+in England eight thousand die annually of unhappy love,&mdash;of broken
+hearts, as the Englishwomen touchingly express it. Beddoes shows that
+vegetable food&mdash;and of this such victims are particularly fond&mdash;fosters
+consumption, and that females incline to this. Besides, the times of
+longing, which of itself, even without disappointment, as homesickness
+shows, is a poisonous revolving leaden ball, occur in youth, when the
+seed of pectoral maladies most easily springs up. O many married ones
+fall, under misconstructions, victims to the death-angel, into whose
+hand they had, previously to marriage, put the sword they themselves had
+sharpened!</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_158_158" id="Footnote_158_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor_158_158"><span class="label">[158]</span></a> Forster's Views, Vol. I.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159_159" id="Footnote_159_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor_159_159"><span class="label">[159]</span></a> A line (French) is one twelfth of an inch.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_160_160" id="Footnote_160_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor_160_160"><span class="label">[160]</span></a> Because he had just said he did not know her.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_161_161" id="Footnote_161_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor_161_161"><span class="label">[161]</span></a> Weigel. in Jena, invented the inverted bridge (<i>pons
+heteroclitus</i>), a stairway on which a person seems to descend, by going
+up.&mdash;<i>Bush's Handbook of Inventions</i>, Vol. VII.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_162_162" id="Footnote_162_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor_162_162"><span class="label">[162]</span></a> It had the name from its height and its being so often
+struck with lightning.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/rivetstart.jpg" width="550" height="140" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Roquairol's Love.&mdash;Philippic against Lovers.&mdash;The
+Pictures.&mdash;Albano Albani.&mdash;The Harmonic T&ecirc;te-à-t&ecirc;te.&mdash;The
+Ride to Blumenbühl.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<h3>60. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/o.jpg" width="100" height="105" alt="O" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">Out of the drops which the harmonica had wrung from Rabette's heart the
+old enchanter, Fate, is perhaps preparing, as other enchanters do out of
+blood, dark forms; for Roquairol had seen it, and wondered at the
+sensibility of a heart which hitherto had been set in motion more by
+occupations than by romances. Now he drew nearer to her with a new
+interest. Since the night of the oath, he had drawn his heart out of all
+unworthy fetters. In this freedom of victory, he went forward proudly,
+and stretched out his arms more lightly and longingly after noble love.
+He now visited his sister incessantly; but he still kept to himself.
+Rabette was not fair enough for him, beside his tender sister. She was
+an artificial ribbon-rose beside one by Van der Ruysch; she said
+herself, naively, that she looked, with her village-complexion in white
+lawn, like black-tea in white cups. But in her healthy eyes, not yet
+corroded into dimness by tragical drops, and on her fresh lips, life
+glowed; her powerful chin and her arched nose threatened and promised<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span>
+spirit and strength; and her upright and downright heart grasped and
+repelled decidedly and intensely. He determined to prove her. The
+Talmud<a name="FNanchor_163_163" id="FNanchor_163_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_163_163" class="fnanchor">[163]</a> forbids to inquire after the price of a thing, when one does
+not mean to buy it; but the Roquairols always cheapen and look further.
+They tear a soul in two, as children do a bee, in order to eat out of it
+the honey which it would gather. They borrow from the eel, not only his
+dexterity in slipping away, but also the power to twine around the arm
+and crush it.</p></div>
+
+<p>And now he let all the dazzling powers of his multi-form nature play
+before her,&mdash;the sense of his ascendency permitted him to move freely
+and gracefully, and the careless heart seemed open on all sides,&mdash;he
+linked so freely earnestness and jest, glow and glitter, the greatest
+and the least, and energy with mildness. Unhappy girl! now art thou his;
+and he snatches thee from thy <i>terra firma</i> with rapacious wings up into
+the air, and then hurls thee down. Like a vine running on a
+lightning-rod, thou wilt richly unfold thy powers and bloom up on him;
+but he will draw down the lightning upon himself and thy blossoms, and
+strip thee of thy leaves and rend thee utterly.</p>
+
+<p>Rabette had never conceived of such a man, much less seen one; he made
+his way by main force into her sound heart, and a new world went in
+after him. Through Liana's love for the Captain, hers mounted still
+higher; and the two could speak of their brothers in friendly
+reciprocation. The good Liana sought to bring to the help of her friend
+many a thing which would hardly take hold, particularly mythology,
+which, by reason of the French pronunciation of the names of the gods,
+was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> still more unserviceable to her. Even with books Liana sought to
+bring them together; so that reading was to her a sort of week-day
+Divine service, which she attended with true devotion, and was always
+delighted when it was over. Through all these water-wheels of knowledge
+streamed Roquairol's love, and helped drive and draw. How many blushes
+now flitted without any occasion over her whole face! The laugh which
+once expressed her gayety, came now too often, and betokened only a
+helpless heart, which longed to sigh.</p>
+
+<p>So stood matters with her when Charles once playfully stole behind her
+and covered her eyes with his hand, in order, under the mask of her
+brother's voice, to give her soft, sisterly names. She confounded the
+similar voices; she pressed the hand heartily, but her eye was hot and
+moist. Then she discovered the mistake, and flew with the concealed
+evening and morning redness of her countenance out of the room. Now he
+looked closer into the eyes of Liana, who blamed him for it, and hers
+too had wept. She would fain at first conceal from him the object of the
+sisterly emotion; but another's No was to him, of old, an auxiliary
+verb,&mdash;a fair wind blowing him into port. Liana grew more and more
+agitated; at last she related how Rabette's account of Albano's youthful
+history had drawn from her in turn the history of his early relations,
+and that she had portrayed to her the bloody night of the masquerade,
+and even shown his bloody dress. "And then," said Liana, "she wept with
+me as heartily as if she had been thy sister. O, it is a dear heart!"
+Charles saw the two linked together like two pastures, namely, by the
+rainbow which stands over both with its drops; he drew her with thankful
+love to his breast. "Art thou then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> happy?" asked Liana, in a tone
+ominous of something sad.</p>
+
+<p>She must needs disclose to him her full heart, and tell him all. He
+heard with astonishment, how that whole Tartarus-night, on which the
+unknown voice had promised Linda de Romeiro to his friend, had been made
+known to her. By whom? She held an inexorable silence; he contented
+himself, because, to be sure, it could only have been Augusti, who was
+the only one that knew of it. "And now believest thou, thou heart from
+heaven," said he, "that I and the brother of my soul could ever separate
+by robbing each other? O, it is all otherwise, all otherwise! He curses
+the mock-spirits and the object of the mimicry. O he loves me; and my
+heart will rejoice in the day when it is his!" The touching ambiguity of
+these last words dissolved him in a sacred melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>But she, in the midst of the heartiest overflow of feeling, took part,
+as if out of piety, with the spirits, and said: "Speak not thus of
+spiritual apparitions! They exist, that I know,&mdash;only one needs not fear
+them." Here, however, with firm hand she held fast the veil over her
+experiences; he too had known long since, that, notwithstanding her most
+tremblingly delicate feelings, which shrunk even from the sight of the
+blue veins on the lily hand, as from a wound, she had appeared
+unexpectedly courageous before the dead and in the ghostly hours of
+fantasy.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the waves of so different an emotion which now drove his heart up
+and down, Rabette was eclipsed. He burned now only for the hour when he
+could tell his Albano the singular treachery of the Lector.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>61. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Even before the Captain disclosed to his friend Augusti's probable
+treachery, Albano was almost entirely at variance with his two tutors.
+In a circle full of young hearts which beat for one another, and still
+more fondly fight for one another, two always take an indissoluble hold
+of each other, and become one at others' expense.</p>
+
+<p>Albano boldly broke with every one whom Charles displeased. Besides,
+Schoppe had long been loved by few, because few can endure a perfectly
+free man; the flower-chains hold better, they think, when galley-chains
+run through them. He, therefore, could not bear it, when one "with too
+close a love clambered up round him so tightly that he had the freedom
+of his arms no more than if he wore them in bandages of eighty
+heads."<a name="FNanchor_164_164" id="FNanchor_164_164"></a><a href="#Footnote_164_164" class="fnanchor">[164]</a> The sarcastic liveliness of his pantomime chilled the
+Captain, by having the appearance of a somewhat stricter observation,
+more than did the composed face of the Lector, who from that very
+circumstance took everything more sharply into his still eye.</p>
+
+<p>The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his
+intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isinglass," as he
+expressed it,&mdash;toward the tender errors of the heart, the sacred
+excesses by which man weaves into this short life a still shorter
+pleasure. On one occasion Charles walked up and down with arms akimbo
+and drooping head, as on a stage, and said, accidentally, so that the
+Titular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the
+world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> shake, in
+jest, a baker's dozen<a name="FNanchor_165_165" id="FNanchor_165_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_165_165" class="fnanchor">[165]</a> of hornets, a basket of crabs, a mug of
+wood-pismires, all at once over the Librarian's skin, and take a flying
+observation of the effect of the stinging, nipping, biting; then can
+one, in a measure at least, conceive what a quivering, swelling, and
+irritation there was in him, so soon as he heard the above-mentioned
+phraseology. "Mr. Captain!" he began, drawing in a long breath, "I can
+stand through a good deal on this rusty, stupid earth,&mdash;famine,
+pestilence, courts, the stone, and fools from pole to pole; but your
+phraseology surpasses the strength of my shoulders. Sir Captain, you
+may, most certainly, use this rhetoric with perfect justice, because
+you, as you say, are not understood. But, O heavens! O devils! I hear,
+in fact, thirty thousand young men and maidens, from one
+circulating-library to another, all with inflated breast, saying and
+groaning round and round, that nobody understands them, neither their
+grandfather nor their god-parents, nor the conrector, when, in fact, the
+wrapping-paper,<a name="FNanchor_166_166" id="FNanchor_166_166"></a><a href="#Footnote_166_166" class="fnanchor">[166]</a> commonplace pack does not itself understand. But
+the young man means by this merely a maiden, and the maiden a young man;
+these can appreciate each other. Out of love will I undertake, as out of
+potatoes, to serve up fourteen different dishes; let one just shear off,
+as they do off of the bears in G&ouml;ttingen, its beastly hair, and no
+Blumenbach would any longer recognize it.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Von Froulay, I have somewhat often compared<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> this cursed exaltation
+of souls, merely from low motives, with the English horsetails, which
+also always stand pointing to heaven, only because their sinews have
+been cut. Must not one be mad, when one hears every day, and reads every
+day, how the commonest souls, the very doggerels and trumpeters' pieces
+of Nature, think themselves exalted by love above all people, like cats
+that fly with hogs' bladders buckled on to them; how they rendezvous in
+the hare's form and emporium of love, the other world, as on a
+Blocksberg, and how, on this finch-ground, in this theatrical green-room
+(or dressing-room, which then becomes the opposite), they drive their
+business until they are coupled. Then it's all over; fancy and poesy,
+which now should be to them for the first time serviceable, are caught!
+They run away from them like lice from the dead, although on these the
+hair continues to sprout out. They shudder at the next world; and when
+they become widowers and widows, they do their courting very well
+without the hogs' bladders, and without the decoy-feathers, and the
+folding screen of the next world. Such a thing as this now, Sir Captain,
+provokes one, and then, in the heat, the just must suffer with the
+unjust, as your ears unfortunately attest!"</p>
+
+<p>Alban, who never light-mindedly forgave, silently separated himself from
+a heart, which, as he unjustly said, quenched the flames of love with
+satiric gall.</p>
+
+<p>In the chain of friendship with Augusti, one ring after another
+absolutely broke in twain. The Count found in the Lector a spirit of
+littleness which was more revolting to him than any bad spirit. The
+elegance of a good courtier, his propensity to keep the smallest secrets
+as faithfully as the greatest, his passion for starting up behind every
+action a long plan, his thirsty curiosity for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> genuine historical
+sources, at court and in the city, and his coldness toward philosophy,
+so dried up the overstrained image which Albano had formed of him, that
+it wrinkled up and grew full of rents. Such dissimilarities never rise
+among cultivated men to open feuds; but they secretly put upon the inner
+man one piece of armor after another, till he stands there in solid
+mail, and strikes out.</p>
+
+<p>Now, in addition to all this, the Lector bore the Captain a hearty
+grudge, because he cost the Minister's lady many anxious hours, and
+Liana, and even the Count, much money, and because he seemed to him to
+pervert the youth. The otherwise directly ascending flame of Albano was
+now, by the obstacles thrown in the way of his love, bent on all sides,
+and, like soldering fire, burned more sharply; but this sharpness
+Augusti ascribed to the friend. Albano appeared to those whom he loved
+warmer, to those whom he endured colder, than he was, and his
+earnestness was easily confounded with defiance and pride; but the
+Lector imagined that Albano's love was stolen from him by Charles.</p>
+
+<p>He undertook, with equal refinement and frankness, to play off on the
+Count a good map-card of the spots which were thickly sown in the
+heavenly body of this Jupiter. But he tore every map. Charles's painful
+confessions on that night extinguished all additions by other hands. And
+Albano's grand faith, that one must shield a friend entirely, and trust
+him entirely, warded off every influence. O it is a holy time, in which
+man desires offerings and priests, <i>without fail</i>, for the altar of
+friendship and love, and&mdash;beholds them; and it is a too cruel time, in
+which the so often cheated, belied bosom prophesies to itself, on
+another's bosom, in the midst of the love-draught of the moment, the
+cold neighborhood of bankruptcy!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As the Lector saw perfectly that Alban, at many of his charges against
+Charles,&mdash;for instance, of his wildness and disorder,&mdash;remained cold,
+for the reason that he might deem himself to be reproached over
+another's shoulders, as the French (according to Thickness) give
+strangers praise over their own; he now, instead of the point of
+similarity, took hold of an entire dissimilarity of the Captain, his
+light-mindedness toward the sex. But this only made the matter worse.
+For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-worshipper,
+and the Lector only the one whom the coal of this fire blackens. Augusti
+cherished, in regard to love, pretty nearly the principles of the great
+world, which, merely for honor's sake, he never coined into action, and
+he assigned only the cloud-heaven near the earth to love. The Captain,
+however, spoke of a third heaven, or heaven of joy, as belonging
+thereto, wherein only saints are the blest. Augusti, after the manner of
+the great world, spoke much more freely than he acted, and sometimes as
+openly as if he were dining in the hall of a watering-place. Charles
+spoke like a maiden. The virgin ear of Albano, which was mostly closed
+in good visiting-parlors, and which in study-chambers remained open,
+united to his want of the experience that a cynical tongue is often
+found in the most continent men, for instance, in our buffoonery-loving
+forefathers, and an ascetic one in modest libertines,&mdash;these two things
+must naturally have involved the pure young man in a double error.</p>
+
+<p>Thus did Augusti start up within him more and more storm-birds. Both
+came often to the verge of a complete feud and challenge; for the Lector
+had too much honor to fear any one thing, and dared in cold blood as
+much as another in hot.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now, at length, did Charles disclose fully to his friend, though with
+all the tenderness of friendship, Liana's acquaintance with that
+Tartarus-night. "The otherwise reserved Lector must be after nearer
+advantages with his tattling," Albano concluded, and now the toad of
+jealousy, which lives and grows in the living tree without any visible
+way in or out, nursed itself to full size in his warm heart. Unanswered
+love is besides the most jealous. God knows whether he is not
+scenery-master of these ghost scenes working in and through each other
+with so many wheels. All these are Albano's private conclusions; open
+accusations were forbidden by his sense of honor. But his warm heart,
+always expressing itself, demanded a warmer society, and this he found
+when he followed the pious father, and went to Lilar into the
+Thunderhouse, into the midst of the flowers and summits, in order, lying
+nearer to the heart of Nature, to dream and enjoy more sweetly.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one warm, sun-bright spot for him in Charles's historical
+picture; namely, the hope that perhaps only the mistakes about his
+relation to the Countess, out of which Liana had been helped by her
+brother, had dictated to her the evenly cold deportment which she had
+hitherto maintained towards him. On this sunny side Rabette threw a
+billet, in which she wrote him that she was going back to her parents on
+Saturday, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence,
+the prospect of less favorable circumstances, his going to Lilar,&mdash;all
+this decided him in the purpose of snatching to himself a solitary
+moment, and therein casting off before Liana the veil from his soul and
+hers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>62. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Singularly did events cut across each other on the day when Albano came
+into the Ministerial house to take leave of Rabette, and (a trembling
+voice said within him) of Liana, too. Rabette beckoned to him, from the
+window, to come to her chamber. She had folded together the Icarus's
+wings of her apparel into the trunks. Over her inner being a prostrating
+storm swept to and fro. Charles had disturbed the equilibrium of her
+heart by his warmth, and had not restored it again by a word of
+recompense. Like the doves, she flutters around the high conflagration.
+O may she not, like them, escape with singed feathers, and come back
+again, and at last fall into it! She said she had longed for her
+friends, ever since she saw yesterday a flock of sheep driven through
+the city. She should accompany, on Saturday, Liana and her mother to
+attend the consecration of the church, and the interment of the princely
+couple. He begged her, so abruptly and eagerly, to contrive for him
+to-day a solitary moment with her friend in the garden, that he
+absolutely did not hear her sweet news of Liana's intention to stay
+there and make her a visit.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! he found with the Minister's lady that showman of magnificent
+pictures, who, like Nature, made not only a beginning of his spring, but
+an end of his autumn, with poisonous flowers,<a name="FNanchor_167_167" id="FNanchor_167_167"></a><a href="#Footnote_167_167" class="fnanchor">[167]</a> Mr. Von Bouverot.
+Dian had sent him four heavenly copies from Rome; these he opened with
+dry, artistic palate. Liana received the Count again as ever. Was,
+perhaps, Raphael's <i>Madonna della Sedia</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> in whose heaven-descended
+palladium her tender soul was absorbed, the seal-keeper of her holiest
+mystery? The all-forgetting artistic passion became her so gracefully!
+Her optic nerves had become, by her long painting, like delicate
+feelers, which closed fast around lovely forms. Certain female forms,
+like this one, stirred up her whole soul. For she had, in childhood,
+sketched in her inner heaven shining constellations of the heroines of
+romances, and in general of unseen women; great ideas of their spirit,
+their heavenly walk, their exaltation above all that she had ever seen;
+and she had felt equal shyness and longing to meet one such. Hence she
+went forth out of this colossal nympheum<a name="FNanchor_168_168" id="FNanchor_168_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_168_168" class="fnanchor">[168]</a> of her fancy, so easily
+dazzled, and with such warm, heartfelt reverence, to meet pure female
+friends and the Countess Romeiro. Now certain pictures brought back
+these altar-pieces like copies. The good girl thought not of <i>this</i>, but
+her friend may well have done so, that one needed only to quicken into
+life the eyes of this loving, down-gazing Mary, and merely to warm these
+lips with tones, and then one had Liana.</p>
+
+<p>The German gentleman went on, and now placed beside each other Raphael's
+Joseph, telling his brothers a dream, and the older Joseph, interpreting
+one to a king, and began to translate the three Raphaels into words, and
+that with so much felicity, and not only with so much insight into
+mechanics and genius, but also with such a precise setting forth of
+every human and moral lineament, that Albano took him for a hypocrite,
+and Liana for a very good man. She seized every word with a wide-open
+heart. When Bouverot painted the prophesying Joseph, as at once
+childlike, natural, still,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> and firm as a rock, and glowing and
+threatening, there stood the original at her side.</p>
+
+<p>There also dropped from the German gentleman much thought about Da
+Vinci's boy Christ in the Temple, about the magnificently executed
+fraternization and adoption of the boy and the youth in one face. Liana
+had also copied the copy, but she and her mother were modestly silent on
+the subject.</p>
+
+<p>But at last Franciscus Albani disturbed the calm that had hitherto
+prevailed, by his "Repose during the Flight." While he acted the
+dream-interpreter to these picturesque dreams, and Rabette had her eyes
+fastened sharply on the Saint Joseph of this picture, sitting beside
+Mary, with an open book, Liana said, unluckily, "A fine Albani!" "I
+should think not," Rabette whispered; "brother is much more beautiful
+than this praying Joseph!" She had confounded Albani with Albano; her
+whole picture-gallery lay in the hymn-book, whose hymns she separated
+from each other with golden-red saints. The others did not comprehend;
+they knew him only as Count of Zesara,&mdash;but Liana, sweetly blushing,
+flung at Rabette a tenderly reproving glance, and looked, with mute
+endurance, more closely at another picture. Never before in Albano,&mdash;in
+whom the strongest and the tenderest feelings coupled, as the echo makes
+thunder louder and music lower,&mdash;had the bitter-sweet mingling of love
+and pity and shame wrought more warmly, and he could have at once knelt
+down before the maiden, and yet have kept silent.</p>
+
+<p>The German gentleman had finished, and said to the men, with a look full
+of victory, "He had, however, something more in his case, which bore
+away the palm from the Raphaels; and he would beg them to follow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> him
+into the adjoining apartment." On the way, he observed, that few works
+were executed with such magnificent freedom and bold abandon. In the
+room he unpacked a little bronze Satyr, against whom an overtaken nymph
+is defending herself. "Divine!" said Bouverot, and held the group by a
+thread, in order not to rub off the rust. "Divine! I set the Satyr
+against the Christ!" Few have even a moderate idea of the amazement of
+my hero, when he saw the critic set virtue and vice at once at a round
+table, without any quarrel for precedency.</p>
+
+<p>With a fiery glance of contempt, he turned away, and wondered that the
+Lector remained. It seems to be unknown to him that painting, like
+poetry, only in its childhood related to gods and divine service, but
+that by and by, when they grew up to a higher stature, they must needs
+stride out from this narrow churchyard,&mdash;as a chapel<a name="FNanchor_169_169" id="FNanchor_169_169"></a><a href="#Footnote_169_169" class="fnanchor">[169]</a> was originally
+a church with church-music, until both were left out, and the pure music
+retained. Bouverot had the regard for pure form in so high a degree,
+that not only the smuttiest, most immoral subject, but even the most
+pure and devout, could not contaminate his enjoyment; like slate, he
+stood the two proofs of heating and freezing, without undergoing any
+change.</p>
+
+<p>Albano had seen the maidens through the window in the alley, and
+hastened down to take leave of his sister, and to something more
+weighty. He came, with fuller roses on his cheeks than those which
+glowed around him, to a grassy bank, where Liana, with his sister, was
+sitting behind the red parasol, with half-drooping eyelids, and head
+bent aside, softly absorbed in the harvest of evening, suffused with a
+sunny redness by the parasol, in white dress, with a little slender
+black cross on her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> tender bosom, and with a full rose; she looked upon
+our lover so simply, her voice was so sisterly, and all was such pure,
+careless love! She told him how delighted she was with the scenes of his
+youth, and with country life, and how Rabette would conduct her
+everywhere; and particularly to the consecration discourse, which her
+father-confessor, Spener, was to deliver on Sunday. She talked herself
+into a glow, with picturing how greatly the great breast of the old man
+would be moved by the dirge and p&aelig;an over the ashes of his princely
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>Rabette had nothing in her mind but the solitary minute, which she would
+fain leave her brother to enjoy with her. She begged her, in a lively
+manner, to play for her yet once more on the harmonica. Albano, at this
+proposal, plucked for himself a moderate nosegay from the&mdash;foliage of
+the tree that hung over his head. Liana looked at her warningly, as much
+as to say: "I shall spoil thy cheerfulness for thee again." But she
+insisted. At the entrance into the water-house, a light blush flitted
+across Albano, at the thought of the latest past and the nearest future.</p>
+
+<p>Liana speedily opened the harmonica, but the water, the colophonium<a name="FNanchor_170_170" id="FNanchor_170_170"></a><a href="#Footnote_170_170" class="fnanchor">[170]</a>
+of the bells, was wanting. Rabette was just going to fill a glass down
+at the fountains, for the sake of leaving them alone; but the Count,
+from manly awkwardness about entering at once into a ruse, stepped
+courteously before her and fetched it himself. Hardly, at length, had
+the lovely, pleasing creature laid, with a sigh, her delicate hands on
+the brown bells, when Rabette said to her, she would go down into the
+alley to hear how it sounded at a distance. As if at the painful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span>
+sunstroke of a too sudden and great pleasure, his heart started up, he
+heard the triumphal car of love rolling afar off, and he was fain to
+leap into it and rattle away into life. The credulous Liana took the
+withdrawal for a veil which Rabette wished to throw over her eye,
+sweetly breaking into tears at music, and immediately removed her hands
+from the bells; but Rabette kissed her entreatingly, pressed back her
+hands upon them, and ran down. "The true heart!" said Liana; but this
+pure, guileless confidence in her friend touched him, and he could not
+say, Yes.</p>
+
+<p>When, in the meadows of Persia, a happy one, who, on the luxuriant
+enamel has been sleeping down among the pinks and lilies and tulips,
+blissfully opens his eyes at the first evening call of the nightingale
+upon the still, tepid world, and the motley twilight, through which some
+gold threads of the evening sun float glowingly: that blissful one is
+like the youth Albano in the enchanted chamber,&mdash;the Venetian blinds
+scattered round broken lights, trembling green shadows; and there was a
+holy twilight as in groves around temples; only murmuring bees flew, out
+of the loud, distant world, through the silent cell, into the noise
+again. Some sharp streaks of sunshine, like lightnings before sleepers,
+were wafted romantically to and fro with the rose; and in this dreamy
+grotto, amid the rustling wood of the world, the solitude was not
+disturbed by so much as the shadowy existence of a mirror.</p>
+
+<p>Into this enchantment she let the tones fly out of her hands like
+nightingales,&mdash;the tones were propelled towards Albano, as by a storm,
+now more clearly, and now more faintly; he stood before her, with folded
+hands, as if in prayer, and hung with thousand looks of love on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> the
+downward gazing form; all at once she lifted upon him that holy eye,
+full of sympathy, but she suddenly cast it down before the sun-glance of
+his.</p>
+
+<p>Now the great eyelids immovably closed upon the sweet looks, and gave
+her, like a sleep, the appearance of absence; she seemed a white
+May-flower on wintry soil, hanging down its blossom-bells. She was a
+dying saint in the devotion of harmony, which she heard rather than
+made; only the red lip she took with her as a warm reflection of life,
+as a last rose, that was to deck the fleeting angel; O could he disturb
+this prayer of music with a word of his?</p>
+
+<p>With narrower and narrower circles did the magnetic vortex of tones and
+of love clasp him round,&mdash;and now, when the drawing of the harmonica,
+like the water-drawing of the scorching sun, licked up his heart; and
+when the lightnings of passion darted over his whole life, and illumined
+the mountain-ridges of the future and the valleys of the past, and when
+he felt his whole being concentrated into one moment, he saw some drops
+trickle out from Liana's drooping eyes, and she looked up cheerfully to
+let them fall; then Albano snatched her hand away from the keys, and
+cried, with the heart-rending tone of his longing, "O God, Liana!"</p>
+
+<p>She trembled, she blushed, she looked at him, and knew not that she
+still wept and looked on, and continued to play no more. "No, Albano,
+no!" she said, softly, and drew her hand out of his, and covered her
+face, started at the pause of the musical tones, and collected herself
+and again made them flow out slowly, and said, with trembling voice:
+"You are a noble being. You are like my Charles, but quite as
+passionate. Only one request! I am about to leave the city for a
+while."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His alarm at this became ecstasy, when she named the place, his
+Blumenbühl. She went on with difficulty before the delighted lover; her
+hand often lay for a long time on the dissonance in forgetfulness of the
+analysis; her eyes glimmered more moistly, although she said nothing
+more than this: "Be to my brother, who loves you inexpressibly, as he
+has loved no other yet,&mdash;O be to him everything! My mother recognizes
+your influence. Draw him,&mdash;I will speak it out!&mdash;especially draw him off
+from playing deeply!"</p>
+
+<p>He could hardly, for his confusion, asseverate the "Yes," when Rabette
+came running in with the almost unsuitably accented tidings, that the
+mother was coming. Probably she had seen that Rabette was alone. Albano
+parted from the pair with abrupt wishes of a pleasant journey, and
+forgot, in the flurry, to answer in the affirmative Rabette's request
+for a visit. The mother, meeting him, ascribed his ardor to a brother's
+emotion at taking leave.</p>
+
+<p>While he hastened through the wealth of the season, he thought of the
+rich future,&mdash;of Liana's stammering and veiling: do not fair female
+souls, like those angels before the prophet, need only two wings to lift
+them, but four to veil themselves? The sea of life ran in high waves,
+but everywhere it flashed on its broad surface, and sparks dropped from
+the oar.</p>
+
+
+<h3>63. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Ah, on the morning following this, the evening redness of a whole heaven
+had grown, to be sure, into a sad cloudiness. For Liana walked before
+the youth in such long, thick veils. Any mystery of trouble throws up
+cold cloister-walls between hearts drawn near together;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> that is
+manifest. Hitherto accidents of various kinds had bent aside some
+flowers which Liana had drawn as a veil over her heart (as the ground
+stories in cities prevent looking in at the windows by flowers and
+grape-vines), and had disclosed the darkest corner of the background, in
+which something like the reverse side of a bust hung, which, turned
+round, would perhaps resemble the Count. But as yet the image hangs with
+its face toward the wall. However, a female heart is often like marble;
+the cunning stone-cutter strikes a thousand blows, without the Parian
+block showing the line of a crack; but all at once it breaks asunder
+into the very form which the cunning stone-cutter has so long been
+hammering after.</p>
+
+<p>On Saturday, when the Minister's lady and the pair of friends were about
+to start for Blumenbühl, in order to behold the burial and the
+consecration, the Captain came to the Count, not only full of joy,&mdash;for
+he had gladly, out of love to Rabette, helped make for Liana, not
+<i>wings</i> indeed, but still <i>wing-shells</i>, and out of a threefold interest
+for his friend, helped tighten the fly-work,&mdash;but also full of anxiety.
+But, ye muses! why in the poetical world are there rarely any
+occurrences which have such manifold motives as often in the actual?</p>
+
+<p>His anxiety was simply this, lest his father should arrive earlier than
+his mother went off,&mdash;for he knew the Minister. The latter intended,
+according to his letters, to arrive on Monday or Tuesday (Saturday at
+the latest); but this might&mdash;as Froulay loved to let his friends swim in
+the broad play-room of expectation&mdash;still more certainly threaten that
+he&mdash;because, like the Basle clocks,<a name="FNanchor_171_171" id="FNanchor_171_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_171_171" class="fnanchor">[171]</a> he always struck an hour too
+early, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> came in the hope of catching his people at some right odious
+thing&mdash;might at any minute come driving in at the court-yard gate. If he
+came driving furiously up this forenoon, or at the moment when the
+servant was lifting the daughter into the carriage, and the mother
+already sat therein, then was this much certain, by a thousand
+conclusions from observance, that both would have to go up into the
+house again; that he would order all trunks and boxes unpacked, and, as
+to the daughter of the Provincial Director, after her ten thousand
+entreaties,&mdash;although her very second would freeze upon her lips,&mdash;he
+would, in a friendly manner, with quite jocose equanimity, let her be
+carried home, as a solitary member of a conclave, in a close carriage.
+Certain men&mdash;and he is their generalissimo&mdash;know no sweeter cordial for
+themselves, than to put under lock and key, before the very nose of
+their friends, the garden-gates of some Arcadia or other, for which they
+have not drawn up for them a map of the route and region, and judicially
+to seal them up. Besides, just before a pleasure party, most parents
+secrete gall; if Froulay, in fact, could absolutely prevent one, that
+was as much for him as if he were himself returning home from one red
+and gay.</p>
+
+<p>At three o'clock in the afternoon, our friends went to walk beneath the
+loveliest sky. Everything had been already arranged; Charles proposed to
+follow to-morrow; Albano not till Monday, after the general return (his
+tender motives, and the hard ones of others, decided it); and there
+floated through the whole vaulted blue no cloud but Charles's concern
+lest the second depositing of the princely corpse might draw his father
+along as early as to-day,... when he suddenly cried out, with a curse:
+"There he comes!" He knew him by the tiger-spotted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> post-team, and still
+more by the long line of horses tackled on tandem. A purgatorial moment
+of life! The carriage rattled swiftly down the street; the head horses
+streamed forth in a longer and quite disorderly train; the people
+stared. At last the pulling distance became an acre long,&mdash;that seemed
+quite impossible,&mdash;when Albano's eagle eye discovered that there was no
+leather connection between the post-train, and at last, that in fact
+there was merely a strange churl, with two horses, accidentally riding
+along before the carriage, and at this moment they saw the open
+triumphal car, with the female trinity slowly moving up the Blumenbühl
+heights, and the blended tulip-bed of the three parasols glimmered long
+after them.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/oend.jpg" width="400" height="83" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_163_163" id="Footnote_163_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor_163_163"><span class="label">[163]</span></a> Basa Metzia, c. 4, m 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_164_164" id="Footnote_164_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor_164_164"><span class="label">[164]</span></a> The <i>head</i> of a bandage is a technical term in
+surgery.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_165_165" id="Footnote_165_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor_165_165"><span class="label">[165]</span></a> The German word <i>mandel</i> (literally <i>almond</i>) means a
+collection of <i>fifteen</i>. There being no one word expressing it
+collectively in English, <i>baker's dozen</i> (which means thirteen) seems to
+come near enough.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166_166" id="Footnote_166_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor_166_166"><span class="label">[166]</span></a> See Dr. Franklin's verses, comparing different classes of
+people to different kinds of paper. Sparks's edition of Franklin's
+Works, Vol. II. p. 161.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_167_167" id="Footnote_167_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor_167_167"><span class="label">[167]</span></a> It is well known that spring flowers, on account of
+dampness and shade, are for the most part suspicious; as also the
+autumnal ones.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_168_168" id="Footnote_168_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor_168_168"><span class="label">[168]</span></a> Museum of Nymph&aelig; or Chrysalides.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_169_169" id="Footnote_169_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor_169_169"><span class="label">[169]</span></a> In the artistic technical sense.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_170_170" id="Footnote_170_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor_170_170"><span class="label">[170]</span></a> A black resin, used for violin-strings.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_171_171" id="Footnote_171_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor_171_171"><span class="label">[171]</span></a> Alluding to the case where by this change of the
+town-clock the Basle people outwitted an enemy&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/barstart.jpg" width="550" height="138" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Albano and Liana.</span></p>
+
+
+<h3>64. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/s.jpg" width="100" height="108" alt="S" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">So many tender and holy sensibilities flutter round in our inner world,
+which, like angels, can never assume the bodily form of outward action,
+so many rich, full flowers stand therein which bear no seed, that it is
+lucky poetry has been invented, which easily treasures up all these
+inborn spirits and the flower-fragrance in its limbo. With this I catch,
+dear Albano, thy glorious perfume-breathing Sunday, and hold fast the
+invisible incense for the Schneider's-skin of the world!</p></div>
+
+<p>On Sunday he moved to the thunder-house in Lilar. The Lector kept
+himself up with the hope that the Count would very soon tread down the
+flower-parterre of the new enjoyment as flat and dead as a cross-way. It
+was a fine morning, all sprinkled with dew; a fresh wind blew from Lilar
+over the blooming grain; and the sun burned alone in a cool heaven. Over
+the Blumenbühl road a swarm of people were plodding onward, and no one
+went long alone; on the Eastern heights he saw his friend Charles, with
+bowed crest, dashing to meet the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The breezes of Lilar came flying to welcome him with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> a breath of
+orange-fragrance, and blew away the ashes which rested on the glowing
+altar-coals of that first magnificent Sunday. He went down the bridge,
+and Pollux, early in his finery, came driving a ruffled turkey-cock to
+meet him. A <i>SÅ“ur Servante</i> of old Spener had been already for an
+hour cooking at Chariton's, merely to see him go by. The latter ran,
+festally decked, out of the house, which opened itself gayly with all
+its windows to the whole heavens, to meet him, and, in the confusion of
+her joy, broke out with the main matter first, namely, that everything
+was ready and beautiful up there in the little house, and whether he
+would have his dinner up there. She would fain, in the midst of the
+conversation, pull Pollux out of the Count's fingers, but he let him
+swing up for a kiss, and won thereby every heart, even the old one
+behind the kitchen fire.</p>
+
+<p>While he marched off toward his little house through the western
+triumphal arch, he felt, with indescribable strength and sweetness, that
+the lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of gods, temples,
+and bliss,&mdash;and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals stalk through
+and strip with their talons.</p>
+
+<p>His blooming path ran at length into the descending and ascending
+stairway, which he had passed with Spener; single streaks of day burned
+themselves into the moist ground and painted the scattered twigs fiery
+and golden. In the mystic bower, where the dead Prince had stalked along
+before him in the by-cavern, he found no such cavern, but only an empty
+niche. He stepped out above, as out of the haunch of the earth. His
+little house lay on the crooked back of the mountain ridge. Down below
+reposed around him those elephants of the earth, the hills, and Lilar
+gloriously swelling in blossoms, and he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> looked from his windows into
+the camp of the giants of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile he could not now stay on the window-sill, nor near the
+inspiring Æolian harp, nor in the eye-prison of books; through streams
+and woods and over mountains fresh nature longed to sweep. That he did.</p>
+
+<p>There are sometimes between the every-day days of life&mdash;when the rainbow
+of Nature appears to us only broken up, and as a misshapen, motley mass
+on the horizon&mdash;certain creation-days, when she rounds and contracts
+herself into a fair form, nay, when she becomes alive, and speaks to us
+like a soul. To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years
+often pass away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along
+on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow
+fuller and fuller to meet him;&mdash;without wind, a landscape was to him a
+stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;&mdash;and now the wind rolled the solid
+land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves
+like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods
+stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances.
+Majestically swam through the blue the silvery islands, the clouds, and
+on the earth shadows stalked like giants over streams and mountains; in
+the valley sparkled the Rosana, and rolled into the oak grove. He went
+down into the warm vale; the flowery pastures foamed and their seed
+played in its cloud-fleece ere the earth caught it; the swan spread
+voluptuously his long wing; pairs of doves were pecking each other for
+love; and everywhere lay beds and twigs full of hot maternal bosoms and
+eggs. Like a glorious blue bouquet, the neck of the reposing peacock
+played off its dissolving colors in the high grasses. He stepped under
+the oaks, which with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> knotty arms seized hold upon heaven, and with
+knotty roots the earth. The Rosana talked alone with the murmuring wood,
+and ate away, foaming, at the rocky crags and at the decaying
+shore;&mdash;night and evening and day chased each other in the mystic grove.
+He stepped into the stream, and went out with it before a warm, busy
+plain full of villages, and out from them came the Sabbath sounds, and
+out of the grain-fields larks arose, and on the mountains human
+foot-paths crept upward,&mdash;the trees lifted themselves up as living
+things, and the distant men seemed to be fast-rooted, and became only
+little shoots on the low bark of the enormous tree of life.</p>
+
+<p>The soul of the youth was cast into the holy fire; like asbestos-paper,
+he drew it out quenched and blank; it was to him as if he knew nothing,
+as if he were <i>one</i> thought; and here the feeling came upon him in a
+wonderfully new manner, that is the world, thou art on the world;&mdash;he
+was <i>one</i> being with it,&mdash;all was <i>one</i> life, clouds and men and trees.
+He felt himself grasped by innumerable polypus-arms, and swallowed up at
+the same time with them, and yet running on in the infinite heart.</p>
+
+<p>In a blissful bewilderment he arrived at his dwelling, from which little
+Pollux came rolling down the mountain to meet him, and call him to
+dinner. In the little house the very thought of his heart was expressed
+by the Æolian harp at the open window. While the child was thundering
+away with his little fist on the harpsichord, and the birds joyfully
+screamed in out of the trees, the soul of the world swept exulting and
+sighing through the Æolian strings, now lawlessly and now regularly,
+playing with the storms and they with it; and Albano seemed to hear the
+streams of life rushing between their shores, the countries of the
+earth,&mdash;and through flower-veins and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> oak-veins, and through
+hearts,&mdash;around the earth, bearing clouds on their bosom,&mdash;and the
+stream, which thunders through eternity, a Divine hand was pouring out
+under the veil.</p>
+
+<p>Albano came, with the innocent boy dancing before him, to the still
+smiling mother. Even here, between the four walls, the sails continued
+to propel him which the great morning had swelled. Nothing surprised
+him, nothing seemed to him common, nothing remote; the wave and the drop
+in the endless sea of life flowed away in indivisible union with the
+streams and whirlpools which it bore onward. Before Chariton he stood
+like a shining god, and she would gladly have veiled either him or
+herself. Never was humanity individualized in purer forms, crippled by
+no alloy of provincialism or nationality, than in this circle of joy,
+wherein childhood, womanhood, and manhood, twined with flowers, met and
+softly clasped each other.</p>
+
+<p>Chariton spoke constantly of Liana, out of love, not merely for the
+absent one, but also for the one who stood near; for, although she
+looked with those open eyes, which seem more to image quietly than to
+behold, more to let in than to draw in, still she was, like children,
+virgins, country people, and savages, at once open-heartedly true and
+keen. She had easily detected Albano's love, because everything is
+easier to disguise from women,&mdash;even hatred, than its opposite. She
+praised Liana infinitely, particularly her incomparable kindness; and
+"her lord had said, few men had so much heart as she, for she had often
+been, without any fear, whole nights with her in Tartarus." Certainly,
+neither was this explicable to the Count. The marvellous is the aureole
+of a beloved head; a sun, softened down to a human<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> countenance, takes
+less powerful hold than a beloved countenance glorified into a
+sun-image.</p>
+
+<p>More and more heartily delighted at his delight, she offered to lead him
+into Liana's chamber. A simple little chamber,&mdash;under a green twilight
+of glimmering vine foliage, some books of Fénelon and Herder, old
+flowers still in their water-glasses, little Chinese dishes, Julienne's
+portrait, and another of a deceased youthful friend, whose name was
+Caroline, an unstained writing-stand, with English-pressed paper,&mdash;was
+what he found. The holy spring hours of the virgin passed by before him,
+dropping dew like sunny clouds.</p>
+
+<p>He happened to touch a penknife, when Chariton brought quills to be cut,
+"because," she said, "they had so much trouble on this score since her
+master had gone away." For a woman can more easily drive any pen&mdash;even
+the epic and Kantian&mdash;than make one; and here, as in several other
+cases, the stronger sex must lend the weaker a hand.</p>
+
+<p>Albano wished to see, also, the working-chamber of his teacher; but this
+she decidedly&mdash;although an hour's eating together had not given her any
+new courage&mdash;refused, because her master had forbidden it. He begged
+once more; but she smiled more and more painfully, and adhered to her
+gentle no.</p>
+
+<p>He now dreamed away the murmur of the morning in the magic garden, on
+whose waters and paths the moonshine and reflection of memory played.
+Out of the nine million square miles of common earth, how do certain
+poetical lands stand out to a poetical heart! On the mountain with the
+altar, where he once saw her disappear down below, the afternoon chime
+of Blumenbühl came wafted to him with the fanning of a freer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> ether; and
+his childhood's life, and the present scenes yonder, and Liana, gave him
+a tender heart, and he surveyed, with dimmer eyes, the transfigured
+land.</p>
+
+<p>At evening came happy church-goers from Blumenbühl, and praised the
+consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still
+standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he
+should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all,
+overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in
+splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song
+of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,&mdash;the constellations over Blumenbühl
+shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his
+closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened
+him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of
+slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.</p>
+
+
+<h3>65. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day
+clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same
+old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in
+order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path
+was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully
+pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the
+broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and
+shepherd-boys had not, like the grass, shot up taller during his
+absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and
+the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much
+prolonged to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear
+alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his
+breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the
+Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even
+the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up
+both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the
+earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high
+to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that
+the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>In the castle how profusely was his heart covered with hearts, and the
+youngest love drowned by the old, from the easily weeping mother,
+Albina, even to the hand-extending old servants, who, on his account,
+stirred more briskly their petrified limbs! He found all his
+loves&mdash;Liana excepted&mdash;in Wehrfritz's study,<a name="FNanchor_172_172" id="FNanchor_172_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_172_172" class="fnanchor">[172]</a> because he loved
+"young folk" and discourse, and always insisted that they should set out
+the breakfast on his table of papers, which, he said, was as good as a
+breakfast-table with varnished scrap-pictures that nobody saw. Albano
+tormented himself with the fear that the Minister's lady had been the
+church-robber of a very goddess, and carried Liana back yesterday,&mdash;till
+the Captain hastily explained the non-appearance. The good soul had had
+yesterday to atone for the commotion of her sympathizing heart with
+sick-headache. Her loved teacher, Spener, with his sublime
+soul-stillness,&mdash;those eyes, which wept no more over the earth, buried
+with the princely pair,&mdash;standing with his head under the cold polar
+star of eternity, so that now, like the pole, it no longer saw any stars
+rise or set,&mdash;calmly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> and with hands apostolically folded in one
+another, speaking so all-persuasively upon the sorrow and the great end
+of this pale life, pressing, with his inspired speech, men's hearts to
+the verge of tearful emotion, and yet with exalted tenderness drawing
+them back from extreme grief, that so only the heart may weep without
+the eye,&mdash;and then the consecration of the coupled coffins and of the
+church,&mdash;O, in the delicate Liana these emotions could not surely fail
+to grow into sorrows, and all that her teacher buried in silence was in
+her spoken aloud. In addition to this, she had not taken the usual
+medicine of keeping still, but had disguised all her pangs behind active
+joy, so as to give her departing mother no pains, although herself far
+too great ones.</p>
+
+<p>Into the midst of this explanation she herself entered pleasantly, in a
+white morning-dress, with a nosegay of Chinese roses,&mdash;a little pale and
+tired,&mdash;looking up with a dreamy softness,&mdash;her voice somewhat low,&mdash;the
+roses on her cheeks closed into buds,&mdash;and, like a child, smiling upon
+every heart;&mdash;thou angel of heaven! who may dare to love and reward
+thee? She beheld the lofty youth;&mdash;all the lilies of her still face
+were, contrary to her wont, baptized into a heavenly morning-red of joy,
+and a tender purple lingered upon them.</p>
+
+<p>She asked him, with an open manner, why he had not come yesterday to the
+festivities, and disclosed, as a matter of moment, that they would all
+to-day visit the pious father, for whom she had been tying her
+dwarf-roses. He took gladly the fourth voice in the concert of the
+pleasure-party. What a magnificent hanging garden, with its loveliest
+flowers and prospects, is built out into the evening-hours! How many
+happy ones a single roof covers!</p>
+
+<p>The ingenuous Rabette, more brisk and busy for her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> still gladness, was,
+unweariedly, Liana's sick-nurse and Roquairol's lion-keeper and
+<i>ma&icirc;tresse de plaisirs</i>, who made every one of the mother's ground-plans
+of pleasure broader by a half, and her whole being was so happy! Ah, her
+poor innocent heart had not yet, indeed, been loved by any one, and
+therefore it glows, with the fresh energies of the first love, so
+brightly and truly before a mighty one which seems to come down to it
+with a blessing, like a loving god, drawing after it a whole heaven!
+Roquairol saw how bewitchingly a busy activity shook aside in the
+play-room of her character and her occupations the heavily hanging
+foliage, which in the visiting parlor darkly overspread her real worth;
+she was even made more lovely by the darker, neat house-dress, since he
+by his preaching had sent back every white drapery of her brunette
+person into the wardrobe. She would not obey her mother in this matter,
+till he had demanded it. Nay, he had yesterday brought her to the point
+of really wearing about with her the watch which the proud Minister's
+lady had presented her, though she blushed like fire at the unwonted
+ornament. Meanwhile he proposed to take with her, as it were, a true
+serpentine flowery way to the altar of his love's <i>loud</i> Yes,&mdash;the
+<i>silent</i> one he was saying all the time;&mdash;he knew she would get in at
+once so soon as he rode forth with the conch-chariot of Venus, to which
+he had tackled a dove and a hawk.</p>
+
+<p>How gloriously the forenoon flew away on golden wing-shells and on
+transparent wings! The beloved Albano was introduced into all the
+changes of the house; the finest was in his study-chamber, which Rabette
+had transformed into her toilet-chamber, sewing-room, and study, and
+which again, since yesterday, had become guest-chamber and library to
+Liana. How gladly did he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> step to the western window, where he had so
+often caused his invisible father and the beloved one to appear, in an
+unearthly manner, in the crystal mirror of his fancy! On the panes were
+many L's and R's drawn by his boyish hand. Liana asked what the R's
+meant; "Roquairol," said he, for she did not inquire after the L. With
+infinite sweetness did the thought flow around his heart, that his
+beloved was indeed to live through some blooming days in the dreamy cell
+of his first fresh life. Liana showed him with childlike joy how she
+shared everything, that is, the chamber, fairly with Rabette, in her
+double housekeeping and chum-ship, and how she made her very hostess her
+guest.</p>
+
+<p>I have often admired with envy the fine, light, nomadic life of maidens
+in their Arcadian life-segments; easily do these <i>doves of passage</i>
+flutter into a strange family, and sew and laugh and visit there, with
+the daughter of the house, one or two months, and one takes the
+ingrafted shoot for a family twig; on the other hand, we <i>house-pigeons</i>
+are inhabitive and hard to transplant, and generally, after a few days,
+journey back again. Since we, as more brittle material, less easily melt
+in with the family ore; since we do not weave our work into that of
+others so easily as maidens do theirs,&mdash;because carriages full of
+working-tools must follow after us,&mdash;and since we need much and contrive
+much;&mdash;from all this our claim to a passport is very well deduced,
+without the least detriment to our characters.</p>
+
+<p>After a half-eternity of dressing,&mdash;since, in the neighborhood of the
+loved one, an hour of absence lasts longer than a month when she is far
+off,&mdash;the maidens entered, equipped for travelling, in the black dress
+of brides. How charmingly the roses become Rabette, in her dark hair,
+and the lace edging on the white neck, and the timid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> flames of her pure
+eye, and the flitting blushes! And Liana&mdash;I speak not of this saint.
+Even the good old Director, when the innocent face looked upon him so
+childlike from beneath the white veil of India muslin, sprinkled with
+gold wire, which was simply thrown over her head after the manner of the
+nuns, could not but give his satisfaction words: "Like a nun, like an
+angel!" She answered: "I wanted once really to be one with a friend; but
+now I take the veil later than she," she added, with a wondrous tone.</p>
+
+<p>She hung to-day with tender enthusiasm upon Rabette, perhaps from the
+weakness of ill health, perhaps from love for Albano and the parents,
+and perhaps because Rabette, in her love, was so good and beautiful, and
+because she herself was nothing but heart. She had, besides, the sacred
+fault of forming too enthusiastic conceptions of her female
+friends,&mdash;into which the nobler maidens easily fall, and which belongs
+less to married women,&mdash;carried to an unusual height; thus, for
+instance, her friend Caroline, who had met her like a heroine of romance
+only on the romantic playground of friendship and beautiful nature, she
+could not, in the beginning, without a rending away of the saintly halo,
+at all conceive of as having hands, which drove the needle and
+flat-iron, and other implements of the female field of labor.</p>
+
+<p>Whoso will feel the tenderest participation in joy, let him look not at
+happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never
+did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina&mdash;across whose face time had
+struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no
+step-motherly discord appeared&mdash;look oftener to and fro, and more
+benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they
+were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and
+perturbations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the
+"hypocrisy and spiritlessness<a name="FNanchor_173_173" id="FNanchor_173_173"></a><a href="#Footnote_173_173" class="fnanchor">[173]</a> of the young people now-a-days,"
+compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was
+chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day
+assigned himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the
+pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for
+as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had
+he&mdash;(others have the devil, the deuse)&mdash;the journeyman's greeting of
+genius, <i>Rascal</i>, together with the derivatives, <i>rascality</i>, &amp;c. But
+how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the
+stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits.
+The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not
+been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of
+man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the
+higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds
+itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly
+characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not
+in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly.</p>
+
+<p>The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his
+glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a
+glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a
+youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing
+whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art,
+by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom!</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>66. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The carriage flew through the village with the four young people. How
+grateful to our youth was the expanse of heaven and of earth! The portal
+of life&mdash;youth&mdash;was hung with flowers and lights. They rolled along at
+the foot of the mountain by the bird-pole, the sign-post of a boyish
+Arcadia, by the cradle where, in the enraptured sleep of childhood, he
+had stretched out his boyish arm after the high heaven; and through the
+birch thicket, now dwindled in his eyes to a bush, which, on that golden
+morning, he had found so broad and long; and by the open triumphal arch
+of the east, behind which the sea of the many-shaped Lilar poured the
+tide of its charms; and when they arrived behind the mountain-wall of
+the flute-dell, they sent back the carriage.</p>
+
+<p>They walked on a glorious earth, under a glorious heaven. Pure and white
+swam the sun like a swan through the blue flood,&mdash;meadows and villages
+crowded up close around the distant, low mountain-ridges; a soft wind
+swayed the green waves of the crop to and fro all over the plain; on the
+hills shadows lay fast asleep under the wings of white clouds; and
+behind the summits of the heights the mast-trees of the Rhine ships
+majestically sailed away.</p>
+
+<p>As Albano went along so close by the side of his beloved, the purgatory
+burning under his Eden fell back deeper and deeper into the earth's
+core; full of uneasiness and hope, he cast his fiery eye now on the
+summer, now on the mild vesper-star, which glimmered so near to him out
+of the spring ether. The good maiden seemed to-day more still, serious,
+and restless than usual. As they went through a little wood, open on all
+sides, along<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> the ridge of a hill that ran round the flute-dell, Liana
+suddenly said to the Count, she heard flutes. Scarcely could he say, he
+heard only far-off turtle-doves, when she at once collected herself as
+for something wonderful, fixed her eyes on heaven, smiled, and suddenly
+looked round toward Albano, and grew red. Then turning to him, she said:
+"I will be frank; I hear at this moment music within me.<a name="FNanchor_174_174" id="FNanchor_174_174"></a><a href="#Footnote_174_174" class="fnanchor">[174]</a> Forgive me
+to-day my weakness and tenderness; it comes from yesterday." "I&mdash;you?"
+said he, passionately; for he, about whom in sicknesses only burning
+images stormed, was inspired with veneration for a being to whom, as if
+from her higher world, low tones like golden sunbeams reach down in her
+pains, and pass veiled through the rough deep.</p>
+
+<p>But Liana, as if for the sake of turning aside his enthusiasm, came upon
+the subject of her friend Caroline, and told how she always hovered
+before her on such days, and especially on this walk. "In the beginning
+I sought her out," said Liana, "because she resembled my Linda. She was
+my instructress, although she was only a few weeks older than I. Her
+pure, severe, unflinching character, and her readiness to sacrifice
+herself cheerfully and in silence, made her even, if I may say so,
+worthy of veneration in the eyes of her mother. She was never seen to
+weep, tender as she was, for she wished to keep her mother always
+cheerful. We were going to take the veil in company, for the sake of
+being always together; I should not live to become old, she said, and I
+must spend my short life happily and without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span> anxiety; but also in
+preparation for the next. Ah, she herself went up before me!
+Night-watching by the sick-bed of her mother, and sorrow for her death,
+took her away. She received the holy supper, for which we were preparing
+ourselves together, only on her death-bed. Then did the angel give me
+this veil, in which I am some time to follow her. O good, good
+Caroline!" She wept unconcealedly, and pressed, with emotion, Albano's
+hand. "O, I should not have begun about this! There comes already our
+friend; we will be right cheerful!"</p>
+
+<p>They had now passed through a high wood of under-brush, which teasingly
+disclosed and hid by turns the landscapes that glided around them, and
+had come near to the spire which looks in upon the flute-dell, and near
+which lay a solitary church and Spener's dwelling, and in the plain
+below the open village. Spener came to meet his pupil&mdash;after the manner
+of old men&mdash;unconcerned about the others; and a young roe ran after him.
+A beautiful spot! Little white peacocks; turtle-doves at large; a city
+of bees in the midst of their bee-flora,&mdash;all bespoke the tranquil old
+man, whom the earth serves and honors, and who, indifferent towards it,
+lives only in God. He came&mdash;disappointing one's expectation of an
+ecclesiastical gravity&mdash;with a light playfulness upon the gay train, and
+laid his finger in benediction on the forehead of Liana, who seemed to
+be his granddaughter, as it were, a second tree-blossom in the late
+autumn of life. In a daughterly way, she placed the bunch of dwarf-roses
+in his bosom, and took very careful notice whether it pleased him. She
+smiled quite serenely, and all her tears seemed fanned away; but she
+resembled the rain-sprinkled tree, when the sun laughs out again,&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span>
+least agitation flings the old rain from the still leaves.</p>
+
+<p>The old man was delighted with the sympathy of the young people, and
+remained with them upon the blooming and resounding eminence, which sat
+enthroned between a wide landscape and the richly laden mountain-ridge,
+running away into Elysium. Since, as with one who ascends in a balloon,
+the tones of earth did not reach him from so great a distance as its
+forms, they let him talk more than listen, as one spares old people.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke soon of that in which his heart lived and breathed, but in a
+singular, half-theological, half-French, Wolfian, and poetic speech. One
+ought, of many a mystic's poetry and philosophy to give, instead of
+verbal, real translations, in order that it may be seen how the pure
+gold of truth glows under all wrappages. Spener says, in my translation:
+"He had formerly, before he found the right way, tormented himself in
+every human friendship and love. He had, when he was fervently loved,
+said to himself, that he could surely never so regard or love himself;
+and even so the beloved being could not truly so think of itself, as the
+loving one did, and though it were ever so perfect or so full of
+self-love. If every one looked upon others as upon himself, there could
+be no ardent love. But all love demands an object of infinite worth, and
+dies of every inexplicable and clearly recognized failure; it projects
+its objects out of all and above all, and requires a reciprocal love
+without limits, without any selfishness, without division, without
+pause, without end. Such an object is verily the divine being, but not
+fleeting, sinful, changeable man. Therefore must the lovesick heart sink
+into the Giver himself of this and of all love, into the fulness of all
+that is good and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span> beautiful, into the disinterested, unlimited,
+universal Love, and dissolve and revive therein, blest in the
+alternation of contraction and expansion. Then it looks back upon the
+world and finds everywhere God and his reflection: the worlds are his
+deeds; every pious man is a word, a look, of the All-loving; for love to
+God is the Divine thing, and the heart yearns for him in every heart."</p>
+
+<p>"But," said Albano, whose fresh, energetic life rebelled against all
+mystical annihilation, "how, then, does God love us?" "As a father loves
+his child, not because it is the best child, but because it needs
+him."<a name="FNanchor_175_175" id="FNanchor_175_175"></a><a href="#Footnote_175_175" class="fnanchor">[175]</a> "And whence," he further inquired, "comes, then, the evil in
+man, and whence sorrow?" "From the Devil," said the old man, and
+pictured out uninterruptedly, with transfigured joy, the heaven of his
+heart,&mdash;how it was always surrounded with the all-beloved, all-loving
+One, how it never desired any good fortune or any gifts from him at all
+(which one did not wish even in earthly love), but only a higher and
+higher love towards himself, and how, while the evening mists of old age
+were gathering thicker and thicker around his senses, his heart felt
+itself, in the darkness of life, embraced more and more closely by the
+invisible arms. "I shall soon be with God!" said he, with a radiance of
+love on that countenance of his, chilled with life, and breaking in
+under the weight of years. One could have borne to see him die. So
+stands Mont Blanc before the rising moon; night veils his feet and his
+breast, but the light summit hangs high in the dark heaven as a star
+among the stars.</p>
+
+<p>Liana, like a daughter, had not let her eye nor her hand go from him,
+and had languishingly drunk in every<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span> sound; her brother had heard him
+with more pleasure than Albano, but merely for the sake of remodelling
+more clearly and fully the mystic Hero into the mimic Mount Athos of his
+representation, and Rabette had contemplated him as in a church among
+believing by-thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>He withdrew now without ceremony to take care of his animals, which he
+loved, as he did everything involuntary, for instance, children, as
+coming at first hand from God. "Everything is divine," he said, "and
+nothing earthly but what is immoral." He could not bear to smoke bees
+with brimstone, let flowers dry up with thirst in the pot-cage, or see
+an overdriven wounded horse, and he passed by a butcher's stall not
+without shuddering limbs.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we," said friend Charles, "take in the glorious evening on the
+magnificent mountain road, and see thy thunder-house, and cast down
+every cup of sorrow into the vales below?" Through what a magic
+neighborhood did they now pass along the sloping ridge of the
+thunder-house! On the right, as it were, the occident of nature; on the
+left, the orient; before them Lilar, glittering in the <i>faerie</i> of
+evening,&mdash;lying in the arms of the glancing Rosana,&mdash;golden grain behind
+silver-poplars, and overhead a heaven filled with a life-intoxicated,
+tumultuous creation,&mdash;and the sun-god stalking away over his
+evening-world, and stooping a little under the midnight to raise his
+golden head in the east. Albano went forth, holding Liana's holy hand.
+"O how beautiful is all!" said he. "How the fluttering world-map rustles
+and murmurs with long streams and woods,&mdash;how the eastern mountains bask
+in steadfast repose,&mdash;how the groves climb the hills, with glowing
+stems! One could plunge<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> down into the smoking vales and into the cold,
+glistening waves. Ah, Liana, how beautiful is all!" "And God is on the
+earth," said she. "And in thee!" said he, and thought of the word of the
+old man, that love seeks God, and that he dwells in the heart which we
+esteem.</p>
+
+<p>Now came rolling toward him the great waves which the Æolian-harp dashed
+out in the thunder-house; and his genius flew by before him with the
+words, "Tell her there thy whole heart!"</p>
+
+<p>Before the little tabernacle of yesterday's dreams his stormy heart was
+dissolved; and the sun and the earth reeled before his passionate tears.
+As he entered with her into the rosy splendor of the evening sun that
+filled the apartment, and into the spirit-like din of tones discoursing
+with one another alone, he seized Liana's hands and pressed them wildly
+to his breast, and sank down before her speechless and dazzled; flames
+and tears suffused his eyes and his cheeks,&mdash;the whirlwind of tones blew
+into his blazing soul,&mdash;the mild angel of innocence bowed herself,
+weeping and trembling, toward the burning sun-god, and a sharp pain
+twined itself like a pale serpent through the roses of the mild
+countenance,&mdash;and Albano stammered: "Liana, I love thee!"</p>
+
+<p>Then the serpent turned round and clasped and covered the sweet rosy
+form. "O good Albano! thou art unhappy, but I am innocent!" She stepped
+back with dignity, and quickly drew down the white veil over her face,
+and said, beside herself, "Wouldst thou love the dead? This is my
+corpse-veil; the coming year it will lie upon this face." "That is not
+true," said Albano. "Caroline, answer him!" said she, and stared at the
+burning sun as if looking for a higher apparition. Frightful moment! as
+during an earthquake the sea heaves and the air rests<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span> in fearful
+stillness, so was his lip dumb beside the veiled one, and his whole
+heart was a storm. On the strings swept by a sighing world of spirits,
+and the last ended with a sharp scream. The beauty of the earth was
+distorted before him, and in the evening clouds broad fiery banners were
+planted; and the sun's eye shut-to in blood.</p>
+
+<p>All at once Liana folded her hands as if in prayer, and smiled and
+blushed; then she raised the veil from her divine eyes, and the
+transfigured one, tinged with the rosy reflection, looked on him
+tenderly,&mdash;and cast her eye down,&mdash;and raised it again,&mdash;and again let
+it sink,&mdash;and the veil fell again before her, and she said, in a low
+tone, "I will love thee, good Albano, if I do not make thee miserable."
+"I will die with thee!" said he. "What then?"&mdash;And now let a holy cloud
+veil the sun-god, who moves flaming through the midst of his stars!</p>
+
+<p>His solitude and Liana's solution of so many wonders were suspended by
+the entrance of Rabette and Charles, who both seemed more touched than
+blessed,&mdash;she by the comforting nearness of the loved one, he by the
+singular situation and the subduing evening; for after certain beings a
+storm follows, and they must, against their will, make the steps that
+they take more rapid.</p>
+
+<p>When Albano, with the peace-angel of his life, with the beloved one,
+who, in the midst of the rush of her feelings, heard, nevertheless, the
+voice of her female friend, walked forth again once more alone upon the
+rocky causeway between fragrant vales of Tempe in the glimmering world,
+he felt as if he had struggled through his life like an eagle through a
+storm-cloud, and as if the black tempest were running far away below his
+wings, and the whole starry heaven burned bright above his head. Liana,
+with maidenly nobleness and firmness, gave him, before he had put a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span>
+question, the answer: "I must now tell you a mystery, which I have
+hidden from every one, and even from my mother, because it would have
+disquieted her. I spoke just now of my never-to-be-forgotten Caroline.
+On the day of my sacrament, which I had wished to take with her, I went
+back by night from my teacher to my mother, and in fact through the
+singular, long cavern, wherein one seems to descend, when one is in
+reality going upward. My maid went before with the lantern. In the
+romantic arbor, where a concave mirror stands, I turn round toward the
+full moon which was streaming in, from a dread of the wild mirror, which
+distorts people too horribly. Suddenly I hear a heavenly concert, such
+as I often heard again afterward in sicknesses,&mdash;I think of my blessed
+friend,&mdash;and gaze, full of longing, into the moon. Then I saw her
+opposite to me, beaming with innumerable rays: in her fair eyes was a
+tender look, but yet something dissolving; the tender mouth, almost the
+only living feature, resembled a red, but transparent fruit, and all her
+hues seemed to be nothing but light. Yet only in the blue eye and red
+mouth did the angel seem like Caroline. I could sketch her, if one could
+paint with light. I became dangerously sick; then she appeared to me
+oftener, and refreshed me with inexpressibly sweet tones,&mdash;they were not
+properly words,&mdash;whereupon I always sank into a soft sleep, as into a
+sweet death. Once I asked her&mdash;more with inner words&mdash;whether I should,
+then, soon come to her into the realm of light. She answered, I should
+not die just now, but somewhat later; and she named very clearly the
+coming year, and the very day, which I have, however, forgotten.... O
+dear Albano! forgive me only a few words! I soon recovered, and mourned
+over the slow, lingering passage of time...."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No," Albano interrupted her, for his feelings were striking against
+each other like swords, "I revere, but I hate her dangerous phantom.
+Fancy and sickness are the parents of the air-born, destroying angel,
+who flies scorching, like a dumb heat-lightning, over all the blossoms
+of youth!"</p>
+
+<p>She answered, with emotion, "O thou good, pure spirit! thou hast never
+distressed me, thou hast ever comforted, guided, made me happy and
+holy,&mdash;a phantom is it, Albano? It even preserves me against all
+phantoms of terror, against all ghostly fear, because it is always about
+me. Why, if it is only a phantom, does it never appear to me in my
+dreams?<a name="FNanchor_176_176" id="FNanchor_176_176"></a><a href="#Footnote_176_176" class="fnanchor">[176]</a> Why comes it not when I will? But it comes only in weighty
+cases; then I consult and obey it very willingly. It has already to-day,
+Albano," she added, in a lower and fainter tone, "twice appeared to me
+on the way, when I heard the inner music, and previously in the
+thunder-house, when the sun went down, and has affectionately answered
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"And what says it, heavenly one?" asked Albano, innocently. "I saw it
+only on the way, and asked no question," replied the childlike one,
+blushing; and here, all at once, her holy soul stood unconsciously
+without a veil before him; for she had, in the thunder-house, received
+from the invisible Caroline the yes to her love; because that being was
+her own creation, and this a suggestion of her own. Yes indeed, heavenly
+one! thou standest before the mirror with the virgin's veil over thy
+form, and when thy image softly raises its own, thou fanciest thyself
+still covered!</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span></p>
+<p>No word can express Albano's veneration for such a sanctified heart,
+which dreamed into such distinctness glorified beings; whose golden
+flowers only grew the higher over the thought of death, as earthly ones
+do in churchyards over the reality; which, simultaneously with his own,
+invisible hands had drawn into two similar dreams;<a name="FNanchor_177_177" id="FNanchor_177_177"></a><a href="#Footnote_177_177" class="fnanchor">[177]</a> to which one was
+ashamed to give common truths for its holy errors. "Thou art from
+heaven," he said, inspired, and his joy became the pearl melted in the
+eye which quenches the thirst of the human heart; "therefore thou
+wouldst go back thither!" "O, I consecrate to thee, my friend," said
+she, smilingly weeping, and pressed his hand to her pure heart, "the
+whole little life which I have, every hour to the last, and I will,
+meanwhile, prepare thee for everything which God sends."</p>
+
+<p>Before they entered the cottage of the pious father, Albano seized his
+friend's hand, and the sisters joined each other. The friends went
+forward for a time in silence; Charles looked upon Albano, and found the
+peace of blessedness upon his face. When the latter saw how Liana
+pressed her overfraught heart to her sister's, then were sincerity and
+joy too strong in him, and he fell without a word upon the heart of the
+dear brother of the eternal bride, and let him silently guess all from
+his tears of bliss. O, he might have guessed it, to be sure, from the
+bridal look of love which his sister more seldom removed from his
+friend, and from the heartiness wherewith she drew Rabette to her heart;
+just as if they two would soon be related to each other, as if her
+brother himself would soon speak more sweetly, since he for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span> some time
+had no longer called her the little Linda; and consecrated her thereon
+for the heart of her brother. Not before the pious father did the
+enraptured look hold itself much in abeyance, which Albano, standing as
+if under the gate of eternity, cast into the heavens, gleaming like
+worlds one behind another; he was still and tender, and in his heart
+dwelt all hearts. O love <i>one</i> heart purely and warmly, then thou lovest
+all hearts after it, and the heart in its heaven sees like the
+journeying sun, from the dew-drop even to the ocean, nothing but mirrors
+which it warms and fills.</p>
+
+<p>But in Roquairol started up immediately, when he saw the heavenly bliss
+so near, the mutinous spirit of his past, and struck with a bloody
+epilepsy the limbs of the inner man: those immortal sighings after an
+ever-flying peace again tormented him; his transgressions and errors,
+and even the hours when he innocently suffered, were painfully reckoned
+up before him; and then he spoke, (and stirred every heart, but most of
+all poor Rabette's, which he pressed against his own to warm himself,
+as, according to the tradition, the eagle does with the dove, after
+which he does not tear her to pieces,)&mdash;nobly he spoke then of life's
+wilderness, and of fate, which burns out man, like Vesuvius, into a
+crater, and then again sows cool meadows therein, and fills it again
+with fire; and of the only blessedness of this hollow life, love, and of
+the injury inflicted, when fate with its winds sways and rubs a
+flower<a name="FNanchor_178_178" id="FNanchor_178_178"></a><a href="#Footnote_178_178" class="fnanchor">[178]</a> to and fro, and thereby cuts through the green skin against
+the earth.</p>
+
+<p>But while he thus spoke, he looked on the glowing Rabette, and would
+fain by these warmings burst open, as it were by force, the fast-closed
+flower-bud of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span> love, and spread its leaves out under the sun. O the
+bewildered and yearning one was surely not yet quite happy even to-day,
+and he wished not so much to affect others as himself.</p>
+
+<p>With what blissful presentiments did they step out again before the
+sphinx of night, who lay smiling before them with soft, starry glances!
+Did they not go through a still, glimmering, subterranean world, light
+and free, without the heavy clogging earth on their feet, while in the
+wide Elysium the warm ether only flutters because invisible Psyches fan
+it with their wings? And out of the flute-dell the old man sends after
+them his tones as sweet arrows of love, in order that the swelling heart
+may blissfully bleed of their woundings. Albano and Liana came out upon
+a prospect where the broad eastern landscape, with its light-streaks of
+blooming poppy-fields, and its dark villages, ascended the soft
+mountains, where the moon awoke, and the splendor of her garment already
+swept like that of a spirit through heaven: here they remained standing
+and waiting for Luna. Albano held her hand. All the mountain-ridges of
+his life stood in a glowing dawn. "Liana," said he, "what innumerable
+springs are there at this moment up yonder on the worlds which hang in
+the heavens; but this is the fairest!" "Ah, life is lovely, and to-day
+it is too dear to me! Albano," she added, in a low voice, and her whole
+face became an exalted, tearless love, and the stars wove and
+embroidered its bridal dress, "if God calls me, then may he let me
+always appear to thee as Caroline does to me. O, if I could only attend
+thee thus through thy whole dear life, and console and warn thee, I
+would willingly wish for no other heaven."</p>
+
+<p>But as he was about to express the fulness of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span> love, and the anger
+of his pain about the death-delusion, just then came his wild friend,
+who, like a Vesuvius, pouring out at once lava- and rain-streams over
+the credulous Rabette, had made both her heart and his own only fuller,
+not lighter; then Charles beheld the glorified beings and the blue
+horizon, where already the moon was flinging forth her glimmering light
+between the bristling mast-peaks and summits, and looked again into the
+splendor of holy love. Then could he no longer contain himself; his
+heart, full of agony, mounted to an eternal purpose, as if to God, and
+he embraced Albano and Rabette, and said: "Beloved man! beloved maiden!
+keep my unhappy heart!"</p>
+
+<p>Rabette clung around him compassionately, as a mother around her child,
+and gave up to him, in hot, gushing tears, her whole soul. Albano,
+astonished, enfolded in his arms the love-bond; Liana was drawn to the
+beloved hearts by the whirlpool of bliss. Unheard the flutes sounded on,
+unseen waved the white banners of the stars overhead. Charles spoke
+frantic words of love, and wild wishes of dying for joy. Albano touched
+trembling Liana's flower-lip, as John kissed Christ, and the heavy
+milky-way bent down like a magic wand toward his golden bliss. Liana
+sighed: O mother, how happy are thy children! The moon had already flown
+up into the blue, like a white angel of peace, and glorified the great
+embrace; but the blest ones marked it not. Like a sounding waterfall,
+their rich life covered them, and they knew not that the flutes had
+ceased, and all the hills were shining.<a name="FNanchor_179_179" id="FNanchor_179_179"></a><a href="#Footnote_179_179" class="fnanchor">[179]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_172_172" id="Footnote_172_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor_172_172"><span class="label">[172]</span></a> Museum (home of the muses) is the beautiful German name
+for it.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_173_173" id="Footnote_173_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor_173_173"><span class="label">[173]</span></a> <i>Kopf-und Ohr-h&auml;ngerei.</i> Hanging down of head (hypocrisy)
+and ears.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_174_174" id="Footnote_174_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor_174_174"><span class="label">[174]</span></a> This self-resounding&mdash;as the Æolian-harp [<i>riesen-harfe</i>,
+giant-harp, in German.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span>], when the weather changes, sounds without a
+touch&mdash;is common in sick-headache and other maladies of weakness; hence
+in dying; for instance, in Jacob Boehme, life, like a concert-clock,
+rung out its hours amidst surrounding harmonies.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_175_175" id="Footnote_175_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor_175_175"><span class="label">[175]</span></a> Some disinterested love or other must from eternity have
+existed. As there are eternal truths, so must there also be an eternal
+love.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_176_176" id="Footnote_176_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor_176_176"><span class="label">[176]</span></a> For the same reason, perhaps, that the poet does not see
+his, so often and distinctly beheld, creations pass in his dreams among
+the images of the day.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_177_177" id="Footnote_177_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor_177_177"><span class="label">[177]</span></a> For on his and her sacrament-day he had imagined her
+death by lightning.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_178_178" id="Footnote_178_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor_178_178"><span class="label">[178]</span></a> The winter stock-jelliflower.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_179_179" id="Footnote_179_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor_179_179"><span class="label">[179]</span></a> Jean Paul's second volume ends here.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/3flowerstart.jpg" width="550" height="142" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Man and Woman.</span></p>
+
+
+<h3>67. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/i.jpg" width="100" height="108" alt="I" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_3">I have often in the theatre made the pleasant experience, that when
+painful scenes immediately followed the rising of the curtain, I took
+but a slight interest in them, while in joyful ones which, immediately
+after the music, came on with their own music, I took the greatest; man
+demands more that sorrow than that rapture should show its motive and
+its apology. Without hesitation, therefore, I begin a third volume<a name="FNanchor_180_180" id="FNanchor_180_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_180_180" class="fnanchor">[180]</a>
+with blisses of which, to be sure, the foregoing couple have been
+preparing more than enough.</p></div>
+
+<p>At the moment where our story has arrived, among all the descendants of
+Adam who lifted a glad face to heaven, and imaged in that face a still
+fairer heaven, there must have been some one who had the highest
+heaven,&mdash;a happiest of all men. Ah yes! And to be sure, among all
+suffering creatures upon this <i>globe</i>, which our short race makes a
+<i>plain</i>, there must also have been one most unhappy; and may the poor
+man soon lie down to sleep under, not <i>on</i>, his rocky road! Although I
+could wish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> that Albano might not be the happiest of all,&mdash;in order that
+there might yet be a higher heaven above his,&mdash;still it is probable
+that, on the morning after that holiest night, in his present dream of
+the richest dream, deep in the threefold bloom of youth, of nature, and
+of anticipation, he bore the broadest heaven in himself which the narrow
+bosom of man can span.</p>
+
+<p>He looked from his thunder-house,&mdash;that little temple on whose walls
+still lingered the radiance of the goddess who had therein become
+visible to him,&mdash;out over the new-created mountains and gardens of
+Lilar; and it was to him as if he looked into his white and red blooming
+future, adorned with mountain-peaks and fruit-tree-tops, a full Paradise
+built out into the naked earth. He looked round in his future after any
+robbers of joy who might attack his triumphal chariot; he found them all
+visibly too weak to cope with his arms and weapons. He called up Liana's
+parents, and his own father, and the host of spirits which had hitherto
+been working in the air, and set them out on the road which lay between
+him and his beloved; in his muscles glowed more than sufficient power
+easily to dash through them to her, and take her with him into his life
+by main force. "Yes," said he, "I am completely happy, and need nothing
+more,&mdash;no fortune, only my heart and hers!" Albano, may thy evil genius
+not have heard this dangerous thought, so as to carry it to Nemesis! O,
+in this wildly entangled wood of thy life, no step, even in the blooming
+avenues of pleasure, is wholly safe; and amidst the very fulness of this
+artistic garden there awaits thee a strange, gloomy upas-tree, and
+breathes cold poisons into thy life! Therefore it was better as it was
+once, when men were still lowly and prayed to God even in their great
+raptures; for in the neighborhood of the Infinite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> One the fiery eye
+sinks and weeps, but only out of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>Let no mean almanac measurement be applied to the fair eternity which he
+now lived, when he saw the beloved every evening, every morning, in her
+little village. As evening star she went forth before his dreams; as
+morning star, before his day. The interval both filled out with letters,
+which they themselves carried to each other. When they parted at
+evening, not long before they were to see each other again, and while in
+the north already the rose-bud twigs shot along low down in the heavens,
+which during men's sleep speedily grew out toward the east, in order to
+hang down from heaven with thousands of full-blown roses ere the sun and
+love came back again,&mdash;and when his friend Charles stayed with him by
+night, and he asked, in the course of an hour, whence the light came,
+whether from the morning or from the moon,&mdash;and when he sallied forth,
+while moon and morning still appeared together in the dew-dripping
+pleasure-woods,&mdash;and when the road, left only a few hours before,
+appeared wholly new and the absence too long, (because Cupid's wing is
+half a second-hand, which shows the day of the month, and half a
+month-hand, which points to the second, and because, in the neighborhood
+of the loved one, the shortest absence lasts longer than the longest
+when she is far away,)&mdash;and when at last he saw her again,&mdash;then was the
+earth a sun, from which rays proceeded: his heart stood all in light;
+and as a man, who on a spring morning dreams of a spring-morning, finds
+it still brighter around him when he awakes, so, after the blessed
+youthful dream of the beloved, did he open his eyes before her, and
+desire the fairest dream no more.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes they saw each other, when the long summer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span> day was too long,
+on distant mountains, where by appointment they looked upon the
+harvests; sometimes Rabette came alone to Lilar to her brother, that he
+might hear something from Liana. When Liana had read a book, he read it
+after her; often he read it first and she last. Whatever of divine the
+fairest, purest souls can manifest to each other when they unfold
+themselves,&mdash;a holy heart which makes one still holier, a glowing heart
+which makes one still more glowing,&mdash;that they manifested to each other.
+Albano was mild toward all, and the radiance of a higher beauty and
+youth filled his countenance. The fair realms of nature and of his
+childhood were both adorned by love, not it by either of them; he had
+mounted from the pale, light moon-car of hope upon the sounding, shining
+sun-car of living ecstasy. Even on the galleys of wooden sciences, as if
+animated by the wonder-working hand of Bacchus, masts and shrouds
+fluttered out into vine-stalks and clusters. If he went to the Froulay
+house, he always, because he went in full of tolerance, came back
+without any sacrifice of the same: the Minister, who had returned from
+Haarhaar with a veil of gay, blooming ideas on his face, imparted to him
+charming prospects of the exultation wherewith city and country would
+celebrate the approaching marriage-feast of the Prince and the gain of
+the most beautiful bride.</p>
+
+<p>And had he not, in addition to all, his friend too? When one stands so
+close before the flame of joy, one does indeed shun men,&mdash;because they
+easily step between us and the pleasant warmth,&mdash;but one seeks them too;
+a hearty friend is our wish and joy, who shall gently lead on, without
+chasing away, the happy dream in which we sleep and speak. Charles
+played softly into his friend's dream; he would, however, have also done
+it from sincere love for the sister.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In fact, with so much youth, summer weather, innocence, freedom,
+beautiful scenery, and deep love and friendship, there may well be
+constructed, even on this low earth, something like that which up in
+heaven is called a heaven; and a celestial chart, an Elysium-atlas,
+which one should map out thereof, would perhaps look not far otherwise
+than this: in front, a long pastoral land, with scattered
+pleasure-castles and summer-houses; a philanthropist's grove in the
+middle, the Tabor mountains overhead, with herdsmen upon them, long
+Campanian vales; then the broad archipelago, with St. Peter's islands;
+over on the other side the shores of a new pastoral continent, all
+covered with Daphnean groves and gardens of Alcinoüs; behind that again,
+stretching far inward, an Arcadia; and so on.</p>
+
+<p>All the philosophy and stoicism that he now had in him&mdash;for he held that
+which the arm out of the clouds gave him as booty gained by his
+own&mdash;Albano applied to the purpose of taking <i>from</i> his ecstasy the
+moderation which they impart. Moderation, he said, was only for patients
+and pigmies; and all those anxious, evenly balanced sticklers for
+temperament<a name="FNanchor_181_181" id="FNanchor_181_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_181_181" class="fnanchor">[181]</a> and time-keepers had, whether in the cultivation of a
+pleasure or of a talent, profited themselves more than the world; on the
+contrary, their antipodes had benefited the world more than
+themselves.<a name="FNanchor_182_182" id="FNanchor_182_182"></a><a href="#Footnote_182_182" class="fnanchor">[182]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span></p><p>He kept in view very good fundamental principles. Man, said he, is free
+and without limits,&mdash;not in respect to what he will do or enjoy, but in
+respect to what he will do without; he can, if he <i>will</i>, will to
+dispense with <i>everything</i>. In fact, he continued, one has simply the
+choice, either <i>always</i> or <i>never</i> to fear; for thy life-tent stands
+over a loaded mine, and, round about, the hours aim at thee naked
+weapons. Only one in a thousand<a name="FNanchor_183_183" id="FNanchor_183_183"></a><a href="#Footnote_183_183" class="fnanchor">[183]</a> hits; and, in any case, I am sure I
+would sooner fall standing than bending like a coward. But, he
+concluded, in order to justify himself on the subject, is then
+steadfastness made for nothing better than for a surgeon and
+serving-maid, and not much rather for our muse and goddess? for it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span> is
+not surely a good, merely because it helps do without something which we
+have lost, but it is intrinsically one, and a greater than the one whose
+place it supplies; even the happiest must acquire it, even without
+outward occasion or bestowal; yes, it is so much the better, if it is
+possessed earlier than applied.</p>
+
+<p>These deceptions or justifications were partly weapons of self-defence
+against the tragic Roquairol, who would fain heighten every pleasure,
+and even those of his friend, by sombre contrasts; and partly they were
+such as a noble man, who hitherto has plunged into sorrow without
+measuring its depth, and who would always feel his power of swimming
+through life, must necessarily fall upon, when he is inwardly aware that
+the centre of gravity of his bliss and of his hell has shifted and
+fallen out of himself into another being. "O, what if she should die?"
+he asked himself. He had not been wont to shudder so at the thought of
+any death as of this. Therefore he squeezed these thorns of fancy right
+sharply in his hand in order to crush them. At last, when the pure
+country air of love and the shepherd-dance in this Arcadia had brought
+more and more roses to Liana's cheek, then his thorns ceased to grow.</p>
+
+<p>To all other vipers of life, so long as they could find no entrance
+through Liana's heart, he was inaccessible. At whatever price,&mdash;and
+though he should have to forsake, give up, provoke, undertake all,&mdash;he
+would buy Liana. The phantoms of terror which came threateningly to meet
+him out of two houses,&mdash;Froulay's and Gaspard's,&mdash;he let come on, and
+dispelled them: let the foe once show himself, thought he, so am I his
+foe too. Often he stood in Tartarus, and found, in this still life of
+death <i>in rilievo</i>, peace of soul. The actual world takes more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span> quickly
+our image than we its; even here he gained soft, broad, life-illumining
+hopes and sweet tears, which flowed from him at the thought of Liana's
+faith in her death, not because he believed in the probability, but in
+the improbability thereof, which, through love and joy and recovery,
+would daily grow greater.</p>
+
+<p>Only one misfortune was there for him, against which every weapon
+snapped in pieces, whose possibility, however, he held to be a sinful
+thought,&mdash;namely, that he and Liana, by some fault or time or the
+world's influence, might cease to love each other. Here, relying on two
+hearts, he boldly defied the future. O, who has not said, when, in
+reliance upon a warm eternity, he has expressed his rapture, The Fatal
+Sister may clip the thread of our life, but shall she come and open the
+scissors against the bond of our love? The very next day the Fatal
+Sister has stood before him, and snapped the scissors to.</p>
+
+
+<h3>68. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Once Roquairol came quite late to take Albano with him to the
+"Evening-Star Party" at the herdsman's hut, which he had arranged with
+Rabette. The Captain loved to build around the warm springs of his love
+and joy the well-curb of wholly select days and circumstances; if he
+could contrive it, for instance, he made his declarations of love, say
+on a birthday, during a total eclipse of the sun, on a valentine's day,
+in a blooming hot-house in winter, in a skating chair on the ice, or in
+a charnel-house; so, too, he loved to quarrel with others in significant
+days and places, in the church-pew, in the beginning of spring or
+winter, in the green-room of the amateur theatre, at a great fire,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span> or
+not far from Tartarus or in the flute-dell. Albano, however, was too
+young, as others are too old, to have to season his fresh feeling with
+artificial hours and situations; he preferred to beautify the latter
+through the former.</p>
+
+<p>With impetuous joy Albano flew along the road to the unexpected
+pleasure. Last evening had been so rich,&mdash;the four rivers of Paradise
+had, in one cataract, poured down from heaven into his heart,&mdash;and this
+evening he would leap into its sprayey whirlpool. The evening heaven
+itself was so fair and pure, and Hesperus went with growing splendor
+down his brightly glimmering path.</p>
+
+<p>Rabette waited at the foot of the mountain on which stood the herdsman's
+hut (the little shooting-house), in order to lead him unsuspecting to
+the unprepared female friend, who at the window, with her gleaming eye
+on Hesperus, lay musing, and thought of the full, glowing autumn
+flowers, which, at this late time of her life, and so shortly before the
+longest night, were springing up. She was troubled to-day about many
+things. She had, in fact, sought hitherto more to deserve and to justify
+than to enjoy and increase her love, and more to bless with it another's
+heart than her own. How indescribably she longed to do deeds for
+him,&mdash;only sacrifices were to her deeds,&mdash;and she really envied her
+friend who had, every time, at least to prepare Charles a beverage. As
+she knew no other way, she expressed her devoted zeal by greater
+daughterly love and attention to Albano's parents and sister; and
+learned even to cook a little, which other ministers' daughters, who
+make nothing but salad and tea, must pardon her, especially when they
+reflect that, in Liana's case, they themselves would not have done
+otherwise, but rather have made one dish more. Yes, she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span> accounted
+Rabette as more virtuous, because she could be more broadly and
+extensively active; Rabette, on the other hand, held Liana to be the
+better of the two, because she prayed so much the more. A similar error
+they repeated twofold in respect to the brothers; Rabette thought
+Charles the gentler, and Liana, Albano; both, according to inferences
+from their mutual reports.</p>
+
+<p>So long as a woman loves, she loves right on, steadily. A man has to do
+something between whiles. Liana transformed everything into his image
+and his name: this mountain, this little chamber, this, to him once
+dangerous, bird-pole, became the crayon pencils for his stereotype
+image. She always came back upon this, that he deserved something better
+than her; for love is lowliness, on the wedding-ring sparkles no jewel.
+It touched her that her early death affected him. There she saw still
+the maiden blinded by the small-pox, whom he had once unconsciously
+pressed to his heart;<a name="FNanchor_184_184" id="FNanchor_184_184"></a><a href="#Footnote_184_184" class="fnanchor">[184]</a> and, with the quick apprehension of sadness,
+she felt herself to resemble the blind one also, in that incident, and
+not merely in the similar, although shorter night, which pain had once
+thrown over her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>As gentle as her emblem, Hesperus, dipping into the western horizon of
+life, did she seem to her lover. She never could pass immediately out of
+her own heart into the startling present; her turnings were always like
+those of the sunflower, very slow, and every sensation lived long in her
+faithful breast. Seldom, indeed, does a lover find the welcome of his
+loved one like the last image, which the farewell had imparted to him; a
+female soul must&mdash;so man desires&mdash;with all the wings, storms, heavens,
+of the last minute, sound over into the next. But Liana had ever
+received her friend shyly and softly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span> and otherwise than she had parted
+with him; and sometimes, to his fiery spirit, this tender waiting, this
+slow lifting of the eyelid, appeared almost as a return to the old
+coldness.</p>
+
+<p>To-day it seized the more ardent Count more strongly than usual. Like a
+pair of strange children who are to become acquainted with each other,
+and smile upon and touch each other, the two stood beside each other
+friendly and embarrassed. She told how she had made his sister tell her
+of his childish break-neck adventure on this mountain. A loved maiden
+knows no more beautiful, no richer history than that of her friend. "O
+even then," he said with emotion, "I looked toward thy mountains! Thy
+name, like a golden inscription, was written on my whole youth. Ah,
+Liana! didst thou haply love me as I thee, when thou hadst not yet seen
+me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not, Albano," answered she, "not till long after!" She meant,
+however, her blindness; and said he appeared to her in this twilight of
+the eyes, on that evening when he ate with her father, like an old
+northern king's son, somewhat like Olo,<a name="FNanchor_185_185" id="FNanchor_185_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_185_185" class="fnanchor">[185]</a> and she had had a certain
+awe before him, as for her father and brother. Her high respect for men
+the fewest were hardly worthy to guess, not to say, occasion. "And how
+when thou hadst<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span> regained thy sight?" said Albano. "I just told thee
+that," she replied naively. "But when thou didst so love my brother,"
+she continued, "and wast so good to thy sister, then to be sure I quite
+took heart, and am now and henceforth thy second sister. Besides, thou
+hast lost one&mdash;Albano, believe me, I know I am surely unworthy,
+especially of thee; but I have <i>one</i> consolation."</p>
+
+<p>Perplexed by this mixture of sanctity and coldness, he could only
+passionately kiss her, and was constrained, without contradicting her,
+to ask forthwith, "What consolation?" "That thou wilt one day be
+entirely happy," said she softly. "Liana, speak more plainly!" said he.
+For he understood not that she meant her death and the announcement of
+Linda by the spirits. "I mean after one year," she replied, "from the
+date of the predictions." He looked at her speechless, wild, guessing
+and trembling. She fell weeping upon his heart, and suddenly gave vent
+to the swell of inward sighs: "Shall I not then be dead at that time,"
+said she with deep emotion, "and look down from eternity to see that
+thou art rewarded for thy love to Liana? And that, too, certainly in a
+high degree!"</p>
+
+<p>Weep, be angry, suffer, exult, and wonder more and more, passionate
+youth! But, to be sure, thou comprehendest not this lowly soul!&mdash;Holy
+humility! thou only virtue which God, not man, created! Thou art higher
+than all which thou concealest or knowest not! Thou heavenly beam of
+light! like the earthly light,<a name="FNanchor_186_186" id="FNanchor_186_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_186_186" class="fnanchor">[186]</a> thou showest all other colors and
+floatest thyself invisible,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span> colorless, in heaven! Let no one profane
+thy unconsciousness by instruction! When thy little white blossoms have
+once fallen, they come not again, and around thy fruits only modesty
+then spreads her foliage.</p>
+
+<p>Painfully did the heart in Albano split into contradictions, as if into
+two, his own heart and Liana's. She was nothing but pure love and
+lowliness, and the splendor of her talents was only a foreign
+border-work, as white marble images of the gods have the variegated
+border only as decoration: one could not do anything but adore her, even
+in her errors. On the other hand, she had, in conjunction with tender,
+susceptible feelings, such firm opinions and errors; his modesty fought
+so vainly against her humility, and his clear-sightedness against her
+visionary tendency. The hostile train which this propensity drew after
+it he saw too clearly sweeping along over all the joys of her life. His
+ever-besetting suspicion, that she loved him merely because she hated
+nothing, and that she was always a sister instead of a lover, again
+charged home upon him like an armed man. Thus did all things fight
+together in this case,&mdash;duty and desire, fortune and place. Both were
+new and unknown to each other, because of love; but Liana divined as
+little as he. O how strange to each other and unlike each other two
+human beings, kindred souls, become, merely because a Divinity hovers
+between the two and shines upon both!</p>
+
+<p>Something remained in him unharmonious and unsolved. He felt it so
+sadly, now that the summer night glimmered for higher raptures than he
+possessed; now that, deep in the ether, the trembling evening star
+pressed on after the sun through the rose-clouds under which he was
+buried; now that the meadows of grain breathed perfume and murmured not,
+and the closed pastures grew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span> green and did not glow, and the world and
+every nightingale slept, and life below was a still cloister-garden,
+and, only overhead, the constellations, like silver, ethereal harps,
+seemed to tremble and sound before the spring winds of distant Edens.</p>
+
+<p>He must needs see Liana again to-morrow, by way of tuning his heart.
+Rabette came up from the mountain with her friend, infinitely animated.
+Both seemed almost exhausted with laughing and joking; for Roquairol
+carried everything, even mirth, to the degree of pain. He had converted
+the evening star, for which he had given the invitation, into a hothouse
+and homestead of pleasant conceits and allusions. At first he would not
+come home with her, even to-morrow; but at last he consented, when
+Rabette assured him "she understood the fine gentleman well enough, but
+he must nevertheless just let her take care of things."</p>
+
+<p>When the ruddy dawn arose, Albano, accompanied by him, came again; but
+the garden-gate of the "manor-garden" was already open, and Liana
+already in the arbor. A stitched book of public documents (seemingly)
+lay in her lap, and her folded hands beside it; she looked rather
+straightforward, as in thought, than upwards, as in prayer; yet she
+received her Albano with so mild and distant a smile, as a man, greeting
+a guest who comes right into the midst of his prayers, smiles upon him,
+and then continues his devotion. The Count had hitherto been obliged
+always to prepare himself for a certain reserve in her reception of him.
+A misunderstanding, which returns quickly, however often it is removed,
+acts again and again as deludingly and freshly as at the first time. He
+felt very strongly that something more fixed than that first virgin
+bashfulness, wherewith a maiden<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span> will always invent for the dazzling sun
+of love, besides the dawn, a twilight too, and again another for that,
+hindered the fiery melting together of their souls.</p>
+
+<p>He asked what she was reading; she hesitated, covering it up. A thought,
+suddenly darting upon her, seemed to open her heart; she gave him the
+book, and said it was a French manuscript,&mdash;namely, written prayers,
+drawn up by her mother several years before, which touched her more than
+her own thoughts; but still there was ever-more looking through her
+tenderly woven face a cloistral thought, which sought to leave her
+heart. What could Albano object to this Psalmist of the heart? Who can
+answer a songstress? A praying female stands, as does also an unhappy
+one, on a high, holy place, which our arms cannot reach. But how
+miserable must most prayers be, since, although in earlier life
+possessing the attraction of charms, like the rosary, which is made out
+of sweet-smelling woods, yet afterward in advanced age they act only as
+blemishes, and like the relic or the death's-head with which the rosary
+itself ends!</p>
+
+<p>Without waiting for his question, she told him at once what had
+disturbed her during her prayer; namely, this passage in it: <i>O mon
+Dieu, fais que je sois toujours vraie et sincere</i>, &amp;c., whereas she had
+hitherto concealed her love from her dear mother. She added, she would
+come now very soon, and then the closed heart should be opened to her.
+"No," said he, almost angrily, "thou mayest not; thy secret is also
+mine!" Men are often hardened by that in prose which in poetry softens
+them; for example, woman's piety and open-heartedness.</p>
+
+<p>Now no one hated more than he the clutching of the parental
+writing-finger, forefinger, and little finger into a pair of clasped
+hands; not that he feared, on the part<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span> of the Minister, wars or
+rivals,&mdash;he rather presupposed open arms and feasts of joy,&mdash;but
+because, to his magnanimous spirit, at once claiming and granting
+liberty, nothing was more revolting than the reflection, what smutty
+turf now for the kindling of the fire the parents might lay on the altar
+of love, or what pots they might set on to boil; how easily, then, even
+poetic parents often transform themselves with the children into prosaic
+or juristical ones, the father into an administrative, the mother into a
+financial board; how, then, to say the least, the court atmosphere makes
+one a bondsman, just as only the poetic heaven's ether makes free; and
+what perturbations his Hesperus might expect from the attracting world,
+the old Minister, who found nothing more unprofitable about love than
+love itself, and to whom the holiest sensibilities seemed about as
+useful for marriages of rank as the Hebrew is for preachers, namely,
+more in examination than in actual service. So ill did he think of his
+father-in-law, for he knew not something still worse.</p>
+
+<p>But the good daughter thought far higher of her mother than did a
+stranger, and her heart struggled painfully against concealing from her
+her love. She appealed to her brother, who was just entering. But he was
+wholly of Albano's mind. "Women," he added, not in the best humor, "are
+more fond of speaking <i>about</i> love than <i>in</i> love; men, the reverse."
+"No," said Liana, decidedly; "<i>if</i> my mother ask me, I cannot be
+untrue." "God!" cried Albano, with a shudder, "and who could wish that?"
+For to him, also, free truth was the open helmet of the soul's nobility;
+only he spoke it merely from self-respect, and Liana out of human
+affection.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Rabette came with the tea-things and a flask, wherein was tea-juice and
+elementary fire, or nerve-ether for the Captain,&mdash;arrack. He never liked
+to visit people in the morning, with whom he could not drink it till
+evening; Rabette had yesterday guessed this naughtiness, and to-day
+gratified it. "How can the soul," said the sound Albano to him often,
+"make itself a slave to the belly and the senses? Are we not already
+bound closely enough by the fetters of the body, and thou wilt still
+draw chains through the chains?" To this Roquairol had always the same
+answer: "Just the reverse! Through the corporeal itself, I free myself
+from the corporeal; for instance, by wine from blood. As long as thou
+canst never escape servitude to the bodily senses, and all thy
+consciousness and thy thinking can only, through a bodily servitude,
+attaching itself to the glebe of the earth, abide in their nobility; I
+cannot perceive why thou dost not properly use these rebels and despots
+as thy servants? Why must I let the body only work ill upon me, and not
+advantageously as well?" Albano stood to it, that the still light of
+health was more dignified than the poppy-oil flame of a slave of opium;
+and the fate of being prisoner of war to the body, which one spirit has
+to bear in common with the whole human army, more honorable than the
+cramping confinement of a personal arrest.</p>
+
+<p>To-day, however, not even the spirituous brimstone-smoked tea-water
+could wash away a certain discontent from Roquairol, whom night-watching
+had colored more pale, as it had the Count more red. He could not be
+reconciled to it, that the manor-garden was all shut in with a
+board-fence as high as a man, which was less intended as a
+billiard-table border, not to let the eye-ball<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span> go out, than as a
+mountebank's booth, to let nothing in, and which of course insured no
+other <i>prospect</i> than the prospect proper; quite as little did the
+pleasure-garden commend itself to his favor by the fact that the
+turf-benches on which they sat in the arbor had not yet been mowed, that
+in all the beds only vegetables for the trimming of cooked meat flapped
+about, that nothing ripe yet hung there but one or two moles in their
+hanging death-beds, that on a bowling-green, whereupon one rolls into a
+tinkling middle-hole, the crooked return-alley let the balls run home
+again, much more easily than they could&mdash;unless one threw them&mdash;be made
+to pass over the earth-bottom of the main alley, and that no orangery
+was anywhere to be seen, excepting once, when fortunately the
+garden-gate stood open, just as a blooming orangery box passed by in a
+wheelbarrow on its way to Lilar.</p>
+
+<p>The Captain needed only to bring forward these particulars satirically,
+and thereby inwardly to wound the outwardly laughing Rabette,&mdash;because
+no woman can bear to hear fault found with her bodily property, whether
+it be children, clothes, cakes, or furniture;<a name="FNanchor_187_187" id="FNanchor_187_187"></a><a href="#Footnote_187_187" class="fnanchor">[187]</a> and then his
+mountain-heights could gradually disencumber themselves of their clouds
+again, and Rabette become still more uncommonly gay.</p>
+
+<p>Albano, in this morning hour of the day, and, as it were, of childhood,
+and in this little paradise-garden of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span> his childish years, was inwardly
+glad,&mdash;for in the first love, as in Shakespeare's pieces, nothing
+depends on the wooden stage of the performance; but to-day's afterwinter
+of yesterday's chill would nevertheless not melt. The morning-blue began
+to be filled with brighter and brighter golden fleeces; as the garden,
+like small cities, had only two gates, the upper and the lower, he
+opened like an aurora that of the morning sun; the splendor gushed in
+over the smoking green; the Rosana gliding below caught lightnings, and
+flung them over hitherward; Albano departed finally full of love and
+bliss.</p>
+
+<p>But the love was greater than the bliss.</p>
+
+
+<h3>69. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>Flying Spring! (I mean love, just as one calls the after summer a
+<i>flying summer</i>) thou hurriest away of thyself over our heads with
+arrowy speed; why do authors again hurry over thee? Thou art the German
+blossoming season; which is never a blossoming month long. We read all
+winter in almanacs and similes much about its magnificence, and we pine
+for it; at last it hangs thick on the dark boughs six days long, and
+beside that, under cold May showers, sweeping bliss-month<a name="FNanchor_188_188" id="FNanchor_188_188"></a><a href="#Footnote_188_188" class="fnanchor">[188]</a> storms,
+and with a dumb-session of half-frozen nightingales,&mdash;and then, when one
+comes out at length into the garden, the footpath is already white with
+blossoms, and the tree at most full of green; then it is over, till in
+winter we again hear with exaltation of heart the beginning of a tale:
+"It was just in the lovely season of the blossoming." Even so do I see
+few authors, at the long session-and-scribbling-table of romance,
+working<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span> right and left for the benefit of the reading-desk, who, after
+the long preface to love, do not so soon as, like a war, it is declared,
+forthwith conclude it; and really, there are more steps <i>to</i> love than
+<i>in</i> it; all that is <i>coming to be</i>,&mdash;for instance, spring, youth,
+morning, learning,&mdash;opens out more widely and in a richer variety of
+hues than fixed <i>being</i>; but is not this latter in turn a progress, only
+a higher; and this, again, a state of being, only a quicker?</p>
+
+<p>Albano would fain lead along more beautifully the fleeting, divine
+season, when the heart is our god; he would have it rather fly <i>upward</i>
+than fly <i>away</i>. He was angry the next day with nobody but himself. He
+tore his way through such petty and yet closely entangling troubles,
+through a condition like that of men during an earthquake, when an
+invisible vapor holds the heavy foot as a snare. "I would rather let
+myself be rained on upon mountains," said he, "than in valleys." Men of
+quick fancy more easily reconcile themselves to the loved one when she
+is absent, than when she is present.</p>
+
+<p>After some days, he went again to Blumenbühl just before sundown. A
+burning red cut through the night-like gloom of the foliage. His
+darkening, woody road was made, by the flames which danced about
+therein, an enchanted one. He transferred his illuminated present deep
+into a future, shady past. O, after years, thought he, when thou
+returnest, when all is gone by and changed, the trees grown up, human
+beings passed away, and only the mountains and the brook left, then wilt
+thou congratulate thyself that thou couldst once in these walks so often
+journey to thy sweetest heart, and on either hand the music and the
+glory of Nature went along with thy joyful soul, as the moon seems to
+the child to run<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span> after him through all streets. An unwonted rapture
+flung through his whole being the long, broad streak of sunshine; the
+farthest flowers of his fancy opened; all tones came through a brighter
+ether, and sounded nearer. The flowers around him, too, exhaled a keener
+fragrance, and the peal of the bell sounded nearer; and both are signs
+of foul weather.</p>
+
+<p>Thus inwardly happy, he made his appearance,&mdash;and, indeed, without
+Roquairol, who in fact came more and more seldom,&mdash;and found his beloved
+up in his childhood's study, her guest-chamber, which was now the usual
+scene of his visits. In a white dress, with dark trimming, as in a
+beautiful half-mourning, she sat at the drawing-table with her eyes
+sharper than usual, buried in a picture. She flew to his heart, but only
+to lead him back presently to the dear form upon which her heart hung as
+in a mother's arms. She related that her mother had been here to-day
+with the Princess, and had showed so much pleasure in her improving
+color, such infinite kindness toward her happy daughter. "She was
+obliged," continued she, "to let me take a slight sketch of her, in
+order that I might only look upon her so much the longer, and have
+something of her to keep by me. I am just finishing the outline of the
+face, but it is absolutely too poor a likeness." She could not tear her
+fancy away from the image, and still less from the original. To be sure,
+no more beautiful medallion can hang <i>on</i> a daughter's heart, or in fact
+<i>in</i> it, than that of a mother; but, nevertheless, Albano thought to-day
+the hanging-ring took up too broad a space.</p>
+
+<p>She talked only of her mother. "I certainly sin," said she; "she asked
+me in such a friendly way whether thou camest often, but I said only
+yes, and nothing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span> further. O good Albano, how gladly would I have given
+up to her frankly my whole soul!"</p>
+
+<p>He answered, that the mother seemed not to be so frank; she perhaps knew
+already the whole through the Lector, and the pure draught of love would
+now be continually disturbed by foreign substances. Against Augusti he
+declared himself very strongly, but Liana quite as strongly upheld him.
+Through both that counterfeiter of the coin of truth, namely,
+suspicion,&mdash;the suspicion that she perhaps loved him as she loved
+everything, since she grew as by a living tie to everything
+good,&mdash;gained, under Albano's sensibilities, which besides had been
+to-day so warm and glad, more and more mint-stamps and currency.</p>
+
+<p>She suspected nothing, but she came back to the subject of her secrecy.
+"But why, then, does it make me unhappy," said she, "if it is right?
+Beloved one, my Caroline too appears to me no longer, and truly that is
+no good sign." This spectral-machinery always came on as oppressively
+and gloomily to him as a thunder-cloud in the outer world. His old
+exasperation against the teasings practised in his own case by apes of
+the air, whom he could not lay hold of, passed over into a similar
+feeling against Liana's optical self-deception. That veil presented her
+by Caroline, wherewith, in the beginning, she had so sublimely arrayed
+herself for the cloister of the tomb,&mdash;that travelling veil for the next
+world,&mdash;had long been to this Hercules a burning garment, drenched in
+the poisonous blood of a Nessus; therefore she no longer dared to wear
+it before him. The conclusion that the fancy of being destined to death
+laid the seed of the reality, and that in the deep overhanging cloud an
+accident might easily attract the striking-spark of death, fell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span> like a
+mourning into his love festival. So are all strange sea-wonders of fancy
+(like this death-delusion) desired only <i>in</i> fancy (in romance), but not
+in life, except once on fantastic heights; but then must such comets,
+like others, soon recede again from our heaven.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke now very seriously,&mdash;of suicidal fancies, of life's duties, of
+wilful blindness to the fairest signs of her recovery, among which he
+reckoned as well the disappearance of the optical Caroline as the
+blooming of her color. She heard him patiently; but through the
+Princess, who, notwithstanding her love, seldom left behind with him
+pleasant impressions, her fancy had to-day taken quite another road, far
+beyond herself and her grave. She stood only before Linda's image, of
+which Julienne had this afternoon communicated to her sharper outlines
+than maidens are wont to give of maidens. "She is a very good girl,"
+they say of each other. Linda's manly spirit, her warm attachment to
+Gaspard in connection with her contempt of the mass of men, her
+inflexibility, her bold strides in manly knowledge, her masterly and
+often severe letters, more pithy than flowery, and, most of all, her
+probably approaching arrival, took a powerful hold of Liana's tender
+heart. "My Albano must have her," was the constant thought of this
+disinterested soul; and if the Princess had had the intention of
+humiliating comparisons, she remarked it not, but fulfilled it. The good
+creature found, too, so much of a higher providence here,&mdash;for example,
+that her brother need now no longer be the rival of her lover and of his
+friend,&mdash;that she herself could portray beforehand her vigorous Albano
+to the proud Romeiro, and that certainly, despite all opposition, all
+the ghostly prophecies strikingly connected and coincided with each
+other. All this she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span> now said (because she concealed only her sorrows,
+not her hopes) right to the Count's face.</p>
+
+<p>What a gnashing bite did an evil genius at this moment make into his
+tenderest life! That glowing love which neither divides nor is divided
+possessed <i>his</i> heart, he thought, not hers. He came very near to
+showing up his inner being just as it was, all kindled at once, as if by
+a lightning stroke, into a lofty blaze. Only the innocent white brow,
+with festive roses in its little ringlets; the childishly bright
+looking-up of the pure blue pair of eyes, and the soft face, which even
+at a musical fortissimo, and at every vehemence in movement or laughter
+on the part of another, caught a sickly redness from the beating heart;
+and his indignant shame at the levity with which a man can abuse his
+omnipotence and his sex, to the terror of the tenderer, restrained him,
+like guardian spirits; and he said merely, in that noble anger which
+sounded like a tender emotion, "O Liana, thou art hard to-day!"</p>
+
+<p>"And yet I am indeed so tender!" said the innocent one. The two had
+hitherto been standing at the window, before the dark tempest which came
+rolling on out of Lilar. She turned suddenly round; for since the day of
+her blindness, when a dark cloud had seemed to fly towards her, she had
+never been able to look at one long; and Albano's tall form, with his
+whole live-glowing face and his soul-speaking eyes, stood illumined by
+the evening light before her. With the hand which he left free she
+softly and playfully swept aside the dark hair from his defiant
+forehead, smoothed the contracted eyebrow, and said, as his look stung
+like a sun, and his mouth shut with determination, "O, joyfully,
+joyfully, shall this fair face one day smile!" He smiled, but sadly.
+"And then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span> shall I be still more blest than to-day!" said she, and
+started, for a lightning-flash darted across his earnest face, as over a
+jagged mountain, and showed it, like that of the god of war, illuminated
+with war-flames.</p>
+
+<p>He hurried away; would not be held back; spoke of a weather-cooling;
+went out into the storm; and left Liana behind in the joy that she had
+spoken to-day merely out of pure love. From the last house in the
+village Rabette flew to meet him; the torrents of the restrained tears
+rolled down his cheeks. "What dost thou want? why weepest thou?" she
+cried. "Thou art dreaming!" cried he, and hurried, without further
+answer, out into the tempest, which had suddenly, like a mantle-fish,
+flung itself stiflingly over the whole heaven. There, under the
+rain-drops and lightning-flashes, he began, first of all, to reckon up
+for himself the best proofs that Liana had saintly charms, divine sense,
+all virtues, especially universal philanthropy, daughterly, sisterly,
+friendly affection, only not, however, the glowing love for one
+person,&mdash;at least, not for him. She is so entirely and exclusively&mdash;such
+is always his conclusion&mdash;possessed and absorbed with the present
+object, whether it be myself or a broken arm of the little Pollux, that
+it hides from her heaven and earth. Hence the setting of her life's day,
+with all the attendant partings, is no more to her than the setting of a
+star. Hence it was that I stood beside her so long, with a heart full of
+the pangs of love, and she saw not into my love, because she found none
+in her own bosom. And this is what makes it so bitter, when man, pining
+in poverty among the common hearts of earth, is rendered by the noblest
+only unhappy at last.</p>
+
+<p>The rain pattered and trickled through the leaves, the fire darted
+through the woods, and the Wild Huntsman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span> of the storm drove his crazy
+chase. This refreshed and rejoiced him like the cooling hand of a friend
+taking his to guide him. As he ascended, not through the cavern, but
+outside over the back of the mountain to his high thunder-house, he saw
+a thick, gray night of rain settle down heavily upon the green Lilar,
+and on the winding Tartarus rested under the flashes the illuminated
+storm. He shuddered, on entering his little house, at a cry which his
+Æolian-harp emitted under the snatches of the wind; for it had once,
+gilded by the evening sun, ethereally clothed his young love like
+starlight, and had followed it with ever-varying tones, as it went out
+over this suffering life.</p>
+
+
+<h3>70. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>On the morning after both storms were dissolved into a still
+cloudiness.&mdash;And out of the great griefs came only errors. Weaklings
+that we are! when at our sham execution fate touches us with the rod,
+not with the sword, we sink impotently from the block, and feel the
+process of dying reach far into our life! All fevers, including
+spiritual ones, are cooled by the freshness of a new morning, just as
+sad evening stirs all their embers into a glow. Who of us has not at
+evening,&mdash;that proper witching hour of tormenting spectres,
+house-haunting ghosts and hobgoblins,&mdash;caught in the threads which he
+himself had spun, but which he took for a web spread by other hands,
+entangled himself more and more deeply the more he turned about and
+tried to extricate himself, till in the morning he saw his turnkey
+before him, namely, himself?</p>
+
+<p>Albano saw on the whole theatre of yesterday's war nothing left standing
+but a pale, kindly figure in half-mourning,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span> who looked round after him
+with innocent maidenly eyes, and toward which he could not help looking
+over, albeit she was now more a bride of God than of a mortal. He felt
+now, to be sure, more strongly how high his demands upon real friends
+rose, than he once did, when he could heighten at pleasure the highest
+which he made upon the beings of his dreams, whom he always cast exactly
+into the temporary mould of his heart; and how he was possessed by a
+spirit that spared no one, that would stretch the wings of every other
+according to its own, because it could bear no individuality except that
+which was copied.</p>
+
+<p>He had hitherto experienced from all his loved ones too little
+opposition, as Liana had too much; both extremes injure one. The
+spiritual as well as the physical man, without the resistance of the
+outer atmosphere, is blown up and burst by the inner, and without the
+resistance of the inner is crushed by the outer; only the equilibrium
+between inner resistance and outer pressure keeps a fair play-room open
+for life and its culture. Besides, men&mdash;since only the best of them
+appreciate in the best of their own sex strong conviction&mdash;can hardly
+tolerate it in women, and would have them not merely the reflection, but
+even the echo, of themselves. They want, I mean, not merely the look,
+but also the word, that says yes.</p>
+
+<p>Albano punished himself with several days of voluntary absence, till the
+unclean clouds should have cleared away from within him which had
+overshadowed the gnomon of the sundial of his inner man. "When I am
+quite cheerful and good-natured," said he, "I will go back to her, and
+err no more." He errs at this moment. Whenever a strange, uncomfortable
+semitone has repeatedly intruded itself between all the harmonies of two
+natures, it swells<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span> more and more fatally till it drowns the key-note,
+and ends all. The dividing tone was, in this case, the strength of the
+man's pitch in connection with the strength of the woman's. But the
+highest love is most easily wounded by the slightest difference. O,
+little avails it then for man to say to himself, I will be another man!
+Only in the finest, only in unimpaired enthusiasm, does he propose to
+himself such a thing; but it is just when the feeling is impaired, when
+he were hardly capable of the purpose, that he has to rise to the
+fulfilment of it, and then he can hardly make the achievement.</p>
+
+<p>The Count went in the morning, as usual, to his lecture-rooms and
+parlors in the city. In the former it was hard for him to fix his
+instruments and his eyes upon the stars of the sciences, and to take
+sight, sailing as he was on such a sea of emotion. In the latter he
+found the Lector colder than ever, the Bibliothecary warmer, the
+household more inflated. He went to Roquairol, whom he to-day loved and
+treated still more cordially, as if by way of atonement to his offended
+sister. Charles said at once, with his sudden and tragical flinging up
+of the curtain of futurity, "All was discovered,&mdash;in the highest degree
+of probability!" As often as lovers see that their Calypso's
+island&mdash;which, to be sure, lies free on the open ocean&mdash;has at length
+come to the eyes of the seafaring world, and that they are making sail
+for it, they are astonished to an astonishing degree; for is there any
+one Paradise which has such a loose and low palisado, allowing every
+passer-by to see in, as theirs?</p>
+
+<p>For a long time, he related, had the Doctor's children always had
+something to fetch from the Architect's wife at Lilar,&mdash;flowers,
+medicine-phials, &amp;c.; certainly as spy-glasses and ear-tubes of Augusti,
+who again was the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span> opera-glass of his mother. In short, his father had,
+at least, been at the Greek woman's yesterday, but had luckily found
+only an empty package<a name="FNanchor_189_189" id="FNanchor_189_189"></a><a href="#Footnote_189_189" class="fnanchor">[189]</a> from Rabette to him (Charles), which,
+according to the liberties of the ministerial Church, he had opened and
+closed.</p>
+
+<p>"Why <i>luckily</i>?" said Albano. "I will justify and honor my love before
+the world." "I referred to myself," he replied; "for never was my father
+more friendly to me than since he broke open my last letters. He is this
+afternoon in Blumenbühl, and it may well be more on my own account than
+my sister's."</p>
+
+<p>Albano had no fear that the city could drill mining-galleries under his
+childhood's land, so as to blow up in one conflagration the blessed
+isle,&mdash;could he not trust his character and courage and Liana's
+own?&mdash;but it pained him now that he had so needlessly robbed the
+childlike Liana of the joy and merit of a childlike open-heartedness.
+How he longed now for the atoning and recompensing moment of the first
+meeting again, after the next morning!</p>
+
+<p>He stayed by his friend as by a consolation, and did not go back till
+the evening redness floated about in the rain-clouds. When he came, he
+found already awaiting him a letter from Liana, written to-day.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"O good Albano, why camest thou not? How much I had to say
+to thee! How I trembled for thy sake on Friday, when the
+frowning cloud pursued thee with its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span> thunder! Thou hast
+weaned me too much from sorrow, so strange and heavy has it
+become to me now. I was inconsolable the whole evening; at
+last, when night fell, the thought sank into my mind that
+thou hadst been oppressed as with presentiments, and that
+the lightning loved to strike the thunder-house. Why,
+indeed, art thou there? I hurried up, and knelt by my bed,
+and prayed to God, although the storm had long been
+dispersed, that he would have preserved thee. Smile at my
+tardy prayer; but I said to him, 'Thou knewest indeed,
+all-gracious One, that I would pray.' I was consoled, too,
+when I looked up to the stars, and the broken ray of joy
+trembled within me.</p>
+
+<p>"But in the morning Rabette made me sad again. She had seen
+thee weeping on the road. A thousand times have I asked
+myself, whether I am to blame for that. Can it have come
+from this,&mdash;for she says so,&mdash;that I afflict thee too much
+with my death thoughts? Never more shalt thou hear them; the
+veil, too, is laid away; but I calculated upon thee
+according to my brother, to whom, as he himself says, the
+dusk of death is an evening-twilight, in which forms seem to
+him more lovely. Truly, I am quite blest; for thou art even
+so, and yet hast so little in having me,&mdash;only a small
+flower for thy heart, but I have thyself. Leave me my
+grave-mound; therefrom, as from a mountain, comes better,
+more fruitful soil into my valley. O how one loves, Albano,
+when all around us crumbles and sinks and melts away in
+smoke, and when, still, the bond and splendor of love stand
+firm and inviolate on the fleeting ground of life, as I have
+often seen with emotion, when standing by waterfalls, a
+rainbow hover, undisturbed and unchanged, over the bursting,
+impetuous floods! O, would that the nightingales were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span> yet
+singing; now I could sing with them! Thy Æolian-harp, my
+harmonica, how gladly would I have it in my hand! My father
+was with us, and more cheerful and friendly toward all than
+ever. Lo, even he is kindly disposed! My parents surely send
+no tempest into our feast of roses. I readily did him the
+pleasure, therefore,&mdash;forgive it!&mdash;of promising him, that I
+would receive no visits from strangers in a strange
+house&mdash;because, he said, it was improper. I must go home for
+some days on account of the Prince's marriage; but I shall
+see thee soon. O forgive! When my father speaks softly, my
+soul cannot possibly say, No. Farewell, my noble one!</p>
+
+<p class="sig">
+L.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>"P. S. Soon a little leaf will come fluttering again over to
+thy mountain. Only continue in perpetual joy! O God! why am
+I not stronger? What beings shouldst thou then take to thy
+heart!&mdash;Thou dear one!"</p></div>
+
+<p>How was he shamed by this full-blooming love, which never rightly knows
+when it is misunderstood, and which presupposes no other fault than its
+own! How sadly did the thought of the commanded separation affect him
+now, after the voluntary one! He could now love her as a guarding angel
+<i>before</i> Paradise, how much more as a giving angel <i>in</i> it! But it is
+hard for a man, as the youth felt, clearly to distinguish in the female
+heart, especially in this one, intention from instinct, ideas from
+feelings, and in this dark, full heaven to count and arrange all the
+stars. Everything like hardness, every unpromising bud, arose at last as
+a flower; and her worth unfolded itself piece-wise like spring; whereas,
+generally, from other maidens, a traveller who visits them carries away
+with him directly at his first evening's departure a little complete<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span>
+flower-catalogue of all their charms and arts, as a Brocken-passenger
+gets at the tavern a neat nosegay of the various kinds of mosses which
+are found on the mountain.</p>
+
+<p>He supposed she was now with her parents; and he followed, not as a
+pouting schoolboy, but as a harmonious man, the giant of destiny. In the
+garden rainy weather held sway, the crop of every heavy tempest, which,
+like a war, always devastates the scene of conflict.</p>
+
+<p>The promised leaflet appeared: "Only be happy. We shall see each other
+very, very soon, and then most blissfully. Forgive me! Ah, I long
+exceedingly!"</p>
+
+<p>Now he experienced what days they were which had <i>once</i>&mdash;that is, only a
+few days ago&mdash;passed before him as divine apparitions, and which now
+again were to come up in the East as returning stars! Why does a
+blessing, not till it is lost, cut its way like a sharp diamond so
+deeply into the heart? Why must we first have lamented a thing, before
+we ardently and painfully love it? Albano threw both past and future
+away from him, that he might dwell wholly and purely in that present
+which Liana had promised him.</p>
+
+
+<h3>71. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>On Sunday morning, when all the blue heavens stood open, and the earth
+was festally decked with pearls and twigs, a gentle finger tapped at
+Albano's door, which could belong to none but a female hand. It was
+Liana who entered at so early an hour; Rabette and Charles without
+uttered a loud greeting. On his exulting breast fell the beautiful
+maiden, blooming from, her walk, with blessed, bright eyes, a freshly
+bedewed rose-bud. It was his finest morning; he had a clear feeling of
+Liana's love.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span> As the Æolian-harp sounded in, she looked towards it,
+remembered with a blush that fairest evening of the covenant, and
+listened in silence, and dried her eyes when she turned them again
+towards Albano. But he could not enter into this temple of joy without
+having cleansed and healed himself by a frank confession of his late
+errors. What a sweet rivalry ensued between them of confessing and
+forgiving, when Liana lovingly exclaimed and owned that she had not
+understood him lately, that only she was the blamable one, and that she
+would begin this very moment to speak better. She could not give herself
+any comfort about the secret pangs which she had caused her friend. As
+mahogany furniture cracks in no temperature, and contracts no spots, and
+needs no polishing, so was it with this heart, Albano's felt, as he now
+swore to himself always, even when he did not understand her, to say to
+himself, She is right.</p>
+
+<p>She solved for him the riddle of her appearing to-day with those
+friendly looks which a good nature redoubles, when it has anything to
+sweeten,&mdash;namely, she was going back to Pestitz to-day; but the carriage
+would not come till late, till evening, in fact, about tea-time, and so
+there remained a whole day before them; and she hoped her father would
+not take this circuitous route through Lilar as a breach of her promise.
+A loving maiden grows unconsciously more bold. Thereupon she sought to
+make him quite calm about the peaceful intentions of her father, and
+represented his strictness, in subjecting himself and others to
+convenience, as the reason of his prohibition, as well as of her being
+summoned back to the wedding-festival. Albano, so soon after the oath
+which he had just sworn to himself, kept it, and said, She is right.</p>
+
+<p>The Captain came in with the red-cheeked Rabette,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</a></span> whose eyes glistened
+with joy. The small apartment did not, by narrowness and confusion, make
+the pleasure less. Charles, generally so much like Vesuvius, which in
+the first hours of morning is still covered with snow, presented already
+a warm summit; he seated himself at the instrument and thundered into
+the noisy presence with a prestissimo (which lay open) of Haydn's,&mdash;that
+true hour-caller of rejoicing hours,&mdash;and played, to the astonishment of
+the females, the hardest part so easily, at sight, that he rather played
+into it, than from it, and kept composing much (for instance, the bass)
+himself; whereas Albano, with almost comic fidelity, gave you the exact
+truth in music quite as much as in history, which, again, always became
+in Charles's mouth a piece of his own personal biography. The morning
+added wings to all their souls, whereas noon always binds men's wings
+down,&mdash;hence Aurora goes with winged steeds, and the god of day with
+wingless ones. "But how now are our seven pleasure-stations to be made
+out?" inquired Charles, "for the day lies like a garden-hall, with
+nothing but pleasure-avenues on all sides open before us." "Charles, is
+it not, then, a matter of indifference <i>where</i> a man loves?" said
+Albano. Blessed one, whose heart needs nothing but one heart more, no
+park into the bargain, no <i>opera seria</i>, no Mozart, no Raphael, no
+eclipse of the moon, not so much as moonlight, and no read or acted
+romance!</p>
+
+<p>"First, I must see my Chariton," said Liana. "Yes," added her brother,
+immediately, "she can bring our dinner after us into the gothic temple."
+He proposed, namely, on this lovely day, to dine in the twelfth century,
+and to sit by a sombre, motley window-light, and on sharp-cornered,
+heavy, thick furniture, and, as it were, darkly under the earth of a
+green present, glistening overhead,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</a></span> to sit with blooming faces; for
+thus did he overload the fullest enjoyments with external contrasts, and
+enjoyed every happy present most in the near gleam and reflection of the
+sharpened sickle which was to mow them away.<a name="FNanchor_190_190" id="FNanchor_190_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_190_190" class="fnanchor">[190]</a> "God forbid and avert
+it, friend!" said Rabette. Albano, too, deemed the friendly Greek, her
+laughing children, and the neighboring rose-fields far preferable, and,
+with the aid of Liana, prevailed. Before the embowered cottage the
+children came running to meet them, Helena, with her little apron full
+of orange-blossoms, which she had picked up, for the breaking of them
+off had been forbidden her, and Pollux, in the last, light bandage of
+his broken arm, the hand of which had now been obliged to work with its
+companion, the right hand, at puckering up and cracking the rose-leaves.
+Both gave notice: "Mother was not ready yet, and had dressed them
+first." But presently, neat and simple as a priestess destined to dance
+around the altar of gods of joy, sprang Chariton to meet her Liana, and,
+as she came, continued adjusting her hastily donned clothes by a light
+hitching and twitching. "This," said Roquairol, after he had easily
+obtained from Rabette a nodding assent thereto, because she had not
+understood his French request for the same, "is my spouse since
+yesterday,"&mdash;and he enjoyed without further circumstance the right of
+thouing her, which she, since the friendly encouragement of the
+Minister, accepted the more fondly with maidenly presentiments.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span></p>
+<p>When Liana kindly announced four noonday guests for Chariton, there
+stood in the dark eyes of the Greek gleams of joy, and the little face,
+with great arched Italian eyebrows, became a stereotype smile, which was
+not culinary embarrassment, but merely tongueless joy; which only made
+her white semicircle of teeth shine more broadly, when Charles spoke
+right out: "Surely thou canst help her, wife!" "Of course!" said
+Rabette, quite delighted; because her heart had no longer any other lips
+than her two hands, for which, if they could only lay hold of hard work,
+it was full as much as if they were pressed by the hand of a lover. Did
+she not again and again curse her awkward, hesitating throat, when
+Roquairol, in her presence, poured out his sounding and fiery torrents
+of speech? On this occasion, when he had again set off the surroundings
+with artificial, shadowy refinements, he insisted upon it, of course,
+that Chariton should be executive secretary, and Rabette only
+corresponding secretary. Liana, too, out of a like womanliness, would
+fain do something for her darling; but since she, as a maiden of rank,
+could not cook anything, but only bake a little, accordingly it was
+assigned her,&mdash;but reluctantly on the part of her friend, who never
+loved to see the sweet form anywhere else than, like other butterflies,
+by his side among the flowers,&mdash;at a quite late moment, and for a space
+of ten minutes, with her eyes and in extraordinary cases with her three
+writing-fingers, to co-operate in making the snow-balls, which were to
+close and crown the dessert.</p>
+
+<p>Never had kitchen ball-queen a broader canopy, or a more beautifully
+carved sceptre and apple, or fairer <i>dames d'atour</i><a name="FNanchor_191_191" id="FNanchor_191_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_191_191" class="fnanchor">[191]</a> than Chariton,
+and vessels and fire were quite thrown into the shade thereby.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</a></span></p>
+<p>Now the happy couples&mdash;and the children too&mdash;went out into the joyful
+day, into the youthful garden, in order, like planets, with their moons,
+to stand now near each other, now far off, now in opposition, and now in
+conjunction, on their heavenly orbit around the same sun. "We will
+launch out at a venture," said Charles, in port, "and see whether we do
+not meet." Albano went with Liana after the children, who were already
+skipping along on the little houses through the rose-walks, on the
+bridge over the singing wood. He whose heart beats in such calm
+blissfulness, seeks in the invisible church no visible one: the whole
+temple of nature is the temple of love, and everywhere stand altars and
+pulpits. On the smoothly descending life-stream man stands without
+rudder, happy in his skiff, and leaves it to its own will.</p>
+
+<p>Then the children, mindful of the maternal prohibition against
+excursions, led the way up along the right, over the bridged eminence,
+to the western triumphal arch; and Helena, merely as guide of the little
+convalescent, ran forward quite unexpectedly and wildly with his hand.
+How gladly did Albano follow the little pilots and pointers! Heavens!
+when they looked round them on the magnificent height, and into the rich
+outspread day, and then into each other's eyes, how freely and broadly
+did the arches of their life-bridge rear themselves, and ships, with
+swollen sails and proudly towering masts, sail away beneath! Rose-trees
+clambered up the triumphal arches, the children reached up, snatched
+roses from their summits, and trudged away (working out and proving the
+unusual obedience) over four gates, in order, from the fifth, to look
+down into the smooth, shining lake, and to descend into the "enchanted
+wood," where art, like the children, played her pranks.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[Pg 469]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Out of the entrance of the wood came forth Charles and Rabette, on their
+way back to Chariton over the arches, the former bound to the
+wine-cellar (he had something empty therefrom in his hand), and she
+intending to run a moment into the kitchen. He went blissfully, as if on
+wings, and said: "Life travels to-day in the constellation of the wain,
+far away through the blue." He turned round, however, to let the
+<i>Pleiades</i> rise before them, that is, the so-called "inverted rain,"
+which ascends only for the space of five minutes, and properly only in
+an illumination. He led them all into the wondrous wood, through a light
+that lay in noonday slumber, glowing under free trees, whose stems,
+standing far asunder, only tendered each other their long twigs. At the
+focus of the picturesque paths, he let them await the play of the rain.
+The children sprang after him with their hopes, and, backed by the
+courage of the grown ones, sat down by them, on designated seats of the
+gods, or children's seats, between two little round lakes.</p>
+
+<p>While Charles ran swiftly up and down in zigzag, attending to the
+hydraulic and other mechanism,&mdash;nearly according to the points of the
+labyrinth-garden in Versailles,&mdash;they could fly about through the magic
+wood that rose everywhere. An all-powerful arm of the Rosana, which
+swept by without, struck in among the flowers, and bore a heavy, rich
+world; now the water was a fixed mirror, now a winding, beating vein,
+now a gushing spring, now a flash of lightning behind flowers, or a dark
+eye behind leafy veils; tapering shores, short beds, children's gardens,
+round islands, little hills, and tongues of land lay between: they held
+their motley, blooming children on arm and bosom, and the blue eyes of
+the forget-me-not, and the full tulip-cheeks, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</a></span> white-cheeked
+lilies played together like brothers and sisters apart from strangers,
+but roses ran through all. Now they heard a murmuring and purling; the
+lakes beside them bubbled up; on a peeled May-tree, fenced in on an
+island, the yellow fir-needles began to drop from above; from the
+hanging birches on the tongue of land, an inner rain dripped and glided
+down; out of the two lakes beside them water-jets flew like
+flying-fishes toward heaven. Now it gushed everywhere, and rows of
+fountains, those water-children, played with the flower-children. Like
+birds, streams fluttered with broad wings out of the laurel-hedges, and
+fell into the groups of roses. On a hill full of oaks, a water-snake
+crawled up; victoriously shot out from all the mouths of the shores
+besieging arches to the summits; suddenly the cheated spectators found
+themselves overhung with rainbows, for the lakes flung their waters high
+across over them, so that the wavering sun blazed through the
+lattice-work of drops, as through a shivered jewel-world. The children
+screamed with a terror of joy. The scared birds cruised through the
+shower; night butterflies were cast down; the turtle-doves shook
+themselves on the ground, beaten down in the torrents; the banks and the
+beds held their blooming little ones beneath the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>After five minutes the whole was over, and nothing remained, save that
+in all flowers and eyes the moist radiance trembled, and on the waves
+the stars continued to glisten. The children ran after the
+wonder-worker, Charles. "All is over outwardly," said Albano, "but not
+within us. I am to-day perfectly and peacefully happy; for thou lovest
+me, and the whole world, too, is friendly. Art thou, too, happy, Liana?"
+She answered, "Still more happy, and I must needs weep for joy if I told
+how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</a></span> happy I am." But she was weeping already. "See! drops!" said she,
+naively, as he looked upon her, and wiped <i>his</i>, which were the
+sprinklings of the rainbow, softly from his cheeks. His lips touched her
+holy, tender eye, but the other remained open, and her love looked out
+from it at him, and never did her holy soul hover nearer to him.</p>
+
+<p>After a few minutes this inverted heavenward shower was also over. They
+went across the middle of the free gardens to the eastern parts and
+gates. How brightly lay the coasts of the future before them, with
+thick, high green, and nightingales flying around the shores! Rapture
+makes the manly heart more womanly. The voice of his full bosom spoke
+but softly to Liana, on whose countenance, turned sidewise and
+heavenward, lay a still, pious gratitude; his fiery glance moved but
+slowly, and rested on the beautiful world; and he went without hasty
+strides around the smallest points of land. The young nightingale whet
+her well-fed bill against the twig, and shook herself merrily; the old
+one sang a short lullaby, and skipped chanting after fresh food; and
+everywhere flew and screamed across each other's paths the children of
+spring and their parents. Little white peacocks ran, without their
+pride, like little children in the grass. Blissfully floated the swan
+between her waves, with the white arch over the eyes that dipped under,
+and blissfully hovered the glistening music-fly, like a fixed star,
+undisturbed in the air, over a distant, flowery bell. The butterflies,
+flying flowers, and the flowers, fettered butterflies, sought and
+sheltered each other, and laid their variegated wings to wings; and the
+bees exchanged flowers only for blossoms, and the rose which has no
+thorns for them they exchanged only for the linden.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Liana," said Albano, "how I love the whole world to-day, on thy
+account! I could give the flowers a kiss, and press myself into the very
+heart of the full trees; I could not tread in the way of the long chafer
+down there." "Should one," she replied, "ever feel otherwise? How can a
+human being, I have often thought, who has a mother, and knows her love,
+so afflict and rend the heart of a brute mother? But Spener says, we do
+not forgive beasts even their virtues." "Let us go to him," said he.</p>
+
+<p>They came out through the eastern gate on the mountain-way behind the
+flute-dell, up to the house of old Spener, which lay in noonday
+brightness; but, as they heard loud reading and praying, they chose
+rather to walk by at a great distance, in order not to throw so much as
+their shadow into his holy heaven.</p>
+
+<p>They gazed into the fair, still flute-dell, and would fain go directly
+in; at length it spoke up to them with one flute. Their friends seemed
+to be down below there. The flute continued long to complain, as if
+lonely and forsaken; no sisters and no fountains murmured in with it. At
+last there rose, panting, in company with the flute, a timid, trembling
+singer's voice, struggling forth. It was Rabette, behind the tall
+bushes. She stirred both to the depths of the soul, because the poor
+creature, with the labor of her helpless voice, was rendering her loved
+one the meek sacrifice of obedience. "O my Albano," said Liana, twining
+around him with ecstasy, "what sweetness to think that my brother is
+happy, and has found peace of soul, and <i>that</i> through thy sister!" "He
+deserves all my peace," said he, with emotion; "but we will not disturb
+the two, but go back the old way." For Rabette's tones were often cut
+short, but it was uncertain whether by fear, or by kisses, or by
+emotion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When they came in again through the eastern gate, the songstress and
+Charles came out of the green portal to meet them, both with wet eyes.
+Charles, stepping impetuously over living beds, and with wandering eyes,
+grasped a hand of both with his, and said, "This is, for once in this
+rainy world, a day which does not look like a night. Brother, but when
+one is so deeply blest, and catches the music of the spheres, the tones
+are such as were once heard in token that from Mark Antony his patron
+deity, Hercules, was departing." Thus are joys, like other jewels,
+mechanical poisons, which only in the distance shine, but, when touched
+and swallowed, eat into us. But Albano replied, smiling, "Since thou now
+fearest, dear friend, thou hast nothing to fear; for thou art not
+perfectly happy. I, however, alas! fear nothing." "Bravo!" said Charles;
+"now go into your kitchen, maiden!" He went into the so-called "Temple
+of Dreams," but soon hastened after her into the forbidden kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>Albano visited Liana's spring chamber. Here he painted to himself from
+memory that bright Sunday when Liana led him through Lilar, and he let
+the past soothingly glimmer into the present; but the latter overpowered
+the former with its beams. Out in the garden stood and shone, so it
+seemed to him, the pure pillars of his heaven, the supporters of his
+temple, the trees; and all that he here saw near him belonged again to
+his happiness, Liana's books and pictures and flowers, and every little
+mark of her tender hand.</p>
+
+<p>At last the saint of the Rotunda herself&mdash;suffused with a virgin blush
+at this nearness and at his blushing&mdash;stepped in, to take him away into
+the cool dining-room. It was small and dusky, but the heart needs not
+for its heaven much space nor many stars therein, if only the star of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</a></span>
+love has arisen. To the table-talk,&mdash;whereby alone an eating becomes a
+human one,&mdash;and to the jokes,&mdash;the finest <i>entremets</i>, the powdered
+sugar of conversation,&mdash;the children contributed their share, especially
+as they, unqualified to ascend from the forbidden <i>thou</i> to <i>you</i>,
+always used thou-you at once. The deeply-red Chariton made extracts from
+Dian's letters and from the history of her life, and from the surgeon's
+bulletins in relation to Pollux's broken arm; she sought to extol the
+snow-balls, listened with a half-credulous, half-cunning look to the
+Captain, who spun out the sportive marriage-thou toward Rabette into
+five acts, and smiled with pleasure just where it was required.
+Especially did that music-barrel of all souls, Charles, spin joyously
+round; that Jupiter, around whom the eclipses of so many satellites were
+always flying, could show a great, serene splendor, when he and others
+wished. As often as Albano, according to the old way, would not come to
+his tragedy, he drew up the curtain of a comedy. To the good Rabette a
+word was as good as a look from him, although she only returned the
+latter, so as neither to fall into the <i>Thou</i> nor into the <i>You</i>.
+Albano, knit with ears and eyes to one soul, could not produce with his
+lips much more than a smile of bliss; he could more easily have made a
+hymn than a <i>bon-mot</i>, a grace at meat than a dinner speech. For his
+Liana was to-day too affectionate, so contentedly and exhilaratingly did
+the sweet maiden look round with such hearty play, acting the chatty,
+bantering hostess, that a man who saw it and thought of her firm
+death-belief, would only have been so much the more deeply affected by
+this dance around the grave with flowers on the head, though he should
+remark&mdash;or rather for the very reason of his remarking&mdash;that she was
+here merely carrying on a joke with jocoseness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[Pg 475]</a></span> itself for the
+sake&mdash;according to her new moral funeral arrangement&mdash;of sweetening for
+her beloved every parting-hour, as well the next as the last of all. But
+this was hard to perceive, because in female souls every show easily
+becomes reality, whether it be a sad or a gay one.</p>
+
+<p>How happy was her friend and every good being to think that the saint
+pronounced herself blest! And then she became, in turn, still more so.
+Thus does the radiance of joy dart to and fro between sympathizing
+hearts, as between two mirrors, in growing multiplication, and grows
+without end.</p>
+
+
+<h3>72. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The hour of departure came rolling on with swifter and swifter wheels;
+more constellations of joy went down than came up. Thus do the blooming
+vineyards of life always grow green on the ups and downs of a
+mountainous way, never on a smooth plain. The two lovers needed quiet
+now, not walks. They took the nearest, the path to the thunder-house.
+They stepped into the glimmering vesper-grounds as into a new land; at
+mid-day man is awakened from one dream after another, and has always
+forgotten and sees things always new. In Albano the golden splendor of
+the strings of joy still lingered under the declining sun; he told her
+gladly, how often he would visit her at her parents', and how he
+certainly hoped to find them friendly. Liana, as a daughter and a lover,
+retouched all his hopes with her own. But now she let her hitherto light
+heart, which had been rocking itself on the flowers of sport, sink back
+upon the solid ground of earnest.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[Pg 476]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When there is peace and fulness in a man, he wishes not to enjoy
+anything else but himself; every motion, even of the body, jostles the
+full nectar-cup. They hastened out of the loud, lively garden into the
+still, dark thunder-house. But when, as if parted from the world, which
+lay out around the windows, brightly glistening and far receding, they
+stood alone together in the little twilight, and looked upon each
+other,&mdash;and when Albano's soul became like a sun-drunken mountain at
+evening, light, warm, firm, and fair, and Liana's soul like an
+up-gushing spring on the mountain, which glides away purely bright and
+cool and hidden, and only under the touch of the evening-beam glows in
+rosy redness,&mdash;and now that these souls had just found each other in the
+wide, unharmonious world,&mdash;then did a mighty joy thrill through them
+like a prayer, and they cast themselves upon each other's hearts, and
+glowed and wept and looked upon each other exaltedly in the
+embrace;&mdash;and, on the Æolian-harp, suddenly the folding doors of an
+inspired concert-hall flew open, and outswelling harmonies floated by,
+and suddenly again the gates shut to.</p>
+
+<p>They seated themselves at the breezy eastern window, before which the
+mountains of Blumenbühl and Lilar's hills and paths lay in the sunlight.
+Around them was evening shade, and all was still, and the Æolian-harp
+breathed low. They only looked at each other, and felt joy to their
+innermost being that they loved and possessed each other. How
+ecstatically did they look, from the protection of this citadel, down
+into the sounding, stirring world! Down below the wind blew the blaze of
+poppies and tulips far and wide, and in among the heavy, yellow harvest.
+The silver-poplars, wearing eternal May-snow, fluttered with uptossing
+splendor; a flock of pigeons went<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</a></span> rustling away, and dipped into the
+blue; and overhead, amid flying clouds, stood those round temples of
+God, the mountains, in rows, beside each other, bearing alternate nights
+and days; and the pious father stood alone on his hill, and handed his
+roe tender branches.</p>
+
+<p>"Thus may we ever remain!" said Albano, and pressed her dear hand with
+both of his to his heart. "Here and hereafter!" said she. "Albano, how
+often have I wished thou wert at the same time my female friend, that I
+might speak with thee of thyself! Who on the earth knows how I esteem
+thee, except myself alone?" "Here and hereafter? Liana, I am happier
+than thou, for I alone believe in our <i>long</i> life here," said he, all at
+once changed.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever, now, may have been the reason,&mdash;whether that man is not at all
+accustomed to be happy in a pure present, severed from all future and
+past, because his inner heaven, like the natural one, directly over his
+head and close to him, always looks dark-blue, and only round about the
+distant horizon radiant; or that there is a bliss so tender and
+unearthly as, like the moonshine, to be made too dark by every passing
+cloud, whereas a sturdy one, like daylight, can bear the broadest; or
+that Albano was too much like men who always in joy feel their powers so
+strongly that they would rather kick over the table of the gods than see
+a dish or a loaf of the heavenly bread less thereupon, rather be
+perfectly miserable than not perfectly happy;&mdash;suffice it, he could not
+and would not be guilty of longer fear and concealment.</p>
+
+<p>So, when Liana, instead of answering, only embraced him, and was silent,
+because she meant to remain the whole day true to her promise not to
+dash the festal tapestry of fair days with a shade of mourning-cloth,
+then,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[Pg 478]</a></span> as if urged on by a strange spirit, he spoke out: "Thou answerest
+nothing? Only joys, not sorrows, shall I share? Thou hast not thy veil?
+Wilt thou spare <i>me</i> as a weakling? and thee alone shall thy
+death-belief continue to oppress? Liana, I will have pangs, too, and all
+thine,&mdash;tell all!"</p>
+
+<p>"Truly, I only meant to keep my promise," said she, "and no more. But
+what then shall I say to thee, dear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dost thou believe, then, that thou art certainly to die after a year,
+superstitious one?&mdash;heavenly one!" said he.</p>
+
+<p>"In so far as it is God's will, certainly," said she. "O my good Albano,
+how can I help my belief, much as it pains thee too?" And here she could
+no longer restrain her tears, and all the crucifixes of memory started
+up alive in the fair soul, and bled intensely.</p>
+
+<p>"God's will?" asked he. "Quite as well might he at this moment
+precipitate a winter as an iceberg, into this happy summer. God?" he
+repeated, looked up, knelt down, and prayed, "O thou all-loving God&mdash;But
+thou shalt not die to me!" He turned, as if in anger, towards her,
+incapable of continuing his prayer, for the cry of his heart, and wiping
+hastily with both hands over his moist face. Now he prayed on, with a
+soft, trembling voice: "No, thou all-loving One! kill not this fair,
+young life! Leave us together long in purity and in peace."</p>
+
+<p>She knelt involuntarily at his side;&mdash;to-day more exhausted with
+pleasures and unknown inner victories, even with long walking, so much
+the more intensely struck by a moving reality that she had been spoiled
+and softened by moving fancies, and inexpressibly afflicted at Albano's
+sorrow;&mdash;she could not speak; her head and neck bowed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[Pg 479]</a></span> as under a
+burden suddenly laid upon them; and thus, as one heavily overclouded by
+a whole life, she looked down upon the floor. The embracing death-flood
+sounded with one arm around her; then did she see, without looking up,
+her Caroline pass by somewhere in bridal dress, and with the white,
+gold-spangled veil trailing along far over life; and she saw clearly how
+the celestial shape, when Albano begged for her life, shook its head
+slowly to and fro. "Cease to pray!" she cried, inconsolably. "But listen
+to me, thou cold apparition, and only make <i>him</i> happy!" she prayed, but
+she saw nothing more; and, with inexpressible love, she hid her face,
+marked all over with the lines of agony, upon his breast.</p>
+
+<p>Here her brother called up, that the carriage was ready. She threw down
+a quick, thin-voiced "Yes." "Must we part?" asked Albano; the fiery rain
+of ecstasy had now fallen back into his open soul, in the shape of a
+darker rain of ashes; and so he went on without any bounds to his
+anguish. "Then have we seen each other for the last time?" and under the
+closed eyelid his noble eye wept.</p>
+
+<p>"No! in the name of the All-gracious, no!" said she, and rose to go.
+"Stay!" said he, and she staid, and embraced him again. "But do not
+accompany me!" she entreated. "Not!" said he, and held her for some time
+as she withdrew, by the tips of the fingers; it pained him so much, when
+he saw the sufferings which had been brought upon this still form, that
+these white wings of innocence had beaten themselves bloody against his
+cliffs and mountain-horns. He drew her again to himself, ere he let her
+and his salvation go from him. He looked after her as she slowly stole
+down along the sunny mountain, drying her eyes under the twigs, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[Pg 480]</a></span>
+went with bowed head along all the gay, blooming paths of the forenoon's
+walk. But he gazed not after, when her carriage rolled away across the
+joyous wood; he stood at the eastern window, and saw his childhood's
+mountains tremble, because he had forgotten to dry his eyes.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;">
+<img src="images/flowerend.jpg" width="400" height="79" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_180_180" id="Footnote_180_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor_180_180"><span class="label">[180]</span></a> The Titan was originally divided into four volumes.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_181_181" id="Footnote_181_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor_181_181"><span class="label">[181]</span></a> A musical term, meaning the compensation made by
+transferring to imperfect concords part of the beauty of the perfect
+ones.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_182_182" id="Footnote_182_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor_182_182"><span class="label">[182]</span></a> Every partial development of course works well for the
+whole; but only for this reason, because its opposite partial one
+balances it in a higher equation and sum total, so that all individual
+men are only the limbs of a single giant, such as the Swedenborgian
+<i>man</i> is. But in so far as, in one individual, a want arises which helps
+out an opposite one in another,&mdash;so that the road of humanity plagues
+and trips equally much by hills and by hollows,&mdash;it will be seen that
+every one-sided fulness is, only a cure of the times, not their health;
+and that the higher law is, after all, a culture slower in the
+individual, but still harmonious; less in amount, indeed, but impartial,
+and thereby, in the long run, even more rapid. We always forget that&mdash;as
+in mechanics power and time are mutual supplements&mdash;eternity is the
+infinite power.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_183_183" id="Footnote_183_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor_183_183"><span class="label">[183]</span></a> According to Borreux, the engineer, literally only every
+thousandth shot from small-arms hits. So is it in all cases; fear death,
+and then there stand flower-pots ready to fall from chamber-windows,
+lightnings from the blue sky, air-guns going off, polypuses in the
+heart, mad dogs, robbers, every gash in the finger, <i>aqua toffana</i>,
+proud flesh, &amp;c., in short, all nature&mdash;that ever-going, crushing
+cochineal-mill&mdash;stands with innumerable open scissors of fate round
+about thee, and thou hast no consolation, save this, that&mdash;nevertheless
+people grow eighty years old. Fear impoverishment: then fire, flood,
+famine, and war, banditti and revolutions, set upon thee with greedy
+claws and fangs; and yet, thou rich man! the poor man&mdash;creeping along
+under the same birds of prey&mdash;becomes at last as rich as thou. March,
+therefore, boldly through the slumbering lion-herd of dangers, lying on
+the right and left, and go up to the fountain, only do not wantonly wake
+them up; of course a hell-god drags down individuals who feared nothing;
+but so, too, does a higher God draw up individuals who expected nothing;
+and fear and hope are swallowed in one common night.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_184_184" id="Footnote_184_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor_184_184"><span class="label">[184]</span></a> Titan, 13. Cycle.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_185_185" id="Footnote_185_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor_185_185"><span class="label">[185]</span></a> At the court of King Olaus, the royal youth Olo, dressed
+as a peasant, offered himself as a champion of the daughter against
+robbers. Then did the fire of the eyes and nobleness of form tell as
+proof of a high descent; thus did Suanhita, for example, recognize King
+Regner in a herdsman's guise by the beauty of his eye and face. The
+king's daughter looked searchingly into Olo's flaming eye, and came near
+swooning; she essayed a second look, and was senseless; and at the
+third, swooned. The divine youth therefore cast his eyelids down but
+uncovered his brow and his golden hair and the signs of his rank. See
+"The German and his Native Land," by Rosenthal and Karg, Vol. I. pp.
+166, 167.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_186_186" id="Footnote_186_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor_186_186"><span class="label">[186]</span></a> For what we call light is only an intenser white. No one
+sees, by night, the luminous stream which rushes upward along by the
+earth, pouring from the sun upon the full moon.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_187_187" id="Footnote_187_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor_187_187"><span class="label">[187]</span></a> This warmer, tenderer, more timid, ever-praised sex,
+living more in the opinion of others than in its own, is poisonously
+pierced by a reproach which only pricks <i>us</i> so as to draw a little
+blood, as noxious beasts, in warm countries and months, poison, and in
+cold ones only wound. Therefore let the girls' schoolmaster consider
+that a dose which is satire upon the boy&mdash;who, besides, must withstand
+opinion&mdash;becomes a lampoon, when it lights upon his sister.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_188_188" id="Footnote_188_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor_188_188"><span class="label">[188]</span></a> Poetic name for May.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_189_189" id="Footnote_189_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor_189_189"><span class="label">[189]</span></a> In which were always enclosed letters from Liana to
+Albano. Let every one see here, by two examples, how on the harmonica of
+love a brother must stand in front as key-bank for the sister, who would
+reach the bells. There should, therefore, always be a couple of couples,
+diametrically connected in sisterhood and affection.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_190_190" id="Footnote_190_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor_190_190"><span class="label">[190]</span></a> "Such a character," writes Hafenreffer in this
+connection, "were desirable for romancing Kotzebues, for they, as he
+always will, according to his nature, create and raise the dignity of
+the situation by the accidental place thereof, might, under the cloak of
+his personality, humor entirely their own and disguise the weakness of
+the poet under the weakness of the hero." Methinks this is, so far as a
+biographer of romancers can decide, very striking.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_191_191" id="Footnote_191_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor_191_191"><span class="label">[191]</span></a> Tiring-women.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[Pg 481]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/shieldstart.jpg" width="550" height="131" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+<h2>SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">The Sorrows of a Daughter.</span></p>
+
+
+<h3>73. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<div class="drop">
+<img src="images/c.jpg" width="100" height="109" alt="C" class="cap" />
+<p class="cap_2">Clouds like these last consisted with Albano less of falling drops than
+of settling dust. His life was yet a hothouse, and stood therefore
+toward the sunny side. Every day brought a new apology for the absent
+sweetheart, till at last she needed one no longer. But still he gave to
+every day its letter of indulgence for her silence; by and by they grew
+into letters of respite (moratories); finally, when she never let
+anything at all be heard or read from her; then he began to re-examine
+the afore-said apologies, and strike out many things therein.</p></div>
+
+<p>Quite as little could he find for himself, or for a note, a way of
+access to her. Even the Captain had been gone for some days on a journey
+to Haarhaar. With faint hands he held the heavy, drained cup of joy,
+which, when empty, weighs the heaviest. The wild hypotheses which man in
+such a case trots<a name="FNanchor_192_192" id="FNanchor_192_192"></a><a href="#Footnote_192_192" class="fnanchor">[192]</a> through him&mdash;as in this, for instance, that of
+Liana's being sick, having caught cold, her imprisonment, absence on a
+journey&mdash;are, in their alternation and value, to be compared with
+nothing, except with the quite as great wildness and number of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[Pg 482]</a></span> the
+plans which he enlists and dismisses,&mdash;that of abduction, of hate, of a
+duel, of despair.</p>
+
+<p>The terrible motionless time had no gnomon on its dial-plate. He stood
+as near his fate as man does to his dreams, without being able to
+recognize or prepare for its form, any more than one can for that which
+dreams will take. He went often into the city, through all whose streets
+there was riding, running, and driving, because they were about bringing
+and nailing together the beams for the grandest throne-scaffolding, on
+which the princely bride at her introductory compliment in the land,
+might look round the farthest; but he heard nothing there of his own
+bride, except that she quite often visited the picture-gallery with the
+Minister.</p>
+
+<p>Hereby two distressing hypotheses, that of her sickness, and that of her
+being at war with her family, seemed to lose their stings. The best,
+though the hardest thing was, to go straight to the Minister, as to
+Vesuvius, in order there to have the fairest prospect. He visited the
+Vesuvius. In fact this volcano was never more still and green. He asked
+after everything, and expressed himself upon much which immediately
+concerned the marriage festival; nor did he seek to conceal his hopes
+and wishes that the Count would help welcome the admirable bride.</p>
+
+<p>At last the latter, too, must venture to unfold <i>his</i> hopes and wishes
+about the ladies. The Minister replied, with uncommon pleasantness, that
+the two had just carried back the "charming Mademoiselle von Wehrfritz"
+to Blumenbühl; and indulged himself forthwith in a eulogium of that
+"unsophisticated nature." Albano soon took his leave, but much happier
+than when he came. A few street-lamps<a name="FNanchor_193_193" id="FNanchor_193_193"></a><a href="#Footnote_193_193" class="fnanchor">[193]</a> certainly were now burning on
+his path.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[Pg 483]</a></span></p>
+<p>But in the morning he fell into a little obscure alley, where there was
+not a single one; in other words, Rabette, the little reindeer, came
+running to Lilar, as she yesterday had to Pestitz,&mdash;for what is a race
+of a mile to a country-girl, else than a simple <i>Allemande</i>?<a name="FNanchor_194_194" id="FNanchor_194_194"></a><a href="#Footnote_194_194" class="fnanchor">[194]</a>&mdash;and
+shook and shook her heart before him, even to its very ears, but nothing
+fell out of it except pleasant images, a few heavens, a complete
+wedding-day, a couple of parents-in-law, and a Captain's wife. "The
+Minister had been so courteous toward me, but&mdash;the mother afterward
+still more so toward my parents; and they have mentioned and praised the
+Captain so much,&mdash;in short, they of course know all, my glorious,
+heartily-loved brother!" said she,&mdash;but of Liana she had nothing to
+bring to her glorious brother, except a bill of her health; her joyous
+eye had not turned toward any dark region whatever. "We were not alone a
+minute, that is the reason of it," she added, and came again upon the
+subject of her Captain, whom the Minister had sent out on the Haarhaar
+road, as chief marshal of the escort of the Princess; yet she referred
+him to the illumination night in Lilar, when she and Liana, and the
+parents on both sides, had arranged to be there. Thou good creature! who
+is so cruel as to begrudge thee the glittering ring of joy, which thou
+contemplatest on thy brown and hard-boiled hand, and who does not fondly
+wish that its stones may never fall out?</p>
+
+<p>Soon after, the brother of the past festivals flew to the heart of the
+deserted one,&mdash;Charles. He repeated almost exactly Rabette's deposition,
+although not her rapture; he said,&mdash;but without special emotion,&mdash;that
+his father actually threw him the brotherly hand kiss through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[Pg 484]</a></span> several
+rooms, distinguished and designated him quite particularly, and kindly
+made use of him for business purposes; and all this merely since he had
+become acquainted with his love for Rabette, and the silent assent of
+the parents; for with his father, though the heart was of no account,
+yet Rabette's fief was, especially as one could not trust, with all the
+romantic stock-jobbing of his heart, that he would not himself one day
+realize the poorest result.</p>
+
+<p>With a sighing breast, which would gladly have imparted more to an
+expecting one, Charles merely related that he had found Liana well and
+quiet, but not alone for one minute. The association of another's want
+with his own open, rich fortune was, so Albano believed, the fair,
+tender reason why Charles glided with such cool, fleeting pleasure over
+the parental benediction of his soul's bond. O, how he loved him at this
+moment! Could he have loved him ever so much more, he would have done
+it, though Liana had been actually lost to the sum of his happiness,
+merely to show himself and him that holy friendship wants no third heart
+in order to love a second.</p>
+
+<p>This cloud of silence lay fixed for weeks, and grew more and more dark
+around his fairest heights; and the guiltless one went round and round
+through the darkness in a circle of contradictions. How must this youth
+have harassed himself when he thought, as he soon did, that the parents
+would, in all probability, reject an alliance with him, as he, indeed,
+thought himself obliged rather to forget than to reciprocate their
+advances, and that they might sacrifice two hearts to political
+heartlessness; or when he let fall upon the innocent Liana the suspicion
+of giving way before parental assaults, which suspicion received
+reinforcement from the past through the conjecture<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[Pg 485]</a></span> that she had
+embraced him rather in poetical enthusiasm and from goodness, and more
+with wings than with arms, and that, in fact, accustomed to such long
+submissions, she could hardly distinguish sacrifices and inclinations,
+and might take one for the other; or when, as he soon and oftenest did,
+he turned the point of all these weapons against his own breast, and
+asked himself why he had such a firm confidence in friendship, and such
+a wavering one in love. Then this reproach led him to a second, upon
+every previous one, which he had cast upon the good soul merely for the
+sake, according to the proselyting system and reforming mania which men
+exercise more upon their wives than upon their friends, of melting her
+down for his own mould. This last he might rue; as Holberg<a name="FNanchor_195_195" id="FNanchor_195_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_195_195" class="fnanchor">[195]</a> observes
+that men do not keep estates so well as women, because the former are
+always wanting to improve them more than the latter; on the same ground,
+also, lovers spoil women more than these do them.</p>
+
+<p>For the sake merely of getting more expeditiously from the tedious
+tribunal of the future his sentence of death, or a more agreeable
+document, he went again to the ministerial house. He was again smilingly
+received by the Minister, and seriously by the mother; and, in reply to
+his question, Liana was not quite well. He laid before old Schoppe (who
+now pressed his friendship upon him more warmly, and who, for some time
+near the dissecting-knife of the Doctor, had not studied any other heart
+than that which was to be spattered to pieces and prepared) a short
+question about the Doctor's visits at the Minister's. How was he
+astonished when he heard that no one out of the house any longer made
+any visits to it,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[Pg 486]</a></span> (while Liana, quite blooming, went into all circles,)
+except merely the Lector, who made very frequent ones!</p>
+
+<p>He well comprehended that only the Medusa's-heads of the parents could
+turn the softest heart into stone against him; but even this he found
+not right. He boldly demanded that she should love him more than her
+parents, "not from egotism," said he to himself, "not on my account, but
+on her own." A lover wishes a great, indescribable love, of which he
+thinks himself always only the accidental and unworthy object, merely
+for the sake of tendering the highest himself.</p>
+
+<p>Even the silent Lector, who generally placed all newly rising lights
+behind light-shades and fire-screens, communicated unbidden to the Count
+the novel tidings that Liana would be, under the administration of the
+coming Princess, something&mdash;<a name="FNanchor_196_196" id="FNanchor_196_196"></a><a href="#Footnote_196_196" class="fnanchor">[196]</a>maid of honor. His old jealous
+suspicion of Augusti's wishes or relations allowed him no answer to
+that.</p>
+
+<p>Now his spirit manned itself, and he wrote straight to the soul that
+belonged to him, and sent the letter to her brother for delivery. The
+latter came the next day, but seemed to him not to have any answer yet,
+because he would otherwise have given it with the first greeting.
+Charles introduced him to the Haarhaar court, where he had lately been;
+said every nerve there had on jack-boots, and every heart a
+hoop-petticoat; then went on to eulogize the youngest, but most
+unpopular Princess, <i>Idoine</i>; declared she possessed, in addition to all
+her other advantages,&mdash;for instance, purity, kindness, decision of
+character, which even on the throne selects for itself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[Pg 487]</a></span> its own lot and
+life,&mdash;the further grace of amiableness, since even the princely bride,
+who loved no one else, hung upon her heart, and&mdash;last, not least&mdash;the
+advantage of a very deceptive similarity to Liana.</p>
+
+<p>"Has Liana received my letter yet?" asked Albano. Charles handed it back
+to him. "By Heaven!" said he, ardently, and yet ambiguously, "I could
+not get it to her just now. But, brother, canst thou believe, only for
+one minute, that she does not remain forever most thine?" "I do not
+believe anything at all!" said Albano, offended, and tore his leaf on
+the spot into little bits no bigger than the letters. "Only <i>we</i> will,"
+he continued, with a tone of emotion, "remain, as we are, firm as iron,
+and flexible as iron when it comes out of the furnace." The deeply
+touched friend sought to console him with the following: "Only wait, I
+pray, the illumination evening;<a name="FNanchor_197_197" id="FNanchor_197_197"></a><a href="#Footnote_197_197" class="fnanchor">[197]</a> then she will speak with thee. She
+must certainly appear, and thou wilt wonder in what character, and for
+whom." He nodded silently; he easily gathered her part from her
+resemblance to Idoine, and from her expected office at court. But what
+help was it to his fortune?</p>
+
+<p>With the return of his note, which he despatched against his pride, that
+same pride came back in renewed strength. Now was a hot seal stamped on
+Albano's bleeding lip; he had now nothing for and before him, except
+time, which was now his poison, and would by and by, as he hoped, be his
+antidote. Nothing was ever master over his sense of honor, when it was
+once roused. He could look forward to a scaffold on which blood spurted
+out, but he could not look upon a pillory where, under the heavy,
+poisonous, murderous pain of scorn and self-contempt, a downcast,
+distracted face hung on the sinful breast.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[Pg 488]</a></span></p>
+<p>Charles sometimes approached with a few lights the long night-like
+riddle; but Albano, however much he wished them, staggered him by
+opposition, and sought not even to hear him, much less to ask him
+questions. So he lay on hard, youthful, thorny rose-buds, which a single
+hour can open into tender roses. Victories beget victories, as defeats
+do defeats; he found now, if not a complete relief from the emotions
+which besieged him, nevertheless a mountain-fortification against them,
+provisioned for a little eternity, in the shape of an astronomical
+observatory. With an entire and firmly collected soul he threw himself
+upon theoretical astronomy, in order not to see daylight, and upon
+practical astronomy in order not to see night. The watch-tower stood
+indeed upon a mountain intermediate between the city and Blumenbühl, and
+commanded a view of both; but he cast his eyes only upon the
+constellations, not upon those rosy-red spots of the earth, where they
+now could have sucked out of the cold flower-cups only water instead of
+honey. Thus amid the festive preparations in Lilar did he go armed to
+meet the long delaying evening when the presence of the fairest soul
+should either bless or destroy him, vainly looking from time to time at
+the distant telegraph of his destiny, which was constantly moving,
+uncertain whether with peaceful or hostile significance.</p>
+
+
+<h3>74. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>To remove the seals from the enrolled acts of the foregoing history for
+the purpose of looking into it,&mdash;or to push back the blinds and shove up
+the windows of the same,&mdash;or to uncover so many covered ways and
+vehicles,&mdash;or, in fine, the whole matter,&mdash;all that is mere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[Pg 489]</a></span>
+metaphors,&mdash;and the most inappropriate ones, too,&mdash;which cannot serve
+any other purpose than only to hold off still longer and more tediously
+the long-expected solution, which they would fain describe; much rather
+and better, methinks, will the whole war and peace position in the
+ministerial palace be at once freely laid bare as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Herr Von Froulay had, as has been already mentioned, come home from
+Haarhaar with a <i>Belle-vue</i> in his face, and with a <i>mon-plaisir</i> in his
+heart (provided these tropes do not seem more elaborate than exquisite).
+He told his lady openly, what had hitherto detained and enchanted him so
+long,&mdash;the future Princess, who had conceived for him a more than
+ordinary fancy. He threw a full, glorifying light on her enriched
+understanding,&mdash;he never praised anything beyond this in
+ladies,<a name="FNanchor_198_198" id="FNanchor_198_198"></a><a href="#Footnote_198_198" class="fnanchor">[198]</a>&mdash;as well as a faint streak of shade upon his own <i>her's</i>;
+and pronounced himself fortunate in the possession of a person whose
+fine, persistent coquetry (he said) he for his part could recommend as a
+model, and whose attachment he, in fact, (that he pretended not to
+conceal,) reciprocated half-way, but only half-way, for it was perfectly
+true, what the Duke of Lauzun<a name="FNanchor_199_199" id="FNanchor_199_199"></a><a href="#Footnote_199_199" class="fnanchor">[199]</a> asserted: in order to keep the love
+of Princesses, one must just hold them in right hard and short. In the
+old man accordingly there shoots up, as we see, quite late,&mdash;not unlike
+the case of fresh teeth,&mdash;which oftentimes old men do not cut till they
+are nonagenarians,&mdash;a lover's heart beneath the star; only it is more to
+be wished than hoped, he will especially play the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[Pg 490]</a></span> ridiculous in the
+matter. For as he all the week long holds the helm of state, either on
+the rower's bench, to keep it in motion, or on the cabinet-maker's
+bench, to trim it down into a fine and light shape for the Prince; the
+consequence is, he is so tired when Saturday comes, that no Virgil and
+no tempest could persuade him&mdash;and though his feet had not more steps to
+take for the purpose than the number of feet in Virgil's hexameter, or
+of commandments in the Decalogue of Moses&mdash;to accompany a Dido out of
+the storm into the nearest cave. He does no such thing. He remains quite
+as free from sentimental and pathetic love as from sensual, especially
+as he apprehends that the former would in the end entangle him in the
+latter, because like a minor-tone it has quite a different returning
+scale from its ascending one. The ironical and stinging element in the
+man made every marriage&mdash;even that of souls&mdash;to him as well as to other
+world's people as disagreeable in the end as the spines of the hedgehogs
+make theirs. He lays up, therefore, in the future for the Princess only
+a cold, politic, coquettish, courtly love, such as she herself haply
+has, and such as he has occasion for, in order less to gain her than to
+gain from her, and to gain first of all the entire Prince. I promise
+myself cosmopolitan readers, who, I hope, find no offence to this
+personage in Froulay's partiality for his lady; for so soon as the
+court-preacher has but once laid his joining hand on the Princess, then
+has this house-steward made, as it were, the cut in the pea-hen,<a name="FNanchor_200_200" id="FNanchor_200_200"></a><a href="#Footnote_200_200" class="fnanchor">[200]</a>
+and she can then be taken off untouched, and be feasted on in other
+places.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[Pg 491]</a></span></p><p>I have already (in the second volume) intimated the anxiety of the
+Minister's lady lest the Minister, if he should (in this volume) come
+back and not find Liana at home, should chafe; but, contrary to
+expectation, he approved; her use of the country air-bath fell in
+exactly with his design of sending her into the vapor-bath of the court
+atmosphere. He told her mother that it by no means displeased him that
+she should now be entirely well, since the new Princess would select her
+for her maid of honor, whenever he should say the word. He could not for
+three minutes see a sceptre or a sceptrelet lying by him without proving
+its polarity for himself, and either attracting or repelling something
+with it. As the famous theologian, Spener,&mdash;a predecessor of our
+Spener,&mdash;prayed to God so beautifully thrice a day for his friends, one
+finds with similar pleasure that the courtier daily prays a little for
+his friends before his god, the Prince, and seeks to obtain something.</p>
+
+<p>The Minister's lady, never opposing his changeable plans in the sketch,
+but only in the execution, easily became reconciled with his latest one,
+because it at least seemed rather to stand in no auxiliary relation to
+the old one of the bethrothal to Bouverot.</p>
+
+<p>One evening, unfortunately, the fatal, anxious Lector&mdash;who pasted the
+smallest visiting-card to a Fulda's historic chart&mdash;arrived in her
+presence with his packet-ship, and came ashore having under his two arms
+the state and imperial advertisements of her two children; he had one of
+them under each; and yet why do I fly out upon the man? Could a
+double-romance, especially when played in the open air, remain better
+concealed than a single one?</p>
+
+<p>Her astonishment can be compared with the greater<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[Pg 492]</a></span> astonishment of her
+husband, who happened to have just been screwing on in the third chamber
+his tin ear,&mdash;made by Schropp of Magdeburg,&mdash;in order to listen to the
+servants, and who now caught a number of things. Nevertheless, the
+double-ear, with the broad meshes of its nocturnal lark-net, had only
+fished up from Augusti's low, whispering, courtly lips single, long,
+proper names,&mdash;such as Roquairol and Zesara. Hardly had the soft-spoken
+Lector gone out, when he stepped gayly into the chamber, with his ear in
+his hand, and demanded of her a report of the reports. He held
+it beneath his dignity either to patch up or disguise his
+suspicion,&mdash;which, even in the friendliest and gayest mood, would never
+shut its Argus ears and eyes,&mdash;or to dissemble his eavesdropping, with
+so much as a syllable or a blush of shame; the fair lilies of the most
+colorless impudence were not painted, but branded on him. The Minister's
+lady immediately seized upon the female expedient, of telling the
+truth&mdash;half-way; namely, the agreeable truth of Roquairol's
+well-received advances at the house of Wehrfritz, whose estate and
+provincial directorship had been cast into a very fitting shape for a
+father-in-law. Meanwhile the Minister had seen in his lady's face the
+mourning-border around this pleasant notification-document, far too
+clearly and broadly not to inquire about that prominent word "Zesara,"
+which his delicate tin searcher had also caught up, but he inquired in
+vain; for the mother held her good daughter too dear to set this wolf on
+the scent for her into her Eden; she hoped to get her out of it in a
+gentler way, by a divine voice and angels; and so evaded his question.</p>
+
+<p>But the wolf now ran farther on in his track; he got the gout in his
+stomach,&mdash;so it was reported to Dr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[Pg 493]</a></span> Sphex,&mdash;demanded of him speedy aid,
+and also some intelligence of his tenant, the Count. Doctor and Madam
+Sphex had already a grudge against the inflated youth; through their
+four juvenile envoys, as <i>enfans perdus</i> in every sense, as four
+hearing-organs of every city rumor, much might be brought in on
+advice-yachts from Blumenbühl and Lilar. In short, the auricular organs
+fitted in so well to those of others, that Froulay, in a few days, was
+in a situation to ask, with his lily brow, the Greek woman for a letter
+to his son, which he offered to take along with him.</p>
+
+<p>He found one, which he broke open with great joy, without, however,
+finding anything therein from Albano's or Liana's hand, but only some
+stupid allusion of Rabette to that couple, which, to the Minister, were
+as much as if, with his sharp exciseman's-probes, he had bored into
+Liana's heart and lighted upon contraband there. Without any long,
+slavish copying of the former seal, he set a second upon the letter, and
+went away enlightened by it.</p>
+
+<p>We can all follow him, when we have detained ourselves only a few
+minutes for his justification, with my</p>
+
+
+<h4><i>Apology and Defence<a name="FNanchor_201_201" id="FNanchor_201_201"></a><a href="#Footnote_201_201" class="fnanchor">[201]</a> in the Matter of the Second Seal upon Letters
+in State Affairs.</i></h4>
+
+<p>Whether the examination of other people's letters pertains to old
+Froulay as minister or father,&mdash;(although the latter presupposes the
+former, the father of the country implying every other father and his
+own too,)&mdash;I will not decide, except by the parenthesis just inserted.
+The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[Pg 494]</a></span> state which tackles on the post-horses before letters has, it
+should seem, the right to examine more narrowly, under the closed visor
+of the seal, these not so much <i>blind</i> as blinding <i>passengers</i>,<a name="FNanchor_202_202" id="FNanchor_202_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_202_202" class="fnanchor">[202]</a> in
+order to know whether it is not using its horses in the service of its
+enemies. The state, an ever-drawing light-magnet, means certainly only
+to have light in the case, and particularly light upon all light in
+general; it requires only the naked truth, without cover or covering.
+All that rides and fares through its gates must, though it were dressed
+in a surtout, just open its <i>red</i> mouth, and say what name and business.</p>
+
+<p>As the common soldier must first show his letters to his officer, the
+garrison-soldier of the Bastile to the governor, the monk his to the
+prior, the American colonist his to the Dutchman,<a name="FNanchor_203_203" id="FNanchor_203_203"></a><a href="#Footnote_203_203" class="fnanchor">[203]</a>&mdash;in order that he
+may burn them up, if they find fault with him,&mdash;so, surely, can no
+statesman, whether he regards the state as a barrack, or as an
+Engelsburg, or as a <i>monasterium duplex</i>, or as a <i>European possession
+in Europe</i>, deny it the right to keep all its letters as open as bills
+of lading, patents of nobility, bills of sale, and apostolic epistles
+are. The only mistake is, that it does not get hold of the letters
+before they are enveloped and sealed. That is immoral enough; for it
+necessitates the government to open and shut,&mdash;to draw the letter out of
+the case, and put it back again, as the cook with pains turns the snail
+out of his shell, and then, when he is once taken off from the fire,
+shoves him back again into it, to serve him up therein.</p>
+
+<p>This last is the point of the compass and cardinal wind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[Pg 495]</a></span> which is to
+guide us onward; for universally acknowledged as it is, just as custom
+and observance are, that the government, on the same ground on which it
+opens the <i>last</i> will, must have the power to unseal also the last but
+one, and the one before that, and finally the very first, before its
+heir can do it, and that a prince must be able still more readily to
+bring servants' letters into the same deciphering chancery (and into
+their antechamber, the unsealing chamber), wherein the letters of
+princes and legates fly open before the caper-spurge,<a name="FNanchor_204_204" id="FNanchor_204_204"></a><a href="#Footnote_204_204" class="fnanchor">[204]</a> nevertheless
+the cork-drawing of letters,&mdash;the joint seal, the vicariate seal, the
+laborious imitation of the L. S., or <i>loco sigilli</i>,&mdash;all this is
+something very annoying and almost detestable; out of the wrong a right
+must therefore be made by constitutional repetition.</p>
+
+<p>Something of the kind might be brought about, I flatter myself, if it
+were commanded to write letters only on stamp-paper. An inspecting and
+stamping office appointed for that purpose would then read everything
+over beforehand.</p>
+
+<p>Or one might prohibit in future all private seals, just as they do
+mint-stamps for private coin. A seal-department would then interfere,
+with full rights, and seal up, as they now do the legacies of the
+deceased, so in that case those of the living.</p>
+
+<p>Or&mdash;which is perhaps preferable&mdash;an epistolary <i>censorship</i> must
+commence. Unprinted newspapers, <i>nouvelles à la main</i>,<a name="FNanchor_205_205" id="FNanchor_205_205"></a><a href="#Footnote_205_205" class="fnanchor">[205]</a>&mdash;that is,
+letters,&mdash;can never, inasmuch as they divulge still greater mysteries,
+demand a greater freedom of censorship than printed newspapers;
+especially<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[Pg 496]</a></span> as every letter, now-a-days, so easily becomes a circular,
+going everywhere. A catalogue of prohibited letters (<i>index
+expurgandarum</i>) would always be, in that case, a <i>word to
+correspondents</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Or let the postmasters be put under oath that they will be faithful
+referendaries of whatever they find weighty or considerable in the
+letters, which, before despatching, they have laid in the mental
+letter-balance, and closed again, with the hope, according to the
+Leibnitzian principle of the non-distinguishable seal, of speeding them
+far and wide.</p>
+
+<p>If the State finds all these ways of reading and closing letters new and
+difficult, then it may go on in its own way&mdash;of opening them.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Froulay flew, laughing, to his lady, and assured her her falsehood
+towards him was no news to him at all. Her present plan, merely to work
+against Herr von Bouverot and himself, he understood full well. Hence it
+was that Rabette had had to come in, and the daughter to go out.
+Meanwhile he would show the hypocrite and bigot, or whoever it might be,
+that she had not merely a mother, but a father too. "She must
+immediately come home; <i>je la ferai damer,<a name="FNanchor_206_206" id="FNanchor_206_206"></a><a href="#Footnote_206_206" class="fnanchor">[206]</a> mais sans vous et sans
+M. le Compte</i>," he concluded, with an allusion to the office of
+court-dame.</p>
+
+<p>But the Minister's lady began, in accordance with her vehement contempt
+of his projects and powers, with that coldness which would have more
+exasperated every ardent one than this cold one, to say to him that she
+must needs disapprove and oppose Liana's and the Count's love still more
+than he did; that she had merely, in an excessive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[Pg 497]</a></span> and otherwise never
+disappointed confidence in Liana's openness of soul, believed her rather
+than herself, and, notwithstanding so many signs of Albano's partiality,
+let her go to Blumenbühl; that she would, however, give him her word on
+the spot to act with as much energy and spirit against the Count as
+against the German gentleman, and that she was, as surely as she knew
+Liana, almost certain of the easiest and happiest result.</p>
+
+<p>Of course this was unexpected to him and&mdash;incredible, especially after
+the previous concealment; only the finest man's soul distinguishes in
+the female the blending boundaries of self-deception and wilful
+delusion, weakness and deceit, accident and intent; besides, the
+Minister's lady was one of those women whom one must first love in order
+to know them, a case which is generally reversed. He readily accepted on
+the one hand the confession of her agreement and co-operation,&mdash;merely
+for the sake, hereafter, of turning it as a weapon against her;&mdash;but he
+could not conceal, on the other hand, that <i>there again</i> (that was
+always his phrase) she had, according to her own confession, neglected
+to watch over her children from a want of jealousy. He retained the
+habit, when an open-hearted soul showed him its breaches, of marching in
+upon it through those breaches, as if he himself had made them. The
+penitent who knelt before him for forgiveness he would crush still
+lower, and instead of the key of absolution draw forth the hammer of the
+law.</p>
+
+<p>I owe it here to the Spaniards, who will one day become acquainted with
+me through miserable translations,<a name="FNanchor_207_207" id="FNanchor_207_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_207_207" class="fnanchor">[207]</a> and to the Austrian knighthood
+of the Golden Fleece, who perhaps read the original in a counterfeit
+edition, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[Pg 498]</a></span> assign the reasons why the house of Froulay did not bespeak
+feasts of joy&mdash;instead of court-mourning&mdash;on the occasion of these
+advances by a son of their order, a Spanish Grandee, who often lays upon
+himself a German princely sceptre as a yardstick to measure himself
+withal. For every Spaniard must have hitherto wondered about this.</p>
+
+<p>I answer every nation. The Froulays had, in the first place, nothing
+against the union except the&mdash;certainty of separation; since on the same
+ground, which the Knights of the Fleece and the Spaniards have opposed
+to me, old Gaspard de Zesara can in no wise suffer a bridge to be thrown
+over from his Gothard to the Jungfrau [virgin]. Secondly, on this very
+ground the Minister could oppose to this romantic love a much older,
+wiser, which he bore toward the German gentleman and his moneys and
+<i>liaisons</i>, as well as the old grudge of the Knight of the Fleece.
+Thirdly, the Minister's lady had, beside these same grounds,&mdash;and
+besides several in favor of the Lector, perhaps,&mdash;one quite decisive
+one, and that was, she could not endure the Count; not merely and solely
+for the reason that she discovered a painful similarity between him and
+her son, and even husband, in pride, in excitability, in the
+characteristic fierceness of genius against poor married women, in want
+of religious humility and devoutness; but the principal reason why she
+could not well endure him was this: that she could not bear him. As the
+system of Predestination sentences some men to hell, whether they
+afterward deserve heaven or not, so a woman never takes back an enmity
+to which she has once doomed any one, all that country and city, God,
+time, and the individual's virtues may say to the contrary,
+notwithstanding.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[Pg 499]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the treaty of peace, concluding the usual chamber-war, the following
+private articles were adjusted between the married couple: The Count
+must be, on the Father's and Director's account, treated with the most
+courtly consideration, and shoved aside,&mdash;and Liana gently and gradually
+drawn away from Wehrfritz's house,&mdash;the whole dissolution of the
+engagement must seem to happen of itself without parental interference,
+merely through the breaking off of the daughter,&mdash;and the whole affair
+remain a mystery. Froulay hoped to keep the whole interlude or episode
+concealed from Liana's earlier-intended, the German gentleman,
+particularly as he, just now, in August, was more at the card-tables of
+the baths than at home.</p>
+
+<p>So it stood; and into this cold, awful pass the friendly Liana moved on,
+when on that warm living Sunday she left the blessed, open Lilar.
+Refined and sanctified by joy,&mdash;for every Paradise was to her a
+purifying Purgatory,&mdash;she came nobly to her mother's bosom, without
+remarking the strange seriousness of the reception by reason of the
+earnest warmth of her own. Her easy confession of the garden-company
+opened the trying scene,&mdash;almost in the <i>coulisse</i>. For the mother, who
+would fain have begun otherwise, had to mount the thunder-car at once,
+in order to thunder and lighten against such incomprehensible
+forgetfulness of female propriety; and yet she held in the
+thunder-steeds in mid-career, in order to enjoin upon Liana immediately,
+as the Minister might come any moment, a perfect silence on the subject
+of to-day's garden-party. Now she cast the deepest strengthening shade
+upon her previous mute falsehood towards a mother; for she arbitrarily
+transposed in her story the sowing and blossoming time of this love,
+even into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[Pg 500]</a></span> days preceding the journey to the country. How did the
+warm soul shudder at the possibility of such an unkindness! She led her
+mother as far as she could up along the pure, light pearl-brook of her
+history and love, and told all that we know, but without giving much
+satisfaction, because she left out precisely the main point; for, out of
+forbearance toward her mother, she felt obliged to let the apparition of
+Caroline, who in the beginning had been the image-stormer of her love
+and then its inspiring muse and bride's-maid, together with the
+death-certificate of the future, remain out of sight in the narration.</p>
+
+<p>She held, with fervent pressure, her mother's hand amidst more and more
+cheerful assurances, how she had always been disposed to tell her
+everything; she thought hopingly, she needed to save nothing but her
+<i>open</i> heart. O thou hast more to save, thy warm, thy whole and living
+heart! Her mother now, from old habit, half believing her, found fault
+with nothing more than the whole affair, its impropriety, impossibility,
+folly. "O good mother," said Liana, simply remaining tender under the
+harsh picturing of the future Albano; "O he is not such, assuredly not!"
+Quite as tenderly did she far overlook the darkly-sketched future
+refusal of Don Gaspard, because to her faith the earth was only a
+blooming grave-mound hanging in the ether. "Ah!" said she, meaning how
+little time she was for this world, "our love is not so important!" Her
+mother took this word and the whole gentleness of her resistance, as
+preludes of an easy victory.</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Albano's father-in-law came in with a kettle-drum,
+alarm-bell, fire-drum, and rattlesnake, in his girdle, in order
+therewith to make himself audible. First he inquired,&mdash;for he had been
+listening in vain,&mdash;in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[Pg 501]</a></span> very exasperated manner, of the Minister's
+lady, where she had stowed away his ear (it was the tin duplicate ear,
+wherein, as in a Venetian lion's-head, all mysteries and accusations of
+the whole service and family met); he said, he had a little occasion for
+it just now, particularly since the newest "adventures of his worthy
+daughter there." The Siamese physicians begin the healing of a patient
+with treading upon him, which they call softening. In a similar manner
+Froulay loved to soften, by way of moral pre-cure; and accordingly
+began, with the above-mentioned speaking-machines in his girdle, to
+declare his sentiments explicitly on the subject of degenerate children;
+upon their arts and artifices; and upon intrigues behind fathers' backs
+(so that no father can accompany a volume of love-poems with a prose
+preface); backed up many points with the strongest political grounds,
+which all had reference to himself and his interest, and wound up with a
+little cursing.</p>
+
+<p>Liana heard him calmly, as one already accustomed to such daily
+returning equinoctial storm-bursts, without any other emotion, except
+that she often raised her downcast eye pityingly upon him, out of tender
+sympathy for the paternal dissatisfaction. In a calm he became loudest.
+"You will see to it, madam," said he, "that to-morrow forenoon she sends
+the Count what she has of his, together with a farewell, and notifies
+him of her new office, as an easy excuse; thou art to be court-dame to
+the reigning Princess, although thou didst not deserve that I should
+labor for thee!"</p>
+
+<p>"That is hard!" cried Liana, with breaking heart, falling upon her
+mother. He supposed she meant the separation from Albano, not from her
+mother, and asked, angrily: "Why?" "Father, I would so gladly," said
+she,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[Pg 502]</a></span> and turned only her face away from the embrace, "die near my
+mother!" He laughed; but the Minister's lady herself shut to the
+hell-gates upon the flames which he still would fain have vomited forth,
+and assured him it was enough, Liana would certainly obey her parents,
+and she herself would be surety for it. The preacher of the law came
+down his pulpit-stairs with an audible ejaculation about a better
+security, calling back, as he went, that his ear must be produced
+to-morrow, and though he should have to search for it in all chests and
+cupboards.</p>
+
+<p>The mother kept silence now, and let her daughter softly weep on her
+neck; to both, after this drought of the soul, the draught of love was
+refreshment and medicine. They came out of each other's arms with
+cheered spirits, but both with entirely delusive hopes.</p>
+
+
+<h3>75. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>A hard, black morning; only the outward atmospheric morning was
+dark-blue; there was nothing loud and stormy, except perchance the
+swarms of bees in the linden-thicket; the heaven's ether seemed to
+flutter away high over the stony streets, so as to settle down low in
+the bright open Lilar upon all hill-tops and tree-tops, and, blue as
+peacock's plumage, to play its hues over the twigs.</p>
+
+<p>Liana found on her writing-table a billet, folded in large quarto,
+wherein the Minister, ever-working, like a heart, sought even at this
+early hour of the morning, before raising out of the public documents
+for the several administration and exchequer counsellors the transient
+tempests which were necessary to fruitfulness, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[Pg 503]</a></span> descend upon his
+shuddering daughter with a cold morning rain-gust. In the decretal
+letter referred to, he developed more in detail, upon a sheet and a half
+what he had meant yesterday,&mdash;separation on the spot; and offered six
+grounds of separation,&mdash;first, his uncongenial relation with the Knight
+of the Fleece; secondly, her own and the Count's youth; thirdly, the
+approaching place of court-dame; fourthly, that she was his daughter,
+and this the first sacrifice to which he, her father, for all his
+previous ones, had ever laid claim; fifthly, she might perceive, by his
+indulgent "Yes," to the love of her brother, whose apparent improvement
+he held out to her as a model, that he lived and cared only for the
+welfare of his children; sixthly, he would send her to Fort * * * to his
+brother, the commandant, in case she were refractory, by way of exiling,
+punishing, and bringing her round; and neither weeping, nor falling at
+feet, nor mother, nor hell should bend him; and he gave her three days'
+time for reflection.</p>
+
+<p>Mutely, and with wet eyes, she handed to her who had been hitherto her
+comforter the heavy sheet. But the comforter had become a judge: "What
+wilt thou do?" said the Minister's lady. "I will suffer," said Liana,
+"in order that <i>he</i> may not suffer; how could I so sorely sin against
+him?" The mother, whether actually under the old notion of her easy
+conversion, or from dissimulation, took that "He" for the father, and
+asked: "Say'st thou nothing of me?" Liana blushed at the substitution,
+and said: "Ah! poor me, I will not indeed be happy,&mdash;only true!" How had
+she during this night prayingly lived and wept amidst the fearful wars
+of all her inner angels! A love so guiltless, consecrated by her holy
+friend in heaven,&mdash;a fidelity so exceedingly abridged by early<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[Pg 504]</a></span> death;
+so sound-hearted a youth, shooting up with high, fruit-bearing summit
+heavenward, whom not even ghostly voices could scare or allure out of
+his faithful childhood's love toward her, insignificant one; the
+everlasting discomfort and grief which he would experience at the first,
+greatest lie against his heart; her short, straight path through life,
+and the nearness of that cross-way, at which she should wish to throw
+back,&mdash;not stones, but flowers upon the other pilgrims;&mdash;all these forms
+took her by <i>one</i> hand to draw her away from her mother, who called
+after her with the words: "See how ungratefully thou art going from me,
+and I have so long suffered and toiled for thee!" Then came Liana back
+again out of the dusky, warm rose-vale of love into the dry, flat
+earth-surface of a life, wherein nothing breaks the monotony save her
+last mound. O how imploringly did she look up to the stars, to see
+whether they did not move as the eyes of her Caroline, and tell her
+<i>how</i> she must sacrifice herself, whether for her lover or for her
+parents; but the stars stood friendly, cold, and still in the steadfast
+heavens.</p>
+
+<p>But, when the morning sun again beamed upon her heart, it beat
+hopefully, newly strengthened with the resolution to endure this day for
+Albano full many sorrows,&mdash;ah yes, even the first. Could Caroline,
+thought she, approve a love to which I must be untrue?</p>
+
+<p>Hardly had she left the lips of her mother with the morning greeting,
+when the latter sought, but more earnestly than yesterday, to draw up
+the roots of this steadfast heart out of its strange soil by a longer
+use of yesterday's flower-extractor. In her comparative anatomy of
+Albano and Roquairol, from the similarity of voice even to that of
+stature, she grew more and more cutting, till<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[Pg 505]</a></span> Liana, with a maiden's
+wit, at once asked, "But why may my brother, then, love Rabette?"
+"<i>Quelle comparaison!</i>" said the mother. "Art thou nothing better than
+she?" "She <i>does</i>, strictly speaking, much more than I," said she, quite
+candidly. "Didst thou never quarrel with the wild Zesara?" asked the
+mother. "Never, except when I was in the wrong," said she, innocently.</p>
+
+<p>The mother was alarmed to perceive more and more clearly that she had to
+pull up deeper and stronger roots than light flowers strike into the
+soil. She concentrated all her maternal powers of attraction and
+lifting-machines upon one point, for the upturning of the still green
+myrtle. She disclosed to her the Minister's dark plan of an alliance
+with the German gentleman, her hitherto concealed strifes and sighs on
+the subject, her thus far effectual resistance, and the latest paternal
+stratagem, to make her a garrison-prisoner with his brother, and thereby
+probably Herr von Bouverot a besieger of the citadel.</p>
+
+<p>For some readers and relicts of the heavy, old-fashioned, golden age of
+morality, the remark is here introduced and printed, that a peculiar,
+cold, unsparing, often shocking and provoking, candor of remark upon the
+nearest relatives and the tenderest relations is so very much at home in
+the higher ranks, that even the fairer souls, among whom, surely, this
+mother belongs, cannot, absolutely, understand or do otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>"O thou best mother!" cried Liana, agitated, but not by the thought of
+the rattle and the snaky breath of Bouverot, or of his murderous spring
+at her heart,&mdash;she thought with as much indifference of being betrothed
+to him as any innocent one does of his dying on a scaffold,&mdash;but by the
+thought of the long building over and crowding out of sight of the
+motherly tears, the streams of motherly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[Pg 506]</a></span> love, which had hitherto flowed
+nourishingly deep down under her flowers. She threw herself gratefully
+between those helpful arms. They closed not around her, because the
+Minister's lady was not to be made weak and soft by any washing wave and
+surge of sudden emotion.</p>
+
+<p>Into this embrace the Minister struck or stepped in. "So!" said he,
+hastily. "My ear, madam," he continued, "cannot be found again at all
+among the domestics; I have that to tell you." For he had to-day posted
+himself upon a law-giving Sinai, and thundered into the ears of the
+service assembled at its foot the inquiry after his own ear, "because I
+must believe," he had said to them, "that you, for very good reasons,
+have stolen it from me." Then he had swept like a hail-storm, or a
+kitchen-smoke in windy weather, through the servants' apartments and
+corners, one by one, in quest of his ear. "And thou?" said he, in a
+half-friendly tone to Liana. She kissed his hand, which he, as the Pope
+does his foot, always despatched for kisses, as proxy and lip-bearer,
+agent, and <i>de latere nuncio</i> of his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"She continues disobedient," said the severe lady. "Then she is a little
+like you," said he, because the mistrustful one looked upon the embrace
+as a conspiracy against him and his Bouverot. Upon this, his ice-Hecla
+burst out, and flamed and flowed, now upon daughter, now upon wife. The
+former was absolutely a miserable creature, he said; and only the
+Captain was worth anything, whom he luckily had educated by himself
+alone. He saw through all, heard all, though they had hid away his
+ear-trumpet. There was, accordingly, as he saw, (he pointed to his
+unsealed morning-psalm,<a name="FNanchor_208_208" id="FNanchor_208_208"></a><a href="#Footnote_208_208" class="fnanchor">[208]</a>) a communication<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[Pg 507]</a></span> between the two colleges;
+but he invoked God to punish him if he did not&mdash;"my dear daughter, pray
+answer at last!" he begged.</p>
+
+<p>"My father," said Liana, who, since the fraternization of Bouverot and
+the ill treatment from her mother, had begun to feel her heart wake up,
+which, however, could only despise and never hate, "my mother has to-day
+and yesterday told me all; but I have surely duties towards the Count!"
+A bolder liveliness than her parents had ever missed or found in her
+beamed under her upraised eye. "Ah, I will truly remain faithful to him
+just as long as I live," said she. "<i>C'est bien peu</i>," replied the
+Minister, astounded at such pertness.</p>
+
+<p>Liana listened now, for the first time, after the word which had escaped
+her; then, in order to justify the past and her mother, she conceived
+the pleasant and ridiculous purpose, of moving and converting the old
+gentleman by her ghost-visions or dream-seeings. She begged of him a
+solitary interview, and afterward&mdash;when it was reluctantly
+granted&mdash;intreated him therein for his sacred promise to be silent
+towards her mother, because she feared to show to that loving one the
+clock-wheels of her death-bell rattling so near to the fatal stroke. The
+old gentleman could only, with a comic expression,&mdash;which made him look
+like one who with a bad cold wants to laugh,&mdash;vow that he would keep his
+word so far as was necessary, because never, so far as he could
+recollect, had his word been kept by him, only he had been often kept by
+his word. In such men, word and deed are like theatrical thunder and
+lightning, which, though generally occurring in close connection, and
+simultaneously in heaven, on the stage break forth out of separate
+corners, and by means of different operators.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[Pg 508]</a></span> But Liana would not rest
+till he had put on a word-keeping, sincere face,&mdash;a painted window.
+Thereupon she began, after a kissing of the hand,<a name="FNanchor_209_209" id="FNanchor_209_209"></a><a href="#Footnote_209_209" class="fnanchor">[209]</a> her ghostly
+history.</p>
+
+<p>With unbroken seriousness, and firmly contracted muscles, he heard the
+extraordinary narration through; then, without saying a word, he took
+her by the hand and led her back into the presence of her mother, to
+whom he handed her over with a long psalm of praise and thanksgiving
+about her successful daughter's-school. "His boy's-school with Charles
+had not been blessed to him, at least in this degree," he added. As a
+proof, he frankly communicated to her&mdash;cold-bloodedly working up all
+Liana's pangs, as the coopers do cypress-branches into cask-hoops&mdash;the
+little which he had promised to bury in silence, because he always
+prostituted either himself or the other party, generally both. Liana sat
+there, deeply red, and growing hotter and hotter, with downcast eyes,
+and begged God to preserve her filial love towards her father.</p>
+
+<p>No sympathizing eye shall be further pained with the opening of a new
+scene, when the ice of his irony broke, and became a raging stream, into
+which flowed tears of maternal indignation, also, at the thought of a
+precious being, and her feverish, fatal, dreaming of herself away into
+the last sleep. The object and the danger almost united the married
+couple for the second time; when there is a glazed frost, people go very
+much arm in arm. "Thou hast sent nothing to Lilar?" asked the father.
+"Without your permission I certainly should not do it," said she; but
+she meant her letters, not Albano's. He took advantage of the
+misunderstanding, and said, "Thou hast, however, surely." "I will gladly
+do, and let be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[Pg 509]</a></span> done everything," said she, "but only on condition the
+Count consents, in order that I may not appear to him disingenuous; he
+has my sacred word for my truth!" At this mild firmness, at this Peter's
+rock overgrown with tender flowers, the father stumbled the hardest. In
+addition to this, the transition of a haughty lover from his own wishes
+to those of his enemies, supposing they had allowed Liana the question
+to the Count, was so impossible on the one hand, and the solicitation of
+this change, whether it were granted or refused, absolutely so degrading
+on the other, that the astounded Minister's lady felt her pride rise,
+and asked again, "Is this thy last word to us, Liana?" And when Liana,
+weeping, answered, "I cannot help it; God be gracious to me!" she turned
+away indignantly toward the Minister, and said: "Do now what you take to
+be <i>convenable</i>; I wash my hands in innocence!" "Not so entirely, <i>ma
+chère</i>; but very well!" said he, "thou wilt stay after to-morrow in thy
+chamber, till thou hast corrected thyself, and art more worthy of our
+presence!" he announced, as he went out, to Liana; firing at her
+meanwhile two eye-volleys, wherein, according to my estimate, far more
+reverberating fires, tormenting ghosts, eating, devouring medicaments,
+brain and heart-borers, were promised, than a man can generally hold to
+give or bear to receive.</p>
+
+<p>Poor maiden! Thy last August is very hard, and no harvest-month day!
+Thou lookest out into the time, where thy little coffin stands, on which
+a cruel angel wipes away the still fresh flower-pieces of love running
+round it, in order that it may, all white, as rosy-white as thy soul or
+thy last form, be consigned to the grave!</p>
+
+<p>This banishment by her mother into the desert of her cloister-chamber
+was quite as frightful to her, only not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[Pg 510]</a></span> more frightful than her anger,
+which she had to-day, only for the third time, experienced, though not
+deserved. It was to her as if now, after the warm sun had gone down, the
+bright evening glow had also sunk below the horizon, and it grew dark
+and cold in the world. She remained this whole day, which was yet
+allowed her, with her mother; gave, however, only answers, looked
+friendly, did everything cheerfully and readily, and&mdash;as she quickly
+dashed away, with her tiny finger, every gathering dew-drop out of the
+corner of her eyes, as if it were dust, because she thought, at night I
+can weep enough,&mdash;she had very dry eyes; and all that, in order not to
+be an additional burden to her oppressed mother. But she, as mothers so
+easily do, confounded a timid, loving stillness with the dawning of
+obduracy; and when Liana, with the innocent design of consolation,
+wished to have Caroline's picture brought for her from Lilar, this
+innocence also passed for hardness, and was punished and reciprocated
+with a corresponding on the part of the parent, namely, with the
+permission to send. Only the Minister's lady demanded the French prayers
+of her again, as if she were not worthy to lay them under her present
+heart. Never are human beings smaller than when they want to plague and
+punish without knowing <i>how</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As every one who rules, whether he sits on a chair of instruction or a
+princely one, or, like parents, on both, when the occupant of its
+footstool once leaves off his former obedience, imputes that obedience
+to him, not as a mitigation, but as an aggravation of his offence, so
+did the Minister's lady also toward her hitherto so uniformly docile
+child. She hated her pure love, which burned like ether, without ashes,
+smoke, or coal, so much the more,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[Pg 511]</a></span> and held it to be either the author
+or the victim of an incendiary fire, particularly as her own married
+love hitherto had seldom been anything more than a showy chimney-piece.</p>
+
+<p>Liana at last, too heavily constrained, since on the other side of the
+wall-tapestry the serene day, the loveliest sky was blooming, ascended
+to the Italian roof. She saw how people were travelling and riding back
+contentedly from their little places of pleasure, because the earth was
+one; on Lilar's bushy path the walkers were sauntering with a blissful
+slowness home,&mdash;in the streets there was a loud carpentering at the
+festive scaffoldings and Charles's-wains for the princely bride, and the
+finished wheels were rolled along for trial,&mdash;and everywhere were heard
+the drillings of the young music, which when grown up was to go before
+her. But when Liana looked upon herself, and saw her life alone standing
+here in dark raiment,&mdash;over yonder the empty house of her loved one,
+here her own, which to her had also become empty,&mdash;this very spot, which
+still reminded her of a lovelier, rarer blossoming than that of the
+<i>Cereus serpens</i>,&mdash;and oh! this cold solitude, in which her heart
+to-day, for the first time, lived without a heart; for her brother, the
+chorister of her short song of gladness, had been sent off, and Julienne
+had for some time been incomprehensibly invisible to her,&mdash;no, she could
+not see the fair sun go down, who, so serene and white, was sinking to
+slumber with his high evening star,&mdash;or listen to the happy evening
+chorus of the long day, but left the shining eminence. O how does joy
+die a stranger in the untenanted, dark bosom, when she finds no sister
+and becomes a spectre there! Thus does the beautiful green, that spring
+color, when a cloud paints it, betoken nothing but long moisture.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[Pg 512]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When she entered, soon, the asylum of day, the bedchamber, the heavens
+without flashed heat-lightning; O why just now, cruel fate?&mdash;But here,
+before the still-life of night, when life, covered with her veil, sounds
+more faintly,&mdash;here may all her tears, which a heavy day has been
+pressing,<a name="FNanchor_210_210" id="FNanchor_210_210"></a><a href="#Footnote_210_210" class="fnanchor">[210]</a> gush forth freely. On the pillow, as if it bore the last,
+long sleep, rests this exhausted head more softly than on the bosom
+which reproachfully reckons up against it its tears; and it weeps
+softly, not <i>upon</i>, only <i>for</i> loved ones.</p>
+
+<p>According to her custom, she was on the point of opening her mother's
+prayers, when she recollected, with a startled feeling, that they had
+been taken from her. Then she looked up with burning tears to God, and
+prepared alone out of her broken heart a prayer to him, and only angels
+counted the words and the tears.</p>
+
+
+<h3>76. CYCLE.</h3>
+
+<p>The father had made this chamber-imprisonment a punitory mark of her
+refusal. With deep anguish she uttered this mute no, in the very fact
+that she voluntarily stayed in the chamber, and denied her mother the
+morning kiss. She had, in the course of the night, cast many an ardent
+look at the dead image of her counsellor Caroline, but no original, no
+fever-created form had appeared to her. Can I longer doubt, she inferred
+from this, that the divine apparition, which has spoken the assenting
+word to my love, was something higher than my own creation, since I must
+otherwise have been able to form it again over against her picture?</p>
+
+<p>She had Albano's blooming letters in her desk, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[Pg 513]</a></span> opened it, in order
+to look over from her island into the remote orient land of warmer
+times; but she shut it to again; she was ashamed to be secretly happy,
+while her mother was sorrowful, who into these melancholy days had not
+even come, like her, out of pleasant ones.</p>
+
+<p>Froulay did not long leave her alone, but soon sent for her; not,
+however, to sound her or pronounce her free, but for the purpose&mdash;which,
+as may well be conceived, required an unvarnished brow and cheek, whose
+fibrous network was as hard to be colored as his with the Turkish red of
+shame&mdash;of appointing her his mistress in artistic language, and taking
+her with him to the Prince's gallery, in order to learn from her the
+explanation of these frontispieces (for such they were to him) in this
+private deaf-and-dumb institution so well that he might be in a
+condition, so soon as the Princess should come to inspect it, to
+represent something better than a mute before the beauties of the
+pictures and the image-worshipping Regentess. Liana had to transfer an
+impression of every pictured limb, with the praise or blame appertaining
+thereunto, over into his serious brain, together with the name of the
+master. How delightedly and completely did she give this kallip&aelig;deia to
+her growling old cornute,<a name="FNanchor_211_211" id="FNanchor_211_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_211_211" class="fnanchor">[211]</a> and would-be <i>connoisseur</i> in painting,
+who paid her not a single thankful look as instruction-money!</p>
+
+<p>At noon, for the first time, did the daughter find her longed-for
+mother, among the kitchen-servants, very serious and sad. She ventured
+not to kiss her mouth, but only her hand, and opened upon her her
+love-streaming eyes only timidly and a little. Dinner seemed a
+funeral-feast. Only the old gentleman, who on a battle-field<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[Pg 514]</a></span> would have
+danced his marriage-minuet, and celebrated his birthday, was in good
+spirits and appetite, and full of salt. In case of a family jar, he
+usually ate <i>en famille</i>, and found in biting table-speeches, as common
+people do in winter and in famine, a sharper zest for food. Quarrelling,
+of itself, strengthens and animates, as physicians can electrify
+themselves merely by whipping something.<a name="FNanchor_212_212" id="FNanchor_212_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_212_212" class="fnanchor">[212]</a></p>
+
+<p>Laughable, and yet lamentable, was it that poor Liana, who was all day
+long to keep a prison, was always called out of it just for
+to-day,&mdash;this time into the carriage again, which was to set down the
+sad heart and the smiling face before nothing but bright palaces. She
+had to go with her parents to the Princess, and look as happy as they,
+who, on the melancholy road, regarded her as if she were to be envied.
+So does the heart which has been born not far from the throne never
+bleed, except behind the curtain, and never laugh but when it rises;
+just as these same distinguished ones were formerly executed only in
+secret. The Prince, who was ridiculously loud on the subject of his
+marriage; Bouverot, just returned from card-tables or privateering
+planks, whom Liana now, since the latest intelligences, could only
+endure with a shudder; and the Princess herself; who excused her
+previous absence from her on account of the distraction of preparing for
+the festival, and who very strangely jested at once about love and
+men,&mdash;only to a Liana who guessed so little, suffered so much, and
+endured so willingly, could all these beings and incidents seem anything
+but the most intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>Ah, what was intolerable, but the iron unchangeableness of these
+connections, the fixedness of such an eternal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[Pg 515]</a></span> mountain-snow? Not the
+greatness, but the indefiniteness, of pain; not the minotaur of the
+labyrinth, its cellar-frost, sharp-cornered rocks, and vaults, make the
+breast contract and the blood curdle therein, but the long night and
+winding of its egress. Even under bodily maladies, therefore, unwonted
+new ones, whose last moment stretches away beyond our power of
+prediction, appear to us more ominous and oppressive than recurring
+ones, which, as neighboring frontier-enemies, are ever attacking us, and
+find us in arms.</p>
+
+<p>Thus stood the dumb Liana in a cloud, when the exulting Rabette, with a
+bosom full of old joys and new hope, came running into the house,&mdash;that
+sister of the holy youth who had been torn away from her, that
+confederate of such glorious days. She was honorably received, and
+constantly attended by a guard of honor,&mdash;the Minister's lady,&mdash;because
+she might, indeed, as likely be an ambassadress of the Count as an
+electress of her son. The cunning girl sought to snatch some solitary
+moments with Liana by boldly begging for her company to Blumenbühl. The
+company was granted, and even that of the mother freely offered, into
+the bargain. Liana led the way to Blumenbühl over the still-blooming
+churchyard of buried days. What a torrent of tears struggled upward in
+her breast when she parted from the still happy Rabette! <i>She</i> had
+innocently left to the house one of the greatest apples of discord for
+the evening meal which the Minister had ever plucked for his fruit-dish
+with his apple-gatherer. Therefore he supped again <i>en famille</i>. That is
+to say, a silly word had escaped Rabette about the Sunday's meeting at
+Lilar. "Of that," said Froulay, in a very friendly manner, "thou hast
+not made one word of remark, daughter." "I did to my mother
+immediately,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[Pg 516]</a></span> she replied, too fast. "I should be glad, too, to take an
+interest in thy amusements," said he, saving up his fury. In the
+pleasantest mood imaginable did this raftsman of so many tears and
+hewn-down blossoming branches, which he let float down thereupon, take
+his seat at the supper-table. He first asked servants and family for his
+auxiliary ear. Thereupon he passed over to the French, although the
+plate-exchangers found a rough translation thereof for themselves, a
+<i>versio interlinearis</i>, on his face, by way of giving notice that the
+distinguished Count had been there, and had inquired after mother and
+daughter. "With good right he asked for you both," continued the moral
+glacier, who loved to cool his warm food. "You are conspired, as I heard
+again to-day, to keep silence towards me; but why, then, shall I still
+trust you?" He hated from his heart every lie which he did not utter
+himself; so he seriously regarded himself as moral, disinterested, and
+gentle, merely for this reason, that he inexorably insisted upon all
+this in the case of others. With an abundant supply of the stinging
+nettles of persiflage,&mdash;the botanical ones also come forward best in
+cold and stony soil,&mdash;he covered over all his opening and closing
+lobster-claws, as we keep brook-crabs in nettles, and took first his
+tender child between the claws. Her soft, submissive smile he took for
+contempt and wickedness. How comes this soft one intelligibly by his
+paternal name, unless one assumes the old hypothesis, that children are
+usually most like that for which the pregnant mother vainly longed,
+which in this case was a soft spouse? Then he assailed, but more
+vehemently, the mother, in order by his mistrust to set her at variance
+with his daughter; yes, in order, perhaps, to torment the latter, by
+means of her mother's sufferings,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[Pg 517]</a></span> into childlike sacrifices and
+resolutions. He very freely declared himself&mdash;for the egotist finds the
+most egotists, as love and Liana find only love, and no
+self-love&mdash;against the egotism around and beside him, and concealed not
+how very cordially he cursed them both for female egotists (as the old
+heathen did the Christians for atheists). The Minister's lady,
+accustomed to live with the Minister in no wedlock so little as in that
+of souls,&mdash;as Voltaire defines friendship,&mdash;said merely to Liana, "For
+whom do I suffer so?" "Ah, I know," she answered, meekly. And so he
+dismissed both full of the deepest sorrows, and thought afterward of his
+business matters.</p>
+
+<p>This general distress was increased by something which should have
+lessened it. The Minister was vexed that he had daily, in the midst of
+his wrath, to consult the taste of the women upon his&mdash;exterior. He
+wanted, at the marriage festival,&mdash;for the sake of his beloved,&mdash;to be a
+true bird of paradise, a Paradeur, a <i>Vénus a belles fesses</i>.<a name="FNanchor_213_213" id="FNanchor_213_213"></a><a href="#Footnote_213_213" class="fnanchor">[213]</a> Of
+old he had loved to act the double part of statesman and courtier, and
+would fain, by way of monopolizing pride and vanity, grow into a
+Diogenes-Aristippus. Something of this, however, was not vanity; but
+that tormenting spirit of the male sex, the spirit of order and
+orthodoxy, would not go out of him. He was a man who would flourish
+against his very livery the clothes-switch wherewith the servant had let
+a few particles of dust settle on the state coat; still more dangerous
+was it&mdash;because he sat between two looking-glasses, the frizzling-glass
+and the large mirror in the stove-screen&mdash;to lay the dust rightly on his
+own wool; and hardest of all was it for him to be satisfied with the
+<i>fixing</i> of his children. Liana, as artist, had now to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[Pg 518]</a></span> suggest the
+proper color of a new surtout. <i>Sachets</i>, or smelling-bags, he directed
+to be filled, and with them his pockets; and a musk-plant pot placed in
+his window, not because he wished to use the leaves for perfume (that he
+expected of his fingers), but because he wished to anoint his fingers by
+rubbing the leaves together. Patent pomatum for the hands, and English
+pressed ornamental paper also for the same (when they wished to use a
+<i>billet-doux</i> pen), and other knickknacks, excited less attention than
+the snuff which he procured for himself; not, however, for his nose, but
+for his lips, in order to rub them red. In fact, he would have rendered
+himself quite ridiculous in the eyes of many a merry blade, if such a
+one had seen him draw privately out of his souvenir the hair-tweezers,
+and with them the hair out of his eyebrows, just where the saddle of
+life, as upon a horse's back, had worn it white; and only the Minister
+himself could look serious during the process, when he sat before the
+looking-glass, smiling through all the finest ways of smiling,&mdash;the best
+one he caught and kept,&mdash;or when he tried the most graceful modes of
+throwing one's self on the sofa,&mdash;how often he had to practise
+this!&mdash;and finally, in short, through all his operations upon himself.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for the mother, the good Lector came; from the hand of this
+old friend she had so often taken, if not a Jacob's ladder, yet a
+mining-ladder, upon which to climb out of the abyss; hopefully she now
+laid before him all her trouble. He promised some help, upon the
+condition of speaking with Liana alone in her chamber. He went to her
+and declared tenderly his knowledge and her situation.</p>
+
+<p>How did the childlike maiden blush at the sharp day-beams<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[Pg 519]</a></span> which smote
+the scented night-violet of her love! But the friend of her childhood
+spoke softly to this smitten heart, and of his equal love for her and
+her friend; of the temperament of her father, and of the necessity of
+considerate measures; and said the best was to make him a sacred vow
+that she would yield to her parent's wish of her strictly avoiding the
+Count, only until he had received from his father, to whom he himself,
+as attendant of the son, had long been obliged to communicate
+intelligence and inquiries about the new connection, the yes or no in
+respect to it; if it were "no,"&mdash;which he would not answer for,&mdash;then
+Albano must solve the riddle; if it were "yes," he himself would stand
+security for a second on the part of her parents; at the same time,
+however, he must lay claim to her profoundest silence toward them in
+relation to his inquiries, whereby they might perhaps find themselves
+compromitted. Thereby he rooted himself only the more deeply in her
+confidence.</p>
+
+<p>She asked, trembling, how long the answer would tarry? "Six, eight,
+eleven days after the nuptials at most!" said he, reckoning. Yes, good
+Augusti! "Ah! we are all suffering, indeed," said she, and added,
+confidentially, and out of a weeping breast: "But is he well?" "He is
+diligent," was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>So he brought her, burdened with two secrets, and for the present
+consenting to an interim-separation, back to her mother; but she
+bestowed only upon the Lector the reward of a friendly look. He desired,
+meantime,&mdash;after his Carthusian manner,&mdash;no other reward than the most
+good-natured silence toward the Minister on the subject of his
+interference, since the latter might hold his deserts in this connection
+much greater than they were.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[Pg 520]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The eight days' improvement and abstinence was announced to the
+Minister. He believed, however,&mdash;keeping in reserve a mistrust towards
+his lady,&mdash;that he could carry the war farther into the enemy's country
+with his own weapons; nevertheless, he contented himself, at the same
+time, with the new respite and Liana's disincarceration, for the sake of
+driving his daughter before him to his beloved at the nuptial festival,
+blooming and healthy as a sparkling pea-hen.</p>
+
+<p>Roquairol at this moment came back, and ushered into the house a cloud
+or two full of beautiful, bright morning redness. He delivered to his
+father tidings and greetings from the Princess. To Liana he brought the
+echo of that beloved voice, which had once said to her heaven: "Let it
+be!"&mdash;ah! the last melody among the discords of the unharmonious time!
+He guessed easily&mdash;for he learned little from his mother, who neglected
+him, and nothing from her daughter&mdash;how all stood. When he was actually
+on the point of slipping Albano's letter to her, in the twilight of
+evening, into her work-bag, and she said, with an ah! of love, "No, it
+is against my word,&mdash;but at some future time, Charles!"&mdash;then he saw, as
+he expressed it, "with crying indignation, his sister, in Charon's open
+boat, sailing into the Tartarus of all sorrows." About his friend he
+thought less than of his sister. The friendly, flattering Minister&mdash;he
+presented, as a proof of it, a valuable saddle to the Captain&mdash;informed
+him of Rabette's visit, and gave hints about betrothment and the like.
+Charles said, boldly: "He postponed every thought of his own happiness,
+so long as his dear sister saw none before her." By way of drawing the
+old gentleman again into more interest for Liana, he suggested to him a
+romantic invention for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[Pg 521]</a></span> marriage festival, which Froulay did not
+dream of, when he already stood quite close to it; namely, Idoine (the
+sister of the bride) was strikingly like Liana. The Princess loved her
+inexpressibly, but saw her only seldom, because on account of her strong
+character, which once refused a royal marriage, she lived in a village
+built and governed by herself, in a courtly exile from court. He now
+proposed to his father the poetic question, whether, on the illumination
+night, Liana might not for a few minutes, in the dream-temple, which was
+entirely suited to this beautiful illusion, delight the Princess with
+the image of her beloved sister.</p>
+
+<p>Whether it was that love toward the Princess made the Minister bolder,
+or he was intoxicated by the desire of brilliantly introducing Liana to
+her office of court-lady; suffice it, he found in the idea good sense.
+If anything supplied tobacco for the calumet of the <i>ex parte</i> peace
+which he had made with his son, it was this theatrical part. He hastened
+immediately to the Prince and the Princess with the prayer for his
+permission and her sympathy; and then, when he had secured both, he
+hastened on to his Orestes, Bouverot, and said: "<i>Il m'est venu une idée
+tres singulière qui peut-&ecirc;tre l'est trop; cependant le prince l'a
+approuvée</i>," etc.,&mdash;and finally&mdash;for he must not forget her either&mdash;to
+Liana.</p>
+
+<p>The Captain had already sought to persuade her beforehand. The mother
+opposed the dramatic imitation from self-respect, and Liana from
+humility; such a representation seemed to her a piece of presumption.
+But at last she gave in, simply because the sisterly love of the
+Princess had seemed to her so great and unattainable, just as if she did
+not cherish a similar sentiment in her own heart; thus she always
+regarded only the image<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[Pg 522]</a></span> in the mirror, not herself, as beautiful; just
+as the astronomer thinks the same evening, with its red splendors and
+night shadows, more sublime and enchanting, when he finds it in the
+moon, than when he stands in the midst of it on the earth. Perhaps, too,
+there entered another element of secret sweetness into Liana's love for
+the Prince's bride, namely, a step-daughter's affection; because she
+should once have been the bride of the Knight Gaspard. Women regard
+relationship more than we; hence, too, their ancestral pride is always
+several ancestors older than ours.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, then, did she make ready her oppressed heart for the light plays
+of the shining festival, which the coming Cycles are to present on the
+New-Year's holiday, as it were, of a new Jubilee.</p>
+
+
+<h4>END OF VOL. I.</h4>
+
+
+<p>Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, &amp; Co.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_192_192" id="Footnote_192_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor_192_192"><span class="label">[192]</span></a> This is Jean Paul's own image.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_193_193" id="Footnote_193_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor_193_193"><span class="label">[193]</span></a> That is, of course, some lights of hope.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_194_194" id="Footnote_194_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor_194_194"><span class="label">[194]</span></a> A German or Suabian dance.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_195_195" id="Footnote_195_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor_195_195"><span class="label">[195]</span></a> His Moral Treatises, Vol. II. p. 96.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_196_196" id="Footnote_196_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor_196_196"><span class="label">[196]</span></a> The Germans call the dash the <i>stroke of thought</i>. Here
+it implies an emphatic pause, as much as to say, "What do you think is
+coming?"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_197_197" id="Footnote_197_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor_197_197"><span class="label">[197]</span></a> At the Prince's marriage.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_198_198" id="Footnote_198_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor_198_198"><span class="label">[198]</span></a> With the Egyptians the enchanters were only learned men;
+with him the learned women were enchantresses.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_199_199" id="Footnote_199_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor_199_199"><span class="label">[199]</span></a> <i>Mémoires secrets sur les Règnes de Louis XIV.</i>, etc. Par
+Duclos. Tom. I.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_200_200" id="Footnote_200_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor_200_200"><span class="label">[200]</span></a> It is well known that a cut is made in a fowl left whole
+as a sign that it has been upon the Prince's table, so that it may not
+be set on again, but otherwise enjoyed.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_201_201" id="Footnote_201_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor_201_201"><span class="label">[201]</span></a> In German, <i>Schutz- und Stich-blatt</i>,&mdash;literally, a plate
+to defend the hand in parrying and thrusting,&mdash;<i>Blatt</i>, meaning <i>leaf</i>
+(of paper) also, conveys a <i>pun</i> not easily translated.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_202_202" id="Footnote_202_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor_202_202"><span class="label">[202]</span></a> The blind-passenger in the German stage-coach corresponds
+to our <i>dead-head</i> in stage or steamboat.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_203_203" id="Footnote_203_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor_203_203"><span class="label">[203]</span></a> See Klockenbring's collected Essays.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_204_204" id="Footnote_204_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor_204_204"><span class="label">[204]</span></a> (In German, <i>Spring-wurzel</i>.) The juice of some plant
+(perhaps Devil's-milk) highly and quickly corrosive.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_205_205" id="Footnote_205_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor_205_205"><span class="label">[205]</span></a> News by hand.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_206_206" id="Footnote_206_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor_206_206"><span class="label">[206]</span></a> The King had to <i>damer</i>, or make a dame of an unmarried
+maiden of rank, before she could go to Versailles to court.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_207_207" id="Footnote_207_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor_207_207"><span class="label">[207]</span></a> Not so miserable perhaps as a French mangling the
+translator remembers to have seen.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_208_208" id="Footnote_208_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor_208_208"><span class="label">[208]</span></a> He refers to the letter he had left on Liana's table, and
+which she had shown to her mother.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_209_209" id="Footnote_209_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor_209_209"><span class="label">[209]</span></a> <i>Fist</i> in the original.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_210_210" id="Footnote_210_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor_210_210"><span class="label">[210]</span></a> I.e. as in a wine-press.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_211_211" id="Footnote_211_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor_211_211"><span class="label">[211]</span></a> Alluding to the horned hat once worn by graduated
+printers' apprentices.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_212_212" id="Footnote_212_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor_212_212"><span class="label">[212]</span></a> Beseke discovered it. See "On the Elemental Fire," by
+him, 1786.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_213_213" id="Footnote_213_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor_213_213"><span class="label">[213]</span></a> Venus with beautiful thighs.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Tr.</span></p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<h3>RICHTER'S WRITINGS.</h3>
+
+
+<p>TITAN. <span class="smcap">A Romance</span>. 2 vols. 16mo. $3.00.</p>
+
+<p>FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 2 vols. 16mo. $2.75.</p>
+
+<p>LEVANA; <span class="smcap">Or, The Doctrine of Education</span>. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>THE CAMPANER THAL, <span class="smcap">and Other Writings</span>. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>HESPERUS. 2 vols. 16mo. <i>Preparing.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The above volumes are printed in uniform size and style.</i></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<h4>IN PRESS.</h4>
+
+<p>LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. By <span class="smcap">Eliza Buckminster Lee</span>. New Edition, Revised. 1
+volume.</p>
+
+<p class="center">TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2), by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #35664 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35664)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2), by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2)
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Charles T. Brooks
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2011 [EBook #35664]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TITAN: A ROMANCE V. 1 (OF 2) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+TITAN:
+
+A ROMANCE.
+
+FROM THE GERMAN OF
+
+_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER._
+
+TRANSLATED BY
+
+CHARLES T. BROOKS.
+
+IN TWO VOLUMES.
+
+VOL. I.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+BOSTON:
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
+1864.
+
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by
+
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
+
+in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+THIRD EDITION.
+
+
+_UNIVERSITY PRESS:_
+WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,
+_CAMBRIDGE._
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+The "Titan" is Jean Paul's longest--and the author meant it, and held
+it, to be his greatest and best--romance; and his public (including Mr.
+Carlyle) seems, on the whole, to have sustained his opinion. He was ten
+years about it, and his other works, written in the interval, were
+preparatory and tributary to this.
+
+As to the _general_ meaning of the title there can hardly, on the whole,
+be any doubt. It does _not_ refer, as the division into Jubilees and
+Cycles might, to be sure, suggest to one on first approaching it, to the
+titanic scale and scope of the work, but to the titanic violence against
+which it is aimed.
+
+It seems, indeed, from a letter of the author's, that he thought at
+first of calling it "Anti-Titan." The only question in regard to the
+_application_ of the title seems to be, whether the champion of truth
+and justice against the moral Titans in this case was meant to be
+understood as represented by the hero of the story, with his friends,
+resisting the iniquity which moved earth and hell to ruin him, or
+whether the book itself is the Anti-Titan, and an age of extravagance
+the Titan.
+
+A French critic says of the "Titan":--
+
+"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological _résumé_, a satire, an elegy,
+a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization
+in the eighteenth century.
+
+"How is it to end, this civilization which exaggerates alike
+intellectual and industrial power at the expense of the life of the
+soul,--wholly factitious, theatrical,--intoxicating, consuming itself
+with pleasure, seeking everywhere new enjoyments,--exploring all the
+secrets of nature, without being able to penetrate the first causes, the
+secrets of God,--what will be the fate of these generations
+supersaturated with romances, dramas, journals, with science, ambition,
+with vehement aspirations after the unknown and impossible?...
+
+"In augmenting the sum of its desires, will it augment the sum of its
+happiness? Is it not going to increase immensely its capacity of
+suffering?
+
+"Will it not be the giant that scales heaven--
+
+"And that falls crushed to death?
+
+"TITAN!"
+
+In giving his romance the title of "Titan," says the same writer, "it is
+not Albano de Cesara the author has in view, but his antipode, Captain
+Roquairol,--that romantic being, that insatiable lover of pleasure, that
+anticipated Byron, that scaler of heaven,--who, after having piled
+mountain upon mountain to attain his object, ends in finding himself
+buried under the ruins....
+
+"Even while at work upon 'Hesperus,' he had formed the resolution of
+placing a pure man, great and noble, by the side of a reprobate, and of
+surrounding them both with a multitude of beings corresponding to them.
+He wished to concentrate in a single work all the ideas of high
+philosophy which he had disseminated in his other creations, and to show
+them followed by their natural consequences. So strong a mind could not
+stop there: he resolved to show the absurdity of exaggeration, whether
+in good or in evil, in virtue or in vice.
+
+"Hence those reproductions of the same types, those satellites
+gravitating around their respective planets; in fine, those parodies of
+the principal personages of the drama.
+
+"By the side of the coldness and the vast plans of Don Gaspard de
+Cesara, we have the no less dangerous intrigues, though upon a less
+elevated scale, of the Minister von Froulay; by the side of the
+ventriloquist Uncle, the lying Roquairol; the Princess Isabelle is
+opposed to Linda de Romeiro, the aerial Liana to her physical
+counterpart, the Princess Idoine; the comic vulgarity of Dr. Sphex
+contrasts with the more elevated buffoonery of Schoppe; and if we have
+Bouverot, we have also Dion, that Greek so elegant and so noble, happy
+mixture of the antique and the modern, that artist so sensible and so
+true....
+
+"The history of Albano, opposed to Roquairol, is the history, taken from
+his tenderest childhood to the epoch of his greatest development, of a
+being who, as the strictest consequence of a quite special education,
+goes through life, wounding himself with all its griefs, drinking at the
+source of all its lawful pleasures; suffering with nobleness, tasting of
+happiness, but only the purest kind; exposed every instant to see
+himself drawn away by fallacious principles, and nevertheless moving on
+with a steady step towards the end which his reason has marked out for
+him; sacrificing to the fulfilment of his duties all the delights that a
+debauched court can offer a young man entering into the world. While all
+the personages who gravitate around him, and who represent each a
+different aberration from the fundamental principle of the work, fall
+successively at his side, victims of the natural consequences of their
+passions, he, strengthening himself by every fall of which he is
+witness, ends by attaining the loftiest position which the ambition of
+man can desire,--a position which he could not have expected, and for
+which, consequently, he had not been able to make the sacrifices that,
+in the course of the work, he does not cease to achieve."
+
+The author whom we have thus copiously quoted alludes to Jean Paul's
+having had the idea of "Titan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us
+of a Philistine disparagement of the "Titan," that so many of the
+characters of the other work reappear here under new names. There are
+some critics who ought to object to the full moon, that she is only the
+same old moon that we had, in her first quarter or half, several nights
+ago. However, as we have not yet had "Hesperus" in English, nor are
+likely to for some time, this kind of objection will not trouble English
+readers of "Titan."
+
+Jean Paul has been justly praised for his success in drawing and shading
+female characters. Our French critic says: "Richter has the rare merit
+of placing on the stage in the same work six female personages, who have
+not a shadow of resemblance to each other, and who, from the moment of
+their appearance on the scene to that of their quitting it, never
+deviate a single minute from the character the author has given them."
+
+The fate of his Titanide, Linda, created a loud remonstrance in Germany;
+and one can hardly, indeed, help feeling as if poetic justice had been a
+little caricatured, at least, in Richter's disposal of that half
+strong-headed and half headstrong woman. Painful, however, as her end
+is, the Translator could not listen an instant to the suggestion of
+omitting a line of the scenes in which that terrible tragedy is brought
+to a close.
+
+When the "Titan" first appeared, complaint was made by some that there
+was too much of drollery, by others that there was not enough; some
+found too much sentimentality, others too much philosophy; the
+Translator has found it full, if not of that brevity which is the soul
+of _wit_ (not, however, of humor), yet of that variety which is the
+spice of life.
+
+The Translator (or Transplanter, for he aspires to the title) of this
+huge production, in his solicitude to preserve the true German aroma of
+its native earth, may have brought away some part of the soil, and even
+stones, clinging to the roots (_stones of offence_ they may prove to
+many, stones of stumbling to many more). He can only say, that if he had
+made Jean Paul always talk in ordinary, conventional, straightforward,
+instantly intelligible prose, the reader would not have had _Jean Paul
+the Only_.
+
+And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of
+metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd
+digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that
+characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a
+broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in
+this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost
+tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose _heart_ (to use
+the homely phrase) is ever _in the right place_.
+
+It has seemed necessary to give a few notes, and only a few. Properly to
+furnish such a work with annotations would require Jean Paul's own
+voluminous un-commonplace-books of all out-of-the-way knowledge, and
+that _Dictionary to Jean Paul_ which one of his countrymen began, but
+unfortunately carried only through one of his works, the work on
+Education, _Levana_.
+
+The Translator desires emphatically to express his obligations to his
+friend, Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and to _his_ friend, the
+accomplished scholar, Mr. Knorr, to whose kind and patient care whatever
+of accuracy or felicity there may be in his version of the first Jubilee
+is largely due; also, to Rev. Dr. Hedge, and all the friends who have
+helped him with suggestion and encouragement in this large and difficult
+undertaking, he makes his warmest acknowledgments;--and he closes by
+commending the Titan to all lovers of the humanities, confident (in the
+words of Mrs. Lee, in her Life of Jean Paul) that "the more it is read,
+the more it will be acknowledged a work of exalted genius, pure
+morality, and perennial beauty."
+
+                            C. T. B.
+    NEWPORT, R. I.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+THE FOUR LOVELY AND NOBLE SISTERS ON THE THRONE.[1]
+
+_THE DREAM OF TRUTH._
+
+
+Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia once looked down into the
+clear-obscure of earth, and, weary of the ever-bright but cold Olympus,
+yearned to enter in beneath the clouds of our world, where the Soul
+loves more because it suffers more, and where it is sadder but more
+warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, with which Polyhymnia passes
+invisibly up and down the low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our
+hearts; and they mourned that their throne stood so far from the sighs
+of the helpless.
+
+Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and to clothe themselves
+in our mortal form. They came down from Olympus; Love and little loves
+and genii flew playfully after them, and our nightingales fluttered to
+meet them out of the bosom of May.
+
+But, as they touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of
+light, and cast no shadows, then the earnest Queen of gods and men,
+Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and said: "The immortal becomes mortal
+upon the earth, and every spirit becomes a human being!"
+
+So they became human beings and sisters, and were called _Louisa_,
+_Charlotte_, _Theresa_, _Frederica_; the little loves and genii
+transformed themselves into their children, and flew into their maternal
+arms, and the motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love in
+a great embrace. And when the white banner of the blooming spring
+fluttered abroad, and more human thrones stood before them,--and when,
+blissfully softened by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon
+each other and their happy children, and were speechless for love and
+bliss,--then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by over them, and
+recognize them, and gave them the tones wherewith the heart expresses
+and awakens love and joy.
+
+And the dream was ended and fulfilled; it had, as is always the case,
+shaped itself after waking reality. Therefore, be it consecrated to the
+four fair and noble sisters, and let all which is like it in _Titan_ be
+so consecrated too!
+
+                               JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The Titan was published during the years 1800-1803. The four
+sisters were the four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, viz.
+the Duchess of Hildburghausen, the Princess von Solms, the
+Princess of Thun and Taxis, and the Louisa who afterward became
+Queen of Prussia, and was so in the Liberation War.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+FIRST JUBILEE.
+                                                               PAGE
+
+PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--THE
+PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE
+EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF
+BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE
+TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE
+FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING
+OF FANCY                                                          1
+
+
+SECOND JUBILEE.
+
+THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE
+FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A
+STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING
+CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE TORTURE
+SOUPÉ.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD, BUT
+WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION                                 70
+
+
+THIRD JUBILEE.
+
+METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR
+PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN
+OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.                           110
+
+
+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                                   128
+
+
+FIFTH JUBILEE.
+
+GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER
+OF THE KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE
+DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD
+AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY
+PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION
+FOR TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE            161
+
+
+SIXTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE TEN PERSECUTIONS OF THE READER.--LIANA'S EASTERN
+ROOM.--DISPUTATION UPON PATIENCE.--THE PICTURESQUE CURE         197
+
+
+SEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF
+POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL
+"MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON
+BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE                215
+
+
+EIGHTH JUBILEE.
+
+LE PETIT LEVER OF DR. SPHEX.--PATH TO
+LILAR.--WOODLAND-BRIDGE.--THE MORNING IN
+ARCADIA.--CHARITON.--LIANA'S LETTER AND PSALM OF
+GRATITUDE.--SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A GARDEN.--THE
+FLUTE-DELL.--CONCERNING THE REALITY OF THE IDEAL                238
+
+
+NINTH JUBILEE.
+
+PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER
+TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF
+ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN
+THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE
+CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN                                268
+
+
+TENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF
+FRIENDSHIP                                                      310
+
+
+ELEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES      334
+
+
+TWELFTH JUBILEE.
+
+FROULAY'S BIRTHDAY AND PROJECTS.--EXTRA-LEAF.--RABETTE.--THE
+HARMONICA.--NIGHT.--THE PIOUS FATHER.--THE WONDROUS
+STAIRWAY.--THE APPARITION                                       351
+
+
+THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE
+PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TÊTE-À-TÊTE.--THE
+RIDE TO BLUMENBÜHL                                              384
+
+
+FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO AND LIANA                                                405
+
+
+FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+MAN AND WOMAN                                                   432
+
+
+SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE SORROWS OF A DAUGHTER                                       481
+
+
+
+
+TITAN.
+
+FIRST JUBILEE.
+
+     PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--THE
+     PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE
+     EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF
+     BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE
+     TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE
+     FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING
+     OF FANCY.
+
+
+1. CYCLE.
+
+On a fine spring evening, the young Spanish Count Cesara came, with his
+companions, Schoppe and Dian, to Sesto, in order the next morning to
+cross over to the Borromæan island, Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore. The
+proudly blooming youth glowed with the excitement of travelling, and
+with thoughts of the coming morrow, when he should see the isle, that
+gayly decorated throne of Spring, and on it a man who had been promised
+him for twenty years. This twofold glow exalted my picturesque hero to
+the form of an angry god of the Muses. His beauty made a more triumphal
+entry into Italian eyes than into the narrow Northern ones from the
+midst of which he had come; in Milan many had wished he were of marble,
+and stood with elder gods of stone, either in the Farnese Palace or in
+the Clementine Museum, or in the Villa of Albani; nay, had not the
+Bishop of Novara, with his sword at his side, a few hours before, asked
+Schoppe (riding behind) who he was? And had not the latter, with a droll
+squaring of the wrinkle-circle round his lips, made this copious answer
+(by way of enlightening his spiritual lordship): "It's my Telemachus,
+and I am the Mentor. I am the milling-machine and the die which coins
+him,--the wolf's tooth and flattening mill which polishes him down,--the
+man, in short, that regulates him"?
+
+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.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Scale.--TR.
+
+[3] This statue, thirty-five ells high, on a pedestal of
+twenty-five ells, in whose head twelve men can find room, stands
+near Arona, and is exactly of a height with Isola Bella, which
+stands over against it, and which rises on ten gardens or
+terraces built one upon another.--_Keysler's Travels, &c._, Vol.
+I.
+
+[4] The old Kremnitz ducats have the infant Jesus on the right
+arm; but the new and _lighter_ ones on the left.
+
+[5] Franklin advised the preserving and corking up of vessels
+from which all the liquor had been drunk, in order thereby to
+keep the ship afloat.
+
+[6] The horse, in the funeral procession of a prince, that comes
+last, and is decked out gayly for the successor of the
+deceased.--TR.
+
+[7] Gray-league (Grau-bünden), the Swiss Canton of the
+Grisons.--TR.
+
+[8] Pictures by Peter Molyn, who, on account of his fine storms,
+was called only Tempesta.
+
+[9] The Pasquino is notoriously mutilated.--Delia Porta was a
+great restorer of old statues.
+
+[10] I. e. to be pressed between two wooden cylinders and a
+metallic one.
+
+[11] This pill consists of Antimonia Regia, and by reason of its
+hardness may be swallowed over and over again with the same
+effect each time; only a little wine is sprinkled on it before
+each repetition of the experiment.
+
+[12] _Tirare di primavere_, the people call it; and Peter Schoppe
+translated it grandly enough, _Electrical pistol-firing of
+spring_.
+
+[13] Quotation-marks.--TR.
+
+[14] A good Wouwermann means, in painters' language, a
+well-executed horse, the sight of which has an influence on the
+beauty of the future colt.
+
+[15] This name is given to the quantum which is withheld from the
+associate judges of the Supreme Court when they have not worked
+enough.
+
+[16] The Ipecacuanha belongs to the Violet species.
+
+[17] Of the order of St. Paul, or _memento mori_, which died in
+France in the seventeenth century. The above address is its usual
+greeting.
+
+[18] The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the
+power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the
+earth.
+
+[19] According to the account of some astronomers, that the sun,
+when eclipsed, has sometimes shone through an opening of the
+moon, Ulloa, e. g., assures us that he once witnessed.
+
+[20] In Calabria (1785) a thousand and four earthquakes happened
+in the space of three fourths of a year.--_Münter's Travels, &c._
+
+
+
+
+_INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMME_
+
+TO TITAN.
+
+
+Before I dedicated Titan to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor and Feudal
+Provost of Flachsenfingen, Mr. Von Hafenreffer, I first requested
+permission from him in the following terms:--
+
+"Since you have assisted far more in this history than the Russian Court
+did in Voltaire's Genesis-History of Peter the Great, you cannot confer
+any handsomer favor upon a heart longing to thank you, than the
+permission to offer and dedicate to you, as to a Jew's God, what you
+have created."
+
+But he wrote me back on the spot:--
+
+     "For the same reason, you might still better, in imitation
+     of Sonnenfels, dedicate the work to yourself, and, in a more
+     just sense than others, combine in one person author and
+     patron. I beg you then (were it only on Mr. Von **'s and
+     Mrs. Von **'s account) to leave me out of the play, and
+     confine yourself to the most indispensable notices, which
+     you may be pleased to give the public, of the very
+     mechanical interest which I have in your beautiful work; but
+     for the gods' sake, hic hæc hoc hujus huic hunc hanc hoc hoc
+     hac hoc.
+
+                                        "VON HAFENREFFER."
+
+
+The Latin line is a cipher, and shall remain dark to the public.
+What the same public has to demand in the way of Introductory
+Programme consists of four explanations of title, and one of
+fact.
+
+The first nominal explanation, which relates to the _Jubilee Period_, I
+get from the founder of the Period, the Rector Franke, who explains it
+to be an Era or space of time, invented by him, of one hundred and
+fifty-two Cycles, each of which contains in itself its good forty-nine
+tropical Lunar-Solar years. The word _Jubilee_ is prefixed by the Rector
+for this reason, that in every seventh year a lesser, and in every seven
+times seventh, or forty-ninth, a greater, Jubilee-, Intercalary-,
+Indulgence-, Sabbath-, or Trumpet-year occurred, in which one lived
+without debts, without sowing and laboring, and without slavery. I make
+a sufficiently happy application, as it seems to me, of this title,
+Jubilee, to my historical chapters, which conduct the business-man and
+the business-woman round and round in an easy cycle or circle full of
+free Sabbath-, Indulgence-, Trumpet-, and Jubilee-hours, in which both
+have neither to sow nor to pay, but only to reap and to rest; for I am
+the only one who, like the bowed and crooked-up drudge of a ploughman,
+stand at my writing-table, and see sowing-machines, and debts of honor,
+and manacles, before and on me. The seven thousand four hundred and
+forty-eight tropical Lunar-Solar years which one of Franke's Jubilee
+periods includes are also found with me, but only dramatically, because
+in every chapter just that number of ideas--and ideas are, indeed, the
+long and cubic measure of time--will be presented by me to the reader,
+till the short time has become as long to him as the chapter required.
+
+A Cycle, which is the subject of my second nominal definition, needs by
+this time no definition at all.
+
+The third nominal definition has to describe the _obligato-leaves_,
+which I edit in loose sheets in every Jubilee period. The
+obligato-leaves admit absolutely none but pure contemporaneous facts,
+less immediately connected with my hero, concerning persons, however,
+the more immediately connected with him; in the obligato-leaves,
+moreover, not the smallest satirical extravasate of digression, no, not
+of the size of a blister, is perceptible; but the happy reader journeys
+on with his dear ones, free and wide awake, right through the ample
+court-residence and riding-ground and landscape of a whole, long volume,
+amidst purely historical figures, surrounded on all sides by busy
+mining-companies and Jews'-congregations, advancing columns on the
+march, mounted hordes, and companies of strolling players,--and his eye
+cannot be satisfied with seeing.
+
+But when the Tome is ended, then begins--this is the last nominal
+definition--a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no
+narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long
+bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I
+name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private
+gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my _honey-moons_,
+because I make less honey therein than I eat, busily employed, not as a
+working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb.
+Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily
+distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the
+undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked
+myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity
+to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the
+readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'Horen,'
+Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a
+wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened?
+
+As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the
+_contrat-social_ among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a
+crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound
+than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under
+date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always
+stick to the subject-matter,--which is the history,--because otherwise
+people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this,
+that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty
+volumes, or even a longer one,--as in this, for instance,--thinks or
+laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in
+the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,--which sentence
+has been already executed on me more than once.
+
+Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in
+the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and
+digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as
+the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present
+reduced to a prescriptive right and confirmed into a servitude, the
+reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of
+Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but
+honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in
+former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and
+begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,--as I
+do here,--have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a
+matter of course, not only the _tribute_ as _alms_, but also the _don
+gratuit_ as _quarterly assessment_. So does not merely the cultivated
+Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the
+traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.
+
+I come now to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor, Von Hafenreffer, who is
+the subject of my promised _exposé of fact_.
+
+It must have been formerly learned from the 45th Dog-Post-Day, who
+governs Flachsenfingen, namely, my revered father. This striking
+promotion of mine was, at the bottom, more a step than a spring; for I
+was, previously, no less than a Jurist, consequently the germ or bud of
+an embryo Doctor _utriusque_, and consequently a nobleman, since in the
+Doctor the whole spawn and yolk of the Knight lies; therefore the
+former, as well as the latter, when anything chances by, lives upon his
+saddle or stirrup, although less in a robber's castle than in a robber's
+chamber; I have, therefore, since the preferment, changed less myself
+than my castle of residence;--the paternal seat in Flachsenfingen is at
+present my own.
+
+I care not now to eat my sugar-cake at court with sin,--although one
+earns sugar-cake and manna more comfortably than ship-bread,--but I
+represent, in order to make a profit upon my adventure, the whole
+Flachsenfingen Department of Foreign Affairs at home here in the castle,
+together with the requisite deciphering chancery. This, then, is what we
+shall do: we have a Procurator in Vienna, two Residents in five Imperial
+cities, a Secretary of the Comitia in Ratisbon under the
+Cross-Bench,[21] three Chancery-clerks of the circle, and an
+Envoyé-Plenipotentiary at a well-known and considerable court not far
+from Hohenfliess, who is no other than the aforementioned Mr. Feudal
+Provost Von Hafenreffer. To the latter my father has even advanced a
+complete silver-service, which we lend him, till he shall have received
+his recall, because it is for our own interest that a Flachsenfingen
+ambassador should, while abroad, do extraordinary honor, by his
+extravagance, to the princely hat or coronet of Flachsenfingen.
+
+Now it is no joke to stand on such a post as this of mine; the whole
+legation-writing-and-reading company write to me under frank, the
+_chiffre banal_ and the _chiffre déchiffrant_ are in my hands, and I
+understand, as it seems to me, the whole mess. It is unutterable, all
+that I thus learn: it could not be read by men nor drawn by horses, if I
+were disposed to hatch, biographically, and feed and reel off the whole
+silk-worm seed of novels, which the corps of ambassadors send me every
+post-day in closely-sealed packages. Yes (to use another metaphor), the
+biographical timber which my float-inspection launches for me from up
+above,--now into the Elbe, now into the Saale, now into the
+Danube,--stands already so high before me in the ship-yard, that I could
+not use it up, supposing I drove on the æsthetical building of my
+biographical fools'-ships, masquerade-balls, and enchanted castles, day
+and night, year out and year in, and never danced, nor rode, nor spoke,
+nor sneezed again in my life....
+
+Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against
+many another spawn, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man
+should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from
+himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and
+hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my
+legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports,
+would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean
+cloister-passages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now,
+for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent
+women of the world, veimers[22] ministers of justice, as well as jesters
+pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the
+Pointeurs.[23]
+
+I come back to my ambassador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned
+distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies
+me--without neglecting other duties--from month to month with as many
+personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his
+legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;--the smallest trifles
+are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different
+way of thinking from that of other ambassadors, who in their reports
+make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance
+into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every _cul de sac_,
+servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his
+opera-glass of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's
+virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a
+hand-and-horse service of good luck, no one of us can wonder,--that is,
+I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,--with
+such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,--with
+such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,--in
+short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, or
+Montgolfiers,[24]--it cannot of course be anything but just what is
+expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain
+height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which
+will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much)
+on the Sun, on Uranus and Sirius, and for which even the lucky
+quill-scraper who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints
+the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself,
+and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy _tooth_ of
+time,--especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by
+the tooth-saw of the critical file,--shall be able to make any
+impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of
+humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but
+unhappily every nature holds itself,--as Dr. Crusius does the
+world,--not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.
+
+The present _Titan_ enjoys, besides, the further advantage that I at
+this moment inhabit and grace the paternal court, and accordingly, as
+draughtsman, have certain sins near and bright before my eyes in a
+position most favorable for observation, of which at least Vanity,
+Libertinism, and Idleness will stay and sit for their likeness; for fate
+has sowed these mushrooms and mosses as high as possible among the upper
+classes, because in the lower and broader they would have spread too
+much, and sucked them dry,--which seems to be the pattern of that same
+foresight by which ships always have their assafoetida which they
+bring from Persia hanging overhead on the mast, in order that its stench
+may not contaminate the freight on deck. Moreover, I have up here in the
+court all the new fashions already around me for my observation and
+contempt, before they have been, down below there, only traduced, not to
+say commended,--e. g. the fine fashion of the Parisians, that women
+shall by a slight tuck in their dress show their calves, which they do
+in Paris, in order to let it be seen that they are not gentlemen, who,
+as is well known, walk on wooden legs,--this fashion will to-morrow or
+day after to-morrow (for it has arrived on an individual lady) be
+certainly introduced. But the females of Flachsenfingen imitate this
+fashion on quite another ground,--for gentlemen among us have no
+defect,--and that is, as a way of proving that they are human beings,
+and not apes (to say nothing less), since, according to Camper and
+others, man alone has calves. The same proof was adduced ten years ago,
+only on higher grounds. For since, according to Haller, man is
+distinguished from monkey in no other respect than by the possession of
+a posterior, the female officers of the crown, the dressing-maids,
+sought as much as possible to magnify in the persons of their mistresses
+this characteristic of their sex by art,--by the so-called _cul de
+Paris_; and, with such a penultimate of the ultimate, it became then a
+jest and an amusement to distinguish at a distance of two hundred paces
+a woman of the world from her female ape,--a thing which now many who
+know their Buffon by heart will venture to do, when they are no nearer
+to her than too near.
+
+Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I maintain in several
+of the German cities;--my honored father pays for them;--in most places
+one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as
+many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much
+like perspective-glasses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that
+is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author,
+from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household
+operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles
+distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that
+a staid, quiet man, whom nobody knows but his barber, and whose course
+of life is like a dark, unfrequented _cul de sac_, but whom one of my
+envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror,
+which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all,
+into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,--the case may
+occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up
+to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there
+smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair,
+buttons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three
+hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of _Indian_ plants
+which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter.
+
+People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the
+people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no ambassadors
+near me.
+
+But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but
+from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into
+cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out.
+No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery,
+and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge, has seemed thus far
+to avert the discovery of the _true_ names of my histories, and, indeed,
+with such success, that of all the manuscripts which have hitherto been
+despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject,
+not one has smelt the mouse,--and truly fortunate for the world; for so
+soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first
+volumes of Titan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic
+chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.
+
+Nothing is to be inferred from the names which I use, for I press into
+the service God-parents for my heroes in the most singular ways. Have I
+not, e. g., often of an evening, during the marching and countermarching
+of the German armies, who made their crusades to the holy sepulchre of
+freedom, gone up and down through the lanes of the camp, with my
+writing-tablets in my hands, and caught and entered the names of the
+privates,--which, just before bedtime, were called out aloud, like the
+names of saints,--just as they fell, in order to distribute them again
+among my biographical people? And has not merit been promoted thereby,
+and many a common soldier risen to be a nobleman fit for table and
+tournament, and have not provost-marshals been raised to ministers of
+justice, and red-cloaks to _patribus purpuratis_? And did ever a cock
+crow in all the army after this corps of observation slinking round
+mobilized on two legs?
+
+For authors who wish at the same time to narrate and disguise true
+anecdotes, I am, perhaps, on the whole, a model and file-leader. I have
+studied and imitated longer than other historical inquirers those little
+innocent stretching and wrenching processes which can make a history
+unrecognizable to the very hero of the same, and I fancy I know how one
+is to make good biographies of princes, protocols of high traitors,
+legends of saints, and auto-biographies; no stronger touches decide the
+matter than those slight ones, by which Peter of Cortona (or Beretino)
+in the presence of Ferdinand of Tuscany transformed a weeping child into
+a laughing one, and the reverse.
+
+Voltaire demands more than once, as he always does,--for he gave
+mankind, like an army, every order of march three times, and repeated
+himself and everything else most indefatigably,--that the historian
+shall arrange his history after the law-table of the drama, to a
+dramatic focal point. It is, however, one of the first dramatic rules
+which Lessing, Aristotle, and the Greek models give us, that the
+dramatic poet must lend to every historical circumstance which he treats
+all that is favorable to the poetic illusion, as well as keep clear of
+everything opposite, and that he must never sacrifice beauty to truth,
+but the reverse. Voltaire gave, as is well known, not only the easy
+rule, but the hard model also; and this great theatre poet of the
+world's theatre, in his _benefit_ dramas of Peter and Charles, never
+stuck to the truth where he was sure he could attain sooner to illusion.
+And that is properly the genuine romantic history corresponding to the
+historical romance. It is not for me, but for others,--namely, the
+Provost and the Secretaries of Legation,--to decide how far I have
+treated a true history illusorily. It is a misfortune that the true
+history of my hero can hardly ever see the light; otherwise the justice
+might be done me that connoisseurs would confront my poetical deviations
+with the truth, and thereafter give each of us more easily his own, as
+well the truth as myself. But this reward is what all royal
+historiographers and scandalous chroniclers must resign _nolens volens_,
+because the true history never appears in conjunction with their works.
+
+But in the composition of a history an author must also keep a sharp
+look-out upon this point, that it shall not only hit and betray no real
+persons, but also no false ones, and in fact nobody at all. Before I, e.
+g., choose a name for a bad prince, I must look through the genealogical
+index of all governing and governed families, in order not to use a name
+which some person or other already bears; thus, in Otaheite, even the
+words which sound like the name of the king are abolished after his
+coronation, and supplied by others. Now, as I was formerly acquainted
+with no living courts at all, I was not in a situation, when preparing
+the battle-pieces and night-pieces which I painted of the Cabals, the
+Egoism, and the Libertinism of biographical courts, to succeed in
+skilfully avoiding every resemblance to real ones; yes, for such an
+idiot as I, it was a miserable help, even, to be often laying
+Machiavelli open before me, in order, with the assistance of the French
+history, by painting from the two, to turn off the edge of the
+application at least upon countries in which no Frenchman or Italian
+ever had the influence that is generally attributed to both of them upon
+other Germans; just as Herder, in opposition to those naturalists who
+derive certain misshapen tribes of men from a half-parentage of apes,
+makes the very good remark that most of the resemblances to apes--the
+retreating skull of the Calmucks, the prominent ears of the Pevas, the
+slender hands in Carolina--appear just in those countries where there
+are no apes at all. Formerly, then, as was said, striking unlikenesses I
+could not succeed in hitting; now, on the contrary, every court around
+which my legation-flotilla coasts is well known to me, and therefore
+secure from accidental resemblances, particularly every one which I
+describe,--that of Flachsenfingen, that of Hohenfliess, &c. The
+theatrical mask which I have on in my works is not the mask of the Greek
+comedian, which was embossed after the face of the individual
+satirized,[25] but the mask of Nero, which, when he acted a goddess on
+the stage, looked like his mistress,[26] and when he acted a god, like
+himself.
+
+Enough! This digressive introductory programme has been somewhat long,
+but the Jubilee-period was so, too: the longer the St. John's day of a
+country, the longer its St. Thomas's night. And now let us dance along
+together into the book,--into this free ball of the world,--I first as
+leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me; so
+that, amidst the sounding baptismal and funeral bells in the Chinese
+house of this world-building,--welcomed by the singing-school of the
+muses,--serenaded from on high by the guitar of Phoebus,--we may dance
+gayly from Tome to Tome, from Cycle to Cycle, from one digression to
+another, from one dash to another,--till either the work comes to an
+end, or the workman, or everybody!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] _Querbank_,--Bench for Protestant Bishops in the Germanic
+Diet.
+
+[22] _Veimer_,--old Westphalian judges.
+
+[23] Tellers in faro-banks.
+
+[24] The inventor of the balloon.--TR.
+
+[25] Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie, etc. de Dubois, Tom. I.
+Sect. 42.
+
+[26] Sueton. Nero.
+
+
+
+
+SECOND JUBILEE.
+
+     THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE
+     FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A
+     STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING
+     CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE
+     TORTURE-SOUPÉ.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD,
+     BUT WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION.
+
+
+10. CYCLE.
+
+In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful
+prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the
+full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cluster and the olive often
+ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan
+(Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all
+things which belong to May--in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May
+butter--he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood
+itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a
+princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of
+counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that
+mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent
+clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and
+fencing-schools, all anticipation of the coming riddles and conflicts of
+his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with his heart full of the
+glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms
+no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double
+conquest.
+
+The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke
+around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in
+full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he
+revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook
+their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;--the
+Librarian sought a _physical_ solution of the acoustic and optical
+illusion; the Lector sought a _political_ one: he could not at all
+comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially
+meant by it all.
+
+This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was
+directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he
+could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar.
+"Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I
+should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I
+would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit
+and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during
+the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too
+few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve
+in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls
+curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain
+beats gladly a free heart.
+
+At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and
+nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they
+approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and
+now the Principality of _Hohenfliess_ lay only one principality distant
+from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the
+first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been
+merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is
+known to geographical readers, _Haarhaar_. The Lector told the
+Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the
+two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much
+because they were _diplomatic_ relatives--although it is true that,
+among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than
+brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old
+folks among the Brandenburghers--as because they were really relatives,
+and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were
+disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two
+courts,--which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,--with all their
+heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him,
+namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the
+principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last
+hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to
+wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the
+land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned
+advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political
+mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told
+for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so
+generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial
+estate of Hohenfliess--its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and
+breed of horses--in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the
+highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great
+intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to
+population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of
+Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not
+even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the
+shepherd's-flute; not of the _energies_ and _matrimonial prospects_ of
+others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must
+ruin!"
+
+As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an
+excursion to Blumenbühl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a
+look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his
+cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the
+city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which
+besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the
+conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness
+of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at
+his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short,
+that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of
+Blumenbühl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the
+world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high
+life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy
+and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.
+
+It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee,
+because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go
+to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however,
+to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates
+against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they
+stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the
+church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned
+round, the tower of Blumenbühl below them to the east; from the one and
+from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his
+future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village,
+and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which
+gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days.
+He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life,
+and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the
+Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.
+
+But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red
+shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy
+day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood,
+when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod,
+over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with
+him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and
+become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so
+sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.
+
+
+11. CYCLE.
+
+It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day--and likewise on the
+birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not
+received the title yet--that this same director--that was to be--had
+his chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pestitz, and see the
+Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the _flail_ of the
+state, by way of experiment, into a _drill-plough_. He was a brisk,
+bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill
+to others, and to whom nothing made time pass heavily but pastime. "In
+the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it,
+for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist
+in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an
+Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,--little as there was in
+it,--and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.
+
+But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to
+the reader?
+
+Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had
+chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to
+mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted
+with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has
+generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only _inborn_ not _acquired_
+sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not
+to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclopædia of
+all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say,
+the rector of the place,--named Wehmeier, better known by the title of
+Band-box-master,--after schooling the village youth for the usual number
+of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest _Struve's spare hours_, his
+_Otia_ and _Noctes Hagianæ_, in teaching Albano, and driving into the
+mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy--impelled by internal
+streams--alphabetic pins,--so as to make it the barrel of a
+speech-organ. Of course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something
+heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the
+language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a
+hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of
+counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither
+note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering
+pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the
+Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself
+so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So,
+also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it
+were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary,
+sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery
+of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent
+its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often
+in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed
+of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from
+quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which
+would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests,
+only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating _aura
+seminalis_ to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider,
+you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the
+thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the
+flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups,
+instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,--and who
+grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the
+dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the
+vine-dressers, with your hoeing and your dunging and your clipping. O,
+can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe
+organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all,
+alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt
+ourselves to the perception of her beauty,--can you ever, in any way,
+make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had
+they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with
+their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence
+it is that your _élèves_ so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in
+spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow
+and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.
+
+Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards
+him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and
+made the mark ["with care"] with which merchants commend valuable boxes
+of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery
+child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had
+confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the
+centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without
+hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own
+off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at
+evening before the new teacher from the city.
+
+Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all
+that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark
+and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the
+creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those
+king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in
+reference to her companion, may be compared with Luke, and mine with
+Matthew.[28] Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family
+feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great
+good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which
+installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid
+up against this day as a birthday christening present.
+
+But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano
+stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting
+out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house;
+for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him
+than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to
+Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at
+least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will,
+however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister,
+Rabette, that annoying _foster_) said, without thinking, No, although
+she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn
+little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will
+and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,--then
+the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and
+pleaded for him, without knowing why,--then Albina protested at least he
+should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,--then he
+marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the
+female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition,
+gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the
+presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.
+
+
+12. CYCLE.
+
+Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules
+strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed
+them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years.
+Exultingly did his new and old Adam--they flew side by side--flap their
+wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring
+ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a
+journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the
+butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned
+herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a
+shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a
+shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the
+upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party
+and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted
+and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their
+dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for
+the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and
+although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and
+earnings,--because an honest man like him finds always in the body
+politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the
+stone _drapery_ remains,--nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and
+feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was
+just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.
+
+The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I
+offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the
+herdsman's mountain fortification, and received from the soldier's wife
+the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all
+eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the
+wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry
+chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the
+windows and looked in beckoning,--when Albano beheld, under the window
+toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on
+which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun
+shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,--when at the western window
+he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the
+Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,--when he
+placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!"
+then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must
+needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.
+
+The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat.
+The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden
+full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the
+cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to
+sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet
+ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who,
+blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she
+dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano
+stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley,
+and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish
+longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself
+away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself free and
+passive into the broad ether!--and so plashing up and down in the cool,
+all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and
+unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,--or to sweep
+after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured
+assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn
+between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to
+little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the
+peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun,
+and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into
+his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at
+last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter,
+intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red
+clouds!...
+
+Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones?
+Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the
+slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,--just as
+if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low
+earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its
+chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the
+horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through
+the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the
+presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the
+chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness,
+and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it
+must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the
+body the body also can lift up the soul.
+
+The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade
+along with the brook, which was running away into the pale-green birch
+thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown
+him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,[29] and he loved to go
+with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would
+itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook,
+deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out
+through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He
+could not accomplish it,--the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the
+brook broader,--the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high
+overhead;--but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic
+polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus,
+for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so
+agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as
+the longest; but the day after either was fatal.[30]
+
+At last, after the progress of some hours in time and space, he heard,
+beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of
+the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by
+two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent
+to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called
+out on all sides of him, but in a cry;--it was his private patron saint,
+the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his
+account at the foot of the mountain.
+
+He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with
+a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch
+of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of
+passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant
+lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the
+landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white,
+glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,--when
+he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town--views of which hung in
+the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the
+mountains--distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates
+for him were closed,--and when, indeed, everything seemed flying
+westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the
+grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away
+over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the
+oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned
+Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great
+fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero
+the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the
+subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood--ah yes, every
+age--often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every
+other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's.
+Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of
+consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye
+turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than
+they show or we imagine.
+
+Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved
+tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner,
+and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the
+bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,--and the thought that
+this was the birthday of his foster-father,--and his inexpressible love
+for his afflicted mother, upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when
+he was alone,--and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to
+weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the
+Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his
+seeking mother.
+
+He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind
+Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly
+through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a
+fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons
+from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her
+arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young
+gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and
+from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.
+
+Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep
+only their promises, but never a threat,--resembling the forest-officers
+of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws,
+impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to
+one hundred kreutzers.[31] They, however, like Solon, who gave out his
+laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the
+proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.
+
+
+13. CYCLE.
+
+I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a
+grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute
+among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself, were I
+not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying
+back of the table dinner-service.
+
+Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and
+phosphorescing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the
+blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the
+morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender
+emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,--even as
+at evening we remember the morning,--and the forms of Nature drew nearer
+to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present
+offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is
+the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With
+what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the
+eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the
+screaming of the cocks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper
+and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again
+on the shore of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the
+valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead
+in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy
+lamb-clouds!
+
+Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes
+and groping too far into the garden,--besides, the blind girl did not
+see,--holding his arms open before him so as not to run against
+anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up,
+he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside,
+stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one,
+holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"--and as she, with a
+modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down
+on her bowed head with sweet emotion.
+
+Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money
+and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by
+him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,--from whose
+ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically
+possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give
+them back,--she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound
+off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But
+the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an _inner_, finer band, and the
+blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so
+overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of
+Dresden into her apron, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one
+on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came
+trudging up the Pestitz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly,
+to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of
+exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a
+magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind
+eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink
+herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and
+would rather please herself in the glass than others out of it. The
+merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought
+up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a
+piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into
+short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair
+down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon,
+and a very serviceable leather queue of Würzburg fabric into the
+bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,--so was Lea with
+hope,--the Jew said he must pack up,--besides, the hair-queue which he
+had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the
+first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every
+morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the
+poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French Insigné, and
+buckled on the Würzburg sheath.
+
+And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise
+of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very
+pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue
+actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living
+scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-god,
+to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.
+
+By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real
+wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had
+her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of
+pure _monkery_ and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape,
+and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires
+of Pestitz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not
+now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor
+any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....
+
+But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the
+shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's
+wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious
+lady,--for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the
+male support of _Titan_, firmly planted by some farmers' boys--to whom,
+moreover, Albina has intrusted the _remarche-règlement_ of hastening his
+return--on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of
+the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying
+horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the
+arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could
+not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his
+picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and
+coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half
+as much as the last bird.
+
+I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff
+dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous
+Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green
+Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine
+figure!
+
+The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at
+the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the
+Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned
+bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.
+
+
+14. CYCLE.
+
+Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form
+and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil
+lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy
+shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of
+a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every
+minute his _élève_ fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments,
+like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus; "and this too,
+now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far
+along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore
+scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the
+sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a
+lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of
+the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the
+master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a
+real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God!
+Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of
+bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there
+better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting--like
+a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge--that
+children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are,
+and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of
+village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet,
+in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble
+chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly
+bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be
+outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years
+old,--supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.
+
+When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and
+the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor
+had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the
+locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps.
+The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the
+Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in
+the way of his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a
+forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The
+soldier's wife wrung her hands,--the servants arranged themselves for
+the taking down from the cross,--the poor little fellow, in a fever,
+drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose
+and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole."
+He would have done it--and put an untimely end to his life and my
+Titan--merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal
+insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the
+chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide
+and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet
+proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at
+that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the
+key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably
+exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an
+Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;--ah,
+Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler,
+end in a discord?--and, secondly, because he had there a
+singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant
+house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as
+spectator of this _début_. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round
+before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his
+pockets;--the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated
+Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard,
+and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another
+has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in
+his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The Band-box master was best off;
+for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of
+agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his
+consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.
+
+Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with
+him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its
+finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and
+the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and
+highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes
+from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and
+from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides
+turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and
+sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and
+energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to
+behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the
+ground below.
+
+Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had
+it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it,
+from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as
+if they could eat him,"--as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He
+voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted
+him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the
+work-shop,--and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned,
+controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's
+harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's
+mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his
+staving through a window, and firing, from the port-hole, a few of the
+most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.
+
+By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and
+boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came
+slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth
+of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down
+along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line
+of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of
+a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the
+Würzburg queue like a tail-feather.
+
+Wehmeier stared at the _cauda prehensilis_ (the ring-tail), and by his
+attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as
+much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of
+his--Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day
+with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten,
+home.
+
+
+15. CYCLE.
+
+The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of
+her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous
+spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might
+transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,--yes, as a
+sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had
+packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the
+cabinet of the dining-room,--and for Albano Albina had already contrived
+an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the _vocation_ of
+the Province. Ah, but what did the lady get from it all but flames,
+which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in
+his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the
+sprinkling of the magister?
+
+Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband
+for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in
+the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as
+ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness,
+because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,--then step by step she
+took back the right,--but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as
+nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their
+mouths,--and at last said he should just give the child up to her.
+
+But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the
+Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in
+reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast
+in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened
+evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own,
+and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a
+teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him--though he himself
+dared and did too much--to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback,
+or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not
+just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose
+educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter
+condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner,
+and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?
+
+Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his
+defiant way to the father's study, and therefore to the court-martial
+punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from
+behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him
+down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning,
+tied on the _vena cava_ of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up
+to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited
+him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical
+mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and
+hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and
+impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally
+she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"
+
+He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated,
+into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant.
+Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice
+of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its
+unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the
+table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad
+habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation
+with wine.
+
+In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by
+their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time
+had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the
+violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a
+low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world
+that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to
+be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of
+the dulcimer let his musical hammer fall on the stringed floor.
+Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the
+whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and
+waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the
+cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs,
+ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their
+leather aprons and _culs de Paris_, to take themselves off instantly.
+
+Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her
+sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew
+he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she
+represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present
+child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in
+which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the
+absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying
+and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his
+waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person
+before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he
+had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle,
+who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would
+certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man
+the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned
+into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul
+in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to
+drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing,
+convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones.
+After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal
+evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon himself by his rides and
+his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on
+every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely,
+herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony
+throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day
+think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.
+
+Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had
+been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed
+upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained
+cold and hard,--for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point,
+the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just
+before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue,
+which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in
+the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Würzburg appendage off over his head.
+Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment,
+with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and
+say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in
+future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified
+tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned
+immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with
+too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all
+torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him,
+"and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly
+done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him,
+but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she
+had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair
+as an act of obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children
+in high life.
+
+Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his
+long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping
+before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and
+thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off,
+the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing
+more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay
+thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and
+while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes
+himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with
+his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly
+and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then
+will the old man read the _Decretum_ over again still more slowly, so as
+almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with
+indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it,
+make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness
+and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him
+thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy
+downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry
+cheeks,--then will he look a pretty long time after his departing
+darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over
+the address of the diploma at his will.
+
+Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?
+
+
+16. CYCLE.
+
+Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above
+the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of
+discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf
+of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he
+shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and
+if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary
+partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he
+would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in
+his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.
+
+Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her
+his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna,
+he said not, as usual, _nolo episcopari_; he did not say he was hemmed
+round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that
+perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of
+fortune,--instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more
+common to brides,--he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told
+Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked
+what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the
+Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and
+Rabette, and all.
+
+But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through
+Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the
+arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the
+greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as
+entertaining _acteur_ of the table, he had so much to do with
+conversing, _savoir vivre_, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in
+proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he
+was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers,
+chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting
+them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard
+fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's
+pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the
+feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague,
+and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume
+to himself the magnificent _winter crop_ in Alban's sowed field as his
+own _summer crop_. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all
+the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the
+aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]
+
+With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own
+hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a
+three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his
+entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some
+time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir,"
+replied coldly and gravely the _paradeur_ of a Falterle by the side of
+our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well
+at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to
+scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a
+cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."
+
+What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two
+brothers-in-office!--the master of accomplishments with the motley
+scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow
+outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the
+waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a
+roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him,
+and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of
+candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle
+had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and
+every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were
+the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master
+wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former
+in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,--the one flapping up like
+a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with
+the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial
+root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his
+green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A
+magnificent set-off, I repeat!
+
+The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led
+forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But
+now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his
+napkin open first,--which became now, as it were, introductory programme
+and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "_Posément,
+Monsieur_," said he to the novice, "_il est messéant de déplier la
+serviette avant que les autres aient déplié les leurs_." After some
+minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one _à la
+Brittanière_, with rings. "_Il est mésseant, Monsieur_," said
+the master of accomplishments, "_de souffler sa soupe_." The
+Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from
+the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short,
+frightened into a dead calm.
+
+When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on
+the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced
+veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed
+more inwardly than outwardly.
+
+After the bomb, came in a pike _au four_, to which, as is well known,
+the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly
+give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher
+what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "_Pardonnez,
+Monsieur_," said his rival gourmand, "_c'est du brochet au four, mon
+cher Compte; mais il est mésseant de demander le nom de quelque mets
+qu'il soit,--on feint de le savoir_."
+
+It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced
+through the Magister's marrow and bone; the _instruments of passion_
+which lay in the cut-off head of the pike _au four_, as in an armory,
+continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he
+thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them,
+and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as
+he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs
+despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he
+was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with
+the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine,
+and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed him most
+lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him
+the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official
+brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and
+the pike _au four_, and could not help laughing up there on his planet,
+to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of
+brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken
+pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out
+of him every day as that other fellow raked in.
+
+We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this
+lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably
+delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a
+diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all
+diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and
+more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,--at
+which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the
+little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,--until at least with one word he
+had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's
+concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company
+how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for
+any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry
+soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer
+punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but
+quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he
+had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son;
+but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense
+for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like
+vines and bees. Besides, deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of
+their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have
+satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by _opera
+supererogationis_ in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than
+win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g.
+Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest
+achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a
+geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried
+on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith
+they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not
+this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself
+a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being
+children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin
+bow?
+
+But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very
+friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the
+magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but
+with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble
+Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard,
+clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the
+ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the
+life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the _frère terrible_, wherewith they
+kept him under,--but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his
+crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling;
+however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.
+
+Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all
+corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a
+favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as
+himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old,
+speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano
+has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of
+Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not
+yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which
+made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes,
+cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the
+circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on
+amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour
+making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets
+there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite
+our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider,
+ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle
+said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody,
+because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I,"
+that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he
+harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly,
+not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only
+honey (i. e. a little praise).
+
+"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he
+had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer
+shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister
+sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much
+for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with
+the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow;
+and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat
+cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went
+slowly out.
+
+The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his
+Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom
+he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement
+was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the
+last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high
+things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the
+close, drowsy cradle of childhood,--he had sprung at once out of the
+warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,--he
+saw the _toga virilis_ hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and
+said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"
+
+Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too
+easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation,
+resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of
+the fig-tree seeming _fruits_ sprout forth, which are only the fleshy
+rinds of the _blossoms_!
+
+And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and
+exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,--just now
+must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his
+bosom,--he determined to pass through the coming years as through a
+white colonnade of monumental pillars,--already a mere Alumnus from the
+city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic
+author,--and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely
+accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father?
+Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and
+the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of his inner world into a sweltry
+mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,--rush
+into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again
+without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a
+night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered
+at the little pilgrim without a hat.
+
+But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party.
+This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching
+the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.
+
+The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of
+Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and
+enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins,
+wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but
+African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When
+the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common
+boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous
+system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed
+his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by
+chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and
+the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round
+by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer
+both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste--because
+she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on
+the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that
+stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping
+hands--demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta
+haughtily turned upon him her splendid back, covered with ringlets;
+beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came
+back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he
+stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill
+himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a
+little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk
+with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the
+fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the
+whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled
+the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,--so that
+nothing more can be hung on that,--and grazed the side of his head. She
+instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down,
+bleeding, and was carried home.
+
+This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted
+up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her
+quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and
+the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy
+without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of
+anxiety, out through the village. A good genius--the yard-dog,
+Melak--had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the
+fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather
+that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who
+oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves,
+should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted
+reasons,--namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy,
+whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed,
+could not give him a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog
+right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees
+except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these
+inversions,--during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and
+seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and
+every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,--he was found by his
+innocent mother.
+
+"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in
+the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he
+had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a
+vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his
+overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in
+tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but
+merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the
+anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's
+situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then
+so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably
+Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied
+through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately,
+strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards
+Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender
+emotion.
+
+When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a
+little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his
+defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his
+countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling
+threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun.
+He placed himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept
+his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a
+double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered
+fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,--the sign of
+the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.
+
+Verily, I have often formed the wish--and afterwards made a picture out
+of it--that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world,
+because no love moves us so deeply as _returning_ love. It must touch
+Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely
+asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,[34] they will
+tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer
+element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the
+distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain
+Immortals when they behold us under the violent _tempests_ of life
+arrayed against each other on the _battle-field_ of enmity, under double
+blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that
+nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[27] I have already said that he was brought up there, under the
+Provincial Director, _Von Wehrfritz_.
+
+[28] With this Evangelist, as is well known, an angel is
+associated.
+
+[29] Compass.
+
+[30] Odious, or tabooed.--TR.
+
+[31] To a German President of Finance, Vol. I. p. 296.
+
+[32] For Boyle found in his experiments that ranunculi, mints,
+&c., which he suffered to grow large in the water, developed the
+usual aromatic virtues.
+
+[33] Some would rather hear this word than _breeches_.
+
+[34] The female Valisneria lies rolled up under the water, out of
+which it lifts its bud, to bloom in the open air; the male then
+loosens itself from the too short stalk and swims to her with its
+dry blossom-dust.
+
+
+
+
+THIRD JUBILEE.
+
+     METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR
+     PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN
+     OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.
+
+
+17. CYCLE.
+
+If we open the two school-rooms, we shall see the Band-box-master, in
+the forenoon, sitting and brooding upon the two-yolked eggs of the
+_élève_, and the accomplishing master, in the afternoon, just as the
+cock-pigeon guards the nest the former part of the day, and the female
+the latter.
+
+Now Wehmeier, as well as his competitor, was fain to take possession of
+his pupil with wholly new instructions; but what were new to him were
+new to himself. Like most of the older schoolmasters, he knew--of
+astronomy, except the little that was found in the book of Joshua, and
+of physics, except the few errors which existed in his rather-forgotten
+than torn-up manuscript books, and of philosophy, except that of
+Gottsched, which required, however, a riper pupil, and of other real
+sciences--strictly speaking, nothing, except a little history. If
+ever--in the literary Sahara, to which the tormenting screw of
+school-lessons, without end, and the beggar's or cripple's wagon of a
+life without pay, that had been turned rather into dross than into ore,
+had exiled him--new methods of teaching or new discoveries came to his
+ears (they never came to his eyes), he noted, at the moment, that they
+were his own, only with a shade of variation; and he concealed from no
+one the plagiarism. I heartily beg, however, all silken and powdered and
+curly-haired Princes' instructors, blame not too sorely my poor
+Wehmeier, so deeply overlaid with the heavy, thick strata of fate, for
+his subterranean optics and his crookedness of posture, but reckon his
+eight children and his eight school-hours and his approaching fifties in
+his life's grotto of Antiparos, and then decide whether the man can,
+under these circumstances, come out again into light?
+
+But yet of history he knew, as was said, something; and this he seized
+upon as pedagogical lucky-bone and Fortunatus's wishing-cap. Had he not
+already, in that epical, picturesque style of paraphrase,--whereby he
+could relate the smallest market-town history in such an interesting and
+fictitious way, (for whence will a good story-teller draw the thousand
+lesser but necessary touches but from his head?)--lectured out to his
+Albano Hübner's Biblical History, in a manner extremely touching? And
+which wept most during the delivery, teacher or scholar?
+
+Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike
+into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in
+the world,--the history of countries. But only the British and the
+French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the
+earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg
+princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat
+for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history,
+on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer, most
+disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in
+Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in
+Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?
+
+The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses
+in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according
+to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the
+22d October,[35] hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's
+and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the
+29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to
+the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is
+compelled to listen to the case.
+
+This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange.
+He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the
+rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us
+more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the
+heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives
+from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace
+for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works
+of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against
+every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning,
+walk along several times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen,
+ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within,
+although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,--the
+biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,--not the shadowy world of
+states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy
+family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with
+which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher,
+as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds
+of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and
+descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the
+whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that
+blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could
+he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality?
+Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the
+Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato
+and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was
+cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the
+eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard
+nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible
+effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so,
+from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting
+which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,--hair, moss,
+roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,--was hidden by
+the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like
+the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full
+of broken inscriptions.
+
+
+18. CYCLE.
+
+The reader is now curious about the afternoon, when the _élève_ is sent
+into the polishing-mill of the Viennite, in order to know what sort of a
+polishing he gets there. It cannot but make him still more curious, when
+I repeat that Wehmeier, who, like other literati, resembled the elephant
+in clumsiness and sagacity, found nothing more agreeable to think
+of--and, therefore, to describe--in ancient history, than a great man,
+who had on little, as, for instance, Diogenes, or went barefoot, like
+Cato, or unshaven, like the philosophers; nay, he hit the very
+Mittel-Mark, and drew out for himself Frederick the Second's clothes,
+whereby he gained as much as Mr. Pagé in Paris, and carried _his_
+shirts, like the noble Saladin's, and with similar proclamations, on
+poles for show, and sketched, as a second _Scheiner_, the best map we
+have of the sun-spots of snuff on Frederick. Then he took these naked,
+rough colossi, and piled them together into one scale, and threw into
+the other the light, wainscoted figures, like Falterle and the nice
+Nuremberg Kinder-gärten of modern courts, and besought the scholar to
+take notice which way the swaying tongue of the balance would
+incline....
+
+I am not wholly on thy side here, Magister, since vigorous youths too
+easily, without any prompting, tear in pieces the thin plate of the
+ceremonial law, and often the platers, the head masters of ceremonies,
+into the bargain. For weaklings, the method is good.
+
+Now, when Albano came to the accomplishing master, he could but faintly,
+on account of the loud resonance of the previous lesson,--for children
+of a certain depth, like buildings of a certain size, give an
+_echo_,--apprehend what Falterle commanded; and only when he remained
+some days without the historical sensation was he more widely open to
+the lesser instructions, as gilded things cannot be silvered over till
+the gold is worn off. The misfortune was, too, that he had to go through
+his task-dances in the very next room to the study of the Director, who
+was there occupied with his own. It often happened that Wehrfritz, when
+Alban was as _distrait_ and inattentive in the Anglaise as a partner in
+love, would cry out, while he was dictating in there, "In the name of
+the three devils, chassez!" Quite as many cases might one reckon in
+which, when the music-master, like a bass-drum, with everlasting
+exhortations glided away through adagio into piano, the man had to call
+out in there, with the strongest imaginable fortissimo, "Pianissimo,
+Satan! pianissimo!" Sometimes he was obliged to rise from his labors,
+when, in the fencing-lesson, all admonitions to "quart!" availed
+nothing, and open the door, and, grim with fury, say to him of Vienna,
+"For God's sake, sir, don't be a hare! Prick his leather soundly, if he
+doesn't mind!" Whereupon the courtly fencing-master would only gently
+encourage him to "quart thrust."
+
+Nevertheless, he learned much. In such early years one cannot rise above
+the finery nor the fine arts of a Falterle, who, besides, was reinforced
+with the magical advantage of having shone and taught in the forbidden
+metropolis. Only the loud stride and the boots were not to be taken from
+the pupil; but the shoulders soon grew horizontal, and the head
+perpendicular; and the oscillating fingers, together with the restless
+body, were steadied with Stahl's eye-holder. In general, men with a
+_liberal_ soul in a finely-built body have already, without Falterle's
+espalier-wall and scissors, an agreeable shape and stature. Moreover,
+he felt toward the neat, friendly Falterle that holy _first love for
+men_ wherewith a child's heart twines round all inmates of his home and
+village; and simply for this reason, that a lady could wind the Viennite
+about her ring-finger,--yes, inside of the gold ring itself,--and
+because he spoke and lied about the Knight of the Golden Fleece as about
+a king, and because he was the most agreeable creature that ever trod
+the earth.
+
+As I mean in my biographies to teach tolerance and even-handed justice
+toward all characters, I must here lead the way with a pattern of
+toleration, by remarking of Falterle, that his poor, thin soul had not
+the power to develop itself under the stone table of the laws of
+etiquette, and under the wooden yoke of an imposing station. To whom did
+the poor devil ever do any harm? Not even to ladies, for whom indeed he
+was always laboring before the looking-glass, like a copperplate
+engraver, upon his dear self, but only, like other sculptors, by this
+artistic work, to display pure beauties, not to mislead them. The
+sea-water of his life--for he is neither a millionnaire, nor even the
+greatest _savant_ of the age, although he has read about among many
+circulating libraries--is sweetened by the water of beauty, wherein he
+hourly bathes. He swills and gormandizes scarcely at all. If he curses
+and swears, he does it in foreign languages, as the Papist makes his
+prayers, and flatters very few except himself.
+
+The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate vain persons much too
+violently; for such persons, after all, are more diseased in the head
+than in the will. I can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader,
+whether he ever, even when he was going about with an uncommonly vain
+feeling, remembers to have detected any deep qualms of conscience or
+discords in himself, which, however, were never wanting, when he lied
+very much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such occasions,
+experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking of his inner man in the
+cradle of state. Hence a vain man is as hard to cure as a gambler; but
+for this further reason,--most sins are occasional sermons and
+occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to
+the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word,
+cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness
+against himself, any more than he can play ninepins or fight a duel with
+himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter-Fair or
+New-Year's Day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal,
+margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life; many
+never at all,--for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost. On the
+contrary, one can praise and crown himself inwardly day and night,
+summer and winter, in every place,--in the pulpit, in the Prater, in the
+general's tent, on the back seat of a sleigh, in the princely chair, in
+any part of Germany,--for instance, in Weimar. What! and must one let
+this perennial balsam-plant, which continually perfumes the inner man,
+be plucked up or lopped off?
+
+
+19. CYCLE.
+
+All these occupations and thorns were to Albano right good, sharp
+earthquake-conductors, since in his bosom already more subterranean
+storm-matter circulated than is needed to burst the thin wall of a man's
+chest. Now he began to get on deeper and deeper into the wild
+thunder-months of life. The longing to see Don Zesara caught new warmth
+from the Roman history, which lifted up on high before him Caesar's
+colossal image, and wrote under it, "Zesara." The veiled Linden-city was
+carried over by his fancy and set upon seven hills, and exalted to a
+Rome. A post-horn rang through his innermost being, like a Swiss Ranz
+des Vaches, which builds out into the ether all summits of our wishes in
+long and shining mountain-chains; and it blew for him the signal of a
+tent-striking, and all cities of the earth lay with open gates and with
+broad highways round about him. And when, at this period, on a cool,
+clear summer morning, he marched along metrically by the side of a
+regiment on its way to Pestitz, so long as he could hear the sound of
+the drums and fifes, then did his soul celebrate a Handel's Alexander's
+Feast; the past became audible,--the rattling of the triumphal cars, the
+movement of the Spartan bands and their flutes, and the clear trumpet of
+Fame,--and, as if at the sound of the last trumpets, his soul arose
+among none but glorified dead on the unbolted earth, and, with them,
+still marched onward.
+
+When History leads a noble 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 Blumenbühl, 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 Pestitz, 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 sex, 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 pass 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 damnation, 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
+documents relating to the case, for the catalogue of petals, which I for
+my own private use am stitching 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 Goddess 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 God? 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 gods than by men; and the ideal foreruns the reality, as, with some
+trees, the tender _blossoms_ anticipate 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 mass
+into the loveliest form.
+
+Circumstances 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 circumstance; 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,
+assailed 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 passing, 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 passions 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 grass 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 space 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 cursèd one; and the young men of those cities, again, on their
+part, take passage 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 Passion-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 goddess,--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
+butterfly,--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 glass 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 peacocks, 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 Pestitz; 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, fag-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 sanctity 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 Uranus, 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 passionate expression, for which, in his own name,
+before so many stoic classical heroes, he could not for shame muster up
+the courage. But in this way the classics could not touch him.
+
+The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass
+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,
+godlike 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 gods 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 butterfly
+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 gods 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 space, 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 passed, 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 snatches 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-assured
+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 Pestitz, 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 Pestitz 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.
+The magic circles of the mount rose ever smaller and smaller out of the
+leaves into the blossoms,--two naked children, among myrtles, had twined
+their arms caressingly about each other's bent head,--they were statues
+of Cupid and Psyche,--rosy night-butterflies were licking, with their
+short tongues, the honey-dew from the leaves, and the glowworms, like
+sparks struck off from the glow of evening, went trailing like gold
+threads around the rose-bushes; he climbed amid summits and roots behind
+the aromatic balustrade toward heaven; but the little spiral alley
+running round with him hung before the stars purple night-violets, and
+hid the deep gardens with orange summits; at length he sprang from the
+highest round of his Jacob's-ladder, with all his senses, out into an
+uncovered, living heaven; a light hill-top, only fringed with variegated
+flower-cups, received and cradled him under the stars, and a white altar
+gleamed brightly beside him in the moonlight.
+
+But gaze down, fiery man, with thy fresh heart, full of youth, on the
+magnificent, immeasurable, enchanted Lilar! A second twilight-world,
+such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out
+before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine
+walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon
+lingers now only on the groves and triumphal gates, and on the
+silver-dust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all
+waters and vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm
+of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like
+Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands
+of our present world,--wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage,
+and all is one lovely, magic confusion. What mean those high, open doors
+or arches, and the pierced groves and the ruddy splendor behind them,
+and a white child sleeping among orange-lilies and gold-flowers, from
+whose cups delicate flames trickle,[43] as if angels had flown too near
+over them? The lightnings reveal swans, sleeping on the waves under
+clouds drunk with light, and their flaming trains blaze like gold after
+them in among the thick trees,[44] as goldfishes turn their burning
+backs out of the water,--and even around thy summit, Albano, the great
+eyes of the sunflowers turn on thee their fiery looks, as if kindled by
+the sparks of the glowworms.
+
+"And in this kingdom of light," thought Albano, trembling, "the still
+angel of my future hides himself and glorifies it, when he appears. O
+where dwellest thou, good Liana? In that white temple? or in the arbor
+between the rose-fields? or up there in the green Arcadian
+summer-house?" If love makes even pangs to be pleasures, and exalts the
+shadowy sphere of the earth into a starry sphere, O what an enchantment
+will it lend to delight! Albano could not possibly, in this outer and
+inner splendor, think of Liana as sick; he represented to himself just
+now only the blissful future, and with a yearning embrace knelt down at
+the altar; he looked toward the glittering garden, and pictured to
+himself how it would be when he should one day tread with _her_ every
+island of this Eden,--when holy Nature should lay his and her hands in
+one another upon these altar-steps,--when he should sketch to her on the
+way the Hesperia of life, the pastoral land of first love, and then its
+holy exultation and its sweet tears, and how he should not then be able
+to look round into the eyes of that most tender heart, because he should
+already know that they were overflowing with bliss. Just then he saw, in
+the moonshine above the triumphal arches, two illuminated forms move
+like spirits; but his glowing soul went on with its painting, and he
+imagined to himself how, when the nightingales trilled in this Eden, he
+should look up to her and say, in a delirium of love, "O Liana, I bore
+thee long ago in my heart,--once upon that mountain, when thou wast
+sick."...
+
+This startled him, and he came to himself; he was indeed on the
+mountain,--but he had forgotten the sickness. Now, kneeling, he threw
+his arms around the cold stone, and prayed for her whom he so loved, and
+who, also, surely had prayed here; and his head sank, weeping and
+darkened, upon the altar. He heard human steps approaching down below on
+the winding hill, and, with trembling joy, he thought it might be his
+father; but he boldly remained on his knees. At last there stepped in
+across the flowery border a tall, bent old man, like the noble bishop of
+Spangenberg; his calm countenance smiled full of eternal love, and no
+pains appeared upon it, and it seemed to fear none. The old man, in mute
+gladness, pressed the youth's hands together as a sign that he should
+pray on, knelt down beside him, and that ecstasy to which frequent
+prayer transfigures one spread its saintly radiance over that form full
+of years. Singular was this union and this silence. The fragment of the
+moon, which was all that yet jutted above the earth, burned darklier,
+and at last went down; then the old man rose, and, with that easiness of
+transition which comes from being habituated to devotion, put questions
+about Albano's name and residence; after the answer, he merely said,
+"Pray on thy way to God, the all-gracious,--and go to sleep before the
+storm comes, my son!"
+
+Never can that voice and form pass away out of Albano's heart; the soul
+of the old man peered, like the sun in an annular eclipse, shining, full
+circle, out over the dark body, which strove to hide it with its
+earth-mould. Deeply struck, to the very roots of his nerves, Albano
+rose, and the broadening flashes of the lightning showed him now, down
+below near the enchanted garden, a second dark, entangled, horrible one,
+a sort of Tartarus to the Elysium. He departed with singular and
+conflicting emotions,--the future, and the beings therein, appeared to
+him, on his way, to stand very near, and already to run to and fro like
+theatre lights behind the transparent curtain,--and he longed for some
+weighty enterprise as a refreshment for his inflamed heart; but he had
+to rest his head, full of this heath-fire, on the pillow, and the high
+thunder, like a god of the night, mingled with its first claps in his
+dreams.
+
+
+24. CYCLE.
+
+THE unknown old man lingered many days in Albano's soul, and would not
+stir. In fact, the channel of his life now needed a bend, to break the
+stress of the stream. Fate can educate men like him only by a change of
+circumstances, just as it can weak ones only by a continuance of the
+same. For if it went on much longer in this way, and the chandelier in
+his temple should, by inner earthquakes, be thrown into ever increasing
+vibrations, the consequence would be, at last, that no candle could any
+longer burn therein. What Imperial-Diet-grievances did not Wehrfritz and
+Hafenreffer already jointly present on the subject, when the shipmaster
+Blanchard, in Blumenbühl, went up with his aerostatic soap-bubbles, and
+Zesara could hardly, by almost the absolute despotism of the Director,
+be kept back from embarking! And how divine a thing does he not imagine
+it would be, not only to hurl down to the earth its iron rings and
+arrest warrants, and soar away, perpendicularly, above all its
+market-rubbish and boundary-trees and Hercules'-pillars, and sweep
+around it as a constellation, but also to hover above the magic Lilar
+and the hermetically-sealed Linden-city with devouring eyes, and to lift
+a whole, full, heavy world to his thirsty heart, by the handle of a
+single look!
+
+But fate broke the fall of this swift stream. Namely, as good luck would
+have it, the Blumenbühl church had this long time been daily threatening
+to tumble down,--and I was wishing the Whitsuntide lightning had gone in
+there, and had made ears and legs for the building committee,--when by
+still greater good luck the old Prince was taken sick. Now in the church
+was the hereditary sepulchre of the Prince, which could not conveniently
+serve, on the other hand, as the hereditary sepulchre of the church.
+
+About this time it must needs happen that the old Princess, with the
+Minister Froulay, passed through the village. The two had long since
+commissioned themselves as Imperial vicars, business-agents, and
+sceptre bearers of the State, because the feeble old gentleman had been
+glad to give up the amusements and burdens, the glitter and weight of
+the crown, and admit those two feudal guardians into the hereditary
+office of the sceptre. In short, the age of the church, together with
+that of the princely couple, decided the building of a new roofing and
+covering for the vault.
+
+The Provincial-Director was one of the inspecting committee, and invited
+the distinguished company to his house; among whom, the Provincial
+architect, Dian, and the Counsellor of Art, Fraischdörfer, as artists,
+and the little princess as naturalist, are particularly to be noticed.
+
+The poor dancing-master got wind of the procession through a telescope,
+just as he was stretching his feet, full of _pas_, into a warm
+foot-bath. It will not gratify anybody, that the Vienna gentleman had
+but one thing in common with the old Magister,--what the Devil shares
+with the horse, namely, the foot, which measured its good foot and a
+half, Paris measure, and that, therefore, his double root, in the narrow
+forcing-pots of shoes, shot out into a fruit-bearing, knotty-stock, full
+of inoculating eyes, i. e. corns. To-day he would have cut these gordian
+knots in a foot-bath; but, as it was, he must, on occasion of such a
+visit,--although he had never stretched them,--put on his tightest
+children's shoes, for effect. Thus are men often caught with too tight
+shoes, as monkeys are with too heavy ones.
+
+Albano, on the contrary, stood in buskins. In general, every one who
+simply came from Pestitz, had, in his eyes, consecrated holy earth on
+his soles; and here he looked with the loving reverence of a village
+youth upon a somewhat oldish, but red-cheeked and tall-built princess,
+whose chin was bent up by time, and whose friendly face--perhaps, by way
+of hiding the many wrinkles--was buried deep in a whole bush of
+millinery. She kept this head moving to and fro with a smiling
+comparison, as of brother and sister, between him and Rabette; for
+mothers always look, in mothers, for the children first. He should have
+further known that he had before him a friend of Liana in the
+frizzle-headed _little_ princess, who, although already of his age, yet
+with a friendly liveliness, which can never be subscribed to by the
+court-marshalship, looked up at all, and even took Rabette by the hand,
+and drew from her an indescribably good-natured and stiff smile. The
+formidable one of the party was to him the Minister, a man full of
+strong parts, both of body and soul, full of furious, murderous
+passions, only that they lay bound with flowery chains, and with respect
+to whom, although his hard face was written over only out of courtliness
+with the twelve friendly signs of the zodiac of love, it would not be
+specially apparent how one could be father and guide to the weak-nerved
+Liana, when the iron parts, of which man carries more in his blood than
+any other animal, had settled, not as in the case of Götz of
+Berlichingen, into his hand, but into his brow and heart.
+
+I give merely a flying glance at the only member of the company who was
+intolerable to Albano,--the art-counsellor, Fraischdörfer, who had
+thrown off his face, like the drapery of the ancients, into folds of
+simple and noble greatness. This man, I must explain, had wanted for
+many years to have our bashful little hero sit to him, even to the very
+pit of his stomach, in order to represent, whether in a crayon likeness
+or a medallion I know not, his face, and the broad, high, Plato-like
+breast shining out from his shirt-frills. But the bashful child played
+about himself with his hands and feet so lustily, that nothing could
+possibly be caught and copied except the naked face without the
+pedestal, the thorax. Before me, on the contrary, dear academy, must
+thou now for years keep thyself on the model-stand, like a stylite, and
+expose to my drawing-pen thy head and thy breast, together with its
+cubic contents, not to mention the groupings at all.
+
+He had, perhaps, to thank his noble form for it, that the beautifully
+built, straight-nosed, and magnificently slender Dian--with his raven
+hair and black, eagle eye, who in every pliant motion showed a higher
+freedom of carriage than is gained in ball-rooms and court-saloons--came
+up to him warmly, and, with very few glances, saw to the green bottom of
+the deep but clear sea of the young man, and discerned the pearl-banks
+there. Albano, with his too loud, vehement voice,--with his respectful
+but sharply-moving eyes,--with his rooted posture,--expressed an
+agreeable mixture of inward culture and ascendency with external rustic
+modesty and mildness, like a tulip-tree not as yet cut up for a
+tulip-bed,--a rural hermitage and log-house with golden furniture. He
+had the faults of youth in its recluseness; but men and winter radishes
+must be sowed _far apart_, in order that they may grow _large_: men and
+trees that stand near together have, it is true, a more slender and
+tapering trunk, but no power to brave the tempest, nor such a rich crown
+and branching as those that stand free. With the most unembarrassed
+heartiness, the architect disclosed to the glowing youth, "They should
+from this time forth see each other every week, since he was to come
+daily to oversee the building of the church."
+
+The whole Wehrfritz household is now peeping out after the majestic
+procession, even to the last disappearing chariot-wheel, and is, of
+course, eager to say three words upon the lavender-water of joy that
+leaves such a fragrance behind it, which the procession had sprinkled
+into all corners and upon all pieces of furniture. From the Master of
+exercises--who, with the compression-machines on his feet, stood only so
+far as the excrescences in Purgatory, but from there up to the crown of
+his head in heaven (because the affable Princess had remembered very
+well his five positions)--even to the modest Rabette, the eulogist of
+her victorious rival,--and even to Albina, who was agreeably impressed
+with such warm, motherly love in a Fürstinn toward the Princess,--and
+even to the Director, who looked back with pleasure on the nobly
+sustained blade- and anchor-proof of his foster-son and the universal
+probity of this converted portion of the great world, because the man
+never observed that Princes and Ministers, just as they have in their
+wardrobes mountain- and mining-habits, so also carry about in their
+dressing-chamber Directorate-dresses, furred gowns of justice,
+consistorial sheep-skins, and women's opera-dresses;--from all these,
+even to the Director, the glad echo swelled, to die away in Zesara with
+an alarm-cannon. His ambition took arms; his liberty-tree shot forth
+into blossoms; the standards of his youthful wishes were consecrated and
+flung to the breeze of heaven; and on the myrtle crown he covered a
+heavy helm with a glittering, high-waving, plumed crest....
+
+The following Cycle is composed merely for the purpose of showing how
+all this is to be taken.
+
+
+25. CYCLE.
+
+It is also my opinion that the antiphonious double choir of the two
+educational colleagues, Wehmeier and Falterle, had hitherto trained our
+Norman, as well as two similar gymnasiarchs, Governess England and
+domestic French instructress France, have actually educated the
+charity-school-girl Germany according to the best school-books, so that
+now we, in our turn, are in a condition to school the Poles, and, with
+the ferule, from the desk of our princely schools, to kantschu them down
+as much as is necessary.
+
+But now too much had waked up in Albano. He felt overswelling energies
+which found no teacher. His father, roving round through Italy, seemed
+to be neglecting him. That seat of the muses, Pestitz,--which now had
+_one_ more muse added to its number,--seemed to be unjustly barred
+against him. Often he knew not how to stay away. Fancy, heart, blood,
+and ambition were at boiling heat. In such a case, as in every
+fermenting cask, nothing is more dangerous than an empty space, whether
+from a want of knowledge or of occupation.
+
+_Dian filled up the cask._
+
+He came each week from the city, as if he had to arrange the hammer-work
+of the church, according to plans, as well as the building of its walls.
+A youth who sees his first Greek cannot, at the outset, rightly believe
+it at all; he takes him for a classic glorification,--a printed sheet
+out of Plutarch. And if his heart burns like that of my hero, and if his
+Greek is of Spartan descent, like Dian,--namely, an unconquered
+_Mainotte_, who has been brought up in the classic double choir of the
+æsthetic singing-schools in Atiniah (Athens) and Rome,--then is it
+natural that the inspired youth should stand every day in the dust-and
+rubbish-clouds of the falling church-walls, and wait to see his
+commander come forth from behind the cloudy pillar.
+
+Dian accompanied his beloved in his walks, often read half the night
+with him, and took him with him on the architectural journeys which he
+had constantly to make into the country. He introduced him with inspired
+reverence into the holy world of Homer and of Sophocles, and went with
+him among the loftier beings of this twin Prometheus, those nobly
+formed, completely developed men, yet unperverted by a partial
+provincial culture, who, like Solomon, had a time for everything
+human,--for laughing, weeping, eating, fearing, and hoping,--and who
+shunned merely rude immoderateness; who sacrificed on the altars of all
+gods, but on that of Nemesis first of all. And Dian, whose inner man was
+a whole, from which no member is torn away, no one swollen, and all
+fully grown, himself went round with his darling as such a Greek of
+Homer and Sophocles. While Wehmeier and the foster-parents were always
+running after him with a pulpit and a pew, at every passionate
+expression of anger, or desire, or exultation, he, on the contrary, with
+fair, liberal freedom, made room for him to unfold himself to his full
+breadth and height. He respected in the youth the St. Elmo's or St.
+Helena's fire, as he did frost in an old man: the heart of vigorous men,
+he thought, must, like a porcelain vase, in the beginning, be turned too
+large and too wide; in the furnace of the world it would soon enough
+shrink up to a proper size. I too require of youth, at first,
+intolerance, then, after some years, tolerance,--that as the stony, sour
+fruit of a strong young heart, this as the soft winter-fruit of an older
+head.
+
+But while the Architect drew with him, and with him examined casts of
+the antiques and works of art, he at the same time made manifest most
+beautifully to the youth his love for the artistical _sign of the
+Balance_ in man (who ought to be his own work of art), and his aversion
+to every paroxysm, which breaks the outward beauty as well as the inward
+into folds and wrinkles, and his desire to regulate his form and his
+heart after the lofty pattern of repose on the antiques.
+
+The Architect, as artists often do, and the Swiss still oftener,
+preserved European culture and rural _naïveté_ and simplicity side by
+side, like his beloved profession, wherein, more than in other arts,
+beauty and surveying reason border upon each other; he therefore at
+first let Albano look in and listen at the window of the philosophical
+lecture-hall from without, standing in the open air. He led him, not
+into the stone-quarry, lime-pit, and timber-yard of metaphysics, but
+directly into the ready-made, beautiful oratory, formed of the materials
+thence collected, otherwise called Natural Theology. He did not let him
+forge and solder ring after ring of any iron chain of reasoning, but
+showed such a one to him as a deep-reaching well-chain, whereby Truth,
+sitting at the bottom, is to be drawn up; or as a chain hanging from
+heaven, whereby the lower gods (the philosophers) are to draw Jupiter
+down. In short, the _skeleton_ and _muscle-preparation_ of metaphysics
+he concealed in the _God-man_ of religion. And so it should be (in the
+beginning); grammar is learned from language more easily than the latter
+from the former; criticism from works of art, the skeleton from the
+body, more easily than the reverse; although we always do reverse it.
+Unfortunate is it for the youth of our day, that they are obliged to
+shake the drops and the insects from the tree of knowledge, before the
+fruit.
+
+And now he boldly threw open to him all the chamber-doors of the
+philosophical schools, i. e. the three heavens; for in this youthful
+season one still takes the wick of every learned light of the world for
+asbestos, as Brahmins dress themselves in asbestos; and the masses of
+ice around the poles of our spiritual world represent, at this early
+age, like the actual ones in the visible world, cities and temples on
+azure-blue columns.
+
+Now when Albano had read himself to the flaming point upon some great
+idea or other, as Immortality or Deity, he had then to write upon it;
+because the Architect believed, and I too, that in the educational world
+nothing goes beyond writing,--not even reading and speaking; and that a
+man may read thirty years with less improvement than he would gain by
+writing a half. It is just in this way that we authors mount to such
+heights; hence it is that even the worst of us, if we hold out, become
+somewhat, at last, and write ourselves up from Schilda to Abdera, and
+from there away up to Grub Street.
+
+But what a glowing hour then came on for our darling! What are all
+Chinese lantern-festivals to the high festival for which an inflamed
+youth lights up all the chambers of his brain, and in this illumination
+throws out his first essays?
+
+In the forepart, and on the very threshold of the essay perhaps, Albano
+still crept along step by step, and made use merely of his head; but as
+he got further on, and his heart quivered with wings, and like a comet
+he must needs sweep along before only shimmering constellations of great
+truths, could he then restrain himself from imitating the rosy-red
+Flamingo, who, in his passage towards the sun, seems to paint himself
+into a flying brand, and to clothe himself in wings of fire? When at
+length he reached the practical application, verily every one was like
+the others; in each he formed and sowed an Arcadia full of human angels,
+who in three minutes could cross over on a Charon's pontoon thrown in
+for the purpose, and land in the Elysium which floated so near: in every
+one of these practical applications all men were saints, all saints
+beatified; all mornings blossoms, and all evenings fruit; Liana
+perfectly well, and he not far from it--her lover;--all nations ascended
+more easily the noonday heights; and he upon his own, like men upon
+mountains, saw everything good nearer to him. Ah! the whole boggy
+present, full of stumps and blood-suckers, had he kicked aside, and was
+now encircled only with floating green worlds, full of pastures, which
+the sun-ball of his head had projected into the ether.
+
+Blissful, blissful time! thou hast long since gone by! O, the years in
+which man reads and makes his first poems and systems, when the spirit
+creates and blesses its first worlds, and when, full of fresh
+morning-thoughts, it sees the first constellations of truth come up
+bringing an eternal splendor, and stand ever before the longing heart,
+which has enjoyed them, and to which time, by and by, offers only
+astronomical newspapers and refraction-tables on the morning-stars, only
+antiquated truths and rejuvenated lies! O, then was man, like a fresh,
+thirsty child, suckled and reared with the milk of wisdom; at a later
+period he is only cured with it, as a withered, sceptical, hectic
+patient! But thou canst, indeed, never come back again, glorious season
+of _first love_ for the truth, and these sighs can only give me a
+warmer remembrance of thee; and if thou ever shouldst return, it
+certainly could not be down here in the low mine-shaft of life, where
+our morning splendor consists of the little flames that play upon the
+quartz crystals, and our sun is a mine-lamp,--no; but it may happen
+then, when death reveals us, and tears away from over the heads of the
+pale-yellow workmen the coffin-lid of the mine-shaft, and we now again
+stand as first men on a new, full earth, and under a fresh, immeasurable
+heaven!
+
+Into this golden age of his heart fell also his acquaintance with
+Rousseau and Shakespeare, of whom the former exalted him above his
+century, and the latter above this life. I will not say here how
+Shakespeare ruled, sovereign, in his heart,--not through the breathing
+of living characters, but by lifting him up out of the loud kingdom of
+earth into the silent realm of infinity. When one dips his head at night
+under water, there is an awful stillness round about him; into a similar
+supernatural stillness of the under-world does Shakespeare introduce us.
+
+What many schoolmasters may blame in Dian is this, that he gave the
+youth all books indiscriminately, without any exact course of reading.
+But Alban asked, in later years: "Is such a course anything but folly?
+Is it possible? For does Fate ever arrange the appearance of new books,
+or systems, or teachers, or outward circumstances, or conversations, so
+according to paragraphs, that one needs nothing more than to transcribe
+all that passes upon the memory, and he shall have the order into the
+bargain? Does not every head need and make its own? And does more depend
+on the order in which the meats follow each other, or on the digestion
+of them?"
+
+
+26. CYCLE.
+
+While Dian was causing a nobler temple to go up in the heavens than the
+stone one in the village, the Princess, whose _castrum doloris_ this was
+to be, died; they had, therefore, to deposit her remains for a time in
+the accommodations of a Pestitz church. This changed one or two thousand
+things. The Crown-prince of Hohenfliess, Luigi, must now, will he nill
+he, come back from Italy, to the princely chair, in which the old man,
+bent up with years, had, for a long time, diminutive and speechless,
+been rather lying than sitting,--although the Minister standing behind
+the princely arm-chair took off his figure and voice in a sufficiently
+lively manner. Don Gaspard, who had not listened to any of the previous
+letters of Albano, now despatched to him the following orders, which
+rushed like fiery wine through his veins: "On my way back from Italy we
+meet, in thy birthplace, _Isola Bella_. Thou wilt be sent for." Even
+readers who have not had a week's practice in folding and sealing
+letters of a diplomatic corps, will easily observe that the Knight of
+the Fleece is thinking to bring his son acquainted with the young
+prince, and to establish and insure their first Pestitz connections.
+
+But I beg the world now to measure the Paradise of a man, who after so
+long seafaring at last sees the long shores of the new world stretch out
+into the ocean. Was not life at this moment open to him in a hundred
+directions? Laurel-wreaths, ivy-wreaths, flower-wreaths, myrtle-wreaths,
+wheat-garlands,--all these crowns overhung the great gate of Pestitz and
+its house-doors. Thou brother, thou sister, (I mean Roquairol and
+Liana,) what a full, yearning soul was marching to meet you! and what a
+dreaming and innocent one! Homer and Sophocles, and the ancient history
+and Dian, and Rousseau, that magus of youth,--and Shakespeare and the
+British weeklies (wherein a higher and more human poesy speaks than in
+their abstract poems),--all these had left behind in the happy youth an
+everlasting light, an unparalleled purity, wings for every Mount Tabor,
+and the fairest but most difficult wishes. He resembled, not the urbane
+French, who, like ponds, reflect the hue of the nearest bank, but those
+loftier men, who, like the sea, wear the color of the boundless heavens.
+
+In fact, now was the ripest, best point of time for his change. Through
+Dian and his journeys, even Albano's _exterior_ man had been trained to
+grace in fashionable saloons. Men, like bullets, go farthest when they
+are smoothest; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond-points
+enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is wounded, and even uncommon
+worth is an uncommon fault,--as _high_ towers, for that very reason,
+appear _bent over_. Zesara learned, even outside the circle of country
+youngsters, a readiness of ideas and words, which formerly stood at his
+service only in a state of enthusiasm; for wit, generally a foe of the
+latter, was with him merely a servant and child thereof. He did not,
+like witty sucklings, coquette with all ideas, but he was either beset
+by them or not touched at all; hence came that silent, slow,
+unostentatious ripening of his power; he resembled mountains of a
+gradual ascent, which always yield more booty than those which rise
+abruptly. With great trees, the seed is smaller and in spring the
+blossoms later than in the case of small bushes.
+
+The time ere Gaspard's messenger came to take him away was to the
+detained youth an eternity, and the village a prison; it shrivelled up
+to the household-buildings of a convent. The hidden plan of his life,
+written, however, by encaustic into his brain, was, as with all such
+young men, this, to be and do nothing more than--everything; that is to
+say, to bless, to glorify, and to enlighten at once himself and a
+country,--to be a Frederick II. upon the throne; in other words, a
+storm-cloud, which should contain thunders of excommunication for the
+sinner, electrical light for the deaf, blind, and lame, showers for the
+insects, and warm drops for thirsty flowers, hail for enemies, an
+attraction for everything, for leaves and dust, and a rainbow for the
+end. Now, as he could not succeed Frederick II., he proposes to be
+hereafter minister at least,--especially as Wehrfritz made so much out
+of this by-sceptre,--this offshoot and chip of the mother sceptre,--and
+in his spare hours a great poet and philosopher withal.
+
+I shall be delighted, Count, if thou shouldst become a second Frederick,
+the second and only; my book will profit by it and I myself mould my
+future thereby as a rare historiographer, compounded of Zenophon,
+Curtius, and Voltaire!
+
+
+27. CYCLE.
+
+Zesara will never forget the spring evening, on which he saw a passenger
+in a greatcoat,--a little limping and covered with brown
+travelling-paint, to which his white eyeballs formed a shining
+contrast,--wade across the shallow brook beside the high bridge, and
+how, further, the passenger took with him a watch-man's cane which the
+then Lieutenant of the Beggar's Police had just leaned against his
+house-door, a vicarious fellow-laborer, and handed the said cane, on his
+way, to a cripple, with the words: "Old man, I have nothing by me
+smaller than the stick. If anybody asks you about it, just tell them you
+are keeping guard in the village against the confounded beggar tribe,
+but have not eyes enough." At the same time our pilgrim reached out to a
+rector's little son, who needed it for about three minutes, his
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+It was of course our old Librarian by title, Schoppe, whom Don Gaspard
+had despatched with the note of invitation for Isola Bella. Albano's
+delight was so great, that only some days later did the youth mistake
+the odd humorist, whereas the latter soon correctly weighed the light,
+ardent, still wildling. Did it not fare still worse with the old
+Provincial Director, who, merely because he rated the _body_ politic of
+the Empire as high as if he were the installed _soul_ therein, upon
+Schoppe's sallies against the constitution, came out in a patriotic
+fury: "Sir," said he, in an excited manner, "even if there were a flaw
+anywhere, still a true German would be bound to maintain a profound
+silence on the subject, unless he can help the matter, especially in
+such cursed times."
+
+The finest of all was, that, at Luigi's request, the Architect had to
+set out at the same time, for the purpose of fetching casts of antiques
+from Rome.
+
+And now march on, that soon ye may come back again, and we may at last
+for once fairly enter Pestitz! It may well be expected that thou, good
+child (I should rather say, wild-bee), wilt take thy flight from the
+rural honey-tree into the glass beehive of the city, with deeper pangs
+than thou hadst imagined beforehand,--has not even the old foster-father
+gone off on his journey without saying his farewell, only to escape
+thine?--and, as to thy good mother, it seems to her as if one of the
+angry Parcæ were tearing a son from her breast, as if his tender
+love-bond, woven only of childish familiarity, would not stretch out
+into the far future,--and thy sister locks herself up in the attic, her
+rustic heart raging with fiery torments, and cannot say anything to
+thee, nor give thee anything, but a letter-case previously and privately
+worked by her with the silken circumscription: "Remember us!" and even
+on thy laurel-seeking head will the triumphal arch or rainbow of
+leave-taking, when thou passest under it, fling down heavy, heavy drops,
+(ah, they will continue to hang longer on the eyes that look after
+thee!) thy honest old teacher Wehmeier will pour out upon thee the last
+stream of his words and tears, and say, and thy tender heart will not
+smile at it: "He is a worn out, old fellow, and has now nothing before
+him but the hole (the grave); thou, on the contrary, art a fresh, young
+blood, full of languages and antiquities and magnificent, god-given
+talents,--of course he shall not live to see thee make a famous man, but
+his children well may; and these poor worms,--thou must one day adopt
+them, young master!"
+
+Thou pure soul, on every familiar house, on every dear garden and valley
+will sorrow, indeed, sharpen her clasp-knife, and tear open therewith
+softly gushing wounds in thy glowing, tender heart. What do I say? even
+from thy friendly morning- and evening-heights, the nunnery-gratings of
+thy holiest hopes, and from Liana herself, thou wilt seem to be stealing
+away.
+
+But cast thy weeping eyes over the broad, blue Italy, and dry them in
+the spring breezes. Life begins,--the signals for the martial exercises
+and tournaments of manly youth are given, and, in the midst of the
+Olympic battle-games, thou wilt hear the music of neighboring concert-
+and dancing-halls magnificently pealing around thee.
+
+What phantasies are these I am playing here? What! is it not more than
+too well known to all of us, that he has been gone this long time, ever
+since the very first Jubilee-period,--yes, and come back again, and has
+already, ever since the second--and we are now counting the fourth--been
+sitting in company with the Librarian and the Lector, on horseback,
+before Pestitz, unable to get in, on account of the barricade of
+the----
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] In Catania, the veil of St. Agatha is the only antidote to
+Etna.
+
+[39] Allusion to the torches, before which the Colosseum and the
+Antiques and the glaciers, which are both, are seen magically
+gleaming.
+
+[40] As the Queen of Heaven, Juno is always, by the ancients,
+clothed in a blue veil.--_Hagedorn on Painting._
+
+[41] An old machine that fires many shots at once.
+
+[42] In Italy the stars look not silvery, but golden.
+
+[43] In a tempestuous atmosphere, little flames are emitted by
+orange-lilies, gold-flowers, sunflowers, Indian pinks, &c.
+
+[44] Probably on fluttering gold plates after the birds.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTH JUBILEE?
+
+GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER OF THE
+KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL
+GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY
+PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION FOR
+TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE.
+
+
+28. CYCLE.
+
+When he came to the fork of the road, of which the right prong points to
+Lilar, Albano, with a somewhat heavy heart, spurred his horse across,
+and flew up the hill, till the bright city, like an illuminated St.
+Peter's dome, blazed far and wide in this spring night of his fancies.
+It lay, like a giant, with its shoulders (the upper city) resting on the
+heights, and stretched its other half (the lower city) down into the
+valley. It was noon, and not a cloud in heaven; at noonday a city stands
+before you in full, white disk, whereas a village does not, until
+evening, come out of its first quarter into full light. It was well
+fortified, not by Rimpler or Vauban, but by a blooming palisade of
+lindens. The long wall of the palaces of the mountain-city gleamed from
+above a welcome to our Albano, and the statues, on their Italian roofs,
+directed themselves towards him as way-guides and criers of joy; over
+all the palaces ran the iron framework of the lightning-rods, like a
+throne-scaffolding of the thunder, with golden sceptre-points; down
+along the side of the mountain lay camped the lower city, by the side of
+the stream between shady avenues, with its gay façades towards the
+streets, and its white back turned toward Nature; carpenters were
+hammering away like a forge on the green-sward among the peeled trunks
+of trees, and the children were clattering round with the birch-bark;
+cloth-makers were stretching out green cloths like bird-nets in the sun;
+from the distance came white-covered carriers'-wagons jogging along the
+country-road, and by the sides of the way shorn sheep were grazing under
+the warm shadow of the rich, bright linden-blossoms,--and over all these
+groups the noonday chime of bells from the dear, familiar towers (those
+relics and light-houses that gleamed out of the dusk of his earlier
+days), floated like one all-embracing and animating soul, and called
+together the friendly throngs of people.
+
+Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the
+open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who
+knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be
+standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be
+unravelled,--where all household gods and household fates of his nearest
+future lie hid,--where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of
+Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching
+close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in
+the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of
+light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner
+mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of
+the best.
+
+Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have
+happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were
+singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the
+passers below, and a building-orator,[45] on the ridgepole of a new
+house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his
+own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding;
+yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation
+of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the
+Muses,[46] who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery
+eye to find his Roquairol,--after all this, when we reach his future
+residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.
+
+It came from the Land-physicus[47] Sphex, his future landlord, who is to
+resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his
+cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper
+city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are
+domiciled the students and the _city_. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex
+was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat
+upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's
+drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his
+drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had
+turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he
+soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but
+during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"
+
+The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the
+house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to
+stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly,
+"Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor
+of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a
+picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the
+dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his
+rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on
+the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his
+foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had
+been sent after him,--fair reflections from the still land of youth,
+left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only
+concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be
+planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the
+goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the
+clare-obscure, made the forms of youth--many of them armed, many
+crowned, a troop of fates and graces--beset his heart, which had
+hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft
+and languid _for three minutes_; verily, to a youth, especially this
+one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring
+volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer,
+are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the
+physical.
+
+Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared
+his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired
+the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation
+to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son,
+who, with two others, named Boerhave and Galen, had hitherto been
+acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind
+a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some
+connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days
+he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?"
+asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked
+anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears,
+and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.
+
+The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary,
+prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old
+prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful
+event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz,
+and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with
+lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son,
+and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people
+had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the
+prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had
+his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death,
+postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving
+sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the
+case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his
+white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that
+time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether
+a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much
+silk in a period of such political embezzlement. "But," replied
+Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs,
+like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still
+they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is
+generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no
+easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and
+corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal
+death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal
+graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children,
+the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new
+inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies,
+we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it
+does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal
+Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means,
+to announce."
+
+Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while,
+brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open,
+with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover;
+but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like
+a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was
+his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his
+head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the
+impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury
+to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to
+conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a
+flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner
+twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook
+his head still more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from
+the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap
+almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from
+this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other
+of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the
+intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to
+conceal.
+
+At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the
+tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the
+events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of
+the letter!
+
+
+29. CYCLE.
+
+When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was
+already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with
+three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and
+three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress,
+and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the
+pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well,
+and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti:
+"The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the
+less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which
+live on _fruits_, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there
+sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on
+_leaves_,--for instance, the leaf-lice,--cleave together nest-wise."
+Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart
+the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation
+and season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it.
+Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common,
+but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of
+bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of
+love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call
+starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too
+near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance
+of bodies.
+
+The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream
+through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with
+whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had
+already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures
+upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a
+treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the
+anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting
+the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly,
+simple, flabby man, named _Malt_, he had a year since, when certain
+symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on
+condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead.
+Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse
+daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a
+horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he
+allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor
+passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.
+
+As to the drum, the corpse is obliged--since he is full as hard of
+hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the
+very reason that he never hears one--to carry that round, strapped to
+him, because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his
+employer and prosector has to censure in him.[49] The Doctor now began
+to scold at him down below--Schoppe stood listening at the window--in
+the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of
+blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under
+your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose
+away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you
+have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can,
+and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in
+this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if
+they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks
+clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret
+of thy trouble with me,--there is no real blessing upon our grease,--and
+one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father,
+verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."
+
+
+30. CYCLE.
+
+The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs,
+when translated, thus:--
+
+"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a
+letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence
+of thy sister's asphyxias; it was written on Good Friday, and looked
+forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the
+event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of
+the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes
+some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain.
+I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful,
+armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the _jongleur_ fast; but
+bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in
+Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old
+Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!
+
+                                  "G. DE C."
+
+"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion,
+and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was
+denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see
+each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and
+smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand
+so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the
+melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and
+decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had
+carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that
+she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood
+contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What
+destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that
+voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and
+boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals.
+"Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not, however, in this
+case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed
+terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced
+for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the
+most beloved.
+
+In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their
+household arrangements,--which, however, had never yet been able to
+efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of
+the Linden-city,--the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary
+prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day
+copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him
+there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the
+world a bill of fare _raisonné_ of all the show-dishes in the gallery;
+but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over
+whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame
+would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly
+covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban,
+in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of
+his mother's,[50] and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had
+no one been there.
+
+But the Princess Julienne was there, whom he (as we all do) still
+recognized right well as a Blumenbühl acquaintance, as she also did him.
+She was truly full of youthful charms, but one did not find these out
+till one had been for two days violently in love with her; that made her
+every minute afterward prettier, as in fact love is rather the father
+than the son of the goddess of grace, and his quiver the best casket of
+jewels and the richest toilet-box, and his bandage the best _mouchoir
+de Venus_ and beauty-patch that I know.
+
+She was just sketching the gypsum-cast of a noble old head, which seemed
+to the Count as if it must have been drawn from the antique-cabinet of
+his memory, and toward which his swelling heart flowed out right
+lovingly; but he could not recall the original. At last Julienne, in
+despite of etiquette, said, looking up most kindly, "Ah, dear Augusti,
+my father lies dead in Lilar." The word Lilar suddenly colored, in
+Albano, the pale image of recollection,--perfectly like this white bust
+had the old man in the moonshine looked, who, in that poetical
+summer-night, pressed Zesara's hands together on the mountain for
+prayer, and said, "Go home to sleep, dear son, ere the storm comes." Now
+another would have inquired after the name of the bust, and then, and
+not till then, have disclosed the nocturnal history; but the Count, in
+his warmth, did merely the latter, after waiting a short time for the
+conversation to run out. Augusti, when Albano began the history--to
+_him_ a foreign one--of his acquaintance with the original, was on
+thorns to interrupt him; but Julienne gave him a nod, to let him go on,
+and the youth true-heartedly communicated to the sympathizing soul the
+beautiful meeting, with a tenderness of emotion and fire, both of which
+increased when her eyes flowed over into her smiles. "It was my
+father,--that is his cast," said Julienne, weeping and glad. Albano,
+after his manner, clasped his hands together, with a sigh, before the
+bust, and said, "Thou noble, heartily-beloved form!" and his large eye
+gleamed with love and sorrow.
+
+The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and
+she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life
+is truly only a longer _punishment of bearing arms_ (as, according to
+the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are
+true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is
+there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female
+pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,--but
+the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the
+eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve
+times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and
+others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count
+(while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more
+brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more
+childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not
+possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut
+himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at
+Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever,
+and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),--and how she
+and Fräulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the
+half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion
+to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber
+of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved;
+how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever
+slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every
+hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as
+one going to bed.
+
+We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again,
+like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the
+grave; and when, like flowers sleeping at evening, they become
+_undistinguishable_, and grow all alike, even before death makes them
+so.
+
+The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these
+funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation
+by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana.
+But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this
+friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in
+which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her
+bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of
+blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to
+portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.
+
+The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other
+through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other
+without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as
+the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but
+they loved each other intensely,--with eyes, lips, and hearts,--like two
+good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made
+it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same
+with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily
+imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once
+painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano,
+as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For
+Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates
+to the highest heavens in his innermost being!
+
+Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself
+without the fee-provost Hafenreffer), have been able to observe
+anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in
+his face, and rapidity of utterance.
+
+
+31. CYCLE.
+
+Into the midst of these delineations and enjoyments the successor, or
+rather the _afterwinter_ of the cold old man, Luigi, suddenly entered.
+With a flat, carved work of spongy face, on which nothing expressed
+itself but the everlasting discontent of life-prodigals, and with a
+little full-grown miniver[51] on his head (as forerunner of the
+wisdom-teeth), and with the unfruitful superfetation of a voluminous
+belly, he came up to Albano with the greatest courtliness, in which a
+flat frostiness towards all men stood prominent. He immediately began to
+dust about him with the bran of empty, rapid, disconnected questions,
+and was constantly in a hurry; for he suffered almost more ennui than he
+caused; as in general, there is no one with whom life drags so
+disagreeably as with him who tries to make it shorter. Luigi had run
+over the earth as quickly as through a powdering room, and had, as in
+such a room, become decently gray; the milk-vessels of his outer and
+inner man had, because they were to be converted into cream-pots and
+custard-cups, for that very reason, perverted themselves into
+poison-cups and goblets of sorrow. As often as I pass along before a
+painted prince's-suite in a corridor, I always fall upon my old project,
+and say, with entire conviction: "Could we only contrive for once, like
+the Spartans and all the older nations, to get a regent to the throne in
+a _healthy_ state, then we should have a _good_ one into the bargain,
+and all would go well. But I know these are no times for such a thing.
+It is a sin, that only at torture do surgeons and physicians assist, not
+at joy, to point out nicely the degree of pleasure as they do of the
+rack, and to indicate the innocent conditions."
+
+Albano, a stranger in the company and in the eyes of this class of men,
+looked upon the gulf between himself and Luigi as much less deep than it
+was; it was merely annoying and uncomfortable to him, as it is to
+certain people, when, without their knowledge, a cat is in the chamber.
+The progress of moral enervation and refinement will yet so cleanse and
+equalize all our exteriors,--and according to the same law, indeed, by
+which _physical weakness_ throws back the _eruptions of the skin_ and
+drives them into the _nobler_ parts,--that verily an angel and a satan
+will come at last to be distinguishable in nothing except in the heart.
+Alban had already brought with him from Wehrfritz, whom he always heard
+contending for the right of the province against the prince, an aversion
+to his successor; so much the more easily flamed up in him a moral
+indignation, when Luigi turned toward the pictures and drew aside the
+curtains or aprons from several of the most indecent, in order, not
+without taste and knowledge, to appraise their artistic worth. A copied
+Venus of Titian, lying upon a white cloth, was only the forerunner.
+Although the innocent hereditary prince made his _voyage pittoresque_
+through this gallery with the artistical coldness of a gallery inspector
+and anatomist, and sought more to show than to enrich his knowledge,
+still the inexperienced youth took it all up with a deaf and blind
+passionateness, which I know not how to vindicate in any way, not even
+by the presence of the princess, and so much the less, because in the
+first place she busily divided her soul only between the gypsum-bust
+and its copy, and because, secondly, in our day, ladies' watches and
+fans (if they are tasty) have pictures on them which Albano would want
+other fans to hide. The two flames of wrath and shame overspread his
+face with a glowing reflection; but his awkward honesty of scorn
+contrasted with the ease of the Lector, who with his cold tone, quite as
+precise as it was light, preserved independence and protected purity.
+"They please me not, one of them," he said, with severity: "I would give
+them all away for a single storm of Tempesta's." Luigi smiled at his
+scholar-like eye and feeling. When they stepped into the second
+picture-chamber, Albano heard the Princess going away. As this apartment
+threatened him with still more rent veils of the _un_holiest, he took
+his leave without special ceremony, and went back without the Lector,
+who had to-day to give a reading.
+
+Never did Schoppe grasp his throbbing hand more heartily than this time;
+the aspect of an abashed young man is almost fairer (especially rarer)
+than that of an abashed virgin; the former appears more tender and
+feminine, as the latter appears more strong and manly, by a mixture of
+the indignation of virtue. Schoppe, who, like Pope, Swift, Boileau,
+forced into combination a sacred reverence for the sex with cynicism of
+dress and language, emptied the greatest vials of wrath upon all
+libertinage, and fell like a satirical Bellona upon the best free
+people; this time, however, he rather took them under his protection,
+and said, "The whole tribe love the blush of shame in others decidedly,
+and defend it more willingly than shamelessness, just as (and on the
+same kind of grounds) blind persons prefer the _scarlet_ color. One may
+liken them to _toads_, who set the costly toad-stone (their heart) on
+no other cloth as they do upon a _red_ one."
+
+The Lector--who with all his purity and correctness would, nevertheless,
+without hesitation, have helped a Scarron write his ode on the seat of a
+duchess--when he would treat the matter of the Count's flight, was at a
+loss what to make of it, when the latter sprinkled him with some
+rose-vinegar, and said, "The bad man's father is lying on the board, and
+one lies before his own iron brow: O, the bad man!" Certainly the
+physical and moral nearness of the two fair female hearts, and his love
+for them, had done most to excite the Count against Luigi's artistic
+cynicism. The Lector merely replied, "He would hear the same at the
+Minister's and everywhere; and his false delicacy would very soon
+surrender." "Do the saints," inquired Schoppe, "dwell only _upon_ the
+palaces and not _in_ them?" For Froulay's bore upon its platform a whole
+row of stone apostles; and on one corner stood a statue of Mary, which
+was to be seen from Sphex's house among nothing but roofs.
+
+Youthful Zesara! how does this marble Madonna chase the blood-waves
+through thy face, as if she were the sister of thy fairer one, or her
+tutelar and household goddess! But he took care not to hasten his
+entrance into this _Lararium_ of his soul, namely, the delivery of his
+father's letter of introduction, by a single whisper, for fear of
+suspicion; so many missteps does the good man make in the very gentile
+fore-court of love; how shall he stand in the fore-court of the women,
+or get a footing in the dim Holy of Holies?
+
+
+32. CYCLE.
+
+The Court now caused to be made known in writing (it could not speak for
+sorrow) that the dead Nestor had departed this life. I set aside here
+the lamentation of the city, together with the rejoicing of the same
+over the new perspective. The Land-physicus Sphex had to eviscerate the
+Regent like a mighty beast,--whereas we subjects are served up with all
+our viscera, like snipes and ground-sparrows, on the table of the worms.
+At evening, there reposed the pale one on his bed of state,--the
+princely hat and the whole electrical apparatus of the throne-thunder
+lay quite as still and cold beside him on a Tabouret; he had the
+suitable torches and corpse-watchers around him. These Swiss-guards of
+the dead (the sound of the word rings through me, and I at this moment
+see Liberty lying on her bed of state in the Alps, and the Swiss
+guarding her) consist, as is well known, of two regency-counsellors, two
+counsellors of the exchequer, and so on. One of the
+exchequer-counsellors was Captain Roquairol. It can be only touched upon
+here, in the way of interpolation, how this youth, who of financial
+matters understood little more than a treasury-counsellor in ----h,[52]
+arose, nevertheless, to be a counsellor in war-matters there,--namely,
+against his own will, through old Froulay, who (in himself no very
+sentimental gentleman) was always reviving and retouching the youthful
+remembrances of the old Prince, because, in this tender mood, one could
+get from him by begging what one would. How odious and low! so can a
+poor prince have not a smile, not a tear, not a happy thought, out of
+which some court-mendicant, who sees it, will not make a door-handle to
+open something for himself, or a dagger-handle to inflict a wound; not a
+sound can he utter which some forester and bugle-master of the chase
+shall not pervert to the purpose of a mouth-piece and tally-ho.
+
+Julienne, at nine o'clock in the evening, visited the only heart which,
+in the whole court, beat like hers and for hers,--her good Liana. The
+latter gladly offered her forehead to her commencing sick-headache, and
+sought only to feel and to still another's pain. The friends, who,
+before strangers' eyes, only displayed pleasantry, and before each other
+only a tender, enthusiastic seriousness, sank more and more deeply into
+this mood before the severe and religious lady of the Minister, who
+never found in Julienne so much soul as in the soft hour after weeping,
+as stock-gilliflowers begin to scent the air when they are sprinkled.
+Not the struggle, but the flight of pain, beautifies the person; hence
+the countenance of the dead is transfigured, because the agonies have
+cooled away. The maidens stood enthusiastically together at the window,
+the waxing moonlight of their fancy was made full moonlight by that of
+the outer world; they formed the nun's-plan to live together, and go in
+and out together for life. Often it seemed to them, in this still hour
+of emotion (and the thought made them shudder), as if the murmuring
+wings of departed souls swept by over them (it was only a couple of
+flies, who, with feet and wings, had caught a few tones on the harp of
+the Minister's lady); and Julienne thought most bitterly of her dead
+father in Lilar.
+
+At last she begged the sister of her soul to ride with her this night to
+Lilar, and to share and assuage the last and deepest woe of an orphan.
+She did it willingly; but the "yes" was hard to extort from the
+Minister's lady. I see the gentle forms step, from their long embrace in
+the carriage, out into the mourning chamber at Lilar,--Julienne, the
+smaller of the two, with quivering eyes and changing color; Liana, more
+pale with megrim and mourning, and milder and taller than her companion,
+having completed her growth in her twelfth year.[53]
+
+Like supernatural beings the two maidens beamed upon Roquairol's soul,
+already burning in every corner. A single tear-drop had power to bring
+into this calcining oven boiling and desolation. Already this whole
+evening had he been glancing at the old man with fearful shudderings at
+the childish end of that faded spirit, which once had been as fiery as
+his own now was; and the longer he looked, so much the thicker
+smoke-clouds floated from the open crater of the grave over into his
+green-blooming life, and he heard therein a thundering, and he saw
+therein an iron hand glowing and threatening to grasp at human hearts.
+
+Amidst these grim dreams, which illuminated every inner stain of his
+being, and which sternly threatened him that a day would come, when, in
+his volcano too, there would remain nothing fruitful but the--ashes, the
+mournful maidens entered, who, on their way, had wept only over the face
+that had grown _cold_, and now wept still more heavily over the form
+that had grown _beautiful_; for the hand of death had effaced from it
+the lines of the last years,--the prominent chin, the fire-mounds of the
+passions, and so many pains underscored with wrinkles, and had, as it
+were, painted upon the earthly tabernacle the reflection of that fresh,
+still morning light which now invested the disrobed soul. But upon
+Julienne a black taffeta-plaster on the eyebrows, which had been left
+behind by a blow,--this sign of wounds made a more violent impression
+than all signs of healing: she observed only the tears, but not the
+words of Liana. "O, how beautifully he rests there!" "But why does he
+rest?" said her brother, with that voice, murmuring from his innermost
+being, which she recognized as coming from the amateur-stage; and
+grasped her hand with agitation, because he and she loved each other
+fervently, and his lava broke now through the thin crust: "for this
+reason,--because the heart is cut out of his breast, because the wheel
+is broken at the cistern, because the fire-wheel of rapture, the
+fountain-wheel of tears, moves therein no more!"
+
+This cruel allusion to the opening of the body wrought terribly on the
+sick Liana. She must needs avert her eyes from the covered breast,
+because the anguish cramped the breath in her lungs; and yet the wild
+man, desolating others as well as himself, who had hitherto been silent
+by the side of the stiff corpse-guard, went on with redoubled crushing:
+"Feel'st thou how painfully this cricket-ball of fate, this Ixion's
+wheel of the wishes, rolls within us? Only the breast without a heart is
+calm."
+
+At once Liana took a longer and more intense look at the corpse; an
+ice-cold edge, as if of death's scythe, cut through her burning
+brain,--the funeral torches (it seemed to her) burned dimmer and
+dimmer,--then she saw in the corner of the chamber a dark cloud playing
+and growing up;--then the cloud began to fly, and, full of gushing
+night, rushed over her eyes,--then the thick night struck deep roots
+into her wounded eyes, and the affrighted soul could only say, "Ah,
+brother, I am blind!"
+
+Only hard man, but no woman, will be able to conceive that an æsthetic
+pleasure at the murderous tragedy found its way into Roquairol's
+frightful anguish. Julienne left the dead, and her old sorrow, and, with
+the new one, flung herself around her neck, and moaned: "O my Liana, my
+Liana! Seest thou not yet? Do look up at me!" The distracted and
+distracting brother led on the sister, upon whose pale cheeks only
+single drops fell like hard, cold water, with the sharp question: "Does
+no destroying angel, with red wings, whiz through thy night; hurls he no
+yellow vipers at thy heart, and no sword-fish into thy network of
+nerves, in order that they may be entangled therein, and whet their
+saw-teeth in the wounds? I am happy in my pain; such thistles scratch us
+up,[54] according to good moralists, and smooth us down too. Thou
+anguish-stricken blind one, what say'st thou,--have I made thee truly
+miserable again?" "Madman!" said Julienne, "let her alone: thou art
+destroying her." "O, he is not to blame for that," said Liana; "the
+headache long since made it misty to my eyes."
+
+The friends took their departure in double darkness, and therein will I
+leave it with all its agonies. Then Liana begged her maiden to say
+nothing of it to her mother so little time before sleep, since it might,
+perhaps, go away in the night. But in vain; the Minister's lady was
+accustomed to close her day on the bosom and lips of her daughter. The
+latter now came in, led along, and sought her mother's heart with a
+groping, sidelong motion, and, in this beloved neighborhood, could no
+longer refrain from a softer weeping; then, indeed, all was betrayed and
+confessed. The mother first sent for the Doctor before she, with wet
+eyes and with her gentle arms around her, heard her afflicted daughter's
+story. Sphex came, examined the eyes and pulse, and made no more of it
+than a nervous prostration.
+
+The Minister, who had everywhere in the house leading-hounds with
+fine--ears, came in, upon being informed; and while Sphex stood by, he
+made, except long strides, nothing but this little note, "_Voyez,
+Madame, comme votre le Cain[55] joue son rôle à merveille_."
+
+As soon as Sphex had gone out, Froulay let loose several
+billion-pounders and hand-grenades upon his lady. "Such," he observed,
+"are the consequences of your visionary scheme of education (to be sure
+his own, in respect to his son, had not turned out specially well). Why
+did you let the sick ninny go?" He would himself have still more gladly
+allowed it from courtly views; but men love to blame the faults which
+they have been saved the trouble of committing; in general, like
+head-cooks, they had rather apply the knife to the _white_- than to the
+_dark_-feathered fowl. "_Vous aimez, ce me semble, à anticiper le sort
+de cette reveuse un peu avant qu'il soit decidé de nôtre._"[56] Her
+silence only made him the more bitter. "_O, ce sied si bien à votre art
+cosmétique que de rendre aveugle et de l'être, le dieu de l'amour s'y
+prête de modèle._" Wounded by this extreme severity,--especially as the
+Minister himself had chosen and commanded this very _cosmetic_ education
+of Liana, against the maternal wishes, to gratify his political
+ones,--the mother had to go and hide and dry her wet eyes in her
+daughter's bosom. Married men and the latest literati regard themselves
+as flints, whose power of giving _light_ is reckoned according to their
+_sharp corners_. Our forefathers ascribed to a diamond belt the power to
+kindle love between spouses. I also still find in jewels this power;
+only this stone (which appertains to the flint species) leaves one,
+after the marriage-compact, as cold and hard as it is itself. Probably
+Froulay's marriage-bond was one of such precious stone.
+
+But the lady only said, "Dear Minister, leave we that! only spare you
+the sick one." "_Voilà précisement ce qui fût votre affaire_," said he,
+laughing scornfully. In vain did Liana eloquently and touchingly pour
+out to him her mistaken yet moving convictions, (aimed at the wall,
+however,) and plead for her brother, which everlasting advocacy of all
+sorts of people (which proved too much) was her only failing;--all in
+vain, for his sympathy with an afflicted one consisted in nothing but
+fury against the tormentors, and his love toward Liana showed itself
+only in hatred of the same. "Peace, fool! But _Monsieur le Cain_ comes
+not into my house, madam, till further orders!" Out of forbearance, I
+say nothing further to the old conjugal bully than go--to the devil, or
+at least to bed.
+
+
+33. CYCLE.
+
+The German public may still remember the _obligato-sheets_ promised in
+the Introductory Programme, and ask me what has become of them. The
+foregoing Cycle was the first, most excellent Public; but see through
+the matter, how it is with obligato-sheets, and that perhaps as much
+history lies therein as in any one Cycle, however it may be called.
+
+The Count had not yet learned anything of Liana's misfortune, when he,
+with the others, went down to the dinner of the Doctor, who to-day was
+very hospitable. They found him seized with a most violent fit of
+laughter, his hands thrust into his sides, and his eyes bent over two
+little ointment vessels on the table. He stood up, and was quite
+serious. The fact was, he found in Reil's Archives of Physiology, that,
+according to Fourcroy and Vauquelin, tears dye violet-juice green, and
+therefore contain alkali. In order to prove the proposition and the
+tears, he had thrown himself into a chair, and laughed in right hearty
+earnest, so as afterward to cry and get a drop or two for the
+brine-gauge of the proposition; he would gladly have wrought himself
+into another kind of emotion, but he understood his own nature, and knew
+that nothing could be got out of it so,--not a drop.
+
+He left the guests alone a moment,--the lady was not yet to be
+seen,--Malt sat on an ottoman,--the children had satirical looks,--in
+short, Impudence dwelt in this house as in her temple. Ridicule had no
+effect upon the old man, and he only countermanded what displeased
+himself, not what displeased others.
+
+At length the rosy-cheeked wife of the physician flourished into the
+apartment,--as preparatory course or preamble of the dinner,--with three
+or four _esprits_ or _feathers in her cap_,--with a dapple
+neck-apron,--in a red ball-dress, from which waltzing had taken out the
+color in which she had rouged,--and with a perforated fancy-fan. If I
+wished, I could be interested in her; for, touching these _esprits_
+(since the _esprit_, like the brain in Embrya, often sets itself upon
+the brain-pan, and there suns itself), she thought women and partridges
+were best served up at table with feathers on their heads; touching the
+fan, she meant to have it understood she had just come from a morning
+call (whereby she very clearly implied that ladies could no more go
+through the streets without their fan-stick than joiners without their
+rule); touching the rest, she knew the guest was a Count. Accordingly,
+it appears that she belongs to the honorables, who (for the most part),
+like rattlesnakes, are never better to be enjoyed than when one has
+previously put the head out of the way; but that we have still time
+enough to believe, when we come to understand her better.
+
+The beautiful Zesara was for her blind, deaf, dumb, destitute of smell,
+taste, feeling; but there are many women whom one cannot, with the
+greatest pains and tediousness, displease; Schoppe could do it more
+easily. Sphex, for his own personal predilections, made more out of a
+cell of fat in Malt than out of the whole cellular texture of a lady,
+even of his own; like all business people, he held women to be veritable
+_angels_, whom God had sent for the ministration of the saints (the
+business men).
+
+The dinner course began. Augusti, a delicate eater, enjoyed much, and
+took not only to the fine service, but to the torn napkins; the like of
+which he had often had in his lap at court, because there, in morals and
+in linen, rents are preferred to plasters. Soon, as usual, came forth
+even the outposts and first skirmishes of miserable dishes, the common
+prophets and forerunners of the best tit-bits, although at a hundred
+tables I have cursed them, that they did not, like good monthly
+magazines, give the best pieces first, and the most meagre last. The
+Doctor had already said to the three boys,--"Galen, Boerhave, Van
+Swieten, what is the polite way of sitting?" and the three physicians
+had already shoved three right hands between the waistcoat buttons, and
+three left hands into the waistcoat pockets, and sat waiting, "bolt
+upright" when good chap-sager was brought in for the dessert Sphex
+partly expressed pleasure in cheese, partly a horror of it, just as he
+found it in the way of his shop-business. He remarked, on one hand, how
+joiners, in their glue-pot, had no better glue than what stood here
+before them,--it had just that binding quality in a man,--yet he would
+rather, for his own individual self, with Dr. Junker, apply it
+externally, like arsenic; but he also confessed, on the other hand, that
+the chap-sager for the Lector was poison. "I would pledge myself for
+it," said he, "that you, if one could examine you, would be found
+hectic! the long fingers and the long neck speak in my favor, and
+particularly are white teeth, according to Camper, a bad sign. Persons,
+on the contrary, who have a set of teeth like my lady there may feel
+safe."
+
+Augusti smiled, and merely asked the Doctor's lady, at what time one
+could best gain access to the Minister.
+
+Such poisonous reflections, as well as cats'-dinners,[57] he gave out,
+not from satirical malice, but from mere indifference to others, whom,
+like an honest man, he never suffered in the least to sway him in his
+actions. With the liberty-cap of the doctor's hat on his head, he
+received, from his medical indispensableness, so many academic freedoms,
+that he, between his four house-walls, ate and acted not more freely
+than between the showy, bristling pale-work of the court. Did he ever
+there--I ask that--let a drop of sweet wine pass his lips without
+previously drawing out an Ephraimite, which did not itself outlive the
+probation-day, and hanging it in the glass, merely to prove before the
+court whether the Ephraimite therein did not grow black? And if the
+silver did so, was there not as good as a demonstration of the wine
+being oversmoked, and could not the physician have _applied_ the whole
+right neatly, court, sweetness, blackening, poisoning, and oversmoking,
+if he had been the man to do it?
+
+The Lector's accidentally inquiring about the time of seeing the
+Minister was what Albano had to thank for saving him from first learning
+the painful misfortune in the house of the Minister, or in the presence
+of the blind girl herself. "You can," answered Sara, the Doctoress,
+"also despatch the servant; he will subscribe for you all; I, however,
+pity none as I do the daughter." Now broke loose a storm of questions
+about the unknown accident. "It is so," began the physician, sulkily;
+but soon (because he saw in some eyes water for his mill, and because he
+sought to roll off all medical blame from himself upon Captain
+Roquairol) he set himself as well as he could to pathetic detail, and
+lied almost like a sentimentalist. With an unobserved hint to the
+_affected_ lady, he pushed an empty dish towards her as a lachrymatory,
+in order that nothing might be lost. From the eclipsed eyes of the
+vainly struggling youth, this first woe of his life snatched some great
+drops. "May recovery be possible?" asked Augusti, exceedingly troubled,
+on account of his connection with the family.
+
+"Certainly; it is a mere affection of the nerves," replied Schoppe,
+briskly, "and nothing more." Whytt relates, that a lady who had too much
+acid in her stomach (in the _heart_ it were still worse) saw everything
+in a _cloud_, as girls do at the approach of sick-headache. Sphex, who
+had lied only for the sake of pathos and alkali, and who was vexed that
+the Librarian should have been of his private opinion, answered just as
+if the latter had not spoken at all. "The highest degree of consumption,
+Mr. Lector, often winds up with blindness, and it were well, in this
+case, to prescribe for both. Meanwhile I am acquainted with a certain
+periodical nervous blindness. I had the case in a lady[58] whom I
+brought out of it merely by blood-letting, smoke of burnt coffee, and
+the evening fog from the water; this we are now trying again in the case
+of our nervous patient. A dutiful physician will, however, always wish
+the devil would take mother and brother."
+
+In other words, the return of Liana's periodical malady almost
+distracted him. Offences against his honor, his love, his sympathy,
+never wrought the Physicus into a heat; through all such he kept on his
+glazed frost surtout; but disturbances of his cures heated him even to
+the degree of flying to pieces; and so are we all a kind of
+Prince-Rupert's-drops, which can bear the hammer and never break, till
+one just breaks off the little thread point, and they fly into a
+thousand splinters; with Achilles, it was the heel, with Sphex, the
+medical D.'s ring-finger, with me, the writing-finger. The Doctor now
+shook out the contents of his heart, as some call their gall-bladder; he
+swore by all the devils he had done more for her than any and every
+physician,--he had, however, already foreseen that such a stupid
+education--merely to look well and pray and read and sing--would prove a
+cursed poor economy,--he had often longed to break the harmonica-bells
+and tambour-needles,[59]--he had often called the attention of the
+mother, with sufficient distinctness and without indulgence, to Liana's
+so-called charms, and to her sensibility, her bright redness of cheeks,
+and velvet-soft skin; but had seemed to himself, by so doing, almost to
+gratify more than to distress her. The only thing that delighted him
+was, that the maiden had, some years before, caught a deadly sickness
+from the first holy sacrament, from which he had tried to keep her away,
+because he had already experienced, in the case of a fourth patient, the
+most melancholy consequences from this holy act.
+
+To the astonishment of every one my Count took part against all with
+Roquairol. Ah, thy first spring-storms were even now whirling round
+imprisoned in thy bosom, without a friendly hand to give them an outlet,
+and thou wouldst cover thy bloody grief! And wast thou not seeking a
+spirit full of flames, and eyes full of flames for thine own, and
+wouldst thou not rather have entered into brotherhood with a thundering
+hell-god than with an insipid pietistical saint, forever gnawing like a
+moth? Sharply he asks the Doctor, "What have you done with the Prince's
+heart?" "I have it not," said Sphex, startled; "it lies in
+_Tartarus_,[60] although it would have been more profitable to science
+had one been permitted to put it among one's preparations; it was large
+and very singular." He was thinking how often--when he could--he had, as
+an augur, during the dissection, secretly slipped aside one or another
+important member--as a princely or a cavalier-robber, _à la
+minutta_--for his study,--a honey-bag which he gladly cut out for
+himself with his anatomical honey-knife.
+
+"Has the young lady, then, an unhappy passion, or anything of the sort?"
+inquired Schoppe. "More than one," said Sphex; "cripples, idiots, young
+orphans, blind Methusalems,--all these passions she has. Sports and
+young gentlemen, I often say to the old lady, would be better for her
+health."
+
+But on this point, in the requirement of cheerfulness, I give in to him.
+Joy is the only universal tincture which I would prepare; it works
+uniformly as _antispasmodicum_, as _glutinans_ and _astringens_. The oil
+of gladness serves as ointment for _burns_ and _chills_ at once. Spring,
+for example, is a spring-medicine; a country-party, an oyster-medicine;
+a recreation at the watering-places is, in itself, a glass of _bitters_;
+a ball is a _motion_; a carnival, a _course_[61] of medicine;--and hence
+the seat of the _blest_ is at the same time the seat of the _immortals_.
+
+"Yes, he had finally," the Doctor concluded,--"as they were people of
+rank,--prescribed a dose of _pride_ (of the meadows), which manifests
+all the officinal healing powers of joy; taken in a stronger dose, it
+works fully as well as enjoyment itself, enlivens the pulse, steels the
+fibres, opens the pores, and chases the blood through the long venous
+labyrinth.[62] In the case of his weakly lady, such as they saw her
+there, he had used, he said, this medicament long ago by dresses and a
+doctor's rank, and had helped her to her legs thereby. But he would
+rather cure sixty common women than one distinguished one,--and he
+should regret, as family physician, merely his receipts and medical
+opinions, in case, as he certainly believed, the fair Liana should go
+hence."
+
+The first question which Albano, who never missed anything that was
+said, put to Augusti on the way back from the Doctor's, was, What the
+Doctor's wife meant by the subscribing servant? He explained it. There
+is, namely, in Pestitz, as in Leipsic, an observance, that when a man
+dies or falls into any other misfortune, his family place a blank sheet
+of paper, with pen and ink, in the entrance-hall, in order that persons,
+who take and show a nearer interest, may send a lackey thither, to set
+their names on the paper as well as he knows how; this merchant-like
+indorsement of the nearer interest, this descending representative
+system by means of servants, who are generally, now-a-days, the
+telegraphs of our hearts, sweetens and alleviates for both cities great
+sorrow and sympathy through pen and ink.
+
+"What! is that it? O God!" said Alban, and grew unusually indignant, as
+if people were forcing servants upon him as chrysographs and
+business-agents of his feelings. "O ye egotistical jugglers! through the
+pen of scribbling lackeys do ye pour yourselves out? Lector, I would
+condole with Satan himself more warmly than thus!"
+
+Why is this veiled spirit so lively and loud? Ah, everything had moved
+him. Not merely lamentation over poor Liana, persecuted by all the
+nightly arrows of destiny, entered like iron into his open heart, but
+also amazement at the gloomy intermingling of fate with his young life.
+Roquairol's ever-recurring expression, "_Breast without a heart_,"
+sounded to him as if it must be familiar; at last the converse of the
+expression came to his thoughts, the word of the Sphinx on the island,
+"_Heart without a breast_." So, then, even this riddle was solved, and
+the place fixed, when he was to hear, contrary to every expectation, the
+prophecy of the loved one; but how incomprehensible,--incomprehensible!
+
+"O yes! Liana she is called, and no God shall change the name," said his
+innermost soul. For in earlier years even the most vigorous youth
+prefers, in maidens, interesting delicacy of health and a tender fulness
+of feeling and a moisture of the eye,--just as, in general, at Albano's
+age, one values the flood (later the ebb) of the eyes too highly,
+although, too often, like an over-rich inundation, they wash away the
+seed-corns of the best resolutions;--whereas, at a later period,
+(because he proposes to himself marriage and housekeeping,) he looks out
+rather for bright and sharp than after moist eyes, and for cold and
+healthy blood.
+
+As Albano, for the most part, drew down the fire from his internal
+clouds on the discharging chains of the harpsichord strings,--seldomer
+into the Hippocrene of poetry,--so did he now unconsciously make out of
+his inner _charivari_ a passage on the harpsichord. I transpose his
+fantasy into my fancy in the following manner. On the softest
+minor-tones the blindness, with its long pains, passed by, and in the
+whispering-gallery of music he heard all the soft sighs of Liana
+repeated aloud. Then harder minor-tones led him down into Tartarus, to
+the grave and heart of the friendly old man who had once prayed with
+him, and then, in this spirit-hour, fell softly, like a dew-drop from
+heaven, the sound, Liana! With a thunder-clap of ecstasy he fell into
+the major-key, and asked himself, "This delicate, pure soul could fate
+promise to thy imperfect heart?" And when he answered himself, that she
+would perhaps love him, because she could not see him,--for first love
+is not vain; and when he saw her led by her gigantic brother, and when
+he thought of the high friendship which he would give and require of
+_him_; then did his fingers run over the keys in an exalting war-music,
+and the heavenly hours sounded before him, which he should enjoy, when
+his two eternal dreams should pass over livingly out of night into day,
+and when brother and sister should furnish at once, to his so youthful
+heart, a loved one and a friend. Here his inner and outer storms softly
+died away, and the evenly-balanced _temperament_ of the instrument
+became that of the player....
+
+But a soul like his is more easily appeased with sorrow than with joy.
+As if the reality had already arrived, he pressed on still further;
+indescribably fair and unearthly, he saw Liana's image trembling in her
+cup of sorrow; for the crown of thorns easily ennobles a head to a
+Christ's head, and the blood of an undeserved wound is a redness on the
+cheek of the inner man, and the soul which has suffered too much is
+easily loved too much. The tender Liana appeared to him as already spun
+into the funeral veil for the Flora of the second world, as the tender
+limbs of the bee-nymph lie transparently folded over the little
+breast,--the white form of snow, which had once, in his dream, melted
+away on his heart, opened the bright little cloud again, and looked,
+blind and weeping, upon the earth, and said, "Albano, I shall die before
+I have seen thee."--"And even if thou shouldst never see me," said the
+dying heart in his breast, "yet will I still love thee. And even if thou
+shouldst soon pass away, Liana, still I gladly choose sorrow, and walk
+faithfully with thee till thou art in heaven."... Heaven and hell had
+both at once drawn aside their curtains before him,--only a few notes,
+and those the same as before, and only the highest, and that only
+interruptedly and faintly, could he any longer strike; and at last his
+hands sank down, and he began to weep, but without too severe pangs,--as
+the storm which has unburdened itself of its lightnings and thunders
+stands now over the earth only as a soft, diffused rain.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[45] One who dedicated a new house (somewhat as we name a ship).
+The _glass fire-bucket_ which _quenched the inner conflagration_
+was probably the wine-glass or beer-tumbler.--TR.
+
+[46] Collegians.--TR.
+
+[47] Provincial Physician.--TR.
+
+[48] According to Camper, hectic patients have very white and
+fair teeth.
+
+[49] Derham (in his Physico-Theology, 1750) observes that the
+deaf hear best under a noise; e. g. one hard of hearing, under
+the sound of bells; a deaf housewife, under the drumming of the
+house-servant. Hence when princes and ministers, who for the most
+part hear badly, are passing through the country, kettle-drums
+are beat and cannon fired, so that they can hear the people more
+easily.
+
+[50] In whose wall the lady with the souvenir sits.
+
+[51] A kind of gray fur.--TR.
+
+[52] Baireuth.--TR.
+
+[53] This precocious completion of growth I have observed in many
+distinguished women, just as if these Psyches should resemble
+butterflies, which do not grow after coming out of the chrysalis
+state.
+
+[54] Cloth is roughened with thistles, i.e. scratched up, in
+order to the better shearing of it afterwards.
+
+[55] A distinguished actor of tragedy.
+
+[56] He means here their divorce, which was only deferred by the
+mutual wish to keep Liana.
+
+[57] Poor dinners, just as cat-silver is an inferior metal.--TR.
+
+[58] A weak-nerved lady (I know not whether it is the same) who
+had much religion, fancy, and suffering, became, as she tells me,
+blind in the same way, and was cured in the same way.
+
+[59] The eternal pricking of the sensitive finger-nerves by
+knitting, tambour, and other needles, perhaps as much as the
+touching of the harmonica-bells, makes one, by stimulating, weak
+in the nerves.
+
+[60] Tartarus is the melancholy part of Lilar.
+
+[61] Kursus--corso.--TR.
+
+[62] Pride of the meadows quickens the circulation of the blood
+even to frenzy. This whole observation on the pharmaceutic value
+of pride of the meadows is taken from Tissot's "Traité sur les
+Nerfs."
+
+
+
+
+SIXTH JUBILEE.
+
+     THE TEN PERSECUTIONS OF THE READER.--LIANA'S EASTERN
+     ROOM.--DISPUTATION UPON PATIENCE.--THE PICTURESQUE CURE.
+
+
+34. CYCLE.
+
+Postulates--apothegms--philosophems--Erasmian adages--observations of
+Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Lavater, do I in one week invent in countless
+numbers, more than I can in six months get rid of by bringing them into
+my biographical _petits soupés_ as episode-dishes. Thus does the
+lottery-mintage of my _unprinted_ manuscripts swell higher and higher
+every day, the more extracts and winnings I deal out to my reader
+therefrom in print. In this way I creep out of the world without having,
+while in it, said anything. Lavater takes a more rational course; he
+lets the whole lottery-wheel, filled with treasures, under the title of
+manuscripts (just as we, inversely, despatch manuscripts to the
+publishers by mail under the title of printed matter) circulate even
+among the _literati_.
+
+But why shall I not do the same, and let at least one or two lymphatic
+veins of my water-treasure leap up and run out? I limit myself to ten
+persecutions of the reader,--calling my ten aphorisms thus, merely
+because I imagine the readers to be martyrs of their opinions, and
+myself the Regent who converts them by force. The following aphorism, if
+one reckons the foregoing as the first persecution, is, I hope, the
+
+
+_SECOND._
+
+Nothing sifts and winnows our preferences and partialities better than
+an imitation of the same by others. For a genius there are no sharper
+polishing-machines and grinding-disks at hand than his apes. If,
+further, every one of us could see running along beside him a duplicate
+of himself, a complete Archimimus[63] and repeater in complimenting,
+taking off the hat, dancing, speaking, scolding, bragging, &c.; by
+Heaven! such an exact repeating-work of our discords would make quite
+other people out of me and other people than we are at present. The
+first and least step which we should take toward reflection and virtue
+would be this, that we should find our bodily methodology, e. g. our
+walk, dress, dialect, our oaths, looks, favorite dishes, &c., no better
+than those of all others, but just the same. Princes have the good
+fortune that all courtiers around them station themselves as faithful
+supernumerary copyists and pier-mirrors of _their_ selves, and propose
+to improve them by this Helot-mimicry. But they seldom attain their good
+end, because the Prince,--and that were also to be feared of me and the
+reader,--like the principle of _non-distinguendum_, does not believe in
+any real twins, but imagines that in morals, as in catoptrics, every
+mirror and mock rainbow shows everything _inverted_.
+
+
+_THIRD._
+
+It is easier and handier for men to flatter than to praise.
+
+
+_FOURTH._
+
+In the centuries before us humanity appears to us to be growing up; in
+those which come after us, to be fading away; in our own, to burst forth
+in glorious bloom: thus do the clouds, only when in our zenith, seem to
+move straight forward, those in front of us come up from the horizon,
+the others behind us sail downward with fore-shortened forms.
+
+
+_FIFTH._
+
+What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes then
+cease.[64]
+
+
+_SIXTH._
+
+The old age of women is sadder and more solitary than that of men;
+spare, therefore, in them their years, their sorrows, and their sex! In
+fact, life often resembles the trap-tree with its spines directed
+upward, on which the bear easily clambers up to the honey-bait, but from
+which he can slide down again only under severe stings.
+
+
+_SEVENTH._
+
+Have compassion on Poverty, but a hundred times more on Impoverishment!
+Only the former, not the latter, makes nations and individuals better.
+
+
+_EIGHTH._
+
+Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's.
+
+
+_NINTH._
+
+When two persons, in suddenly turning a corner, knock their heads
+together, each begins anxiously to apologize, and thinks only the other
+feels the pain and that he himself has all the blame. (Only I excuse
+myself without any embarrassment, for the very reason that I know, by my
+persecutions, how the other party thinks.) Would to God we did not
+invert this in the case of moral offences!
+
+
+_LAST PERSECUTION OF THE READER._
+
+Deluded and darkened man, living on from the mourning veil to the
+corpse-veil, thinks there is no further evil beyond that which he has
+immediately to overcome; and forgets that after the victory the new
+situation brings a new struggle. Hence, as before swift ships there
+swims a hill of water and a corresponding billowy abyss glides along
+close behind, so always before us is there a mountain, which we hope to
+climb, and behind us still a deep valley out of which we seem to have
+ascended.
+
+Thus does the reader vainly hope now, after having stood out ten
+persecutions, to ride into the haven of the story, and there to
+lead a peaceable life, free from the troubled one of my
+characters; but can any spiritual or worldly arm, then, protect
+him against scattered similes,--against hemispherical
+headaches,--whimsies,--reviews,--curtain-lectures, --rainy
+months,--or in fact honey-moons, which come in at the end of
+every volume?--
+
+Now for our History! In the evening Albano and Augusti went with the
+paternal letter of credit to the Minister's. The frostiness and pride of
+that individual the Lector endeavored, on their way, to varnish over by
+praising his laboriousness and discernment. With a knocking at his heart
+the Count seized the door-knocker to the heaven- or hell-gate of his
+future destiny. In the antechamber--that higher servant's apartment and
+_Limbus infantum et patrum_--there were still people enough, for
+Froulay regarded an antechamber as a stage, which must never be empty,
+and on which, as in the Jewish temple, according to the Rabbins, for
+those who kneel and pray, it is never too close. The Minister's lady was
+not present as a patient here, merely because she was looking after one
+of her own elsewhere. The Minister also was not here,--because he made
+few ceremonies, and only demanded uncommonly many,--but in his
+working-cabinet; he had heretofore had his head under the warm
+throne-canopy and taken a deep bite into the forbidden apple of the
+Empire, therefore he willingly made a sacrifice (not _to_ others, but
+_of_ others), and let himself, as a saintly statue, be hung round with
+votive limbs, without having to bestir his own, and, like St. Franciscus
+at Oporto, with letters of thanks and petitions which he never opens.
+
+Froulay came, and was--as ever, _aside_ from business--as courteous as a
+Persian. For Augusti was his home friend,--i. e. the Minister's lady was
+_his_ home-friend,--and Albano was not a good person to run against;
+because one had occasion for his foster-father in the votes of the
+Province, and because the youth by a peculiar and proper pride of his
+own commanded men. There is a certain noble pride through which merits
+shine brighter than through modesty. Froulay had not the most
+comfortable part before him; for the Court of Haarhaar was as
+disaffected toward the Knight of the Fleece, as he was toward it;[65]
+but Haarhaar was to be without doubt (according to all Italian
+_surgical_ reports) and in a few years (according to all _nosological_
+ones) the heir of his inheritance and throne. Now the bad thing about it
+was, that the Minister, who, like a good Christian, looked mainly to the
+future, had to creep along between the German Herr von Bouverot, on the
+one hand, who was secretly a creature of Haarhaar, and the demands of
+the present moment, on the other.
+
+He received the Count, I said, in an uncommonly obliging manner, as well
+as the Lector, and disclosed to the two that he must present to them his
+lady, who desired their acquaintance. He sent word to her, but, without
+waiting an answer, conducted them both into her apartment. Now was it to
+the youth as if the heavy door of a still and holy temple turned on its
+hinges. Even I too, at this moment, during their passage through the
+rooms, share so in his foolishness that I fall into full as great
+anxiety, as if I went in behind them. When we entered the eastern room,
+which was extended out at pleasure by picturesque paper-tapestry into a
+latticed arbor of woodbine, there sat merely the Minister's lady, who
+received us pleasantly, with firm and cold reserve in look and tone. Her
+severely closed and faintly-marked lips mutely spoke a seriousness which
+is the gift of a good heart, and a stillness which is the ornament of
+beauty,--as many wings, only when they are folded, shower down
+peacocks'-eyes,--and her eye gleamed with the good-will of reason; but
+the eyelids had been, by stern years, drawn deeply in, with a sickly
+expression, over the mild sight. Ah, as oftentimes between newly-married
+people a dividing sword was laid, so did Froulay grind daily at a
+three-edged one which separated him and her! Singularly did the impure
+roil on his face contrast with the aftersummer serenity on hers,
+although before witnesses, as it seemed, he took away the irony from his
+courteousness towards her, and kept hatred, as others do love, only for
+solitude.
+
+Fortunately this nut-tree, which threw an unwholesome, frosty nut-shadow
+on the whole flowerage of love and poetry, soon transplanted itself back
+again among more congenial guests. The Minister's lady, after the first
+expressions of courtesy, directed herself more to the Lector, whose
+correct, civilian's measure accorded entirely with her religious one;
+especially as only he could ask and condole with her about Liana. She
+replied, that this room of Liana's had been left exactly as it was the
+evening the blindness came on, in order that, when she recovered, it
+might remain for her a pleasant remembrancer, or a mournful one for
+others, if she did not. O, deeply moved Albano, if every absence
+glorifies, how much more must it do so with so many traces of the
+beloved object's presence! I confess, except a loved one, I know of
+nothing lovelier than her sitting-room in her absence.
+
+On Liana's work-table lay a sketched outline of a Christ's head near the
+open Messiah,--a folded walking-veil, together with the green
+walking-fan, with inscribed wishes of female friends,--some cut-out
+envelopes,--the gossiping letter of one of Froulay's tenants,--a whole
+lacquerwork sheep-fold, with wagon, stalls, and house, with whose
+Lilliputian Arcadia she had proposed to please Dian's children,[66]--a
+plucked leaf from the thinning album of a female friend, which she had
+trimmed with an India-ink flower border and then planted full of fair
+wishes, of which fate had robbed her own life. Ah, beautiful heart, how
+fondly would I sketch and hand round something like a tabular view of
+all the little mosaic of thy lightsome past, had the fee-provost entered
+more intimately into these matters! But what moves me and the Count more
+deeply is a framed embroidery, on which her needle, like an
+ingrafting-knife, had, on that dark day, ingrafted a rose with two buds,
+and which wanted nothing more but the thorns. O, _these_ had destiny
+only too fully developed on thy roses of joy, and then pressed them so
+deeply through thy breast even to the heart!
+
+At no hour of his life was Albano's love so tender and holy as at this,
+or his sympathy so fervent. Fortunately, the Minister's lady was all the
+time looking out of the window into the garden, and did not perceive his
+emotion. At last she went on to point out Liana's harmonica, which stood
+near; then was his heart too full and visible; he started with the hasty
+words, _he had never yet heard one_, and stepped before it. Ah, he was
+fain to touch something whereon her finger had so often rested. He laid
+his hand, as upon a sacred thing, on those prayer-bells which had so
+often trembled under hers for pious thoughts; but they gave him no
+answer, till the Lector, a connoisseur in the A B C as in the technology
+of all arts, gave him in three words the indispensable instructions. Now
+did he drink into his soul, full of sighs and struggles, the first
+tri-clang, the first plaintive syllables of that mother-tongue of the
+pining breast,--ah, of those _mutes'-bells_ which the inner man shakes
+in his hand, because he has no tongue! and his veins beat wildly like
+wings which wafted him up from the ground, and bore him to a higher
+prospect than that which opens into the last joy or the last agony. For
+in strong men great pains and joys become overlooking heights of the
+whole road of life.
+
+I know not whether many readers will believe the fault _possible_, which
+he now _actually_ committed. The Minister's wife, in the course
+of conversation, had very naturally--_apropos_ of Liana and
+Roquairol--fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary
+to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be
+broken in childhood or the heart in old age. Ah, she and her daughter
+themselves knelt, indeed, full of patience, before fate, whether loading
+or armed; although the mother's was a pious patience, which looked more
+to Heaven than to the wound, Liana's a loving patience, which resigns
+itself to new sorrows as to old sicknesses, as a queen does on
+coronation-day to the pains and friction of her heavy jewelry, and like
+a child that sweetly sleeps away and more sweetly dreams away his scars.
+But Zesara, who like a wolf fled the very clanking of a chain, and new,
+exasperated, against everything of the kind, from the light carcanets
+and chains of knighthood even to the heavy harbor-chains which obstruct
+the passage of youth out into the laboring sea, could not restrain
+himself, especially with that heart of his so full of emotions, from
+saying, in too great warmth: "Man must defend himself; sooner would I,
+in a free struggle, empty all my veins on the stirring battle-field than
+shed one drop from them bound to the rack."--"Patience," said the
+Minister's lady, who was full of it, "contends and conquers also, only
+in the heart."--"Dear Count," said Augusti, alluding not merely to
+Arria,[67] "the women must always say to the men, 'It does not hurt!'"
+
+I have not till now had an opportunity to make known this fault of
+Albano, that he never spoke his opinion more freely and strongly than
+just then when he had reason to fear losing one or two heavens of his
+life by the stake; in cases of less danger he could be more yielding.
+Although, therefore, he observed that the Minister's lady was painfully
+reminded thereby of the muscular, but also hard-grasping, hand of her
+wild son,--or much rather _for the very reason_ that he observed it, and
+because he proposed to be armor-bearer to this future friend,--he stuck
+to his opinion, threw all instruments for breaking in the young manly
+will out of the school-rooms into the street, and said, in his strongly
+relieved style: "The Goths preferred never to send their children to
+school, in order that they might remain lions. Even if maidens must be
+soaked in milk a day before planting them out in the civil world, boys,
+however, must be stuck, like apricots, with the stony shell in the
+earth, because they will soon enough throw off and forsake the stone by
+their rooting and growth."--The Lector, with his fine openness,--a
+crystal vase with golden edge,--remarked, with a gentle reprimand of
+Alban's impetuosity, that at least the way in which they had severally
+adduced their proofs was one of those very proofs themselves; and women
+needed and showed more patience with persons, and we more with things.
+
+The Minister's wife, who imagined herself listening more to her son than
+to his friend, was silent, and stepped nearer to the window. Amid these
+war-troubles the evening had wheeled her resplendent moon up over the
+eastern mountains, and the streams of her light flowed in at this
+moment, from all quarters, through the whole garden that lay stretched
+out before the eastern room, and lay in its broad alleys and
+flower-circles, when all at once a little round house appeared through
+upshooting water-jets, kindled into triumphal arches by the moon-light,
+and stood, even to its Italian trellised roof, all in a blaze. With soft
+emotion, the Minister's lady said: "On that water-house stands my Liana;
+she is trying the evaporation of the fountain; the physician promises
+himself much therefrom. And Providence grant it!"
+
+But the agitated Zesara, with all his sharp eyes, could not, however, in
+the full dazzling light of the level moon, and behind the quivering
+nunnery-grate of confined silver-or lymphatic-veins, individualize
+anything at this moment from the glimmering Eden, except an
+undistinguishable, still, white form. But it was enough for a weeping
+and burning heart. "Thou angel of my youthful dreams," thought he, "may
+it be thou! I greet thee with a thousand woes and joys. Ah! can there
+then be sorrows in thee, thou heavenly soul!" And it came over him, that
+if she were here in the room, with her afflicted and enchanting form,
+she would melt his whole being with sympathy, and he could now have cast
+off the embrace of the brother, by whose hand fate had closed her soft
+eyes in that long dream.
+
+The stifling air of the most painful sympathy caused him to look away,
+and turn round, and fasten on the open Messiah those eyes whose drops he
+would not show; but the recollection that he was repeating her last
+reading-pleasure made them fall only hotter and thicker. Suddenly
+something darkening, which fluttered down before the window like a
+falling raven, directed his look again to Liana, over whom stood a fully
+illuminated little cloud, as if it were a risen or descending saintly
+halo. Immortals seemed to dwell thereupon as on Ossian's clouds,
+awaiting their sister; and when she at length moved and slowly sank down
+into the water-house, seemed it not then as if her garment of flesh
+were passing into the earth, and her peaceful spirit into the cloud?
+
+Here Augusti, as the mother had to follow the returning invalid into the
+sick-chamber, gave him the hint for departure, which he took willingly;
+his love contented itself for the present with solitude, and with the
+hope of another meeting. Young love and young birds need, in the
+beginning, only to be _warmed_ by _covering_, and not till later to be
+_nourished_.
+
+But a paraclete or comforter whispered softly in the ear of the youth's
+heart as they departed: to-morrow thou wilt see her only a few steps
+from thee in the garden! And that is very easily brought about; he has
+only, at evening-twilight to-morrow, when the evening-walker makes use
+of her eye-medicine, to repair to the alley, and from among the leaves
+look freely up into the magic countenance, and then drink in the whole
+doctrine of felicity in one paragraph, one passage, breath, moment;--but
+what a prospect!
+
+The Count begged the Lector not to sit long with the busy Minister. When
+they found him again, he hardly--behind a pile of public
+documents--remembered, after considerable (perhaps counterfeited)
+thought, that they had been there, and deeply regretted that they were
+going away. Ah, the comforter is whispering all the evening and all
+night,--To-morrow, Albano!
+
+
+35. CYCLE.
+
+As the juggling night threw our Albano from one side and vision to the
+other,--for not the near past but the near future wearies us with
+rehearsals of our waking acts, with dreams,--how glad he was, in the
+morning, that his fairest future had not yet gone by. Two very
+Eulenspiegelish wishes often lodge in man: I often form the wish with my
+whole heart, that some real joy of mine, e. g. a master-work, a
+pleasure-journey, &c., might yet at last have an end; and, secondly, the
+wish above referred to, that one or another pleasure might stay away a
+little longer.
+
+The evening came with the greatest pleasure of all, when Zesara, like Le
+Gentil starting for the East Indies, set off for the eastern park of the
+Minister, to observe the transit of his evening star Venus; but only
+through the moon. Before the lighted windows of the palace he stopped
+among the people, and reflected, whether it were quite allowable thus to
+run into the garden; but really, had he been turned back, his thirsting
+heart would have carried him in through a whole Clerus and Diplomatic
+Congress posted before the gate. Boldly he strode along through the
+noisy palace before a barricade of tackled carriages, turned the iron
+lattice-gate, and stepped hastily into the nearest leafy avenue. Here,
+attended by a torch-dance of gleaming hopes, he went to and fro, but his
+eye was a telescope, and his ear was a hearing-trumpet. The green avenue
+wound up over the garden till it grew into another near the bath-house;
+into this he entered so as not to meet the blind one, or rather her
+attendant.
+
+But nothing came. To be sure he had not, like the moon,--as was, indeed,
+to have been expected of him,--come a half-hour too late, but in fact a
+half-hour too early. The moon, that star which leads wise men full of
+incense to the adoration, at last let fall broad, long, silver-leaves,
+like festive tapestry, into Liana's eastern room,--the Madonna on the
+palace was arrayed in the halo and nun's-veil of her rays,--the
+Minister's wife stood already at the window,--Nature played the
+larghetto[68] of an enchanted evening in deeper and deeper
+strains,--when Albano caught nothing further except a smaller one, made
+up of mere tones, which came from the bath-house, the pleasure-seat of
+all his wishes, and which, dying, would fain breathe its last with the
+spring-day. But he could not guess who played it. One might have
+inferred that it was Roquairol, merely because he afterward, as I shall
+relate, according to the April-like nature of his musical temperament,
+sprang up out of pianissimo into a too wild fortissimo. The brother,
+exiled by his father, could at least in the bath-house see and console
+his dear sister, and show her his love and his penitence; although his
+stormy repentance makes a second necessary, and at last became only a
+more pious repetition of his fault.
+
+Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every
+world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the
+sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the
+larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high
+waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art)
+dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with
+a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to
+the Selam-cipher, signify _hopes_; but really one after another was
+short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his
+perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,--he kept plucking
+away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves
+from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening
+windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was
+impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the
+bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance,
+when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo,
+and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of
+sparkling silver. Albano looked out....
+
+Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering
+water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage
+before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly
+beautiful form! As Grecian gods stand and look unearthly before the
+torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad
+glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw
+irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation
+and no effort had as yet cast a wave,--and the thin, tender,
+scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,--and the face like a perfect
+pearl, oval and white,--and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the
+May-flowers over her heart,--and the delicate grace's-proportions,
+which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,--and the ideal
+stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a
+finger upon the balustrade, as if the Psyche only floated over the
+lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,--and the large
+blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such
+inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in
+distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow!
+
+Thou too fortunate man!--to whom the only visible goddess, Beauty,
+appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her
+heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,--the past
+fades away,--the near tones seem to steal from the depth of
+distance,--the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with
+splendor the mortal breast!
+
+Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty
+heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or
+later?--and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow?
+
+For Liana--into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle
+through--was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its
+own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she
+thought a linden-top concealed it;--and this uncertain inclination so
+suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick
+pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and
+pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why
+from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away?
+And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her
+companion, and--O God! she knows not where they stand."
+
+But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely
+on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon
+the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor
+of the next life.
+
+A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the
+distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with
+single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana,
+and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so
+that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked down, and Albano started
+back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face,
+upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink,
+tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling
+tones of the brother and of the nightingale,--the eyelids quivered
+oftener over the gleaming eyes,--and at last the gleam became a quiet
+tear,--it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which
+the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs,
+though unwounded, weep.
+
+There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always
+begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment,
+in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir
+itself,--that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink
+of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,--kneel
+before her,--tell her thy whole heart;--what though thou then art lost
+forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!--and then cool
+and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he
+thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah!
+before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good
+spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be
+silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."
+
+Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall,
+and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As
+he passed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half
+latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure
+Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a shining
+lily[69] from the next world, which, to herself, is a sign that she is
+soon to pass thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling
+the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest
+veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe
+them.
+
+Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last
+had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and
+then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now shines
+to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O,
+at some future time after yet many years, when this _glowing_
+rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and
+magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it,
+glimmer after thee as a _white_ rose-parterre of memory!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[63] The title of a man, among the Romans, who walked behind the
+corpse and acted out the looks and character which the deceased
+had when living.--_Pers._, Sat. 3.
+
+[64] As Solomon says, "Desire shall fail."--TR.
+
+[65] It had formerly refused to give the Spanish knight the hand
+of the Princess; but I have had the promise of satisfactory
+documents on this weighty article.
+
+[66] Dian's family reside at Lilar.
+
+[67] Roman Arria, who stabbed herself to show her Poetus how to
+die.--TR.
+
+[68] A movement in music a little more than two degrees quicker
+than adagio.--TR.
+
+[69] It used to be believed that a lily lying in the
+singing-seats signified the death of the person to whom it
+belonged.
+
+
+
+
+SEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF
+     POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL
+     "MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON
+     BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE.
+
+
+36. CYCLE.
+
+If the Feudal-Provost Von Hafenreffer had no existence except as a
+creature of my fancy, I should certainly proceed with my history, and
+tell the world, as matter of fact (and the whole romance-writing set
+would go to the death upon it[70]), that Albano was sitting there the
+next morning, blind and deaf, behind the broad bandage which the
+bandage-maker Cupid had bound before his eyes,--that he had not been
+able to count more than _five_, except at evening, when he cast up the
+strokes of the clock, in order, afterward, to run in a magic circle
+round the Froulay water-house, like one who sets out to _charm the fire_
+which glides snake-like after him,--that he had, through those two
+blow-holes[71] wherewith sentimental whales blubber right out in
+bookstores, spouted out considerable streams,--for the rest, had never
+looked at another book (except some leaves in the book of Nature), nor
+at another human being (except a blind man),--"and to this my surgeon's
+certificate of erotic wound-fevers (I would say at the conclusion of my
+lies) Nature manifestly sets her privy seal."
+
+That she does not, says Hafenreffer; these are nothing but confounded
+lies; the case is quite otherwise, thus:--
+
+Zesara never stole a second time into Froulay's garden; a proud blush of
+shame darted over him at the very thought of the painful blush with
+which he should come in contact, for the first time, with a mistrustful
+or inquiring eye.
+
+But in this wise the dear soul remained hid from him until her recovery,
+as the May-month did from her; and he silently tormented himself with
+reckonings up of her sufferings and doubts of her cure. He was ashamed
+to be taking any pleasure during her period of sadness, and forbade
+himself the enjoyment of spring and the visiting of Lilar: ah! he knew
+too, full well, that the loving spring and Lilar, where she had received
+so many joys and the last wound, would make his heart too ungovernable
+and too full.
+
+His thirst for knowledge and worth, his pride, which bade him stand in a
+glorious light with his father and his two friends, impelled him onward
+in his career. With all his native fire he threw himself upon
+jurisprudence, and took no longer any other walks than between the
+lecture-room and his study-chamber. To this zeal he was driven by a
+characteristic passion for completeness; everything imperfect was to him
+almost a physical horror; he was shocked at defective collections,
+broken sets of monthly magazines, lawsuits left to sleep, libraries,
+because he could never read them out, people who died as aspirants for
+office, or in the midst of building-plans, or without a rounded system
+of thought, or as journeymen clothiers' boys or shoemakers' apprentices,
+and even Augusti's flute-playing, which he only took up _by the way_. It
+was the same energy which made him hold the bridle of Psyche's winged
+horse tight, and stick the rowel of the spur into him; even when a child
+he had experimented on this kind of force, in the holding of his breath,
+or in the painful pressure of a sore spot,--and, by Heaven! he now,
+figuratively, did both again. There dwelt in him a mighty will, which
+merely said to the serving-company of impulses, Let it be! Such a will
+is not stoicism, which rules merely over internal _malefactors_, or
+_knaves_, or _prisoners of war_, or _children_, but it is that genially
+energetic spirit, which conditions and binds the healthy _savages_ of
+our bosoms, and which says more royally to itself, than the Spanish
+regent to others, I, the king!
+
+Ah, of course (how could his warm soul do otherwise?) he often stood, at
+midnight, before the breezy window, and looked tearfully at the white
+Madonna of the ministerial palace, silvered by the pure moon. Yes, in
+the daytime, he often sketched in his souvenir (it happened to be a
+fountain and a form behind it, nothing more), or he read in the Messiah
+(naturally going on with the canto which he had already begun at the
+house of the Minister's lady), or he informed himself about nervous
+maladies, (was he, perhaps, with all his studying, guarded against
+them?) or he let the fire of his fingers run over the strings,--nay, he
+would have plucked nothing but roses, although with thorns, had this
+been their blooming season.
+
+And this sighing, stifled soul must shut itself up! O, he began already
+to fear every key of the harpsichord would become a stylus, the
+instrument itself a box of letters, and all actions treacherously
+legible words. For he must keep silent. The first young love, like that
+of business people (those of the Electorate of Saxony excepted), needs
+no instruments of speech, at most only a portable inkstand and pen. Only
+worldly people, who repeat their declarations of love quite as often as
+the players, are in a situation--and on similar grounds--to publish
+them, just as the players do. But in the holier season of life the image
+of the most beloved soul is hung, not in the parlor and antechamber, but
+in the dim, silent oratory: only with loved ones do we speak of loved
+ones. Ah, it was with reluctance that he even heard others speak of his
+saint; and he often stole (with the altar of incense in his bosom) out
+of the room where people were carrying round for her a censer more full
+of coal-smoke than of frankincense.
+
+
+37. CYCLE.
+
+They were expecting every day in Pestitz the return of the German
+gentleman M. de Bouverot, who had been in Haarhaar, putting the last
+retouching hand to the almost sketched marriage contract between Luigi
+and a Haarhaar princess, Isabella. Augusti was not partial to him, and
+even said Bouverot had no _honnêteté_;[72] and related the following,
+but with the soft irony of a man of the world:
+
+Some years before, Bouverot had been sent by the court of Haarhaar[73]
+to the Pope at Rome, in relation to certain canonical difficulties;
+just at the time when Luigi also made the princely procession to Rome,
+together with his Romish indictions.[74] Now Haarhaar, which in truth
+already went _chapeau-bas_ with the princely hat of Hohenfliess, and had
+every possible officinal prospect of wearing it, would not, for this
+very reason, present the appearance of looking with cold eyes on the
+extinction of the race of Hohenfliess, the more, as the very male
+support of the line, Luigi, even in his first years, was not a hero of
+any great nervous significance. Nay, it must needs be a matter of some
+consequence to the court of Haarhaar that the good thin autumn-flowerage
+should return, if possible, _otherwise_ than it went out; and even on
+such grounds it privily instructed the German gentleman to
+rule and watch over all his pleasures and pains as _maître de
+plaisirs_,--especially with _maîtresses de plaisirs_,--in such a manner
+as to give perfect satisfaction in this respect. Meanwhile, if our
+princely abiturient[75] had started pure as a foetus, unhappily he was
+brought back ground down to a _punctum saliens_, especially as, by
+sundry caprioles and other leaps through the hoop of pleasure, he was
+spoiled for the leap into the knight's saddle. It may be possible that
+the German gentleman was too sanguine in his expectations of the
+rejuvenescence of the Prince; yes, he may have imitated the
+youth-restoring, wondrous essence of the Marquis d'Aymar,[76] whereby an
+innocent old lady, who anointed herself with the elixir more than her
+years required, was, through the excessive renovation, reduced to a
+little child. In short, by this crusade under the Knight of the Cross,
+Bouverot, the princely seat of Hohenfliess--as is often the consequence
+of crusades--will be left open at the proper time, and Haarhaar will
+seat itself thereon.
+
+I confess reluctantly that Albano, in the beginning,--because, with all
+his sharp-sightedness, his purity was quite as great,--comprehended the
+fact only confusedly; but when he did get the idea, it was to him
+_pharmaceutic_ manna, as it was to Schoppe _Israelitish_. "The Knight of
+the Cross," said the latter, "beareth not his cross in vain,--it does
+him quite as much service as one daubed on the houses in Italy does to
+them: not a soul may do on either of them what even in Rome may be done
+before every antechamber."
+
+Not long after that our three friends were going out into the street
+just at the hour when the noisy carriages rolled along to tea and play,
+when a litter was carried by before them with the seat _backward_,
+whereupon, however, a man was sitting. "Holy Father!" cried Schoppe, "in
+there sits, bodily, Cephisio, from Rome, who must sometime or other give
+me a sound drubbing."--"Softly, softly!" said Augusti, "that is the
+German gentleman; Cephisio is his Arcadian name."[77]--"Well, I rejoice
+so much the more that I once in my life had a hearty, downright set-to
+with the red-nose," said he, turning round and accompanying the litter,
+with his arms thrust under it, for almost ten paces, in order to get a
+better view of the caged bird, before the latter snatched-to the
+curtains. Albano caught a glimpse within the litter, as it passed
+swiftly along, only of a sharp eye drawn like a dagger, and a
+red-glowing nose-bud.
+
+Schoppe came back and related the transactions in Rome. He said,
+against all mortal sinners, blood-guilty men, and imps of iniquity he
+bore no such bitter and grim wrath as against professional bankers,
+_croupiers_,[78] and _Grecs_; if he had a canker-worm-iron wherewith he
+might scrape away this vermin from the earth, or a cochineal-mill
+wherewith he might grind them to powder, he would do it most cordially.
+"O heavens!" he then broke out, "had I in fact my foot just stretched
+out over the curling, coiling worm-stalk (and though that foot had the
+gout in it), I would gladly dash it down upon them, and tread out the
+vile filth." But what he could, he did. Being his own travelling
+servant, and a decoy-spider, darting to and fro through all Europe, he
+had full often the pleasure of getting these faro-leaf-caterpillars and
+leaf-sappers under his thumb,--of becoming their pretended
+associate,--learning their tactics,--and then rolling some fire-wheel or
+other into their hissing snakes'-hole. I am not intimately instructed
+whether it is known in Leipsic who the ringleader was that, a short time
+since, at the fair, played a mock-police with mimic-constables, and
+broke up a bank;--at least the bankers were altogether out on the
+subject, because they were expecting the real police the next day, and
+were begging for some indulgences and _il_legal-benefits; but I am in a
+condition here to name the thief-catcher: it was Schoppe. The spoils he
+applied mostly to the purpose of running new mines under the
+faro-tables.
+
+With Cephisio he had played his cards otherwise. He stepped up before
+his bank, and looked on for some minutes, and at last presented a card
+with a shield-louis-d'or. It won, and he showed behind the card a long
+roll of louis. Bouverot would not pay this roll. "He had not seen
+anything," he said. "What is your _croupier_ sitting there for, then?"
+said Schoppe, and pronounced them swindlers, if they did not pay. To
+escape greater damage, they paid him his winnings. He took the money
+coldly, and departed, with these words to the Pointeurs: "Gentlemen, I
+assure you, you are playing here with finished cheats; but they have
+paid me only because I knew them." Amidst the increasing stiffness and
+paleness of the partners he turned, and slowly, with his
+broad-shouldered, compact figure, and his knotty cudgel, walked away
+unscathed.
+
+Augusti wished from his heart--for the persecution's sake--that Bouverot
+might not know the Librarian again. They found at home an invitation
+from the Minister to tea and supper. "The poor daughter!" said Augusti;
+"for the sake of this Bouverot, the half-blind one must go to-morrow to
+the table." Meanwhile, our youth will then surely see her again at last,
+and only a spring-day separates him from the dearest object! If Augusti
+is right, then my observation fits in here, that a good sound villain is
+always the motive-pike which sets the still, quaker-like carp-tribe in
+the pond to swimming; the hidden pock-matter, which brings cold children
+at once to life.
+
+
+38. CYCLE.
+
+Liana's eyes healed, but only slowly: Nature would not lead her at once
+out of her sombre prison into the sun; she could now, like the
+philosophers, just recognize light rather than forms. Nevertheless, the
+Minister issued cabinet orders that she should day after to-morrow play
+on the harmonica, appear at the _souper_, and even make the salad, and
+thereby mask her blindness. He sometimes commanded impossible things, in
+order to meet with as much disobedience as his anger needed for the
+purpose of venting itself in punishment. Certain people keep themselves
+all day long full of vexation beforehand for some coming event or other,
+like urinal phosphate, which always boils under the microscope, or
+forges, wherein every day fire breaks out.
+
+The Minister's lady pronounced her soft, firm, No. About the harmonica
+she said she had asked the Doctor, in his name, who had strictly
+forbidden it; and the rest was an impossibility. Here he could already,
+he felt so like it, be angry at several things, especially at the asking
+of the Doctor, which, however, had not yet taken place; he grew mad
+enough, and swore he should act according to _his own_ principles, and
+devil a bit did he care for _other_ people's.
+
+This _principle_ was in the present case the German gentleman. That is
+to say, the above-mentioned anecdote--Bouverot's guardianship of the
+hereditary Prince on his travels, or the design of the thing--had at
+both courts come to be the common talk in assemblies and at tables, and
+was hidden only from the Prince Luigi; for on thrones, there are almost
+no mysteries to any one excepting him (hardly his wife) who sits
+thereupon, as in whispering-galleries the people in distant corners hear
+everything aloud, only not he who stands in the middle. The German
+gentleman was, therefore, in the Hohenfliess system, the important
+port-vein and pulmonary artery wherewith even Froulay would water
+himself. The latter is obliged throughout to serve the present and the
+future, or two masters, of whom the one of Haarhaar might very soon be
+his.
+
+Bouverot was attached not merely to Froulay the minister, but to Froulay
+the father; a man like him, who causes to be sent after him from Italy a
+whole cabinet of Art, and whose acquaintance with the arts has so long
+knit together even him and the Prince, must know how to prize a Madonna
+of such carnation as Liana, and of the Romish school, and, what is more,
+who, detached from the canvas, moved as a full, breathing rose. As to
+marrying the rose, that he could not propose to himself, because he was
+a German Herr.
+
+He had not seen her since his Italian tour,--nor had the Count
+either,--to both the Minister wished to show her as a round pearl of
+special whiteness and figure. Froulay had--which after all happens
+oftener than we imagine--quite as much vanity as pride; the latter to
+repel blame, the former to court praise. But I should have now to write
+a tournament-chronicle to tell posterity the half of all his raging and
+racing and lance-thrusts, in a fight wherein he served under the banners
+of enmity, vanity, and avarice. He was no more to be hunted to death
+than a wolf. All weapons were alike to him, and he was ever taking
+sharper and more poisonous ones. In the old _judicial_ duels between man
+and wife, the man stood commonly up to his stomach in a pit, in order to
+bring his strength down to a level with the woman's, and she struck at
+him with a stone tied up in a veil; but in the _matrimonial_ duels the
+man seems to stand in the free air and the woman in the earth, and she
+often has only the _veil_ without the stone.
+
+In this combat there stepped between the two a shining peace-angel who
+caught the wounds, namely, Liana. The daughter, who had an enthusiastic
+love for her mother, and the womanly reverence for the stronger sex
+toward her father, and who suffered so endlessly under their strifes,
+fell upon her mother's neck and begged her to allow her what her father
+demanded; she would certainly do everything so as not to excite
+observation; she would take the greatest pains and practise herself
+specially beforehand,--ah, he would otherwise only be still more unkind
+to her poor brother,--this discord, merely on her account, was so
+painful to her, and perhaps more injurious than playing on the
+harmonica.
+
+"My child, thou knowest," said the mother, for now she _had_ asked,
+"what the physician said yesterday against the harmonica; the rest is at
+thine own risk!" Liana kissed her joyfully. She must needs be led to her
+father, that she might make known to him aloud the gladness of her
+obedience. "I thank you, and be hanged," said he, softly; "it is simply
+your cursed duty." She left him with her joy dissipated to atoms, but
+without any great pangs; she was already accustomed to this.
+
+
+39. CYCLE.
+
+The Lector, while they were yet on their way to the Minister's, begged
+Albano to moderate the fire of his assertions and his pantomimes. He
+made known to him only so much of the family-jar as was necessary, in
+order that he might not, by a mistaken idea of her restoration, throw
+Liana into embarrassment. As they entered the card-room, everything was
+already in full blaze.
+
+As, at this time, no one is presented to him, I must do it; they are
+disciples (at least _twelfth_ disciples) of the Minister.
+
+And first, I introduce to thee the holy President of Justice, Von
+Landrok, a good apothecary's-balance of Themis, which weighs out
+scruples, and wherein no false weights lie; but what is quite as bad,
+much smut, rubbish, and rust. Those at the ombre-table near by are the
+lords and ladies of Vey, Flöl, and Kob, sleek, fine souls, like minerals
+in cabinets, polished off on the show-side, but on the concealed base
+still jagged and scratching.
+
+Go with me to the entrance of the next apartment; here I have to present
+to thee the young but fat canon Von Meiler, who, in order to line and
+stuff out and pad his inner man with a thick, warm, outer one, needs to
+fleece no more peasants yearly than the number of linden-trees the
+Russian peels for his bark-shoes, namely, one hundred and fifty.
+
+The apartment into which thou art looking I present to thee as a
+fly-glass full of courtiers, who, in order to enter into the _kingdom of
+heaven_, have become not merely _children_, but in fact _embryons_ of
+four weeks, who, as is well known, look like flies; if Swift desires of
+his servants nothing more than the _shutting-to_ of the doors, these
+wish nothing of their employer and bread-provider but the _leaving-open_
+of the same.
+
+I have the honor to set before thee yonder--it is he who is not
+playing--the holy Church-Counsellor, Schäpe, who would fain be chief
+chaplain to the court; a soft scoundrel, who soaks and softens the
+seed-corns of the divine and human word, like melon-seed (they are
+thereby to spring up sooner in the heart), so long in sugared wine, that
+they rot in it; a spiritual lord who never in his life _offered_ any
+other prayers than the two which he always refuses, the _fourth_ and
+_fifth_.[79]
+
+But the Lector will soon name to thee, at the window, every one of the
+lords and dames, coldly, gently, and without pantomime. At present the
+Minister himself conducts thee to a gentleman, one of the players, with
+a cross on, who drinks water with saltpetre, and is continually licking
+his dry mouth; it is _Bouverot_,--he is just rising in thy presence;
+examine the cold, but impudent and cutting, sharply-ground eye, whose
+corners resemble a pair of open tinman's-shears, or a trap set,--the red
+nose, and the hard, lipless mouth, whose reddish crab's-claw, worn off
+by whetting, pinches together,--the cocked-up chin, and the whole
+stocky, firm figure. Albano does not surprise him; he has already seen
+all men, and he inquires about no one.
+
+The Minister refreshed the youth, whose inner being was one snarl, with
+the promise that at supper he would present to him his daughter. He
+offered him a game; but Alban replied, with a too youthful accent, he
+never played.
+
+He could now roam round through the lanes of the card-tables, and survey
+whatever he wished. In such a case one posts himself, if there is no one
+of the company whom he can endure, exactly before or beside the face he
+detests the most, in order inwardly to lash himself into vexation at
+every word and every feature of the countenance. Albano might have had
+many visages in his eye which were, at least in a small degree,
+intolerable, and by which he might have stationed himself;--nay, no
+sufficient reasons could have been assigned why he should not have given
+his whole attention to a certain chaffy, dried up paste-eel, a weakling
+full of impertinence, who was observing through an eye-glass the card
+constellations as they came up, while Albano could extend the feelers
+of his optic nerves even to the spots on the cards in the second
+apartment;--there would, indeed, have been no reasons, had not the
+German gentleman been there; before him he must place himself; of him he
+knew the most and the worst; he stood in distant connection with
+Schoppe, even with Liana. Furies! in the neighborhood of certain faces
+the pinions of the soul crumple up and mew themselves as swans' and
+pigeons' feathers are crushed before eagles' quills; it was as
+uncomfortable and close for all the innocent feelings in such a roomy
+breast as Albano's, as it is to a flock of pigeons into whose cote some
+one has thrown the tail of a polecat.
+
+I cannot disguise the fact, he muttered and growled inwardly at all the
+man did and had,--whether it was his having fingers whose points were
+finely shaved for the faro-game, and whose nails had been somewhat
+peeled off by an altogether worse game of _hazard_ yet,--or his looking
+occasionally through the hair of his eyebrows,--or (only once) squashing
+a fly by a sudden snapping to of his lips like a fly-trap,--or his
+uttering now a line of German and now of French, which I expect of good
+circles, whereas only low people never bring out a German word, except a
+few, such as _Lansquenet_,[80] _canif_ (kneif), _birambrot_ (bier am
+brod), excepted. Suffice it, he thought always of Schoppe's fine
+expression: "There are men and times at which and with whom nothing
+could be more refreshing to an honest man than--to give them a sound
+drubbing." Duelling is quite as good, thought the Count.
+
+However, Schoppe must here be justified by an authority. Namely, the
+author himself, otherwise such a soft, warm swan-skin, could never stand
+behind card-table-chairs without becoming a complete game-cock, and
+spreading out his scratching, bristly wing the wider the longer he idly
+looked on; the reason is this, that in general one finds only those
+people more and more tolerable and better upon acquaintance, with whom
+one pursues and purposes the same kind of objects.
+
+Albano wished heartily he had his brother-in-arms Schoppe with him now;
+he went often, it is true, to Augusti to vent himself; but _he_ always
+sought to pacify him; yes, by keeping himself constantly engaged with
+the church-counsellor, he cut off from him the opportunity of betraying
+his youthful, inexperienced soul to listeners. Moreover, the Lector
+chose afterward for half an hour--what familiar friends often do in the
+absence of familiar female friends--the latter (namely, absence).
+
+The Count stood some time behind Bouverot's seat, and looked into a
+Chinese mirror, japanned on the inside with grotesque figures, and
+changed his position constantly, till he brought Cephisio's face to
+appear therein right beside a painted dragon, just by way of
+comparison;--all this went on, interrupted, however, by constantly
+increasing heart-beatings for Liana, when the servants opened the doors
+to the supper-hall; and now his heart thumped even to pain, and his
+form, already so blooming with youth, hung all full of the roses of
+happy and modest confusion.
+
+
+40. CYCLE.
+
+With beating heart and burning cheek he made his way into the midst of
+the motley promenading throng with some old lady or other, who, in her
+vanity, misunderstood him, and at once hung on his arm like a
+spring-bracelet, and who got nothing from him but--answers. With flying
+and piercing glances he stepped into the bright hall, which seemed as if
+it were made of crystallized light, and into the sea of heads. He was
+just making some answer when he caught, in the tumult behind him, the
+low words, "I certainly hear my brother,"--and immediately the still
+lower refutation, "It is my Count." He turned round; between the Lector
+and her mother stood the dear Liana, a modest, timid, pale-red angel, in
+a black silk dress, over which ran only the glittering spring-frost of a
+silver chain, and with a light ribbon in her blond hair. The mother
+presented her to him, and the tender cheek bloomed more redly,--for she
+had, indeed, confounded the similar voices of the guest and the
+brother,--and she cast down those beautiful eyes which could see
+nothing. Ah, Albano, how violently thy heart trembles now that the past
+has become present, the moonlit night a spring morning; and this still
+form, now so near thee, works far more mightily than in any dream! She
+was too holy in his sight for him to have been able to utter a lie
+before her about the apparent recovery; he preferred silence;--and thus
+the warmest friend of her life came to her the first time only veiled
+and dumb.
+
+The Lector soon led her away to her seat under the second lustre;
+opposite her sat her mother (probably, for this reason, that the good,
+unconscious daughter, who surely could not always be letting her eyelids
+fall, might raise them with friendliness and propriety towards a beloved
+being); the German gentleman, as an acquaintance, seated himself,
+without further ceremony, on her right, Augusti on her left,--Zesara, as
+Count, came far up above beside the highest lady.
+
+Deuse take it! that is, unfortunately, so often my own case! I assert
+the upper seat of honor,--and observe, a mile below me, the daughter,
+but, like a myops, only half of her, and can bring about nothing the
+whole evening. Do pray transpose me without any scruples down beside
+her,--you have to deal with nothing more than a puffed-up man,--why, on
+earth, as in the heavens, must, then, the largest planets be placed
+exactly the farthest from their sun?
+
+I now draw my readers to the Minister's table, not to show them the
+ministerial pomp ingrafted upon avarice, or his dance of honor hemmed in
+between the parallel lines of etiquette, or even his family arms, which
+were carried round on every chafing-dish and salt-cellar, and with the
+ice and mustard,--enough for us to know the ubiquity of the insignia
+upon his flower-pots, shirts, bed-clothes, dog's cravats, and all his
+thoughts; but the reader shall just now look only at my hero.
+
+He is very prominent. Upon such a new-comer, people, in a
+residence-city, have already, before he has fairly given the driver his
+drinking-money, got all possible light of nature and revelation;
+nineteen of the company were fastened upon him as his moral odometers.
+The boldness of his nature and his rank made up with him for worldly
+tact, which was missed nowhere except in this, that he never took sides
+except in the very strongest manner, and always ran off into general and
+cosmopolitan observations. But see, I pray you!--O, I wish Liana could
+see it,--how the rosy glow and the fresh green of his healthiness shines
+among the yellow sicklings of the age, out of whom, as from ships on the
+African coast of youth, all the pitch that held them together had run
+out,--and how the cheek-redness of spiritual health, a tender,
+ever-returning suffusion (from anxiety about Liana) graces him, whereas
+most of the world's people at the table seem, like cotton wool, to take
+all colors more easily than _red_!
+
+He looked and listened, against the salvation-laws of visiting, too much
+to Liana. She ate, under the heightened redness of a fear of mistaking,
+only sparingly, but without embarrassment; the Lector, with easy hand,
+barred up against her the smallest road to error. What astonished him
+was, that she covered such a sensitive and easily weeping heart with
+such an unembarrassed cheerfulness of countenance and conversation.
+Young man! _that_ is, with the most delicate maidens, free from pangs of
+love, no covering and disguise, but an enjoying of the moment and
+habitual courtesy! She retained so considerately (what she had probably
+learned beforehand) the relative rank of the familiar voices, that she
+never directed her answer to the wrong place. She, however, looked often
+to her mother with full eyes, and smiled then still more serenely, not,
+however, for the purpose of deceiving, but from real, hearty love.
+
+Touching her salad, the best and most fit to be a prince's table-guest
+among my female readers, who had seen her mix it, would have taken
+several fork-loads thereof. Uncommonly charming was it, when, growing
+more earnest and red, she drew off her glove before the blue, celestial
+hemisphere of glass; with white hands and supple arms, without a silken
+fold, worked away in the green, between the blue of the glass and the
+black of the silk; considerately felt for the vinegar-and oil-castors,
+and poured out as much as her practice (and the deciphered advice of the
+Lector,--at least so it seems to me) directed. By heavens! the dressing
+is, in this case, the salad; and the vain Minister, who had no
+understanding of pictures, had a great eye for things that would make
+good pictures.
+
+The mother seemed scarcely to look at the leaf-mixing. To the Count, the
+Minister's lady seemed to-day to have only good-breeding and no pious
+strictness; but he did not yet sufficiently know those polished women,
+who have refinement without wit, sensibility without fire, clearness
+without coldness; who borrow of the snail his feelers, his softness, his
+coolness, and his dumb gait, and who demand and deserve more confidence
+than they obtain.
+
+At this moment came in Cephisio, like an angel among three men in the
+fiery furnace, but a dark angel. To the Count, his contiguity of seat,
+and every word he addressed to Liana, was already a crucifixion,--only
+to pass with a look from her to him was an agony, little different from
+that which I should have, if I had spent a day at Dresden in the antique
+Olympus of ancient gods, and then, on going out, should fall into a
+refectory full of swollen monks, or into a naturalist's cabinet full of
+stuffed malefactors' skins and bottled embryo-spiders. However he was
+pacified--in my opinion, only deceived--by one thing, that the German
+gentleman did not blaze away in lyrics beside her, was neither in heaven
+nor out of his head, but in his head, and quite composed and very
+polite. There are no pigeons, Count,--ask the farmers,--which the hawks
+oftener pounce upon than the _glossy white_ ones!
+
+The German gentleman now produced a snuff-box, with a neat picture of
+Lilar, and asked Liana how it pleased her; he liked the sentimentality
+of it particularly.
+
+The Lector was terrified, leaned forward toward the box-piece, and threw
+out a few opinions beforehand which should guide the half-blind one in
+forming her own; but after she had passed it two or three times
+obliquely against the lights and near before her eyes, she was able to
+express an original opinion herself, that the child illuminated by the
+half-sunken sun, who is drawn aloft by a flower-chain under the
+triumphal arch, was, to her feelings, "so very lovely." Here--and I have
+observed the same case in a half-blind lady of powerful fancy and
+receptive sense of art--the effort and the artistic sense, or the
+spiritual eye, came to meet the bodily half-way. The box, as well as its
+snuff, was presented farther on, and came down along to the Counsellor
+of Arts, Fraischdörfer, upon whom the new Prince's love of the arts and
+the favorite's knowledge in them now placed new crowns; he found fault
+with nothing but the white of the blossoms. "Spring," said he, "is, by
+reason of its wearisome whiteness, a mere monochrome; I have visited
+Lilar only in autumn." "There is the nightingale's song, too, which we
+of course cannot paint, but yet we can hear it," said Liana, cheerfully;
+he was her teacher, and now, in the technology of painting, even her
+father's. Over all her acquisitions and inner fruits and blossoms the
+rose of silence had been painted; to that her tyrannical father had
+entirely accustomed her, and especially before men, in whom she always
+revered copied fathers.
+
+When the landscape came to Albano, and he held before him in miniature
+that spring night when Lilar and the noble old man appeared to him so
+enchantingly,--and as he touched what the dear soul had handled,--and
+now in his own soul all accordant strings trembled,--just then the Devil
+struck again a dissonant chord of the seventh:--
+
+"The Prince, gracious sir," said the Minister to the German gentleman,
+"was yesterday buried in private; only eight days hence we have the
+public interment. We are obliged to hasten, because the suspension of
+the court-mourning lasts until the inauguration, on _ascension-day_, is
+gone by." I am too much excited to express myself upon the eternal
+master of ceremonies, Froulay, who would have raised a lantern-tax in
+the sun, and bridge-toll before park-bridges and asses'-bridges; but
+Albano, dazzled by so many side-lights and glancing rays,--reminded of
+Liana's sorrow over the old man, of his birthday, of the heart without a
+breast, and of the madness of the world,--was not in a condition,
+however much he had intended appearing in gentleness and lambs' clothes
+before Froulay, to keep the latter on; but he must needs (and louder
+than he meant), in opposition to his next neighbor, the Church
+Counsellor, Schäpe, with too great youthful exasperation (not lessened
+by the eager listening of Liana for the brotherly voice) declare himself
+against many things,--against the everlasting dead sham-life of
+men,--against the ceremonial haughtiness of a soulless form,--against
+this starving on love merely from making false shows of it;--ah, his
+whole heart burned on his lip!
+
+The honest Schäpe, whom I just now called a scoundrel, took, with
+several expressions of countenance, Albano's part. But I do not by any
+means, friend Albano!--thou hast yet to learn for the first time that
+men, in respect to ceremonies, modes, and laws, like a flock of sheep,
+will, in a body, provided the bell-wether can only be got to leap over a
+pole, continue to leap carefully over the same place when the pole has
+been taken away;--and the most and highest leaps, in the state, are
+those we make without the pole. But a youth would be an ordinary one who
+should love civil life very early, however certain it is that he and we
+all judge too bitterly the faults of every office which we do not
+ourselves hold.
+
+The company listened in silence, and, out of politeness, only inwardly
+admired; on Liana fell a tender seriousness.
+
+They rose,--the closeness vanished,--so did his zeal;--but, whether it
+came from the speaking, or the contemplation of the loved object, or
+from a youthful over-leaping of the hedges of visiting-propriety,--(it
+arose not, however, from want of manners),--the fact is not to be denied
+(and I do my best, too, to give it exactly) that the Count left the poor
+old lady who had been escorted in by him,--Hafenreffer himself knows not
+her name,--left her standing, and, I believe unconsciously, took Liana
+under his escort. Ah, her! What shall I say of the magic nearness of the
+dreamed-of soul,--of the light resting of her hand, felt only by the arm
+of the inner man, not of the outer,--of the shortness of the heavenly
+way, which should have been at least as long as Frederick Street?
+Verily, he himself said nothing,--he thought merely of the abominable
+Inhibitorial-room, where their separation must take place,--he trembled
+at every effort to speak. "You have, perhaps," said Liana, lightly and
+openly, who loved to hear the friendly voice, especially after the warm
+discourse, "already visited our Lilar?"--"Truly not; but have you?" he
+said, too much confused. "My mother and I have made it our favorite home
+every spring."
+
+Now were they in the parting-chamber. Alas! there and thus he stood with
+her, who saw nothing, for some seconds immovable, and looked straight
+before him, wanting to say something, till he was aroused by her mother,
+who was eagerly seeking, for her affection, which the whole evening had
+been nourishing, a sequestered hour on her daughter's heart,--and so all
+was over, for both vanished like apparitions.
+
+But Alban was as a man who is deserted by a glorious dream, and who all
+the morning is so inwardly blest, but remembers the dream no more. And
+yet, stands not Lilar open to him, and will he not surely see it, so
+soon as ever Liana can see it too?
+
+Never was he more gentle. The attentive Lector, in this warm, fruitful
+seed-time, threw in some good seed. He said, as they looked out together
+into the moonlit night, Albano had this evening hardly brought forward
+anything but thorny and exaggerated truths, which only imbitter, but do
+not enlighten. At another time the Count would have asked him whether he
+should have carried himself like Froulay and Bouverot, who, with all
+possible tolerance, presented theses and antitheses to each other, like
+an academical respondent and opponent, who previously prepare in concert
+logical wounds and plasters of equal length;--but to-day he was very
+kindly disposed towards him. Augusti had so delicately and
+affectionately cared for mother and daughter,--he had, without
+blackening or whitewashing, said much good, but nothing hastily, and his
+expositions had been calmly listened to: he had neither flattered nor
+offended. Albano, therefore, replied, softly: "But it is surely better
+to imbitter, dear Augusti, than to put to sleep. And to whom shall I
+then say the truth but to those who have it not nor any faith in it?
+Surely not to others." "One can speak any truth," said he, "but one
+cannot reckon as truth every mode and mood in which he speaks it."
+
+"Ah!" said Albano, and looked up; beneath the starry heaven stood the
+marble Madonna of the palace, like a patron saint, softly
+illuminated,--and he thought of her sister,[81]--and of Lilar,--and of
+spring,--and of many dreams,--and how full his heart was of eternal
+love, and that he had as yet no friend and no loved one.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[70] Lit. "Let themselves be struck dead thereupon," i. e. lay
+their life that it was so. We have a vulgarism: "I'll be shot if
+it's not so."--TR.
+
+[71] _Blase-löcher_, mouth-pieces.--TR.
+
+[72] _Honnêteté_ entirely excludes, in the higher classes,
+murder; _dés honnêteté_, lying, &c., except in a _certain_
+degree.
+
+[73] This court is Catholic, but the country Lutheran; and to
+this latter confession that of Hohenfliess also subscribes.
+
+[74] Or convocations every fifteen years.--TR.
+
+[75] A departing graduate.--TR.
+
+[76] See Count Lamberg's Day-book of a Man of the World.
+
+[77] Whoever goes to the Academy of the Arcadians, takes an
+Arcadian name.
+
+[78] One who watches the card and takes up the money at the
+bank.--TR.
+
+[79] Give us our daily bread, and forgive us our debts.--[? TR.]
+
+[80] Lanzknecht.--TR.
+
+[81] Liana.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+EIGHTH JUBILEE.
+
+     LE PETIT LEVER OF DR. SPHEX.--PATH TO
+     LILAR.--WOODLAND-BRIDGE.--THE MORNING IN
+     ARCADIA.--CHARITON.--LIANA'S LETTER AND PSALM OF
+     GRATITUDE.--SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A GARDEN.--THE
+     FLUTE-DELL.--CONCERNING THE REALITY OF THE IDEAL.
+
+
+41. CYCLE.
+
+I Sat up all last night till towards morning,--for I cannot suffer any
+strange _déchiffreur_ in the case,--in order to cipher out the Jubilee
+to the very last word, so enchained was I by its charms; I hope,
+however, as the mere thin leaf-skeleton from Hafenreffer's hand has
+already done so much, that now, when I run through its veins with
+sap-colors and glossy green, the leaf will do absolute miracles.
+
+With the Count it had been troubled weather since last evening. For the
+patient, modest form which he had seen shone, like the purpose of a
+great deed, before all the images of his soul; and in his dreams, and
+before he sank to slumber, her gentle voice became the Philomela of a
+spring-night. Withal, he heard them continually talking about her,
+especially the Doctor, who every morning announced further progress of
+the ocular cure, and at last placed Liana's setting out for Lilar nearer
+and nearer. To hear of a loved one, however, even the most indifferent
+thing, is far mightier than to think of her. He heard further, that her
+brother, since the murder of her eyes, had withdrawn entirely from the
+city, in which he would not again appear except on a so-called
+festive-steed at the Prince's funeral;--and around this Eden, or rather
+around its creatress, so high a garden-wall had been run, and he went
+round the wall and found no gate.
+
+I know nothing more odious than this; but in what residence-city is it
+otherwise? If I ever wrote a Romance (of which there is no probability),
+one thing I affirm openly, there is nothing which I would so sedulously
+shun as a residence-city, and a heroine in it saintly enough for a
+canoness. For the conjunction of the upper planets is more easily
+brought about than that of the upper class of lovers. Does _he_ wish to
+speak alone with _her_ at Court or at tea or in her family, there stands
+the Court, the tea-party, the family close by;--will he meet her in the
+park, she rides, like the Chinese couriers, double, because we give a
+consciousness to maidens, as nature gives all important organs,
+duplicate, just as we give good wine double bottom;--will he meet her at
+least accidentally in the street, then there stalks along behind her (if
+the street lies in Dresden), a sour servant as her plague-vinegar,
+soul-keeper, _curator sexus_, _chevalier d'honneur_, genius of Socrates,
+contradictor, and Pestilentiary. In the country, on the other hand, the
+parson's daughter takes a run (that is all), because the evening is so
+heavenly, about the fields of the parsonage, and the candidate needs do
+nothing more than put on his boots. Really, among people of rank, the
+mantle of (erotic) love seems in the beginning to be a Dr. Faust's
+mantle, which swears to soar over everything, whereas it merely covers
+over everything; only, at last, there stands a Schreckhorn, a Mount
+Pilate, and a Jungfrau, before one's nose.
+
+Blessed hero! On Friday came the Lector, and reported, that on Monday
+the illustrious deceased--namely, his empty coffin--is to be buried, and
+Roquairol rides the festive-steed,--and Liana is almost well, for she
+goes with the Minister's lady to-morrow to Lilar, in all probability to
+escape some sad black-bordered notes of condolence,--and, on the
+following ascension-day comes the consecration and masquerade....
+
+Blessed hero! I repeat. For hitherto what hast thou possessed of the
+blooming vale of Tempe, except the barren heights whereon thou stood'st
+looking down into the enchantment?
+
+
+42. CYCLE.
+
+On the May-Saturday-evening, at 7 o'clock, every vapor disappeared from
+the sky, and the brightly departing sun went to meet a glorious Sunday.
+Albano, who then, at length, meant to visit the unseen Lilar, was, on
+the evening before, as sacredly happy as if he were celebrating
+confession eve before the first holy supper;--his sleep was one constant
+ecstasy and awaking, and in every dream a mimic Sunday morning rose, and
+the future became the dark prelude of the present.
+
+Early on Sunday he was about to sally forth, when he had to pass by the
+half-glass door of the Doctor. "Sir Count, one moment!" cried he. When
+he entered, the Doctor said, "Directly, dear Sir Count!" and went on
+with what he was about. To the painters, who, in future centuries, will
+draw from me as they have hitherto from Homer, I present the following
+group of the Doctor as a treasure; he lay on his left side; Galen was
+smoothing down his father's back with a little scratch-brush, while
+Boerhave stood near him with a broad comb, and kept dragging that
+instrument perpendicularly (not obliquely) through the hair. He always
+said he knew nothing that cheered him up so, and was such a good
+aperient, as brush and comb. Before the bed stood Van Swieten in a thick
+fur, which the correctioner had to wear when the weather was warm and
+his behavior bad, in order that he might, thus arrayed, be laughed at,
+as well as half roasted.
+
+Two girls stood waiting there in full Sunday gala, and were thinking of
+going out into the country to see a parson's daughter, and to the
+village church; these he first mauled, limb by limb, with the hammer of
+the law. He loved to make his children antipodes of Romish defendants,
+who appear in rags and tatters, and so he set them in the pillory, all
+ruffled and tasselled, especially before strangers. The Count had
+already this long time, on the red children's account, been standing
+with his face turned toward the open window; he could not, however,
+refrain from saying, in Latin, "Were he his child, he would long ago
+have made way with himself; he knew nothing more degrading than to be
+scolded in finery." "It takes so much the deeper hold," said Sphex, in
+German, and fired only these few farewell shots after the girls: "You
+are a pair of geese, and will do nothing in church but just cackle about
+your rags and tags; why don't you mind the parson? He is an ass, but he
+preaches well enough for you she-asses; in the evening do you tell me
+every word of the sermon."
+
+"Here is a laxative drink, Sir Count, which, as you are going to Lilar,
+I beg you to give the Architect's lady for her little toads; but don't
+take it ill!" By the deuse! that is what precisely those people most
+frequently say, who, themselves, never take anything ill. The
+Count,--who at another time would have contemptuously turned his back
+upon him,--now blushing and silent before the preserver of his Liana,
+put it into his pocket, because, too, it was for the children of his
+beloved Dian, to whose spouse he wished to bear greetings and news.
+
+
+43. CYCLE.
+
+Lilar is not, like so many princely gardens, a torn-out leaf
+of a Hirschfeld,--a dead landscape-figurant and mimic- and
+miniature-park,--one of those show-dishes which are now served up and
+sketched at every court, of ruins, wildernesses, and woodland-cottages,
+but Lilar is the _lusus naturæ_ and bucolic poem of the romantic and
+sometimes juggling fancy of the old Prince. We shall soon enter in a
+body behind our hero, but only into _Elysium_. _Tartarus_ is something
+entirely different, and the second part of Lilar. This separation of the
+contrasts I praise even more than all. I have long wanted to go into a
+better garden than the common chameleonic ones are, where one hands you
+China and Italy, summer-house and charnel-house, hermitage and palace,
+poverty and riches (as in the cities and hearts of the proprietors), all
+on one dish, and where day and night, without an aurora, without a
+mezzotinto, are placed side by side. Lilar, on the contrary,--where the
+Elysium justifies its happy name by connected pleasure-tents and
+pleasure-groves, as the Tartarus does its gloomy one, by lonesome,
+veiled horrors,--_that_ is drawn right out of my heart.
+
+But where is our youth now going with his dreams? He is yet on the
+romantic road that leads into Lilar, properly the first garden-walk of
+the same. He strolled along an embowered road, which gently rose over
+hills, with open orchards, and into yellow-blooming grounds, and which,
+like the Rhine, now forced its way through green, ivy-clad rocks, and
+now opened its flying, smiling shores behind the twigs. Now the white
+benches under jessamine bushes and the white country-seats became more
+frequent; he drew nearer, and the nightingales and canary-birds[82] of
+Lilar came roving along, like birds announcing land. The morning blew
+fresh through the spring, and the indented foliage yet held fast its
+light, ethereal drops. A carrier lay sleeping on his rack-wagon, which
+the beasts, browsing right and left, safely drew along the smooth road.
+Albano heard, in the Sunday stillness, not the war-cry of oppressive
+labor, but the peace-bells of the towers: in the morning chime the
+future speaks, as in evening chimes the past; and at this golden age of
+the day there stood, also, a golden age in his fresh bosom.
+
+Now the fork-tailed chimney-swallows began to quiver with their purple
+breasts over the heavenly blue of the wild germanders, announcing the
+approach of our dwellings as well as their own; when his road seemed
+about to pass through an old, open, ruined castle, overhung with rich,
+thick leaves, like scales, at whose entrance, or egress, a red arm,
+pointing aside with the white inscription, "Way out of Tartarus into
+Elysium," stretched out toward a neighboring thicket.
+
+His heart rose within him at this double nearness of such opposite days.
+With long steps he pressed on toward the Elysian wood, which seemed to
+be cut off from him by a broad ditch. But he soon came out of the
+bush-work before a green bridge, which flung its arch like a giant
+serpent across the ditch, not, however, on the earth, but among the
+summits of the trees. It bore him in through a blooming wilderness of
+oaks, firs, silver-poplars, fruit-trees, and lindens. Then it brought
+him out into the open country, and now Lilar, from the east, flung, over
+the wide-extending spikes of grain, the splendor of a high golden ball
+to meet him. The bridge sank gently with him again into fragrant,
+glimmering broom, and beneath and beside him sang and fluttered
+canary-birds, thrushes, finches, and nightingales, while the well-fed
+brood slept under the covert of the bridge. At last, after passing an
+arched avenue, it came up again to the light, and now he saw the
+blooming mountain cupola with the white altar, whereon he had knelt on a
+night of his youth; and farther to the south behind him, the veil and
+dividing-wall of Tartarus, a high-reared wood; and as he stepped onward,
+Elysium opened upon him more broadly,--a lane of small houses with
+Italian roofs full of little trees, smiled joyfully and familiarly upon
+the sight out of the green world-map of dells, groves, paths, lakes; and
+in the east five triumphal gates opened passages into a wide-extending
+plain, waving on like a green-glistening sea, and in the west five
+others stood opposite to them with opened lands and mountains.
+
+As Albano passed down along the slowly-descending sweep of the bridge,
+there came forth into view, now blazing fountains, now red beds, now new
+gardens enfolded in the great one, and every step created the Eden anew.
+Full of awe he stepped out, as upon a hallowed soil, on the consecrated
+earth of the old Prince and the _pious father_[83] and Dian and Liana;
+his wild course was arrested, and entangled, as if by an earthquake; the
+pure paradise seemed made merely for Liana's pure soul; and now for the
+first time a timid question about the propriety of his hasty journey,
+and the loving fear of meeting for the first time her healed eye, made
+his happy bosom grow uneasy.
+
+But how festal, how living, is all around him! On the waters which gleam
+through the groves swans are gliding; the pheasant stalks away into the
+bushes, deer peep curiously behind him out of the wood through which he
+has come, and white and black pigeons run busily under the gates, and on
+the western hills hang bleating sheep by the side of reposing lambs;
+even the breast of the turtle-dove in some hidden valley trembles with
+the _languido_ of love. He strode through a long, high-bushed
+rose-field, that seemed a settlement and plantation of hedge-sparrows
+and nightingales, which hopped out of the bushes on the growing
+grass-banks, and ran out in vain after little worms; and the lark sailed
+away on high over this second world, made for the more innocent of God's
+creatures, and sank behind the gates into the grain-fields.
+
+Intoxicate thyself more and more, good youth, and link thy flowers into
+a chain as closely as the boy toward whom thou art hastening. For,
+overhead, on the Italian roof, before whose balustrade-breastwork
+silver-poplars, girdled about with broad vine-leaves, played, and which,
+in the spring-night, he had taken for a bower in roses, stood a
+blooming boy bent forward, who was letting down a chain of marigolds,
+and kept fastening on new rings to the too short green cable. "My name
+is Pollux," he answered briskly to Alban's soft question, "but my sister
+is named Helena,[84] but my little brother is named Echion." "And thy
+father?" "He is not here now, he is away off there in Rome; just go in
+to mother Chariton, I am coming immediately." On what fairer day, in
+what fairer place, with what fairer hearts could he come into the holy
+family of the beloved Dian, than on this morning, and with this mood?
+
+He went into the bright, laughing house, which was full of windows and
+green Venetian blinds. When he entered into the spring-room he found
+Chariton, a young, slender woman, looking almost like a girl of
+seventeen,[85] with the little Echion at her breast, defending herself
+against the sickly and excitable Helena, who, standing in a chair under
+the window, kept swinging in a many-leaved sling of a vine-branch, and
+trying to girdle and blind therewith the eyes of her mother. With
+charming confusion, wishing at once to rise, with her left hand to
+remove the leafy fetters without tearing, and to cover up the suckling
+more closely, she stepped forward, inclining her head, to meet the
+beautiful youth, with childlike friendliness and warmth, but with
+infinite shyness, not on account of the rank indicated by his dress, but
+because he was a man, and looked so noble, even like her Greek. He told
+her, with an enchanting love, which, perhaps, she had never seen so
+magnificently pictured, on his strong countenance, his name, and the
+gratitude which his heart kept in store for her husband, and the news
+and greetings which he had brought from him. How the innocent fire
+blazed out of the dark eyes of the timid creature! "Was then my lord,"
+so she called her husband, "very well and happy?" And so she began now,
+unembarrassed as a child, a long examination all about her husband.
+
+Pollux came dancing in with his long chain. Alban playfully took out the
+Doctor's medicine from his pocket, and said, "This is what you are to
+take." "Must I drink it right down, mother?" said the hero. Here she
+inquired quite as naively after the detailed prescriptions of the
+Doctor, until the little suckling at her breast rebelled, and drove her
+into a by-room to sit over the cradle. She excused herself, and said the
+little one must go to sleep, because she was going to walk with Liana,
+for whom she was looking every minute.
+
+Children love powerful faces. Alban was at once the favorite of children
+and dogs, only he could never act with the little jumping troop, on the
+childish playground, when grown spectators were in the boxes.
+
+"I can do a good many things!" said Pollux. "And I can read, sir!"
+rejoined Helena to her brother. "But then only in German; but I can read
+Latin letters splendidly, you!" replied the little man to her, and ran
+round through the room after readings and specimens; but in vain. "Man,
+wait a little!" said he, and ran up-stairs into Liana's chamber, and
+brought one of Liana's letters.
+
+
+43a. CYCLE.
+
+Albano knew not that Liana had the upper--so bloomingly shaded--chamber
+reserved for her own private use, wherein she frequently--especially
+when her mother remained behind in the city--drew, wrote, and read. The
+childlike Chariton, inspired with the love-draught of friendship, did
+not know at all how she could possibly so much as show her warmth of
+kindness to the fair, affectionate friend: ah, what was a chamber? Now
+into this always open room came the children, whom Liana sometimes heard
+read; and thus was Pollux able on the present occasion to fetch out of
+the solitary room the sheet which she had written this morning.
+
+While Albano, during the errand, sat so alone in the keeping-room of the
+far-off friend of his youth, near _his_ still, pale daughter, who looked
+now at him and now at a toy sheep-fold, as well known to him as Liana's
+eastern chamber, when the morning breeze swept in the glorious hum
+through the cool window, especially when, in the light cut-work of the
+floor the Chinese shadows of the vine and poplar foliage crinkled into
+each other, and when, at length, Chariton began to sing the suckling to
+sleep with a quicker, louder lullaby, which sounded to him like her
+echoing sigh after the fair land of her youth; then was his full heart,
+which had been already so stirred by all the events of the morning,
+wondrously moved, and--especially by the flickering sham-fight of the
+shadows--almost to tears; and the child looked up more and more
+meaningly into his face.
+
+Then came Pollux back with his two quarto leaves, and now set himself at
+once to his lesson. The very first page composed the melody to Alban's
+inner songs; but he could neither guess the authoress nor the date of
+the letter, except further along, by a desultory sort of reading to and
+fro. The leaves belonged to previous ones; not so much as a grain of
+writing-sand evinced their recent birth (for Liana was too courtly to
+use any); further, all the names were disguised; that is to say,
+Julienne, to whom they were directed, had unfortunately in Argenson's
+_bureau de décachetage_, where she resided, i.e. at court, demanded them
+in cipher, and she accordingly took the name of Elisa; Roquairol was
+called Charles, and Liana her little Linda. Linda, as will be well
+remembered, is the baptismal name of the young Countess of Romeiro, with
+whom the Princess on the day of that (for Roquairol) so bloody
+masquerade had established an eternal heart- and letter-alliance; Liana,
+to whose pure, poetic eyes every noble woman became a blessed saint and
+heroine, the opaque jewel a bright, pure, transparent one, loved the
+high Countess as if with the heart of her brother and her female friend
+at once, and the gentle soul named herself, unconscious of her worth,
+only the little Linda of her Elisa.
+
+Nor did Albano recognize the delicate running-hand; Julienne loved the
+French language even to its letters, but Liana's resembled not the
+scrawled Gallic protocols, but the neatly-rounded handwriting of the
+English.
+
+Here is her leaf at last. O thou lovely being! how long have I thirsted
+for the first sounds of thy refreshing soul!
+
+
+                                          "Sunday Morning.
+
+     "... But to-day, Elisa, I am so profoundly happy, and the
+     evening-mist is transformed to an aurora in heaven. I ought
+     not to give thee yesterday's work at all. I was too much
+     troubled. But might not my dear mother, who had come hither
+     merely for my sake, become thereby still sicker, whatever
+     appearances of tolerable health she might, for that very
+     reason, assume with me? And then came thy form, beloved one,
+     and all thy sorrow and the painful neighborhood,[86] and our
+     last evening here. O how reproachfully did all that pass
+     before my heavy heart! So, as we stopped before the house of
+     dear Chariton, and she kissed my mother's hand with tears of
+     joy; then was I so weak that I too turned aside and shed
+     tears, but other tears,--I wept for the rejoicing one
+     herself, who indeed could not know whether at that hour her
+     precious friend in Rome might not be sick or dying.
+
+     "But now the dark, gray mist is wholly blown away from the
+     flower-garden of thy little Linda, and all the blossoms of
+     life shine in their pure, high colors before her. After
+     midnight my mother's headache passed almost entirely away,
+     and she was still sleeping so sweetly this morning. O, what
+     were my feelings then! Soon after five o'clock I went down
+     into the garden and shrunk back at the splendor which burned
+     in the dew and between the leaves; the sun was just looking
+     in under the triumphal gates,--all the lakes sparkled in a
+     broad fire,--a gleaming haze floated like a saintly halo
+     around the edge of the earth which the heaven touched,--and
+     a high waving and singing streamed through the splendor of
+     morn.
+
+     "And into this unlocked world I had come back restored and
+     so happy. I wanted continually to cry out: 'I have thee
+     again, thou bright sun! and you, ye lovely flowers! and ye
+     proud mountains, ye have not changed! and ye are green
+     again, and, like me, renewed, ye sweet scented trees!' I
+     floated, as if transfigured, in an endless felicity, Elisa,
+     weak, but light and free; I had, so it seemed to me, put off
+     this burdensome clay under the earth and kept only the
+     beating heart, and in my enraptured bosom warm
+     tear-fountains gushed down, as if over flowers, and covered
+     them with brightness.
+
+     "'Ah, God!' said I, trembling at the very greatness of my
+     joy, 'was it then a mere sleep, that immovable repose of
+     mother?' and I must needs (smile on!) before I went further,
+     go up to her again. I crept breathless to the bedside, bent
+     listeningly over her, and my good mother opened slowly her
+     still gently dozing eyes, looked upon me languidly but
+     affectionately, and closed them again without stirring, and
+     gave me only her dear hand.
+
+     "Now could I right blissfully return to my garden; I bore,
+     however, a morning-greeting to the ever-cheerful Chariton,
+     and told her that I might be found on the broad way to the
+     _altar_,[87] if I should be wanted for anything. Ah, Elisa,
+     what feelings then were mine! And why had I not thee by the
+     hand, and why could not my distressed Charles see that his
+     sister was so happy? As, after a warm rain, the evening-red
+     and the liquid sunlight run from all the gold-green hills,
+     so stood a quivering splendor over my whole inner being and
+     over my past, and everywhere lay bright tears of joy. A
+     sweet gnawing consumed away my heart as if to death, and all
+     was so near to me and so dear! I could have answered the
+     whispering aspen and thanked the spring-breezes which fanned
+     so coolingly my hot eye! The sun had laid itself with a
+     motherly warmth on my heart, and brooded over us all,--the
+     cold flower, the naked young bird, the stiff butterfly, and
+     every creature. Ah, such should man be too, thought I; and I
+     took the sandy path, and spared the life of the poor little
+     blade of grass and the flower that peeped so lovingly, which
+     truly breathe and wake like us. I drove not away the thirsty
+     white butterflies and pigeons which stood beside each other
+     and bent down from the moist turf to drink. O, I could have
+     stroked the waves ... this creation is truly so precious and
+     from God's hand, and every the smallest-shaped heart has
+     surely its blood and a longing, and into every little
+     eye-point under the leaf the whole sun and a little spring
+     enter and abide!
+
+     "I leaned, a little exhausted, under the first triumphal
+     arch, ere I ascended to the altar, and looked out into the
+     glimmering landscape full of villages and orchards and
+     hills; and the glistening dew, and the ringing of the
+     village-bells, and the chime of the herd-bells, and the
+     floating of the birds over all, filled me with peace and
+     light. Yes, in such peace and seclusion and serenity will I
+     spend my fleeting life, thought I: does not the little
+     Sad-cloak persuade me, who, before my eyes, with his wings
+     torn by autumn, nevertheless flutters again around his
+     flowers; and does not the night-butterfly admonish me, who
+     clings, chilled, to the hard statue, and cannot soar to the
+     blossoms of day? Therefore will I never stir from my mother;
+     only let the precious Elisa stay with us as long as her
+     Linda lives, and call her noble friend soon,[88] that I may
+     see and heartily love her!
+
+     "I went up the green-shaded mountain, but with pain: joy
+     weakens me so much. Think of me, Elisa: I shall some time
+     die of a great joy or of a great, all too great woe! The
+     spiral path to the altar was painted with the hues of the
+     blossom-dust, and overhead, not colored and stationary, but
+     shifting, burning rainbows quivered through the twigs of the
+     mountain. Why stood I to-day in a splendor such as I never
+     knew before?[89] And when the morning breeze fanned and
+     lifted me, and when I dipped myself deeper into the blue
+     heaven, then said I, 'Now thou art in Elysium.' Then it was
+     to me as if a voice said, 'This is the earthly Elysium, and
+     thou art not yet sanctified for the other.' O, how ardently
+     did I then form the purpose to disentangle myself from so
+     many faults, and especially to renounce that too hasty
+     imagination of offence, which I may indeed conceal from
+     others, but through which I nevertheless injure them. And
+     then I prayed at the altar, and thanked the Eternal
+     Goodness, and wept unconsciously; perhaps too much, but yet
+     without my eyes smarting.
+
+     "At last I wrote the poem of thanks which I append to this,
+     and which I will put into verse, if the _pious father_
+     approves.
+
+
+"POEM OF THANKS.
+
+"'Do I then gaze again with blessed eyes into thy blooming world, thou
+All-loving One, and weep again, because I am happy? Why did I then fear?
+When I went under the earth in the darkness like the dead, and caught
+only a distant sound of the loved ones and of spring above me, why was
+my feeble heart in fear that there was no more hope for life and light?
+For thou wast by me in the darkness, and didst lead me up out of the
+vault into thy spring; and around me stood thy joyous children, and the
+serene heavens, and all my smiling loved ones! O, I will now hope more
+steadfastly! Continue thou to break off from the sick plant all rank
+flowers, that the rest may more fully ripen! Thou dost indeed lead thy
+human creatures into thy heaven and to thyself over a long mountain; and
+they go through the storms of life along the mountain, only
+overshadowed, not smitten, by the clouds, and only our eye grows wet.
+But when I come to thee, when Death again throws his dark cloud over me,
+and draws me away from all that I love into the deeper cavern, and thou,
+All-gracious, settest me free once more, and bearest me into thy
+spring,--into a still fairer one than this, which is itself so
+magnificent,--will then my frail heart, near thy judgment-seat, beat as
+gladly as to-day, and will the mortal bosom dare to breathe in thy
+ethereal spring? O, make me pure in this earthly one, and let me live
+here, as if I were already walking in thy heaven!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If even you, ye friends, who have never seen her, are yet won and
+touched by the patient, pure form, which can resignedly rejoice that the
+storm-cloud has, after all, only sent down rain-drops upon it, and no
+hailstones, how must she then have agitated the deeply-moved heart of
+her friend! He felt a consecration of his whole being, just as if Virtue
+came down incarnate in this shape from heaven, to hallow him with her
+smile, and then flew back in a shining path, and he followed, inspired
+and exalted, in her track.
+
+He urged the boy instantly to carry back the leaves, in order to spare
+her and himself--as she might appear any moment--the most painful of
+surprises; yet he firmly resolved--cost what it might--to be true, and
+confess to her, this very day, what he had done.
+
+The little fellow ran up stairs and down again, remained a long time
+before the door, and came in with Liana by the hand, who was dressed in
+white, with a black veil. She looked in and around a little perplexed,
+as she with both hands pushed back the veil from her friendly face; but
+she heard Chariton's lullaby. She did not know him till he spoke; and
+then her whole beautiful being reddened like an illuminated landscape
+after an evening shower: she had the pleasure, she said, of knowing his
+father. Probably she knew the son still better by Julienne's and
+Augusti's pictures, and on more congenial sides; her sisterly heart was
+certainly moved, too, by his brotherly voice; for the charm, and even
+preferableness, of resemblance and copy is so great, that one who looks
+like even an indifferent person becomes more dear to us, like the echo
+of an empty sound, merely because, in this case as in the imitative art,
+the past and absent, shining through the fancy, become a present.
+
+The gradually lowering tone of the mother's lullaby announced the
+sinking of the infant to slumber, and at last the diminuendo died away,
+and Chariton, with glistening eyes, ran to take Liana's hand. A frank
+and serene friendship bloomed between the innocent hearts, and held them
+entwined, as the vine does the neighboring poplars. Chariton related to
+her what Albano had related, with a reliance upon her most fervent
+sympathy. Liana listened to her friend with eager attention; but that
+was quite as much as if she were looking at the historical source itself
+that was so near at hand.
+
+
+44. CYCLE.
+
+At last they began a journey through the garden. Pollux very
+reluctantly, and only after Liana's promise to draw him a horse again
+to-day, stayed behind as patron-saint of the cradle. Alban said, to the
+extreme joy of the Architect's wife, who could now show the beautiful
+man everything, that he had seen but little of Lilar yet. How
+bewitchingly the two forms, linked in friendship, walked before him side
+by side! Chariton, although a matron, yet of a Grecian slenderness,
+fluttered along as a younger sister beside the lily-form of her somewhat
+taller Liana. The former seemed, according to the classification of the
+landscape-painters, nature in motion; Liana, nature in repose. As he
+joined Liana again, by whose left hand Helena was running along,--the
+mother on the right,--he found her softly-descending profile
+indescribably touching, and around the mouth he recognized lines which
+sorrow had drawn, the scars of returning days; while the lovely maiden,
+on the sunny side of the front face, as in her easy conversation,
+manifested a free, benignant cheerfulness, which Albano, who had never
+knocked at the school-room door of any young ladies' academy, found it
+hard to reconcile with her tearful poetry. O, if the tear of woman
+passes away lightly, so flutters away still more lightly woman's smile;
+and the latter, still oftener than the former, is only appearance!
+
+He tried, from a longing of the thirsty heart, to catch the little one's
+hand, but she hung with both upon Liana's left; presently, however, she
+skipped away, and plucked three iris-flowers,--which, like her,
+resembled butterflies,--and gave one to her mother, and two to Liana,
+with the words, "Give _him_ one too!" And Liana handed it to him,
+lifting her friendly face upon him as she did so with that holy
+maiden-look which is bright and attentive, but not searching, expressive
+of childlike sympathy without giving and demanding. Nevertheless,
+several times during the day did she let those holy eyes sink down; but
+what compelled her to it was, that on Zesara's rocky face, softened
+though it was by love, there rested a physiognomical right of the
+stronger: he seemed to look upon a shy soul with a hundred eyes, and his
+two true ones blazed as warmly, although quite as purely, as the sun's
+eye in the ether.
+
+The iris-flowers have this peculiarity, that one smells them, another
+not; only to these three beings in one did the cups open themselves
+equally wide, and they rejoiced long over this community of enjoyment.
+Helena ran forward and disappeared behind a low bush; she sat on a
+child's bench by a child's table, awaiting, with a smile, the grown
+people. The good old Prince had low moss-benches, little garden-chairs,
+little table- and pot-orangeries, and the like, placed everywhere, for
+the children, about the resting-places of their elders; for he loved to
+draw these refreshing open flowers of humanity near to his heart! "One
+wishes so often," said Liana, "to live in the patriarchal time, or in
+Arcadia, or in Otaheite; children are, indeed,--do you not believe
+so?--everywhere the same, and one has already in them what only the most
+remote time and the most remote region can insure." He indeed believed
+it, and gladly; but he kept asking himself, How can such an unstained
+Aphrodite be born out of the dead sea of a court, as pure dew and rain
+arise out of the briny water of the ocean?
+
+While speaking, she occasionally drew an uncommonly graceful--how shall
+I write it--_H'm!_ after her words, which, although a grammatical
+blunder at court, betrayed an unspeakable good nature; but I describe
+it, not in order that all my fair readers may let this attractive
+interjection be heard the very next Sunday.
+
+"The same," replied Albano,--but he meant it well,--"holds of the
+animals: the swan yonder is like the one in Paradise." She took it just
+as it was meant; but the reason was the pious Father Spener, her
+teacher; for at Albano's question touching Lilar's abundance of
+beautiful and gentle creatures, she answered: "The old Lord loved these
+creatures with a real tenderness, and they could often bring him even to
+tears. The pious Father thinks so too; he says, since they do everything
+at God's behest by instinct, accordingly it seems to him, when he
+contemplates the care of the parents for their young, just as if the
+Infinitely Gracious One were doing it all himself." They ascended now a
+half-shaded bridge, over a long water-mirror hung round with quivering
+poplars, wherein Liana's emblem, namely, a swan, slept on the
+water-rings, the bent neck beautifully nestled on the back, the head
+upon the wing, and gently wafted more by the breezes than by the waves.
+"So reposes the innocent soul!" said Alban, and thought, perhaps, of
+Liana, but without the courage to confess it. "And thus it awakes!"
+Liana added with emotion, as this white magnified dove slowly raised its
+head from the wing; for she thought of her mother's waking on this very
+day.
+
+Chariton, as if all made up of salient points, was continually turning
+to Liana, and asking: "Shall we go this way? or in through there? or out
+through here? If my lord were only here! he knows all about it." She
+would gladly have led him round every fount and every flower, and looked
+into the youth's face as lovingly as into that of her friend. Liana said
+to her, on the cross way at the bridge: "I think the flute-dell yonder,
+with the gleaming gold ball, will perhaps be pleasantest, especially for
+a lover of music; and, besides, they will look for me there, when they
+bring the harp to my mother." She had promised to come back to her as
+soon as that arrived. She shunned every path toward the south, where
+Tartarus frowned behind its high curtain.
+
+Liana spoke now of the contest between painting and music, and of
+Herder's charming official report of this strife. She, although a votary
+of the pencil, gave in her vote, as was natural to the female and the
+lyric heart, entirely for tones, and Albano, although a good pianist,
+was rather for colors, "This magnificent landscape," said Albano, "is in
+fact a picture, and so is every fair human form." "Were I blind," said
+Chariton, naively, "then I should not see my lovely Liana." She replied:
+"My teacher, the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, also set painting
+above music. But to me, when I hear music, it is as if I heard _a loud
+past_ or _a loud future_. Music has something holy; unlike the other
+arts, it cannot paint anything but what is good."[90] Verily, she was
+herself a moral church-music, the angel-stop in the organ. The pure
+Albano felt, by her side, the necessity and the existence of a yet
+tenderer purity; and it seemed to him as if a man might injure, even
+unconsciously, a soul like this, whose understanding was hardly anything
+more than a finer feeling,--as window-glasses of pure transparency are
+often broken, because they appear as if they were not. He turned round
+mechanically, because he was always one step in advance, and not only
+the blooming Lilar, but also Liana's full form, shone at once and
+transfigured into his soul. To clasp her to his heart was not now his
+yearning, but to snatch this being, who had so often suffered, from
+every flame; to rush for her, sword in hand, upon her foe, to bear her
+mightily through the deep, cold hell-floods of life;--that would have
+illuminated his existence.
+
+
+45. CYCLE.
+
+They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped
+from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when
+Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with
+her into a pathless oak-grove;--she looked upon him so contentedly and
+open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of
+being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the
+words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial
+Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting
+eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's
+breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with
+the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola
+Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning
+had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears.
+Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,--but like an
+angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been
+compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain
+address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!
+
+They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion
+never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye
+was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,--into that
+resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have gone round freely,
+without sleep. Chariton--from her earnestness much more busy--had, after
+a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let
+certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the
+blooming veil, which retired as they approached;--and Albano beheld now
+the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one
+in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before
+him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the
+higher terrace,--everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs,
+from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down
+below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which
+wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and
+mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains
+placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver
+rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold
+globe beside the sun,--the last mirror of his dying evening-glance.
+"Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually
+repeating.
+
+Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered
+with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey
+the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high
+pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an
+auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height,
+behind a statue of a Muse,--for the Nine Muses beamed from the green
+Tempe,--seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My
+brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile
+with the knitting-work which she had taken from her friend, "wishes
+very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its
+holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from
+embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your _Charles_
+like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did
+not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.
+
+All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and
+out of the bowers,--more and more continually joined them,--they
+quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,--at last
+flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared
+toward heaven;--they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps,
+and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue
+spring,--and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted
+on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of
+May,--and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering
+rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.
+
+Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar
+to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her
+eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as
+the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid
+summer-night;--but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the
+sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,--certainly not against sun
+and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated
+form, played--a sublime contrast to himself--with the ringlets of the
+little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big
+tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.
+
+At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and
+asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other
+ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the
+dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more
+strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.
+
+A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the
+vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of
+raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of
+his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,--by heaven, I must
+say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with
+trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been
+in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it
+all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder
+history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept
+saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said
+Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with
+heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the
+agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely
+to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read
+anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up
+soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed
+from him.
+
+O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this
+heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou,
+this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel
+among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err, so
+hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for
+once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the
+sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and
+hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with
+the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love
+in their hearts,--if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust
+each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry
+months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the
+other,--"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life,
+before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like
+thee!"--O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!
+
+The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was
+working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters
+and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something
+violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he
+had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled
+occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and
+stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange!
+how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the
+outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he
+could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his
+father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the
+gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path,
+and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the
+heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and
+perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried along after
+them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the
+awakened strings as from an Æolian harp, and bore them onward with it;
+and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of
+swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale
+continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and
+hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his
+ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked
+over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the
+distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping.
+And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!
+
+But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the
+loved objects only _in_, and not _on_, your bosoms, am I not, like the
+Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble
+sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the _Archimime_,
+who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your
+soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead
+of a past, has only given a future,--wilt thou not one day say to me, I
+should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies,
+for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it
+not been for these Phoenix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished
+lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then
+caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me
+than with the rest of you?
+
+Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really
+live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in _memory_, or
+beforehand in _hope_, you would, therefore, rather have the present day
+without either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of
+time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of
+the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the
+middle; but as to the past and the future,--neither of which can any man
+live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our
+heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,--you
+will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in
+order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.
+
+By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so
+that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and
+then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso
+would fain translate _poetic_ dreams into waking reality[91] is more
+foolish than the North American, who realizes his _nightly_ ones: he
+proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew
+into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch,
+bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us
+one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our
+present ideals,--as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love
+here below, which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner
+becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but _then_--no, for the Then
+of the life hereafter, this little _Now_, has no voice; but if, I say,
+here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral
+life, and every dream a day,--ah, even then would desire still remain
+enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a
+higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;--in _Arcadia_ we
+should pine after _Utopia_; and on every sun we should see an
+unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should--sigh as we
+do here!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[82] They have a whole room for winter quarters, of which in
+summer the windows are merely thrown open.
+
+[83] Such was the general title of the secluded Emeritus, the
+court preacher, Spener, who resided there, and who was related to
+the noble old pious Spener, not only on the paternal side, but
+also on the spiritual.
+
+[84] They had these names as twins.
+
+[85] The grammar seems to require "a still almost maidenly
+looking woman of seventeen years," but the translator did not
+dare to think Jean Paul could have meant that, consistently with
+the ages of the three children, though, as an Oriental, Chariton
+may have married _very_ young.
+
+[86] The Tartarus with Julienne's father's heart.
+
+[87] Such is the name of that mount which Albano found in the
+well-known spring night.
+
+[88] Linda de Romeiro.
+
+[89] The reason is, that after her recovery she was still
+short-sighted, and to a short-sighted person the dew is so much
+the more brilliant.
+
+[90] This proposition, that pure music, without text, cannot
+represent anything immoral, deserves to be more investigated and
+developed by me.
+
+[91] It cannot be objected to me, that in fact the scenes of my
+book have been actually experienced, and that no one would wish
+to experience any better; for in the representation of fancy
+reality assumes new charms, charms with which every other faded
+present magically glimmers through the memory. I appeal here to
+the sensations of the very characters who figure in _Titan_,
+whether they would not in my book--in case they should ever light
+upon it--find in the pictured scenes, which, however, are their
+own, a higher enchantment, which has gone from the real, and
+which, to be sure, might produce such an effect--but altogether
+illusorily--that my characters could wish to live _their own
+life_.
+
+
+
+
+NINTH JUBILEE.
+
+     PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER
+     TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF
+     ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN
+     THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE
+     CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN.
+
+
+46. CYCLE.
+
+Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in
+the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his
+Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of
+reality into his web,--namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the
+state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend.
+
+This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely
+coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been
+made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two
+first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as
+virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its
+end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal-
+and prefiguring-burial of the illustrious deceased, the old pious Father
+Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in
+order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the run-down
+wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper
+his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without
+speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and
+evening-offering of friendship.
+
+Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to
+talk a long while,--all Pestitz societies were auxiliary funeral
+societies, and full of burial-marshals,--every scaffolding of the
+neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or
+an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary,
+rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,--the Lector had
+already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off
+winter-garb, and found it to fit,--the court-marshal had not a minute's
+rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come
+to him now before its time,--the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold
+Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely
+pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in
+heaven himself as was the illustrious deceased,--the women had risen
+from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy
+_drapery-paintresses_ a long chain of coats and of their wearers
+probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their
+husbands.
+
+Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved
+the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings,
+Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The
+mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus,
+and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon
+be ready to be stretched to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a
+half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female
+crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the
+Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into
+Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's,
+and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one
+can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it."
+"You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said
+she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the
+Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano,
+caught and stopped her.
+
+Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away
+themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away
+therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle
+and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her _lazy
+Jack_[92] of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things,
+either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a
+_clothes'-rod_ of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she
+looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done
+in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count
+had she an eye,--under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good
+physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most
+physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the
+face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.
+
+Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer the walk or
+_gang_ was a press-gang,[93] the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a
+bird-net,[94] and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to
+be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers,
+and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the
+universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your
+eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What
+interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In
+the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from
+monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make
+leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they
+drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their
+merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should
+spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to
+have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like
+the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra,
+they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she
+replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the
+mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back
+with astonishment.) "Black?--black is a travelling-color, and
+bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color;
+and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the
+Jews in Morocco,[95] shall appear in black.
+
+"Pestalozzi, madam--but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe
+turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap
+it during the procession, so as to catch something of the muffled
+funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he
+might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi
+remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress,
+posture, image-worship, superstition, and love for charlatans, approach
+daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi,
+that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy,
+and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and
+caricatures, but also this very black of joy."
+
+Among the children,--of whom the uneducated alone were not
+ill-bred,--Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most
+prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which
+they were engraving on their bread and butter; and Galen showed his
+satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have
+made Mama have!"
+
+The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she
+offered to go in, assuring her he would not let her pass till she
+surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have
+got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough.
+He continued:--
+
+"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes
+one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead
+Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the
+Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more
+than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest and a Jewish
+king[96] it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more
+than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should
+permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the
+closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,[97] he
+had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds,
+answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a _Droit d'Aubaine_,
+a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed
+clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No,
+madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by
+their dying, as Marcion[98] asserted of Christ's journey to hell, bring
+up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out
+of hell into the heaven of the new administration.
+
+"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but
+consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought
+crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a
+sale for them;--an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy
+consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his
+predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is
+not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once
+strikes the whole metropolis,--even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only
+one word more, love: I assure you there is nothing coming yet but the
+company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse,
+which might easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been
+previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order
+that the procession may have no other _pensées_ than _Anglaises_[99]....
+O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of
+equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many
+people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."
+
+But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's
+thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of
+Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became
+his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark
+chain. He praised them for opening the _bal masqué_ of the new
+administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves
+for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the
+allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything
+easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the
+Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything,
+not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with
+pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on
+the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even
+the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four
+points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he
+found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside
+down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi,
+Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once
+into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be
+led along and held up on both sides.
+
+
+47. CYCLE.
+
+In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To
+the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the
+dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells,
+opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his
+blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing
+more loudly than all--one will hardly guess what--proclaimed before him
+the partings of life,--namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the
+funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all
+earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our
+hearts,--he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable
+three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first
+act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and
+bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.
+
+As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in
+summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to
+himself in _his_ season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener
+and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for
+in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only
+in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form;
+before the tired, older man, in Gothic.
+
+Schoppe generally began with _comic_ humor, and ended with _tragic_; so
+also now did the empty mourning-chest, the crape of the horses, their
+emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German
+Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an
+eminence, to which the contemplation of a multitude of men at once
+always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and
+laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal,
+tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed
+frenzy of mankind, and his own too.
+
+Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol,
+on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides.
+A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of
+all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under
+the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in
+which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of
+passion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his
+father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory
+rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart,
+and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good
+Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How
+painfully does the noble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and
+graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is
+right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's
+hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a
+close _bonsoir_, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon
+me,--we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and
+we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and
+kicking,--and there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and
+trailing his long crape,"--in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious
+mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the
+Librarian.
+
+All at once Schoppe, out of patience with this general emotion, said:
+"What a masquerade for the sake of a mask! Rag and tag for a piece of
+rag-paper! Throw a man quietly into his hole, and call nobody to see. I
+always admire London and Paris, where they toll no alarm-bells, nor set
+the neighborhood stirring, when the undertaker carries one, who has
+fallen asleep, to bed." "No, no," said Zesara, full of capacity for
+grief, "I admire it not: to whomsoever the holy dead are of no
+consequence, to him the living are so too;--no, I will gladly let my
+heart break into one tear after another, if I can only still remember
+the dear being."
+
+O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before
+which the coffin of the coffin passed by, there stood a bronze statue of
+the old man on horseback, who saw pass by below him the unsaddled
+mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was
+stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle,
+which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the
+forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than
+any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily
+man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how
+our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as _absent_, so soon as it
+is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the
+players on the stage.
+
+But had not the gray hermit, Spener, laid upon the sunken breast of that
+deeper hermit a double youth? O, in this frosty hour of pomp and
+pageantry, counts not the faithful Julienne every tone of the funeral
+bell with the beads of her tears,--that poor daughter whom sickness has
+exempted from the ceremonials, not from pain, who now has lost her _last
+but one_, perhaps her _last_ relative, since her brother is hardly one?
+And will not Liana, in her Elysium, guess the farce of sorrow which is
+acted so near to her over behind the high trees in Tartarus? And if she
+suspects anything, O how profoundly will she mourn!
+
+All this the noble youth heard in his soul, and he thirsted hotly after
+the friendship of the heart: it was to him as if its mountain- and
+life-air floated down from eternity, and blew the grave-dust away from
+his life-path, and he saw, up yonder, the Genius place his inverted
+torch upon the cold bosom, not to extinguish the immortal life, but to
+enkindle the immortal love.
+
+He could not now do otherwise than go forth into the open air, and, amid
+the flying tones of spring and the deep, hollow murmur of the receding
+dead march, write the following words to Liana's brother, in which he
+said to him, after a youthful style, Be my friend!
+
+
+                "TO CHARLES.
+
+     "Stranger! At this hour, when, in the dead sea and through
+     our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of men and
+     their bridge-posts appear to us _broken_, a true heart puts
+     a question to thee frankly, and let thine answer it
+     willingly and in truth!
+
+     "Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee,
+     stranger, and hast thou thy friend? Do thy wishes and nerves
+     and days grow together with his, like the four cedars on
+     Lebanon, which can bear nothing around them but eagles?
+     Hast thou two hearts and four arms, and livest thou twice
+     over, as if immortal, in the battling world? Or standest
+     thou solitary and alone upon a frosty, dumb, slender,
+     glacier-point, having no human being to whom thou canst show
+     the Alps of creation, and with the heavens arching far above
+     thee and abysses yawning below? When thy birthday comes,
+     hast thou no being to shake thy hand, and look thee in the
+     eye and say, We still cleave together faster than ever?
+
+     "Stranger: if thou hast had no friend, hast thou deserved
+     one? When spring kindled into life, and opened all her
+     honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the hundred gates
+     of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bitterly looked up and
+     begged of God a heart for thine? O when, at evening, the sun
+     went down like a mountain, and his flames departed from the
+     earth, and now only his red breath floated upward to the
+     silvery stars, hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of
+     friendship which sank together on battle-fields, like stars
+     of one constellation, stealing forth through the bloody
+     clouds out of the old world, like giants; and didst thou
+     think of _this_,--how imperishably they loved each other,
+     and thou, like me, wast alone? And, solitary one, when
+     night--that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid
+     climes, _toils_ and _travels_--reveals her cold suns above
+     thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the
+     distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, and
+     immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feelest, upon
+     the cold earth, that thy heart beats against no breast but
+     only thine own,--O beloved! weepest thou then, and most
+     bitterly?
+
+     "Charles, often have I reckoned up, on my birthday, the
+     increasing years,--the feathers in the broad wing of
+     time,--and thought upon the sounding flight of youth: then I
+     stretched my hand far out after a friend, who should stick
+     by me in the Charon's skiff wherein we are born, when the
+     seasons of life's year glide by along the shore before me,
+     with their flowers and leaves and fruits, and when, on the
+     long stream, the human race shoots downward in its thousand
+     cradles and coffins.
+
+     "Ah, it is not the gay, variegated shore that flies by, but
+     man and his stream: forever bloom the seasons in the gardens
+     up and down along the shore; only _we_ sweep by once for all
+     before the garden, and never return.
+
+     "But our friend goes too. O, if thou at this hour of death's
+     juggleries art contemplating the pale Prince, with the
+     images of youth on his breast, and thinking of the gray
+     friend who secretly bewails him in Tartarus, then will thy
+     heart dissolve, and in soft, warm flames run round through
+     thy bosom, and softly say: 'I will love, and then die, and
+     then love--O Almighty, show me the soul which longs and
+     languishes like mine!'
+
+     "If thou say'st that, if thou art thus, then come to my
+     heart: I am as thou. Grasp my hand, and hold it till it
+     withers. I have seen thy form to-day, and on it the marks of
+     life's wounds: hasten to me; I will bleed and struggle at
+     thy side. I have long and early sought and loved thee. Like
+     two streams will we mingle and grow, and bear our burdens,
+     and dry up together. Like silver in the furnace, we will run
+     together with glowing light, and all slags shall lie cast
+     out around the pure shimmering metal. Laugh not, then, any
+     longer so grimly, to think what _ignes-fatui_ men are; like
+     _ignes-fatui we_ burn and fly away in the rainy storm of
+     time. And then, when time is gone by, we find each other
+     again, and it will be again in the spring.
+
+                              "ALBANO DE CESARA."
+
+
+
+
+48. CYCLE.
+
+How gloriously,--before all the beating veins of the inner man, like
+those of the outer in old age, have stiffened into gristle, and all the
+vessels have become inflexible and earthy, and the moral pulse, like the
+physical, hardly makes sixty strokes in a minute, and before the shy old
+fool, at every emotion, reserves a piece of his nature which he keeps
+cold and dry, and which is to wait for another occasion, as sprinkled
+raspberry leaves always remain dry on the rough side,--how gloriously, I
+say, before this period of espionage, does a youth, especially an
+Albano, step along his path, how freely, boldly, and exultingly! and
+seeks with equal confidence the friend and the foe, and closes with him,
+to fight either for him or against him!
+
+Let this excuse Albano's fiery letter! The next day he received from
+Roquairol this answer:--
+
+     "I am as thou. On ascension-evening I will seek thee among
+     the masks.
+
+                                 "CHARLES."
+
+
+
+The redness of mortification rushed over the Count's face at this
+artificial postponement of the acquaintance; he felt that, after such a
+tone from the heart, _he_ would have immediately, without a dead interim
+of five days, and without an _homage-day masquerade_ in a double sense,
+gone to his friend and become his. But now he swore no longer to run to
+meet him, but only to wait for him. However, the roused indignation soon
+subsided, and he began to invent fairer and fairer mitigations for the
+first leaf of the so-long-sought favorite. Charles might certainly, e.
+g. not wish to mix up the holy time of the first recognition with this
+bustle of taking the allegiance-oath,--or that first suicidal masquerade
+might have made every succeeding one an inspiring era of a new second
+life,--or he knew, perhaps, in fact, about Albano's birthday,--or,
+finally, this glowing spirit chose to run or fly on his own track.
+
+Meanwhile, his note made the Count reproach himself for his own letter,
+as if it had been a sin against his Schoppe; he held it to be a sin, in
+one friendship, to yearn after another; but thou mistakest, fair soul!
+Friendship has steps which lead up on the throne of God, through all
+spirits, even to the Infinite: only love is satiable, and, like truth,
+admits no three degrees of comparison; and a single being fills its
+heart. Moreover, Albano and Schoppe, in such a mutual metempsychosis of
+their ideas, and such a near relationship of their pride and nobility,
+held each other far more dear than they showed to each other. For, as
+Schoppe, in fact, showed nothing, one could love him in return only with
+the finger on the lip, but, perhaps, so much the more strongly. Albano
+was a burning-hot concave mirror, which has its object near, and
+represents it erect behind itself; Schoppe one which holds the object
+far off, and throws an inverted image of it into the air.
+
+On the evening before his birthday, and the day of allegiance, Albano
+stood alone at his window, and pondered his past,--for a last day is
+more solemn than a first: on the 31st of December I reckon up three
+hundred and sixty-five days and their fates; on the first of January I
+think of nothing, because, in fact, the whole future is transparent, or
+may be all out in five minutes;--while the vesper-bell pealed over the
+fast-closing twentieth year of his life, and the vesper-hour rose within
+him, he measured the _abside-line_[101] of his moral being, and looked
+up at the towering pile of the approaching morrow, which hung full
+either of spring-showers or hailstones. Never yet had he so tenderly
+surveyed the circle of his beloved beings, or glanced through the open
+doors of futurity, as at this time.
+
+But the fair hour was spoiled by Malt, who burst in with the information
+that the limping gentleman had leaped overboard. From the dormer-window
+might be seen a returning village funeral-procession, conglomerated
+around the spot on the bank where Schoppe had plunged in. With frightful
+wildness--for in Albano indignation was next-door neighbor to terror and
+pain--he dragged along with him, as he flew to the rescue, the lazy
+provincial physician, and even threatened him with hard words; for Sphex
+was going to wait for a carriage, and meanwhile represent to himself the
+possible cases of too late preparations for a rescue, and besides,
+perhaps, cherished a hope of serving up Schoppe, on the anatomical
+table, as Doctor's-feast of science.
+
+The youth ran out with him,--through corn-fields, amidst tears and
+amidst curses,--with alternate clenched fist and outspread palm, and his
+eye grew more and more dim and dizzy, and his heart hotter and hotter,
+the nearer they approached the dark circle. At last they could not only
+see the Librarian, but also hear him; in good case he turned towards
+them his curly head from among the reeds, and, occasionally, as he was
+haranguing the mourning-retinue, he flung up, in a fiery manner, his
+hairy arm above the water-plants.
+
+Of course the case stood thus:--
+
+His sorites, as long as he lived, was the following: "He had come into
+the world, not feet foremost, but head foremost, and, accordingly,
+carried his head and nose high and lofty,[102] because he could not help
+it. Now he knew of no more genuine freedom than health;--every malady
+shuts up and warps the soul, and the earth is, merely for that
+reason, a universal block-house, _la salpetrière_ and house of
+bruises;[103]--whoso made use of an oyster-snail-viper medicine was
+himself a slimy, snaky, sticking viper, oyster, snail, and therefore the
+ever-free savages killed their invalids, and the vigorous Spartans gave
+no patient an office, least of all the crown;--and strength was
+especially necessary, in our degenerate days, in order to maul qualified
+subjects, because, to his certain knowledge, the fist with some
+substance in it was the best plaintiff's plea and _actio ex lege
+diffamari_ which a citizen could institute."
+
+Therefore he bathed summer and winter in ice-cold water, just as he, for
+the same reason, kept himself temperate in all things.
+
+Now, then, in this odious May-weather, he had merely, in his gray
+hussar-cloak,--at home, his night-gown,--and with shoes down at the
+heel, gone to the water-side; he had previously stripped himself at the
+house so as to be ready as soon as he should arrive at the bank. The
+mourning-company, who saw him go at his swift pace down to the water,
+and at last throw off everything and leap in, could not but believe the
+man meant to drown himself, and ran in a body to his bathing-place, not
+to let him do it. "Do not drown himself!" cried the mourning-company of
+blacks, while yet afar off. He just let them come on till he could
+discourse the matter to them somewhat nearer, in the following wise:--"I
+am yet open to conviction; I can hear reason, good folk, though I am
+already standing up to my neck in the water; but suffer yourselves to be
+correctly informed in this case, dear _Cherstens_ generally, for so
+Christians were called in the time of Charles. I am a poor
+Sacramentarian, and can hardly recollect what I have hitherto lived on,
+it was so bloody-desperate little. Whatever I have undertaken in this
+world, no blessing went with it, but it was all crab's-track backwards
+and forward. I set up, in Vienna, a neat little magazine of snipes'
+dung, but I made nothing out of it for want of snipes. I took hold on
+the other end, and hawked about in Carlsbad, for the lords and great
+ones, who are accustomed to set a picture upon every old stool and piece
+of trumpery, fine engravings for waste-paper and privy purposes, in
+order that, instead of the mere printed paper, they might have something
+tasty for consumption; but the whole set was left, a dead loss, on my
+hands, because the manner was too hard and not ideal enough. In London I
+prepared ready-made speeches (for I am a _litterateur_) to be used by
+men who are hanged, and yet would fain have something to say for
+themselves: I offered them to the richest parliamentary orators, and
+even knaves of booksellers, but came near having to use the speeches for
+myself. I would gladly have got my living by vomiting,[104] but that
+requires funds. I tried once to get a settlement as note-stand to a
+count's regiment, because it looks stupid enough on drill- and
+parade-days to see every one with a musical flap hanging on his
+shoulder, from which his next neighbor behind plays. I offered for a
+trifle to wear all the musicalia on my own person, and stand before them
+with the notes; but the first-lieutenant (who is at once in the regency
+and in the treasury) thought it would make the fifers laugh when they
+came to blow. Thus has it fared with me from time immemorial, dear
+Cherstens--but don't trample about on my precious cloak there! As ill
+luck would have it, I entered into wedlock with a lady of Vienna, who
+was endowed with melted seals;[105] her name was _Prænumerantia
+Elementaria Philanthropia_;[106] you don't know what this means in
+German,--a real hell-broom, who chased me, all heated, like a hunted
+stag, into the reeds here. Cherstens, I should defame myself in the
+water, were I to come out plainly with the whole story of our woful
+condition;[107] ... in short, my Philanthropia before marriage was soft
+as the spines of a new-born hedge-hog, but in the nuptial state, when
+the foliage was off, I saw, as on trees in winter, one raven's- and
+devil's-nest after another. She was all the time dressing herself and
+dressing herself, till it was time to undress; when a fault in me or the
+children had been removed, she would still continue to scold a little,
+as one continues to vomit, when the emetic and everything is out; she
+indulged me preciously little, and had I had a Fontanel[108] she would
+have reproached me for the fresh pea which I should have been obliged
+every day to put into it; in short, we two pulled opposite ways,--the
+linch-pin of love came out in the struggle, and I came with the
+forward-wheels down into the water here, and my Prænumerantia stays with
+the hind-wheels at home. See, my women, this is why I do violence to
+myself--besides, the gnawing-man[109] would have, at any rate, caught me
+by the throat; but behold yourselves in me as in a mirror! For when a
+man who is a _litterateur_, and therefore, as you yet know by the case
+of Fichte, goes about as instituted overseer, schoolmaster, and mentor
+of the human race, leaps overboard before his wife's face, and lets his
+Ephorie and tutorship go, you may conclude from this of what your own
+husbands, who cannot measure themselves with me at all in learning, are
+capable, in case you are such Prænumerantias, Elementarias, and
+Philanthropias as unfortunately you have the appearance of being. But,"
+he concluded suddenly, as he saw Albano and the Doctor, "clear
+yourselves away; I am going to drown myself!"
+
+"Ah, dear Schoppe!" said Albano. Schoppe blushed at his situation. "It
+must be a clown," said the retiring funeral retinue. "What child's
+foolery is this, then?" asked Sphex, resenting Albano's former passion
+and the anatomical misshot, and derived satisfaction from telling the
+story of the latter's rage. Schoppe knew how heartily the noble youth
+loved him, and he would not say anything, because he was ashamed, but he
+swore to himself (in the grotesque style to which he was accustomed even
+in soliloquy) very shortly to let him into his breast-cavern, and show
+him hanging therein a whole, wild heart full of love.
+
+
+49. CYCLE.
+
+The blue day on which an ascension, a rendering of allegiance, and a
+birthday were to be celebrated already stood over Pestitz, after having
+cast off its morning-red,--two horses were already harbingers of four,
+the lowly coach-box, of the highest,--the country nobility already went
+down, uncomfortably frizzled, into the rooms of the inn, and scolded at
+being cheated out of the fairest weather for heath-cock coupling,
+and the city nobility, yet unpowdered, spoke of the day, but
+without real earnestness,--the court-micrometer,[110] the
+court-marshal, was surrounded by all his quartermasters,--the
+court-transit-instruments,[111] the courtiers, instead of their
+half-holiday, when they work only in the afternoon, had a whole
+working-day, and were already standing at the wash-table,--the
+allegiance-preacher, Schäpe, believed almost every word of his
+discourse, because he had read it too many times over, and the nearness
+of publication infused emotion into him,--there was no longer a domino
+to be had for the evening, except among the Jews,--when a man alighted
+at the door of the Doctor's house, who among all others was the most
+honest and hearty about the allegiance, the Director Wehrfritz. There
+were a son and a father in each other's arms, a fiery youth and a fiery
+man. Albano seemed to him no longer to be the old Albano, but--warmer
+than ever. He brought with him from "his women," as he called them,
+congratulatory letters and birthday presents; he himself made not much
+of the birthday or forgot it, and Albano had only celebrated it a little
+just after waking. These festivals belong more to the other sex, who
+gladly toy with times and seasons in the way of loving and giving.
+
+The Titular Librarian marched out to a village, named Klosterdorf, where
+the Mayor with his family, after an ancient custom, had to imitate the
+Prince with his, and so, as commissioner, drive in the allegiance of the
+neighboring circle; this, Schoppe said, he still was pleased with, but
+the other worked too fatally on his inwards. The Director, dazzled by
+the prospects of the day, and posted in the front with an official
+speech to the chivalry, fell into a quarrel with Schoppe. "The Exchequer
+and the Court," said he, "have been, of course, from time immemorial,
+such as they are; but the Princes, dear sir, are good; they are
+themselves sucked dry, and then they seem to be the suckers."
+"Somewhat," rejoined Schoppe, "as the death-vampyres only give out blood
+from themselves, while they appear to take it; but I make up for that
+again by attributing wholly to the Regents, besides the sins of others,
+the merits, victories, and sacrifices of others also; herein they are
+the pelicans, who shed a blood for their children which really at a
+distance seems to be their own."
+
+All went off: Schoppe, out into the country; Wehrfritz, to church with
+the procession; Albano, into a spectator's-box in the allegiance-hall;
+for he would not in any wise be stuck into the train of the Prince, not
+even as embroidery. Soon the noisy stream of pomp came sounding back
+into the hall. The chivalry, the spirituality, and the cities mounted
+the stage, where the oath was to be taken. In the court-yard of the
+castle one foot stood upon another, and a needle might, to be sure, have
+reached the ground, but no one could do so, to pick it up; everybody
+looked up at the balcony, and cursed before he _swore_. The Prince, too,
+stayed not away; the throne, that graduated and paraphrased princely
+seat, stood open, and Fraischdörfer had decorated it with beautiful
+mythological and heraldic shoulder-pieces and appendages.
+
+Opposite the Count bloomed the court-dames, and below them a rose and a
+lily, Julienne and Liana. As one lifts his eye from the stiff frosty
+landscape of winter to the blue breathing heavens which looked down upon
+our spring evenings, and wherein the light summer clouds floated and the
+rainbow stood, so did he glance over the shining snow-light of the court
+at the lovely Grace of spring, around whom remembrances hung, like
+flowers, and who now stood so far aloof, so cut off, so imprisoned in
+the heavy finery of the court! Only through her friend, who sits beside
+her, was she gently melted and harmonized with the dazzling present.
+
+Now began fine official speeches, the longest being made by the old
+Minister, the shortest by Wehrfritz: the Prince let the warm eulogies
+glide over his December-visage without thawing it down,--a mistaken
+indifference! For the praise of the Minister, as well as of other
+court-servants, may yet help him with posterity, since, according to
+Bacon, no praise is of more consequence than that which servants give,
+because they surely know their master best.
+
+Then the Upper-Secretary, Heiderscheid, read Luigi's genealogical table,
+and illuminated the hollow family-tree, together with its dryness, and
+the last pale green twig; with sunken eyes Julienne heard this amid the
+_vivat_ of the people, and Albano, never subdued by _one_ thought alone,
+saw her eyes, and could not, however intently the Regent listened,
+avoid the funeral picture, how, one day, and that very soon, this
+extinguished man would bear down after him the name of his whole race
+into the vault; he saw them carving the inverted arms and hanging the
+shield upside down, and heard the shovels strike against the helmet and
+fling the earth after the coffin. Gloomy idea! the tender sister would
+certainly have wept, had she only been alone!
+
+At last the turn came to those, to whom it never comes first, although
+they are the only ones who have a hearty meaning in such ceremonies.
+Heiderscheid stepped out on the balcony, and caused the noisy swarming
+multitude to stretch out the forefinger and thumb, and repeat the oath
+after him. The mass, always fascinated, shouted their _vivat_; in the
+dazzled eyes gleamed the confident expectation of a better regency and
+love for the unknown individual. The Count, whom a multitude generally
+made enthusiastic, as it did Schoppe melancholy, glowed with the
+inspiration of brotherly love and thirst for achievement; he saw
+princes, like omnipotent ones, holding sway on their eminences, and saw
+the blooming provinces and the gay cities of a wisely-ruled land spread
+out before him; he represented to himself how he, were he a prince,
+could, with the electric sparkling of the sceptre-point, dart, with an
+animating shock, into millions of united hearts at once, whereas he
+could now, with so great difficulty, scarcely kindle a few of the
+nearest; he saw his throne, as a mountain in morning light, pouring out,
+instead of lava, navigable streams through the lands, and breaking the
+storms, with a hum of harvests and festivals around its feet; he thought
+to himself how far, from such a high place, he could send light abroad,
+like a moon, which does not hide the sun by day, but, from her
+elevation, flings his distant brightness into the night,--and how he
+would, instead of only defending, _create_ and _educate_ freedom, and be
+a regent for the sake of forming self-regents.[112] "But why am I not
+one?" said he mournfully.
+
+Noble youth! do thy estates, then, furnish thee no subjects? But just so
+does the lesser prince believe he would govern a duchy quite otherwise,
+and the higher one believes the same in regard to a kingdom, and so does
+the highest, in regard to universal monarchy.
+
+Meanwhile, all through this singular uneasy day, wild perspectives of
+youth passed to and fro before him, and the old spirit-voice, which he
+was going to meet to-day, repeated in him the dark exhortation, Take the
+crown! Wehrfritz came back in the evening with a red face from the fiery
+allegiance-banquet, and Albano took an agitated leave of him, as if of
+the ebb and calm of life--his childish youth; for to-day he launched out
+deeper into its waves. Schoppe came back and wanted to have him before
+the sight-hole of his show-box, wherein he slid through the
+vicariate-allegiance-swearing in Klosterdorf, in a series of comic
+pictures; but these contrasted too severely with higher ones, and gave
+little pleasure.
+
+At night Albano put on his beautiful, serious character-mask, that of a
+knight-templar,--for a comic one his form, and almost his mood, was too
+great;--the latter was made still more solemn by this funeral dress of a
+whole murdered knightly order. After he had caused to be described to
+him once more the awful paths of Tartarus, and the burial-place of the
+Prince's heart, to avoid mistaking of the way in the night, he went
+forth, about ten o'clock, with a high-heaving bosom, which the
+night-larvæ[113] of fancy, together with friendship and love and the
+whole future, conspired to excite.
+
+
+50. CYCLE.
+
+Albano stepped, for the first time, into the inverted puppet-world of a
+masquerade, as into a dancing realm of the dead. The black forms, the
+slit masks, the strange eyes, gleaming as out of night behind them,
+which, as in that mouldering Sultan in the coffin, alone remained
+alive,--the mingling and mimicking of all ranks, the flying and
+ring-running of the clinking dance, and his own solitude under the
+mask,--all this translated him, with his Shakespearian frame of spirit,
+into an enchanted and ghostly island full of juggleries, chimeras, and
+metamorphoses. Ah, this is the bloody scaffold, was his first thought,
+where the brother of thy Liana rent his young life, like a
+mourning-garment; and he looked fearfully round, as if he feared
+Roquairol might again attempt death.
+
+Among the masks he found no one under which he could suppose him to be;
+this meaningless cousinship of standing parts, footmen, butchers, Moors,
+ancestors, &c.,--these could not conceal any loved one of Albano's.
+Lonesomely and inquisitively he paced up and down behind the rows of the
+Anglaise; and more than ten eyes, which glistened opposite in the
+annular eclipse of the lace mask,--for women, from their
+open-heartedness, do not love masks, but are fond of showing
+themselves,--followed the powerfully and pliantly built form, which,
+with the bold helm and plume, with the crossed white mantle and the
+gleaming mail on his breast, seemed to bring a knight out of the heroic
+age.
+
+At last a masked lady, who was chatting between unmasked ones, came up
+to him with long steps and large feet, and boldly grasped his hand as if
+for a dance. He was extremely embarrassed at the boldness of the
+summons, and about the choice of an answer; it is valor precisely that
+loves to marry itself to gallantry, as the Damascene blade, besides
+hardness, possesses a perpetual fragrance; but the lady only wrote in
+his hand his initials, with the interrogation-mark after them,--"_v.
+C.?_" and after the Yes, the charming one said, softly, "Do you not
+remember me? the master of exercises, Von Falterle?" Albano testified,
+notwithstanding his dislike of the part, a real joy at finding again a
+companion of his youth. He asked which mask was Captain Roquairol;
+Falterle assured him he had not yet arrived.
+
+By this time--as the footmen, the butchers, Falterle, &c., were only the
+snow-drops of this masquerade-spring--better flowers--violets,
+forget-me-nots, and primroses--had sprung up or come in. For one such
+forget-me-not I see a churl entering, puffed out behind and before, and
+convex like a burning-glass, who now opened the back-door and shook out
+confects from his hump-back, and then the front-door and produced
+sausages. Hafenreffer, however, writes me the invention has once before
+appeared at a masquerade in Vienna. Then came a company of German
+play-cards, which shuffled and played out and took each other; a fine
+emblem of atheism, which exhibits it wholly free from the absurdity
+wherewith men have so loved to disfigure it! Mr. Von Augusti appeared
+also, but in simple dress and domino; he became (incomprehensibly to the
+Count) very soon the polar-star of the dancers, and the controlling
+Cartesian vortex of the dancing-school.
+
+With what miserable, black ammunition-biscuit and beggar's-bread of
+enjoyment these people get along! thought Albano, to whom, all day long,
+his dreams, those Jupiter's-doves, had been bringing ambrosia. And how
+pale and stale is their fire, their fancy, and their speech, he thought
+too. Verily, a life down in a gloomy glacier-chasm! for he imagined
+everybody must speak and feel as intensely and ardently as he.
+
+Now came a limping man, with a great glass-chest on his belly; of course
+it was easy to recognize the Librarian; he had on--either because he
+sent too late, or would not pay, for a domino--something black, which he
+had borrowed of a mourning-cloak lender, and was covered from
+shoulder-blade to shin-bone with awful masks, which he, with many
+finger-signs, offered mostly to those people who played their parts
+behind the opposite kind, e. g. short-nosed ones to long noses. He was
+waiting for the beginning of a hop Anglaise, the notes for which stood
+just on the hand-organ of his chest; then he, too, began; he had therein
+an excellent puppet-masquerade which had been planed out by Bestelmaier,
+and now he set the little masks to hopping parallel with the great ones.
+His object was a comparative anatomy of the two masquerades, and the
+parallelism was melancholy. Besides, he had rigged it all out with
+by-work: little dumb persons swung their little bells in the chest; a
+tolerably grown-up child rocked the cradle of an inanimate doll, with
+which the little fool still played; a mechanic was working away at his
+speaking machine, by which he was going to show the world how far mere
+mechanism could go toward giving life to puppets; a live, white
+mouse[114] sprang out by a little chain, and would have upset many of
+the club, if he could have broken it; a starling, buried-alive, a true
+first Greek comedy and school for scandal in miniature, was practising
+upon the dancing-company the death-blow of the tongue with perfect
+freedom and without distinction; a looking-glass-wall mimicked the
+living scenes of the chest so deceptively, that every one took the
+images for true puppets.
+
+The point of this comico-tragic dagger came home directly enough upon
+Albano, as, besides, the hopping wax-figure-cabinet of the great
+masquerade seemed to double the solitude of man, and to separate two
+selves by four faces; but Schoppe went further.
+
+In his glass case stood a faro-bank, and by it a little man, who cut out
+the masked banker in black paper, but into a likeness of the German
+gentleman; this picture he carried into the card-chamber, where a
+bank-keeping mask--most certainly Cephisio--must needs hear and see him.
+The banker looked at him some time inquiringly. Another, dressed wholly
+in black, with a dying expression, which represented the _Hippocratica
+facies_,[115] did the same. Albano looked towards it with a fiery
+glance, because it occurred to him it might be Roquairol, for it had his
+stature and torch-like eye. The pale mask lost much, and kept redoubling
+its loss; at that it drank out of a quill immoderate draughts of
+Champagne wine. The Lector came up; Schoppe kept on playing before the
+eyes that crowded round; the pale mask looked steadily and sternly at
+the Count. Schoppe took off his own before Bouverot; but there was
+another under it; he pulled this off; it disclosed an under-mask of the
+under-mask; he carried on the process to the fifth root;--at last his
+own rough face came forth, but bronzed with gold-beater's skin and
+distorted, as it turned towards Bouverot, with an almost frightful glaze
+and smile.
+
+The pale mask itself seemed to start, and hastened with long strides off
+into the dancing-hall; it threw itself wildly into the wildest of the
+dance. This, too, confirmed Albano's conjecture, as well as its great
+defying hat, which seemed to him a crown, because he prized nothing more
+highly about manly attire than fur, cloak, and hat.
+
+More and more fingers continually drew the letters "_v. C._" in his
+hand, and he nodded composedly. The time surrounded him with manifold
+dramas, and everywhere he stood between theatre-curtains. As with uneasy
+head and heart he stepped to the window, to see whether he should soon
+have moonshine for his night-walk, he saw a heavy hearse, flanked by
+torches, move along across the market, which was conveying a manor-lord
+to his family-vault; and the undisturbed night-watchman called out,
+behind the creeping dead man, the beginning of the spirit-hour and of a
+birth-hour, which is precious to us. Could his smitten heart refrain
+from saying to him how sharply Death, the hard, solid, insoluble, with
+its glacier-air, sweeps through the warm scenes of life, and leaves
+behind it all over which it breathes stiff and snow-white? Could he help
+thinking of the cold young sister, whose voice now awaited him in
+Tartarus? And as Schoppe, with his puppet-parody, came to him, and he
+pointed out to him the street, and the latter said: "Bon! Friend Death
+sits on his game-wagon, and glances quietly up, as if the friend would
+say, 'Bon! only dance on; I make my return trip, and carry you too to
+your place and spot,'"--how close must it have been to him under his
+sultry visor! At this second the pale mask came, with others, to the
+window; he opened his glowing face for coolness; a hasty draught of
+wine, and still more his fancy, showed him the world in burning
+surfaces; the mask surveyed him closely, with a dark, uncertain glow of
+the eye, which he at last could no longer bear, because it might as well
+have been kindled by hatred as by love, just as the spots on the sun
+seem now like abysses and now like mountains.
+
+Eleven o'clock had gone by; he suddenly disappeared from the hot looks
+and the crushing throng, and betook himself on his way to the heart
+without a breast.
+
+
+51. CYCLE.
+
+While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks
+(mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand,
+&c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the
+tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no
+servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy
+catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of
+others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than
+the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be
+murdered than shamed before his father.
+
+How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward
+toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars,
+stood erect before thee!--Beneath the heavens there is no terror, only
+under the earth!--Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on
+Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and butterflies. In the distance
+fiery prongs grew out of the earth and moved along;--it was the hearse
+with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which
+leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward
+the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had
+met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey
+(probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro.
+
+He passed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed
+down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of
+peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward
+Elysium,--a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some
+windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were
+continually seizing and vanishing.
+
+Impetuously Albano ran down a stairway darkened with hangings, and came
+upon an old battle-field,--a gloomy waste with a black wall, of which
+the monotony was broken only by white gypsum heads, which stood in the
+earth as if they were on the point of sinking or of resurrection; a
+tower full of blind gates and blind windows stood in the midst, and the
+solitary clock talked with itself therein, and, with its iron rod
+swaying to and fro, seemed fain to divide the wave of time, which ever
+tended to run together again: it struck three quarters to twelve, and
+deep in the wood the echo murmured as if in sleep, and softly spake once
+more to fleeting man of fleeting time. The road ran in an eternal circle
+round about the churchyard wall, without coming to a gate. Alban must,
+according to his information, seek a spot in the wall where it roared
+and reeled under him.
+
+At last he stepped upon a stone which sank with him; then a section of
+the wall fell down; and a tangled wood, full of clumps of trees, whose
+stems twined together into bush-work, intercepted every beam of the
+moon. As he looked round him under the gate, there hung over the shadowy
+stairway a pale head like a bust of the murder-field, and passed down
+without a body, and the bloodless dead seemed to awake and run after
+it;--the cold hellstone[116] of horror contracted his heart: he stood:
+the death's-head hovered immovable over the last step!
+
+All at once his heart sucked in warm blood again; he turned toward the
+misshapen wood with drawn sword, because he was bearing along his life
+in his hand near armed Death. He followed in the darkness of the
+moss-green towers the roar of the subterranean flood and the rocking of
+the ground. Unfortunately he looked round again, and there stood the
+death's-head behind him still, but high in the air on the trunk of a
+giant. The extreme of horror always drove him with compressed eyes full
+upon a phantom; he called twice through the echoing wood, "Who's there?"
+But when, at this moment, a second head seemed all at once to stand
+beside the first, then his hand clove, frozen, to the ice-cold key of
+the gate of the world of the dead, and he tore it away bleeding.
+
+He fled, and plunged through thicker and thicker twigs, till at last he
+came out into an open garden and into the splendor of the moon; here, ah
+here, when he saw the holy, immortal heavens and the rich stars in the
+north gleaming again, which never rise nor set, the pole-star and
+Friederich's-Ehre,[117] the Bear and the Serpent, and Charles's Wain
+and Cassiopæa, which looked down upon him mildly, as if with the bright
+winking eyes of eternal spirits, then his spirit asked itself, "Who can
+lay hands on me? I am a spirit among spirits"; and the courage of
+immortality beat again in his warm breast.
+
+But what a singular garden! Great and little flowerless beds, full of
+yew, rue, and rosemary, divided it among them; a circle of weeping
+birches drooped like a funeral train around the mute spot; under the
+garden murmured the buried brook, and in the middle stood a white altar,
+near which lay a man.
+
+Albano was strengthened by the appearance of the common dress and the
+mechanic's bundle on which the sleeper rested; he stepped quite close to
+him, and read the golden inscription of the altar: "Take my last
+offering, all-gracious one!" The heart of the Prince must here be
+mouldering in the altar.
+
+Ah, after these rigid scenes, it soothed his soul even to tears to find
+here human words and a human sleep, and the remembrance of God; but as
+he looked with emotion at the sleeper, suddenly that sister's voice
+which he had heard on Isola Bella said softly in his ear, "I give thee
+Linda de Romeiro." "Ah, good God!" he cried, and turned round; and there
+was nothing on either side of him, and he held himself up by the corner
+of the altar. "I give thee Linda de Romeiro," it said again; frightfully
+the thought seized him, that the hovering death's-head might be speaking
+near him, and he shook the sound sleeper, who woke not, and shook and
+called still more violently, when the voice spake for a third time.
+
+"What?" said the drowsy man, "directly! What will he?--you?" and raised
+himself reluctantly and with a yawn; but at the sight of the naked sword
+fell down on his knees, and said: "Mercy! I will, indeed, give up all!"
+
+"Zesara!" a cry came from the wood,--"Zesara, where art thou?" and he
+heard his own voice; but now he boldly called back, "At the altar!" A
+black form rushed out, with a white mask in hand, and hesitated in the
+moonlight before the armed one. Then at length Albano recognized the
+brother of Liana, for whom he had so long panted; he flung his sword
+behind him, and ran to meet him. Roquairol stood before him mute, pale,
+and with a sublime repose on his countenance. Albano continued to stand
+near him, and said with emotion, "Hast thou been seeking me, Charles?"
+Roquairol nodded silently, and had tears in his eyes, and opened his
+arms. Ah, then could the blissful man, with all the flames and tears of
+love fall upon the long-loved soul, and he kept saying incessantly, "Now
+we have each other! now we have each other!" And more and more
+passionately he embraced him, as the pillar of his future, and melted
+into tears, because now, indeed, the buried love of so many years and so
+many choked up fountains of the poor heart could at once gush forth.
+Roquairol, trembling, only clasped him to himself gently with one arm,
+and said, but without passion, "I am a dying man, and that is my face,"
+holding forth the yellow death-mask; "but I have my Albano, and will die
+on his bosom."
+
+Wildly they twined around each other; the sap of life, Love, ran through
+them with a creative power; the ground over the rolling, subterranean
+flood shook more violently; and the starry heaven, with the white, magic
+breath of its trembling stars, floated around the magic glow.
+
+Ah ye happy ones!
+
+
+52. CYCLE.
+
+Some men are born fast friends; their first finding of each other is
+only a second, and they then, like those who have been long parted,
+bring to each other not only a future, but a past also;--this latter our
+happy ones demanded of one another impatiently. Roquairol answered
+Alban's question, How he came hither, in a fiery manner: "He had been
+following him this whole evening,--he had gazed at him at the window
+during the funeral pomp with such a painful longing, and had almost been
+constrained to fly and embrace him,--he had already, but a moment ago,
+stood close by him, and at his question, 'Who's there?' immediately
+taken off his mask." Now did Albano's fallen arm strike again tensely
+through the thin magic-lantern show of ghostly fear, as he now
+learned that the two-headed giant had grown entirely out of an
+optically-magnifying, mistaken notion of the distance of a form which
+was so near, and the death's-head had forfeited its body on the stairway
+only by the dark curtains and its black dress; even the hard
+spirit-scene at the altar seemed to him now less insuperable through the
+rich gain of living love.
+
+Roquairol asked him what woe or joy had driven him hither at midnight to
+a _Moravian_ churchyard, and whither he had sent the man with the sword.
+Albano did not know that Moravians reposed here; and, moreover, he had
+not observed that the sword, probably from fear of its being used, had
+been stolen. He answered, "My dead sister was fain to speak with me at
+the altar; and she has spoken"; but he feared to say more of this. Then
+Roquairol's countenance suddenly changed; he stared at him, and demanded
+confirmation and explanation; during this he looked into the air as if
+he would draw faces from it by his looks, and said monotonously, fixing
+his eyes, however, on Albano the while, "Dead one, dead one, speak
+again!" But only the death-flood went on speaking under them, and
+nothing more. But he threw himself before the altar on his knees, and
+said in measured tone, and yet with trembling lips: "Fly open,
+spirit-gate, and show thy transparent world. I fear not you, the
+transparent ones; I become one of you, when you appear, and walk with
+you, and become an apparition myself." "O my good one, forbear," Albano
+entreated, not only from piety, but from love also; for an accident, a
+night-bird shooting over, might, indeed, kill them by horror: this
+horror stood, too, not far from them; for on the illuminated side of the
+weeping birches stepped out a white, majestic old form. But when
+Roquairol, frantic with wine and fancy, reached out the dying mask into
+the air, and said, turning toward the grave of the heart, "Take this
+face, if thou hast none, old man, and look at me from behind it!" Alban
+seized him; the white form stepped back with bowed head and folded arms
+into the branches; the round tower on the battle-field struck the hour,
+and the dreamy region, murmuring, struck a response.
+
+"Come to my warm heart, thou passionate soul. O that I were permitted to
+receive thee on my very birthday, at my very birth-hour!" This sound
+melted at once the ever-changing man, and he hung upon him with wet eyes
+of joy, and said: "And to keep me even till our dying hours! O look not
+upon me, thou unchangeable, because I appear so wavering and broken; in
+the waves of life man breaks and crinkles as the staff flickers in the
+water, but the essential being stands nevertheless firm as the staff. I
+will follow thee into other parts of Tartarus; but still relate the
+history."
+
+To give this history amounted to opening a _sanctum sanctorum_ of the
+inner man, or even a coffin to the light of day; but do you believe that
+Albano bethought himself a minute? or would you yourselves? We are all
+better, franker, warmer friends than we know and show; only let the
+right spirit meet you,--such a one as thirsting Love ever
+demands,--pure, large, clear, and tender and warm,--and you give him
+everything, and love him without measure, because he is without fault.
+Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his
+whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did
+not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his
+whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the
+rainy season;--hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad
+motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained,
+was a stream with waterfalls.
+
+Charles led him into the so-called catacomb, while he listened to the
+ghost-story of Isola Bella, which, however, from having been exhausted
+by the former, he heard with diminished fear. A dreary, charred vale,
+full of sunken shafts, basked gray in the moonshine; out of the wood
+crept forth the death-flood below their feet, and leaped down a stony
+stairway into the catacombs. The two followed it on another that ran by
+its side. The entrance bore as frontispiece an old dial-plate, of which
+the lightning had once struck away the hour _one_. "One?" said Albano;
+"singular!--just our coming hour!"
+
+How adventurously does the catacomb now wind onward! The long
+death-flood murmurs obscurely far in through the darkness, and glimmers
+at times under the silvery stream which the moonlight sends in through
+the shaft-openings; immovable creatures--horses, dogs, birds--stand
+drinking on the dark bank, that is to say, their stuffed skins; small
+gravestones, worn smooth by time, with a few names and limbs, are the
+pavement; on a brighter niche we read that a nun was immured here; in
+another stands the petrified skeleton of a miner, who was buried alive,
+with gilded ribs and thighs; in scattered spots were black paper hearts
+of men shot by the arquebuse, and heaped-up nosegays of poor sinners;
+the rod which had whipped a forgiven penitent to death, a glass bust
+with a phosphorus point in the water, chrisom-cloths[118] and other
+children's clothes and playthings, and a dwarf skeleton.
+
+As the explanatory words of Roquairol, whose life-path always ran down
+into vaults and out over graves, beat out life more and more thin and
+transparent before him, Zesara, after his manner, at once shaking his
+head, heaving forward his breast, stamping in the sand, and cursing
+(which he easily did in terror and in strong emotion), broke out with
+the words: "By the Devil! thou crushest my breast and thine own. It is
+not so! Are we not together? Have I not thy warm, living hand? Burns not
+within us the fire of immortality? Burnt-out coals are these bones, and
+nothing more; and the heavenly flame which has consumed them has again
+seized upon other fuel, and blazes on. O," he added, as if comforted,
+and stepped into the brook and looked through the opening of the shaft
+up to the rich moon, which streamed down from heaven, and his great eyes
+filled with splendor,--"O, there is a heaven and an immortality; we
+remain not in the dark hole of life; we, too, sweep through the ether
+like thee, thou shining world!"
+
+"Ah, thou glorious one," said Charles, whose soul consisted of souls, "I
+will now bring thee to a more cheerful place." They had hardly gone
+eight steps, when it darkened behind them, and a sword, flung in
+overhead, came perpendicularly down, and struck with its point in the
+sand under the waves. "O thou infernal devil up there!" cried the
+infuriate Roquairol; but Albano was softened at the thought of the iron
+virgin[119] of the death-hour, who had folded her sharp arms together so
+near him. They clasped each other more warmly, and went silent and sad
+towards a low music and a grave-mound. They seated themselves upon it
+opposite an avenue which formed a right angle with the tormenting
+catacomb, lined with green moss, and of which crumbled sparks of rotten
+wood pointed out the extent. It lost itself in an open gate, and a
+prospect of Elysium, of which only the white summits of some
+silver-poplars were distinguishable, and in the distance was seen the
+spring redness of midnight blooming in the heavens, and two stars
+twinkling overhead. The gate, however, was grated, and guarded by a
+skeleton with an Æolian harp in his hand, which seemed to strike upon it
+the thin minor tones which the draught of wind just now wafted into the
+cavern.
+
+"Here," said Charles, at the beautiful spot, and made more curious by
+the deadly fling of Albano's sword, "finish your narrative of to-day!"
+Albano reported to him candidly the word which the sister's voice had
+spoken: "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." In the tumult of his inner being
+he thought not of the anecdote, that she was the very one for whom
+Charles when a boy had proposed to die. "Romeiro?" he started up. "Be
+still! She? O thou mocking executioner, Fate! Why she, and to-day? Ah,
+Albano, for her I early braved death," he continued, weeping, and sank
+upon his breast, "and that is what has made my heart so bad, because I
+have lost her. Do thou only take her, for thou art a pure spirit; the
+glorious shape which appeared to thee on the sea, so she looks, or now
+still fairer. Ah, Albano!" This noble youth trembled at the complicated
+plot, and at the destiny, and said: "No, no, thou dear Charles, thou
+thinkest falsely about everything."
+
+Suddenly it was as if all the constellations rang, and a melodious
+spirit-choir thronged in through the gate. Albano was startled.
+"Nothing; let be," said Charles. "It is not the skeleton; the _pious
+father_ is walking in the _flute-dell_, and is just drawing out his
+flutes, because he prays. But how sayest thou, I think falsely of
+everything?" "How?" repeated Albano, and could not, in the magic circle
+of these echoes, which all-powerfully brought back to him that Sunday
+morning, either think or speak. For did not the silver-poplars wave to
+and fro against the stars, and rosy clouds lie couched about the
+heavens, and did not the whole Elysium pass openly by with the sounds
+which had floated through it, with the tears which had besprinkled it,
+and with the dreams which no heart forgets, and with the holy form which
+eternally abides in his breast? And now he held so fast the hand of her
+brother; so near was he to love and friendship, those two foci in the
+ellipse of life's pathway; impetuously he embraced the brother, with the
+words: "By Heaven, I say to thee, she whom thou hast just named concerns
+me not, and never will."
+
+"But, Albano, thou dost not surely know her yet?" said Charles, pursuing
+his inquiries, perhaps, too hardly; for the noble youth beside him was
+too bashful and too steadfast to unlock the sanctuary of wishes to the
+kinsman of his loved one; to a stranger he could have done it much more
+easily. "O torment me not," he answered sensitively; but he added more
+softly, "Believe me, I pray you believe me, this first time, my good
+brother!" Charles yielded full as seldom as he; and although swallowing
+the inquisitive tone, and speaking in a right loving one, nevertheless
+said this: "By my bliss, I'll do it, and with joy; a heart must have
+been heartily loved and divinely blessed which can renounce such a one."
+Ah, does Albano, then, know that! He only leaned silently, with his
+fiery cheek full of roses, on Liana's brother, shunning scrutiny for
+shame; but when the expiring calls of the flute-dell gathered together
+like sighs in his breast, and reminded him too often how that Sunday
+morning closed, how Liana stole away, and how he looked after her with
+dim, wet eyes from the altar; then, although his heart did not break,
+his eye broke into tears, and he wept violently, but silently, on his
+first friend.
+
+Then, with mute souls, they turned homeward, and looked thoughtfully
+toward the long, vanishing ways of the future; and when they parted,
+they well felt that they loved each other right heartily, that is, right
+bitterly.
+
+On the morrow the pious father lay prostrate under a shock which was
+more blissful than mournful; for he said he had in the night seen his
+friend, the deceased Prince, walking, clad in white, through Tartarus.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[92] [_Fauler Heinz._] Or Athanor, a chemical stove, which works
+on for a long time without poking. [Corresponding to our
+air-tight stove. _Athanor_, from the Greek, _undying_?--TR.]
+
+[93] The translator had to resort to the Scotch to help him get
+this pun into English.
+
+[94] Ezek. xiii. 18: "Woe to the women that sew pillows to all
+arm-holes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature, to
+hunt souls!"--TR.
+
+[95] According to Lempriere.
+
+[96] Sanhedrim, c. 2, Misch. 3.
+
+[97] Cic. ad Quirit. post redit, c. 3.
+
+[98] His sect represented Christ's journey to hell as having
+released all the wicked from that region, but not Abraham, Enoch,
+the prophets, &c.--Tertul. adv. Marcion.
+
+[99] A title given to black colors.
+
+[100] The Corinthian, who was hidden from his enemies in a chest
+of cedar, ivory, and gold, richly adorned with figures in relief,
+and at last expelled the usurpers and mounted the throne.--TR.
+
+[101] The line which is drawn from the aphelion to the
+perihelion, the two apsides, or the nearest and farthest points
+of a planet's distance from the sun.
+
+[102] A child coming into the world face foremost cannot
+afterward bend its head forward.--_The Mother of a Family_, Vol.
+V.
+
+[103] The name of the Invalid Hospital in Copenhagen.
+
+[104] In Darwin's Zoönomy, page 529, the case is adduced of a man
+who did this before spectators. In Paris another did the same by
+swallowing air.
+
+[105] In Vienna there was an Institute which made new sealing-wax
+out of old, and endowed poor persons with the proceeds.
+
+[106] Such was the tasteless name by which Basedow was going to
+baptize a daughter, in memory of the appearing of an elementary
+work by subscription. See Schlichtegroll's Necrology.
+
+[107] _Wehestande_, a parody of _Ehestande_, wedded state.
+
+[108] An issue.
+
+[109] A name given in some places to the consumption.
+
+[110] A micrometer consists of fine threads stretched across in
+the telescope, which serve to measure the smallest distance.
+
+[111] The transit-instrument, or culminatory, observes when a
+star has reached the highest point in its course.
+
+[112] Autarchs; for monarchs or sole-rulers are etymologically
+distinguished from self-rulers.
+
+[113] Ghosts of the dead.--TR.
+
+[114] Does he allude to the frightful white form, in my "vision
+of annihilation"?
+
+[115] A phrase applied to the form of a dying man. [Properly a
+distemper which gives one a deathly look. See Bailey's
+Dictionary.--TR.]
+
+[116] The _lapis infernalis_, or silver cautery.--TR.
+
+[117] Frederick's Honor.
+
+[118] Linen cloths smeared with aromatic ointment, anciently
+placed on the heads of children just born or baptized.--TR.
+
+[119] An allusion to a well-known instrument of the
+Inquisition.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+TENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.[120]--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF
+     FRIENDSHIP.
+
+
+53. CYCLE.[121]
+
+Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth,
+should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter
+as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life,
+when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung
+round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like
+gentle _goddesses_, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years,
+they summon us, like stern _gods_, with commands! And at this period
+Friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as
+later, in a narrow Gothic chapel.
+
+Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with
+islands and ships; he had his whole breast full of friendship and youth,
+and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had
+rebounded from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously
+upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched
+him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul
+and his whole life--(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into
+his heart); all models of friendship among the ancients he was fain to
+copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his
+being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a
+double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.
+
+When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,--which
+was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the
+spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of
+night,--and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery
+smoke-column of an Ætna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see
+the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the
+more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who,
+after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote
+island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the
+baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life,
+comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom
+we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any
+moment play again the give-away game with the human form.
+
+Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the
+disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped
+for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course,
+a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's
+tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as
+on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies the Hippocratic face of
+the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was
+occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a
+chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet
+hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the glasshouse of a run-down
+hour-glass, and the washing-and the writing-table stood open, on which
+latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or
+writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the
+ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers
+on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left
+ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like butterflies on the
+window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet
+there, much less a Cycle.
+
+Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one
+loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of
+tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house
+in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one
+in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a
+spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an
+infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was
+still something noble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an
+imitator of what he eulogized.
+
+As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green
+garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the
+warm air of friendship and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once
+into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states
+of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was
+a second Russia, which harbors all climates, from France even to Nova
+Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he
+was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could
+throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it
+sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The
+girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and
+city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was
+vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who
+pronounced everything correctly.--Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften
+instead of Juchten, Fünfzig instead of Füfzig, and Barbieren (the _r_ in
+which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),--Roquairol was a
+free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and
+spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time
+an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed
+that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of
+speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one
+another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the
+Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite
+and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several
+departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent
+masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts
+merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have
+to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order
+that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pestitz
+representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano,
+rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of
+life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.
+
+But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;--friendship has its
+deceptions as well as love;--and often, when he had long looked upon
+this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and
+proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon _his_ wavering
+soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose
+fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the noble one move him
+even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say
+to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I
+lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and
+decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and
+repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came--the
+momentous day for both--when he did it. How could he ever have resisted
+_Fancy_, when he only resisted _by and through_ Fancy? I do him half
+injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.
+
+Roquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the higher youth of our
+times are so early and richly overhung with the roses of joy that, like
+the inhabitants of spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by
+put under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose-sirup and
+bathe themselves in rose-oil,[122] until nothing more is left them
+thereof for a stimulus except the thorns, so are most of them--and often
+the very same ones--stuffed full in the beginning, by their
+philanthropic teachers, with the _fruits_ of knowledge, so that they
+come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, then the cider and
+perry thereof, until at last they ruin themselves with the brandy made
+of that. Now if, in addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy
+that makes their life a naphtha-soil, out of which every step draws
+fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences are thrown, and the
+consumption become still greater. For these burnt-out prodigals of life
+there is then no new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no
+old one entire and fresh; a dried-up future, full of arrogance, disgust
+with life, unbelief and contradiction, lies round about them. Only the
+wing of fancy still continues to quiver on their corpse.
+
+Poor Charles! Thou didst still more! Not merely truths, but feelings
+also, he anticipated. All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to
+which Love and Friendship and Nature exalt the heart, all these he went
+through in poems earlier than in life, as play-actor and theatre-poet
+earlier than as man, earlier on the sunny side of fancy than on the
+stormy side of reality; hence, when they at last appeared, living, in
+his breast, he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill them,
+and stuff them well for the refrigeratory of future remembrance. The
+unhappy love for Linda de Romeiro, which, at a later period, would
+perhaps have steeled him, opened thus early all the veins of his heart,
+and bathed it warmly in its own blood; he plunged into good and bad
+dissipations and amours, and afterward represented on paper or on the
+stage everything that he repented or blessed; and every representation
+made him grow more and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun
+by ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy
+sensibilities; but they were simply a new luxury, a tonic, at best; and
+precisely in proportion to their height did the road run down the more
+abruptly into the slough of the unholiest ones. As in the dramatic poet
+angelically pure and filthy scenes stand in conjunction and close
+succession, so in his life; he foddered, as in Surinam, his hogs with
+pine-apples; like the elder giants, he had soaring wings and creeping
+snakes'-feet.[123]
+
+Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one
+of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when
+she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings.
+But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and
+strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread
+every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first
+threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors,
+which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full
+of these eagles. They love you not, though they think so; because, like
+the blest in Mahomet's paradise, instead of their lost arms of love,
+they have only wings of fancy. They are like great streams, warm only
+along the shore, and in the middle cold.
+
+Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran through the alternation
+between ether and slime more and more rapidly, till he mixed them both.
+His blossoms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the Ideal, which,
+however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start with horror, but
+believe it,--he sometimes plunged on purpose into sins and torments, in
+order, down there, by the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into
+himself more deeply the oath of reformation; somewhat as the physicians,
+Darwin and Sydenham, assert that _strengthening_ remedies (Peruvian
+bark, steel, opium) work more powerfully when _weakening_ ones
+(bleeding, emetics, &c.) have been previously prescribed.
+
+External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow
+of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he
+been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and
+a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason
+the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some
+occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,[124] &c. But the
+lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more
+vain and bold.
+
+So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,--hunting like
+an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart,
+whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable
+of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth
+assimilated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able
+much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the
+true language of passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate
+dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided
+against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and
+indispensable--hearts and joys and truths--melted down and floated
+about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything
+which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking
+round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his
+resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of
+the _tuning-hammer_, and not of the _tuning-fork_, of the finest
+morality; and, in the midst of the roar of passion, standing in the
+bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his
+madness, and gives warning of it.
+
+Only _one_ good angel had not flown with the rest,--Friendship. His so
+often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but
+friendship it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto
+loved as a friend,--so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now
+Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace!
+
+In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with
+himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the
+country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose
+rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men--and he--are like the
+fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the
+morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at
+midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the
+sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a
+great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of
+lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread
+wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to
+Albano, when the whole girandole[125] of his faculties and feelings
+burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of
+flasks.
+
+But do you know the medicine of example, the healing power of
+admiration, and of that soul-strengthener, reverence? "It is shameful of
+me," said Roquairol, "when he is so credulous and open and honest. No, I
+will deceive the whole world, only not his soul!" Such natures would
+fain make good their devastation of humanity by being true to one.
+Humanity is a constellation, in which _one_ star often describes half
+the figure.
+
+From this hour forth, his resolution of the heartiest confession and
+atonement stood fixed; and Alban, before whom life had not yet run down
+into a jelly of corruption, but was capable of being analyzed as a sound
+and well-defined organism, and who did not, like Charles, complain that
+nothing would take right hold of him, but everything played round him
+like air,--_he_ it was who was to bring back youth to his sick wishes,
+and with the help of the pure youth's unwavering perceptions and the
+danger of losing his friendship, Roquairol proposed forcing himself to
+keep with _him_ the word of fruit-bearing repentance, which to himself
+he had too often broken.
+
+Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.
+
+
+54. CYCLE.
+
+Once Albano came early in the forenoon to the Captain, when the latter
+was usually, according to his own expression, "a fag-end of a
+yesterday's candle stuck on thorns"; but to-day he stood working away
+blusteringly at the piano-forte and writing-desk by turns; and, like a
+dried-up infusorial animal, was already, even at this early hour, the
+same old, busy creature, because wine enough had been poured upon him,
+that is to say, a good deal. Full of rapture, he ran to meet the welcome
+friend. Albano brought him from Falterle the childish leaves of
+love--for the Master of Exercises had not had the heart to throw them
+into the fire--which he had written from Blumenbühl to the unknown
+heart. Charles would have been moved on the subject almost to tears,
+had he not already been so before the arrival. The Count had to stay
+there all day, and neglect everything; it was his first day of
+irregularity; it was comic to see how the otherwise unfettered youth,
+subservient, however, to a long habit of daily exertions, struggled
+against the short calm, in which he should sail no ship, as against a
+sin.
+
+Meanwhile, it was heavenly; the low-lying day of childhood, which once
+clothed him with wings, when the house was full of guests, and he,
+wherever he wanted to be, came up again above the horizon; the
+conversation played and made gifts with everything which exalts and
+enriches us; all his faculties were unchained and in ecstatic dance. Men
+of genius have as many festal days as others do working days, and hence
+it is that they can hardly endure a trivial and commonplace[126]
+intercalary-day, and especially on such days of youth! When Charles
+conjured before him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe,
+Klinger, Schiller, and life saw itself colossally represented in the
+poetic magnifying-mirror, then did all the sleeping giants of his inner
+world rise up; his father came and his future, even his friend stood
+forth there as in new relief, out of that shining, fantastic time of
+childhood, when he had dreamed of him beforehand in these characters;
+and in the internal procession of heroes, even the cloud that floated
+through the heavens and the guard-troop marching away across the market
+were incorporated. His friend appeared to him far greater than he was,
+because, like all youths, he still believed of actors and poets, that,
+like miners, they always received into their bodies the metals in which
+they labored. How often they both said, in that favorite metaphor of the
+young man, "Life is a dream," and only became thereby more glad and
+wide-awake! The old man says it differently. And the dark gate of death,
+to which Charles so loved to lead the way, became before the youth's eye
+a glass door, behind which lay the bright, golden age of the belated
+heart in immeasurable meadows.
+
+Maidens, I own,--as their conversations are more fragmentary,
+matter-of-fact, and less intoxicating,--instead of such an Eden-park, go
+for a spruce Dutch garden, well trimmed with crab's-shears and
+lady-scissors, which is furnished them every day in the afternoon by the
+black hour, which serves up to them on the coffee- or tea-table, the
+small black-board[127] of some evil reports, a couple of new shawls
+sitting by, a well-bred man who passes by with a will or marriage
+certificate, and finally the hope of the domestic report. Come back to
+our young men!
+
+Towards evening the Captain received a red billet. "Very well!" said he
+to the woman who brought it, and nodded. "You'll get nothing out of
+that, madam," said he, turning toward Albano. "Brother, guard only
+against married women. Just snap once, for a joke, at one of their red
+beauty-patches; instantly they dart their fish-hooks into your
+nape.[128] Seven of these hooks, such as you see here, have made a
+lodgement in mine alone." The innocent child Albano! He took it for
+something morally great to assert at once the friendship of seven
+married ladies, and would gladly have been in Charles's case; he could
+not see the mischief of it,--that these female friends, like the
+Romans, love to clip the wings of victory (namely, of ourselves), so
+that the Divinity may not fly any farther.
+
+On a fine day, nothing is so fine as its sunset. The Count proposed to
+ride out into the evening twilight, and on the hill to look at the sun.
+They trotted through the streets; Charles pulled off his great cocked-up
+hat, now before a fine nose, now before a great pair of eyes, now
+before transparent forelocks. They flew into the Linden avenue,
+which was festally decked with a motley wain-scoting of female
+street-_sitters_.[129] A tall woman, with piercing, fiery eyes, in a red
+shawl and yellow dress, strode through the female flower-bed, towering
+like the flower-goddess: it was the authoress of the red note; she was,
+however, more attentive to the beautiful Count than to her friend. On
+all walls and trees bloomed the rose-espalier of the evening redness.
+They blustered up the white road toward Blumenbühl; on both sides the
+gold-green sea of spring heaved its living waves; a feathered world went
+rowing about therein, and the birds dove down deep among the flowers;
+behind the friends blazed the sun, and before them lay the heights of
+Blumenbühl, all rosy-red. Having reached the eminence, they turned their
+horses toward the sun, which reposed behind the cupolas and
+smoke-columns of the proudly burning city, in distant, bright gardens.
+In wondrous nearness lay the illuminated earth round about them, and
+Albano could see the white statues on Liana's roof blush like life under
+the blooming clouds. He drove his horse close to his companion's, to lay
+his hand on Charles's shoulder; and thus they beheld in silence how the
+lovely sun laid down his golden cloud-crown, and, with the fluttering
+foliage-breath around his hot brow, descended into the sea. And when it
+grew dusky on the earth, and a glow lighted up the heavens, and Albano
+leaned across and drew his friend over to his burning heart, then rose
+the evening-chime in Blumenbühl. "And down below there," said Charles,
+with soft voice, and turned thither, "lies thy peaceful Blumenbühl, like
+a still churchyard of thy childhood's days. How happy are children,
+Albano,--ah, how happy are children!" "Are not we so?" answered he, with
+tears of joy. "Charles, how often have I stood on high places, in
+evenings like this, and fervently stretched out my childish hands after
+thee and after the world. Now indeed I have it all. Truly, thou art not
+right." But he, sick with the murmur and ringing-in-his-ears of long
+past times, remained deaf to the word, and said, "Only our cradle-songs,
+only those cradle-songs, sounding back on the memory, soothe the soul to
+slumber, when it has wept itself hot."
+
+More silently and slowly they rode back. Albano bore a new world of love
+and bliss in his bosom; and the youth,--not yet a debtor to the past,
+but a guest of the present,--sweetly unbent by the long Jubilee of the
+day, sank into clear-obscure dreams, like a towering bird of prey
+hanging silent on pinions open with ecstasy.
+
+"We will stay all night at Ratto's," said Charles, when they reached the
+city.
+
+
+55. CYCLE.
+
+They alighted down in Ratto's Italian Cellar. The house seemed to the
+Count at first, after the contemplation of broad nature, like a fragment
+of rock rolled upon it,--although every story, indeed, groans under
+architectural burdens,--but the heavy feeling of subterranean
+confinement[130] soon forgot itself, and singular was the sound that
+came down into the Italian vault of the rattling of carriages overhead.
+The Captain bespoke a _punch royal_. If he goes on so in his
+good fire-regulation, and always has a full cask at home as
+extinguishing-apparatus, and his hose-pipes well proved, then my book
+cannot be touched by the objection, that, as in Grandison, too much tea
+is consumed; more likely is it that too much strong drink will be
+absorbed.
+
+Schoppe was sitting in the Italian souterrain. He loved not the Captain,
+because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were
+heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy
+guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings." Charles paid him back his
+dislike; the hottest waves of his enthusiasm immediately bristled up in
+ice-peaks before the Titular Librarian's face. Only not to-day! He drank
+so amply of king's-punch,--whereof a couple of glasses might have burnt
+through all the heads of Briareus or of the Lernean serpent,--that he
+then said everything, even pious things. "By heavens!" said he, healing
+himself in this Bethesda-pool by--drawing from it, "since it is all
+fiddle-faddle about this growing better, one should obfuscate
+himself[131] with a shot, in order that the baited spirit may once for
+all go free from its wounds and sins." "From sins?" said Schoppe; "lice
+and tape-worms of the better sort will by all means emigrate from my
+territory, when I grow cold; but the worst of them my inner man will
+certainly carry up with it. By the hangman! who tells you, then, that
+this whole churchyard of poor sinners here below shall at once march
+home as an invisible church full of martyrs and Socrateses, and every
+Bedlam come out a high-light lodge? I was thinking to-day of the next
+world, when I saw a woman in the market with five little pigs, every one
+of which she would fain drive before her with a string tied to its leg,
+but which shot off from her and from each other like wisps of electric
+light; now, said I, we, with our few faculties and wishes, which this
+cultivating age sets out _in quintuplo_, fare already as pitifully as
+the woman with her drove; but when we get ten or more new farrows by the
+rope, as the second world, like an America, must surely bring new
+objects and wishes, how will the Ephorus[132] manage his office there? I
+prepare myself to expect there greater indescribable distresses, feudal
+crimes and oppositions." But Roquairol was in his red blaze; he exalted
+himself far above Schoppe and above himself, and denied immortality
+plumply, by way of parodying Schoppe. "An individual man," said he,
+"could hardly, on his own account alone, believe in immortality; but
+when he sees the masses, he has pity, and holds it worth the while, and
+believes the second world is a _monte testaceo_ of human potsherds. Man
+cannot come nearer to God and the Devil hereafter than he does already
+here; like a tavern-sign, his _reverse_ is painted just like his
+_obverse_. But we need the fictitious future for a present; when we
+hover ever so still above our slime, we yet are continually flapping,
+like carps lying still, with poetic fins and wings. Hence we must needs
+dress up the future paradise so gloriously that only gods shall fit into
+it, but, just as in princes' gardens, no dogs. Mere trumpery! We cut
+out for ourselves glorified bodies, which resemble soldiers'-coats;
+_pockets_ and _buttonholes_ are wanting; what pleasure can they hold,
+then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano,
+what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even
+freaks of humor.
+
+At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux.
+He put on his cravat,--he had been sitting there _à la Hamlet_,--and
+said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused,
+still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps.
+
+In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring,
+overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven!
+drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked
+round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as
+slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing
+with them.
+
+Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly
+into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and
+then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his
+friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily
+bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a
+calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting
+through. He was now, after the analogy of the fire-eaters, a
+fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The
+latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer:
+"_Redeem the time_, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life
+all you can: _that_ is time. To this end the best shops of the times,
+the apothecaries', require that a man, after _punch royal_, shall go to
+bed and sweat immoderately."
+
+Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,--when
+the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in
+Derbyshire-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,--when from the
+Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner
+being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the
+proudest (only not the tenderest one),--and when, like Adam in the state
+of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such
+crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but
+from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,--then
+did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the
+unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic,
+credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking
+_naïve_ and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon
+that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he
+was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.
+
+"Come out o' doors,--out o' doors!" said Charles; and that had long been
+Albano's wish. It struck one, as they saw, on the narrow cellar-stairs,
+the stars of the spring heaven overhead glistening down through the
+entrance of the shaft. How freshly flowed the inhaled night over the hot
+lips! How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of
+stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How
+was the fiery eye of Albano refreshed and expanded by the giant masses
+of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the
+transparent mantle of night! Zephyrs, the butterflies of day, fluttered
+already about their dear flowers, and sucked from the blossoms, and
+brought in incense for the morning; a sleep-drunken lark soared
+occasionally into the still heavens with a loud day in her throat; over
+the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose
+jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the
+purple pennons of Aurora, as she sailed toward morning. With an exalting
+power the thought seized the youth, that this very minute was measuring
+millions of little and long lives, and the walk of the sap-caterpillar
+and the flight of the sun, and that this very same time was being lived
+through by the worm and God, from worlds to worlds, through the
+universe. "O God!" he exclaimed, "how glorious it is to exist!"
+
+Charles merely clung, with the drooping, heavy feathers of the
+night-bird, to the cheerful constellations around him. "Happy for thee,"
+said he, "that thou canst be thus, and that the sphinx in thy bosom
+still sleeps. Thou knowest not what I am about to do. I knew a wretch
+who could portray her right well. In the cavern of man's breast, said
+he, lies a monster on its four claws, with upturned Madonna's face, and
+looks round smiling, for a time, and so does man too. Suddenly it
+springs up, buries its claws into the breast, rends it with lion's-tail
+and hard wings, and roots and rushes and roars, and everywhere blood
+runs down the torn cavern of the breast. All at once it stretches itself
+out again, bloody, and smiles away again with the fair Madonna's face.
+O, he looked all bloodless, the wretch! because the beast so fed upon
+him and thirstily lapped at his heart."
+
+"Horrible!" said Albano; "and yet I do not quite understand thee." The
+moon at this moment lifted herself up, together with a flock of clouds
+that lay darkly camped along her sides, and she drew a storm-wind after
+her, which drove them among the stars. Charles went on more wildly: "In
+the beginning, the wretch found it as yet good: he had as yet sound
+pains and pleasures, real sins and virtues; but as the monster smiled
+and tore faster and faster, and he continued to alternate more and more
+rapidly between pleasure and pain, good and evil; and when blasphemies
+and obscene images crept into his prayers, and he could neither convert
+nor harden himself; then did he lie there, in a dreary exhaustion of
+bleeding, in the tepid, gray, dry mist-banks of life, and thus was dying
+all the time he lived.--Why weepest thou? Knowest thou that wretch?"
+"No," said Albano, mildly. "I am he!" "Thou? Terrible God, not thou!"
+"O, it is I; and though thou despisest me, thou wilt be what I ... No,
+my innocent one, I say it not. See, even now the sphinx rises again. O
+pray with me, help me, that I may not be obliged to sin,--only not be
+obliged! I must drink, I must debauch, I must be a hypocrite,--I am a
+hypocrite at this moment." Zesara saw the rigid eye, the pale, shattered
+face, and, in a rage of love, shook him with both arms, and stammered,
+with deep emotion, "By the Almighty! this is not true! thou art indeed
+so tender and pale and unhappy and innocent."
+
+"Rosy-cheek," said Charles, "I seem to thee pure and bright as yonder
+orb; but she too, like me, casts a long shadow up toward heaven." Zesara
+let go of him, took a long look toward the sublime, dark Tartarus,
+encompassing Elysium like a funeral train, and pressed away bitter
+tears, which flowed at the remembrance how he had found therein his
+first friend, who was now melting away at his side. Just then the
+night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the
+wood-caterpillar, and Albano pointed silently to the crashing tree.
+Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee
+to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair
+stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.
+
+This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears;
+a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with
+his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild
+self, and every selfish thought. Softly he laid himself on his friend's
+bosom, and with magical, low words, and full of humility, and without
+fiery images, told him his whole heart; and that it was not wicked, but
+only unhappy and weak, and that he ought to have been as heartily
+sincere towards him, who thought too well of him, as towards God; and
+that he swore, by the hour of death, to be such as he,--to confess to
+him everything, always,--to become holy through him. "Ah, I have only
+been loved so very little!" he concluded. And Albano, the
+love-intoxicated, glowing man, the good man, who knew by his own
+experience the sacred excesses and exaggerations of remorse, and took
+these confessions to be such, came back, inspired, to the old covenant
+with unmeasured love. "Thou art an ardent man!" said Charles; "why do
+men, then, always lie frozen together on each other's breasts, as on
+Mount Bernard,[133] with rigid eye, with stiffened arms? O why camest
+thou to me so late? I had been another creature. Why came she[134] so
+early? In the village down below there, at the narrow, lowly
+church-door,--there I first saw her through whom my life became a
+mummy. Verily, I am speaking now with composure. They carried along
+before me, as I went out to walk, a corpse-like white youth on a bier
+into Tartarus: it was only a statue, but it was the emblem of my future.
+An evil genius said to me, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee.' She
+stood at the church-door, surrounded by people of the congregation, who
+wondered at the boldness with which she took up, in her two hands, a
+silver-gray, tongue-darting snake, and dandled it. Like a daring
+goddess, she bent her firm, smooth brow, her dark eye, and the
+rose-blossoms of her countenance upon the adder's head, which Nature had
+trodden flat, and played with it close to her breast. 'Cleopatra!' said
+I, although a boy. She, too, even then, understood it, looked up calmly
+and coldly from the snake, and gave it back, and turned round. O, on my
+young breast she flung the chilling, life-gnawing viper. But, truly, it
+is now all gone by, and I speak calmly. Only in the hours, Albano, when
+my bloody clothes of that night, which my sister has laid up, come
+before my eyes, then I suffer once more, and ask, 'Poor, well-meaning
+boy! wherefore didst thou then grow older?' But, as I said, it is all
+over now. To thee, only to thee, may a better genius say, 'Love the fair
+one whom I show thee!'"
+
+But what a world of thoughts now flew at once into Albano's mind! "He
+continues to torment himself," thought he, "with the old jealousy about
+Romeiro. I will open heart to heart, and tell the good brother that it
+is indeed his sister I love, and that eternally." His cheeks glowed, his
+heart flamed, he stood, priest-like, before the altar of friendship,
+with the fairest offering, sincerity. "O Charles," said he, "now,
+perhaps, she might be otherwise disposed towards thee. My father is
+travelling with her, and thou wilt see her." He took his hand, and went
+with him more quickly up to a dark group of trees, to unfold, in the
+shadow, his tenderly blushing soul. "Take my most precious secret," he
+began, "but speak not of it,--not even with me. Dost thou not guess it,
+my first brother? The soul that I have loved, as long as I have loved
+thee?"--softly, very softly he added,--"thy sister?" and sank on his
+lips to kiss away the first sounds.
+
+But Charles, in the tumult of rapture and of love, like an earth at the
+up-coming of Spring, could not contain himself; he pressed him to
+himself; he let him go; he embraced him again; he wept for bliss; he
+shut to Albano's eyes, and said, as if he had found his sister anew,
+"Brother!" In vain did Albano seek to stifle, with his hand, every other
+syllable on his lips. He began to paint to the excited youth--who, amid
+the secluded and poetic book-world, had acquired a higher tenderness
+than the actual intercourse of society teaches--the portrait of Liana;
+how she did and suffered; how she watched and pleaded for him, and even
+impoverished herself to wipe out his debts; how she never severely
+blamed, but only mildly entreated him, and all that, not from artificial
+patience, but from genuine, ardent love; and how this, after all, made
+up hardly the accessories of her picture. In this purer inspiration than
+the foregoing evening had granted him, what crowned his bliss was, that
+he could love his sister, among all beings, the most intensely and the
+most disinterestedly, and with a love the most free from poetic luxury
+and caprice. Really strengthened by the feeling that he could, for once,
+exult with a pure and holy affection, he lifted once more in freedom his
+disengaged hands, hitherto, like Milo's, jammed and caught in the tree
+of happiness and life, which he would fain have torn open; he breathed
+fresh, living air and courage, and the plan of his inner perfection was
+now gracefully rounded by new good fortune and a consciousness full of
+fair objects.
+
+The moon stood high in heaven, the clouds had been driven away, and
+never did the morning-star rise brighter on two human beings.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[120] At the canonization of a saint, the _Devil_ was heard by
+_attorney_, in the shape of objections to the act. Jean Paul,
+with a slight variation of the sense of the old title, hints a
+converse process in Roquairol's case, making the better angel
+show cause why sentence of _damnation_ should not be absolutely
+pronounced against him.--TR.
+
+[121] Here began Jean Paul's second volume of the Titan.--TR.
+
+[122] Ottar of Roses.--TR.
+
+[123] The above description of Roquairol reminds one of a German
+_Sinn-spruch_ on sensuality, from the Persian:--
+
+    "Make his reason serve his passions,
+      That is what man never should;
+    _To the Devil's kitchen, angels_
+      _Never carry wood_."
+
+[124] Simon's Christian Antiquities. Mursinna, &c., p. 143.
+
+[125] Branch candlestick.--TR.
+
+[126] Schlendrians,--of a slow fellow,--corresponding to our _old
+fogy_.--TR.
+
+[127] Or Black-book.--TR.
+
+[128] Allusion to the mode of angling for frogs with a bit of red
+cloth.
+
+[129] Spazier-sitzerinnen,--not _gängerinnen_, i. e.
+street-walkers.--TR.
+
+[130] _Zwinger_ means, originally, the narrow space between
+town-walls and town.--TR.
+
+[131] Literally, press something before his brow.--TR.
+
+[132] Overseer, a Lacedæmonian officer.--TR.
+
+[133] Strangers who are frozen are placed by the monks, unburied,
+beside each other, each leaning on the next one's breast.
+
+[134] Linda de Romeiro.
+
+
+
+
+ELEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES.
+
+
+56. CYCLE.
+
+Joyfully did Roquairol, on the first evening when he knew his father had
+gone a journey, bear to his friend the invitation to go with him to his
+mother. Albano blushed charmingly for the first time, at the thought of
+that fiery night which had wrung from him the oldest mystery; for
+hitherto neither of them, in the common hours of life, had retouched the
+sacred subject. Only the Captain could easily and willingly speak of
+Linda as well as of every other loss.
+
+Liana always beheld her brother--the creator and ruling spirit of her
+softest hours--with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to
+get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book
+in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She
+and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately
+relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the
+Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the
+visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern
+chamber, from which he had seen, for the first time, the dear maiden,
+only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns!
+The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her,
+after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling
+of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire,
+of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent
+consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of
+Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical,
+strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the
+flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten
+years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden;
+afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually
+at once thirteen and seventeen years old.
+
+Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting
+because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be
+avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious
+spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground
+to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and
+warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and
+brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet _proudly_,
+but so _affectionately_, that true pair of eyes!
+
+And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,--whose continuance
+is often, on _men's_ faces, but not on _maidens'_, the title-vignette of
+falsehood,--she received our noble youth, but not him alone.
+
+She seated herself at the embroidery-frame; and the mother soon launched
+the Count out into the cool, high sea of general conversation, into
+which only occasionally the son threw up a green, warm island. Alban
+looked on to see how Liana made her mosaic flower-pieces grow; how the
+little white hand lay on the black satin ground (Froulay's _thorax_ is
+to wear the flowers on his birthday), and how her pure brow, over which
+the curly hair transparently waved, bent forward, and how her face, when
+she spoke, or when she looked after new colors of silk, lifted itself
+up, animated with the higher glow of industry in the eye and on the
+cheek. Charles sometimes hastily stretched out his hand towards her. She
+willingly reached hers across; he laid it between his two, and turned it
+over, looked into the palm, pressed it with both hands, and the brother
+and sister smiled upon each other affectionately. And each time Albano
+turned from his conversation with the mother, and true-heartedly smiled
+with them. But poor hero! It is of itself a Herculean labor to sit idly
+by where fine work is going on, such as embroidery, miniature painting,
+&c.; but above all, with a spirit like thine, which has so many sails,
+together with a couple of storms in behind, to lie inactively at anchor
+beside the embroidery-frame, and not to be, say, a spinning Hercules
+(that were easy), but only one that sees spinning,--and that, too, in
+the presence of a great spring and sunset out of doors,--and, in
+addition to all this, in the company of a mother, so chary of her words
+(in fact, before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to
+introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter),--these are sore
+things.
+
+He looked down sharply at the embroidered Flora. "Nothing pains me so
+much," said he,--for he always philosophized, and everything useless on
+the earth troubled him grievously,--"as that so many thousand artificial
+ornaments should be created in vain in the world, without a single eye
+ever meeting and enjoying them. It will touch me very nearly if this
+green leaflet here is not especially observed." With the same sorrow
+over fruitless, unenjoyed plantings of labor, he often shut his eyes
+upon wall-paper foliage, upon worked flowers, upon architectural
+decorations. Liana might have taken it as a painter's censure of the
+overladen stitch-garden, which, merely out of love for her father, she
+was sowing so full,--for Froulay, born in the days when they still
+trimmed the gold-lace with clothes, rather than the reverse, was fond of
+buttoning a little silk herbary round his body,--but she only smiled,
+and said, "Well, the little leaf has surely escaped that evil destiny:
+it _is_ observed."
+
+"What matters a thing's being forgotten and useless?" said Roquairol,
+taking up the word, full of indifference to the Lector, who was just
+entering, and full of indifference to the opinion of his mother, to
+whom, as well as to his father, only the entreaties of his sister
+sometimes made him submissive. "Enough that a thing _is_. The birds sing
+and the stars move in majesty over the wildernesses, and no man sees the
+splendor. In fact, everywhere, in and out of man, more passes unseen
+than seen. Nature draws out of endless seas, and without exhausting
+them; we, too, are a nature, and should draw and pour out, and not be
+always anxiously reckoning upon the profit, for watering purposes, of
+every transient shower and rainbow. Just keep on embroidering, sister!"
+he concluded, ironically.
+
+"The Princess comes to-day!" said the Lector, and, delighted with the
+prospect, Liana kissed her mother's hand. She looked up often and
+confidentially from her embroidery at the courtier, who seemed to be
+very intimate, but who, as a refined man, was full as much respected
+and as respectful as if he were there for the first time.
+
+The announcement of the Princess set the Captain into a charming state
+of easy good-humor; a female part was to him as necessary for society as
+to the French for an opera, and the presence of a lady helped him as
+much in teaching, as the absence of a button did Kant.[135] By way of
+drawing his sister off from the flowers, he removed the red veil from a
+statue on the card-table, and threw it, like a little red dawn, over the
+lilies on the face of the embroideress; just then the door opened and
+Julienne entered. Liana, trying to remove the veil, in her haste to
+welcome her, entangled herself in the little red dawn. Albano
+mechanically reached out to her his hand to relieve her of the veil, and
+she gave it to him, and a dear, full look besides. O how his enraptured
+eye shone!
+
+Julienne brought with her a train of _jeux d'esprit_. The Captain, who,
+like a pyrotechnist, could give his fire all forms and colors,
+reinforced her with his; and his sister sowed, as it were, the flowers
+with which the zephyrettes of raillery could play. Julienne almost said
+no to yes, and yes to no; only toward the Minister's lady was she
+serious and submissive,--a sign that, on her arena of disputation, among
+the grains of sand particles of golden sand still lay, whereas for
+philosophers the arena is the prize and the ground,--at once the
+battle-field, the _Champ de Mars_, and the _Champs Elysées_. Upon the
+Count she fixed her passionate gaze as boldly as only princesses may
+venture to and love to; and when he returned the glance of her brown
+eye, she cast it down; but she remembered him, from her old visit in
+Blumenbühl, and inquired after his friends. He now entered with pleasure
+upon something that was as ardent as his own soul,--encomiums. It is
+against the finest politeness to praise or blame persons with
+warmth,--things one may. While he portrayed with grateful remembrance
+his sister Rabette, Julienne became so earnestly and deeply absorbed in
+his eye, that she started, and asked the Lector about the steps of the
+_Anglaise_ which he had led at the masquerade. When he had done his best
+to give an idea of it, she said she had not understood a word of what he
+had been saying; one must, after all, execute it.
+
+And herewith I suddenly introduce my fair readers in a body to a
+domestic ball of two couples. See the two sisters-in-soul, side by side,
+like two wings on _one_ dove, harmoniously flutter up and down. Albano
+had expected Julienne would form a contrast, by nimble and sprightly
+fluttering, to the still, hovering movement of her friend; but both
+undulated lightly, like waves, by and through each other, and there was
+not a motion too much nor too swift.
+
+Hence I have so often wished that maidens might always dance exactly
+like the Graces and the Hours,--that is to say, only with one another,
+not with us gentlemen. The present union of the female wave-line with
+the masculine swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does
+not remarkably beautify the dance.
+
+Liana assumed a new ethereal form, somewhat as an angel while flying
+back into heaven lays aside his graceful earthly one. The dancing-floor
+is to woman's beauty what the horse's back is to ours; on both the
+mutual enchantment unfolds itself, and only a rider can match a dancing
+maiden. Fortunate Albano! thou who hardly dar'st take the finger-points
+of Liana's offered hand in thine! thou gettest enough. And only look at
+this friendly maiden, whose eyes and lips Charis so smilingly brightens
+for the dance, and who yet, on the other hand, appears so touchingly,
+because she is a little pale! How different from those capricious or
+inflexible step-sisters, who, with half a Cato of Utica on the wrinkled
+or tightly stretched face, hop, fall back, and slip round. Julienne
+flies joyfully to and fro; and it is hard to say before whose eyes she
+loves to flutter best, Liana's or Albano's.
+
+When it was done, Julienne wanted to begin over again. Liana looked at
+her mother, and immediately begged her friend rather for a cooling off.
+A mere pretext! A female friend loves to be alone with a female friend;
+the two loved each other before people only with a veil upon their
+hearts, and longed for the dark arbor where it might fall off. Liana had
+a real loving impatience, till she could, with her duplicate-soul, her
+twin-heart, snatch moments free from witnesses in the garden of evening
+and May. They came back changed and full of tender seriousness. The
+lovely beings were perhaps as like each other in their innermost souls
+and in stillness as in the dance, and more so than they seemed.
+
+And thus passed with our youth a fair-starred evening! Pardon him,
+however, that he grasped and pressed this nosegay so close as to feel
+some of the thorns. His heart, whose love grew painfully near another,
+could not help finding this other, where there was no sign of response,
+at once _higher_ and _farther_ off. Her love was love of man,--her smile
+was meant for every kind eye,--she was so cheerful. In Lilar she easily
+passed into emotion and general contemplations; not so here,--of course
+she would look right sympathetically upon her wildly loving brother,
+who, since that confession-night, had twined himself as if with
+oak-roots around the darling; but her half-blind love for the brother
+might indeed be only, in the deceiving light of reflection, shining upon
+_his_ friend. All this the modest one said to himself. But what he had
+enjoyed in full measure of ecstasy was the increasing, clear, tender,
+steadfast love of his soul's-brother.
+
+
+57. CYCLE.
+
+As to Liana's secret inclination and Zesara's prospects I shall never
+once institute any conjectures, although I might erase them again before
+printing. I remember what came of it, when I and others, on a former
+occasion, covered over with our hands Hafenreffer's official reports
+upon matters of consequence, and undertook to unfold at length, by pure
+fancy, how things might have gone on;--it was of no use! And naturally
+enough; for women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, many _doors_
+and few _windows_, and it is easier to _get_ into their hearts than to
+_look_ into them. Particularly maidens', I mean; since women,
+physiognomically and morally, are more strongly marked and boldly
+developed, I would rather undertake to guess at and so portray ten
+mothers than two daughters. The bodily portrait-painters make the same
+complaint.
+
+Whoever observes the influence of night, will find that the doubts and
+anxieties which he had contracted the evening previous about the heroine
+of his life it has, for the most part, completely killed by the time it
+gets to be towards morning. Albano, in the spring morning, opened his
+eyes upon life as in a triumphal car, and the fresh steeds stamped
+before it, and he could only let them have the reins.
+
+He alighted with his friend at Liana's after a few years, that is, days;
+the Minister had not yet come back. Heavens! how new and bloomingly
+young was her form, and yet how unchanged her demeanor! Why is it,
+thought he, that I can get only her motions, not all her features, by
+heart? Why can I not imprint this face, even to the least smile, like a
+holy antique, cleanly and deeply upon my brain, that so it may float
+before me in eternal presence? For this reason, my dear: young and
+beautiful forms are the very ones which are hard for the memory as for
+the pencil; and coarse, old, masculine ones easier for both. Again he
+filled himself with joys and sighs by looking at her,--and these were
+increased by the nearness of the garden, wherein June with his evening
+splendor lay encamped. O, if only _one_ moment could come to him, in
+which his whole soul might speak its inspiration! Out of doors there lay
+the young, fiery spring, basking, like an Antinoüs, in the garden, and
+the moon, impatient for the fair June-night, stood already under the
+gate of the east, and found the living day and the lingering sun still
+in the field. But the mother refused to the asking look of Liana the
+sight of sunset,--"on account of the unwholesome _Serein_."[136] Albano,
+with his heart full of manly blood, thought this maternal barrier around
+a child's health very small.
+
+The hour for shutting gates upon to-day's Eden would have struck for him
+the next minute, had it not been for the Captain and the _Cereus
+serpens_.
+
+The Captain came running down from the Italian roof, and announced that
+the Cereus would bloom this evening at ten o'clock, the gardener said,
+and he should stay there. "And thou too," he said to Albano. All that
+the double limitations of forbearing tenderness toward sister and friend
+would allow he lovingly set at stake, for the sake of pleasing the
+latter. Liana herself begged him to wait for the blooming; she was so
+delighted to find it was so near! Her soul hung upon flowers, like bees
+and dew. Already had her friend, the pious Spener, who fixed an
+enraptured eye upon these living arabesques of God's throne, made her a
+friend to these mute, ever-sleeping children of the Infinite; but still
+more had her own maidenly and her suffering heart done it. Have you
+never met tender, female souls, into whose blossoming time fate had
+thrown cold clouds, and who now, like Rousseau, sought other flowers
+than those of joy, and who wearied themselves with stooping, in valleys
+and on rocks, to gather and to forget, and to fly from the dead _Pomona_
+to the young _Flora_? The thorough-bass and Latin, wherewith _Hermes_
+proposes to divert maidens, must yield here to the broad, variegated
+hieroglyphics of Nature, the rich study of Botany.
+
+A nameless tenderness for Liana came into Albano's soul at the little
+four-seated supper-table; it seemed to him as if he were now nearer to
+her, and a relative; and yet he comprehended not his kinswoman, when,
+from every serious mood into which her mother sank, she strove to win
+her back with pleasantries. Out of doors the nightingales were calling
+man into the lovely night; and no one pined more to be abroad than he.
+
+For the soul's eyes, the _blue_ of heaven is what the _green_ of earth
+is to the bodily eyes, namely, an inward strengthening. When Zesara, at
+length, came free and clear out of the fetters of the room,--out of this
+spiritual house-arrest into the free realm of heaven, and beneath all
+the stars and on the magic Olympus of statues, at which he had so often
+longingly looked up,--then did his forcibly contracted breast
+elastically expand: how the constellations of life moved to meet each
+other in brighter forms; how did spring and night sit enthroned!
+
+The old gardener, who, simply from a grateful attachment to "the
+good-souled, condescending Fräulein," had, with rare pains, forced these
+early blossoms from the _Cereus serpens_, stood up there already,
+apparently as an observer of the flowers, but in fact as an expectant of
+the greatest praise, with a brown, indented, pitted, and serious face,
+which did not challenge praise with a single smile.
+
+Liana thanked the gardener before she came to the blossoms; then she
+praised them and his pains. The old man merely waited for every other
+one of the company to be astonished also; then he went drowsily off to
+bed, with a firm faith that Liana would to-morrow remember him in such a
+way as to make him contented.
+
+The exotic beads of nectar-fragrance which hung in five white calyxes,
+crowned as it were with brown leaf-work, seized the fancy. The odors
+from the spring of a hotter clime drew it away into remote dreams. Liana
+only stroked with a soft finger, as one glides over eyelids, the little
+incense-vases, without touching with predatory hand the full little
+garden of tender stamina which crowded together in the cup. "How lovely,
+how very tender!" said she, with childlike happiness. "What a cluster of
+five little evening stars! Why come they only by night,--the dear, shy
+little flowers?" Charles seemed to be on the point of breaking one. "O
+let it live!" she begged; "to-morrow they will all have died of
+themselves. Charles! thus does so much else fade," she added, in a lower
+tone. "Everything!" said he, sharply. But the mother, against Liana's
+will, had heard it. "Such death-thoughts," said she, "I love not in
+youth; they lame its wings." "And then," replied Liana, with a
+maiden-like turning of the tables, "it just stays with us, that's all,
+like the crane in Kleist's fable, whose wings they broke, so that he
+could not travel with the rest into the warm land."
+
+This gay, motley veil of deep earnestness was not transparent enough for
+our friend. But by and by the good maiden took pains to look just as the
+careful mother wished. The benumbing lily which the earth wears on her
+breast, the moon; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens;
+and the city, with its pierced-work of night-lights; and the high,
+majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white
+lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and
+the nightingales singing out of distant gardens;--did not all this stir
+omnipotently every heart, till it would fain confess with tears its
+longing? And the softest heart of all which beat at this moment below
+the stars, could it have succeeded in wholly veiling itself? Almost! She
+had accustomed herself, before her mother, to dry away with her eye, so
+to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall.
+
+Singular was her appearance, the next minute, to the Count. The mother
+was speaking with her son; Liana stood, far from the latter, with face
+turned half aside, and a little discolored by the moon, near a white
+statue of the holy Virgin, and looking out into the night. All at once
+she looked upon him and smiled, just as if a living being had appeared
+to her in the abyss of ether, and her lip would speak. Earthly form more
+exalted and touching had never before met his eyes; the balustrade by
+which he held swayed to and fro (but it was he himself who shook it),
+and his whole soul cried, "To-day, now, I love the heavenly one with the
+highest, the deepest love I have felt." So he also said lately, and so
+will he say oftener: can man, with the innumerable waves of love,
+institute measurements of altitude, and point to that one which has
+mounted the highest? Thus does man, whereever he may be standing, always
+imagine himself standing in the centre of heaven.
+
+Ah, at this moment he was again surprised, but it was with an "Ah!"
+Liana went to her mother, and when _she_ felt in the hand of her darling
+a slight shudder, she importuned her to go out of the night-air, and
+would not give over till she left with her the magic spot.
+
+The friends stayed behind. According to Albano's reckoning, it would
+not, of course, have been too much, if, in this frank time, wherein our
+holier thoughts, hidden by the common light of day, reveal themselves
+like stars, they had all lingered on the roof till toward morning. The
+two walked for a time up and down in silence. At last the incense-altar
+of the five flowers held them fast. Albano clasped accidentally the
+neighboring statue with both hands, and said: "On high places, one wants
+to throw something down,--even himself oftentimes; and I, too, would
+fain throw myself off into the world, into far-distant lands, as often
+as I gaze into the nightly redness yonder, and as often as I come under
+orangery-blossoms, as under these. Brother, how is it with thee? The
+heavens and the earth open out so broadly: why, then, must the spirit
+so creep into itself?" "Just so do I feel," said he; "and in the head,
+generally, has the spirit more room than in the heart." But here, by a
+delicate guess, he arrived, through agreeably circuitous routes, at the
+accidental discovery of the reason why his sister had hurried down so
+soon.
+
+"Even to obstinacy," said he, "she pushes her care for her mother. The
+last time, when she observed that mother saw her grow pale under the
+dance, she immediately ceased. To me alone she shows her whole heart,
+and every drop of blood, and all innocent tears therein; especially does
+she believe something in respect to the future, which she anxiously
+conceals from mother." "She smiled to herself just before she went
+away," said Albano, and drew Charles's hand over his eyes, "as if she
+saw up there a being from the veiled world." "Didst thou too see that?"
+replied Charles. "And then did her lip stir? O friend, God knows what
+infatuates her; but this is certain, she firmly believes she is to die
+next year." Albano would not let him speak further. Too intensely
+excited, he pressed himself to his friend's breast; his heart beat
+wildly, and he said: "O brother, remain always my friend!"
+
+They went down. In the apartment which adjoined Liana's they found her
+piano-forte open. Now that was just what the Count had missed. In
+passion--even in mere fire of the brain--one grasps not so much at the
+pen as at the string; and in that state alone does musical fantasying
+succeed better than poetic. Albano, thanking, meanwhile, the muse of
+sweet sounds that there were forty-four transitions,[137] seated himself
+at the keys, with the intention now to beat a musical fire-drum, and
+roar like a storm into the still ashes, and drive out a clear,
+sparkling swarm of tones. He did it, too, and well enough, and better
+and better; but the instrument struggled, rebelled. It was built for a
+female hand, and would only speak in female tones, with lute-plaints, as
+a woman with a friend of her own sex.
+
+Charles had never heard him play so, and was astonished at such fulness.
+But the reason was, the Lector was not there; before certain
+persons--and he was one of them--the playing hand freezes, so that one
+only labors and lumbers to and fro in a pair of leaden gloves; and,
+secondly, before a multitude it is easier playing than before one,
+because the latter stands definitely before the soul, the former floats
+vaguely. And, besides all that, blessed Albano, thou knowest who hears
+thee. The morning air of hope flutters around thee in tones,--the wild
+life of youth stalks with vigorous limbs and loud strides up and down
+before thee,--the moonlight, undesecrated by any gross earthly light,
+hallows the sounding apartment. Liana's last songs lie open before thee,
+and the advancing moonshine will let thee read them soon,--and the
+nightingale in the mother's neighboring chamber contends with thy tones,
+as if summoned by the Tuba to the field.
+
+Liana came in with her mother, not till late, because the heavy din of
+tones had something in it hard and painful to both. He could see the two
+sitting sidewise at the lower window, and how Liana held her mother's
+hand. Charles, after his manner, walked up and down with long steps, and
+sometimes stood still near him. Albano, in this nearness of the still
+soul, soon came out of the wilderness of harmony into simple moonlit
+passages, where only a few tones moved delicately like graces, and quite
+as lightly linked as they. The artistical hurly-burly of unharmonious
+_ignes fatui_ is only the forerunner of the melodious Charites; and
+these alone insinuate themselves into the softer souls. It seemed to
+him--the illusion was complete--as if he were speaking aloud with Liana;
+and when the tones, like lovers, went on ever repeating the same thing
+from heartiness and zest, did he not mean Liana, and say to her, "How I
+love thee! O how I love thee!" Did he not ask her, "Why mournest thou?
+why weepest thou?" And did he not say to her, "Look into this mute
+heart, and fly not from it, O pure, innocent one, my own!"
+
+How did the good youth blush, when suddenly the caressing friend placed
+his hands over _his_ friend's eyes, which hitherto, unseen in the
+darkness, had been overflowing for love! Charles stepped warmly to his
+sister, and she, of her own accord, took his hand and said words of
+love. Then Albano took refuge in the murmuring wilderness of sounds,
+until his eyes were dried enough for the leave-taking by lamp-light; by
+slow degrees he let the cradle of our heart cease rocking, and closed so
+mildly and faintly, and was silent for a little while, and then slowly
+rose. O, in this mute, young bosom lived every blessed thing which the
+most glorious love can bestow!
+
+They parted seriously. No one spoke of the music. Liana seemed
+transfigured. Albano dared not, in this spirit-hour of the heart, with
+an eye which had so recently calmed itself, rest long upon her mild blue
+ones. Her deeply touched soul expressed itself, as maidens are wont, to
+her brother only, and that by a more ardent embrace. And from the holy
+youth she could not, in parting, conceal the tone and the look, which
+he will never forget.
+
+That night he awoke often, and knew not what it was that so blissfully
+rocked his being. Ah! it was the tone whose echo rang through his
+slumber, and the dear eye which still looked upon him in his dreams.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[135] He is said, in teaching, to have always looked at the spot
+on a student's coat where the button was gone; and was
+embarrassed when it was sewed on again.
+
+[136] The evening hour, which people in southern countries shun
+so much.
+
+[137] From one key to another.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+TWELFTH JUBILEE.
+
+     FROULAY'S BIRTHDAY AND PROJECTS.--EXTRA-LEAF.--BABETTE.--THE
+     HARMONICA.--NIGHT.--THE PIOUS FATHER.--THE WONDROUS
+     STAIRWAY.--THE APPARITION.
+
+
+58. CYCLE.
+
+Happy Albano! thou wouldst not have remained so, hadst thou, on the
+birthday of the Minister, heard what he then proposed!
+
+Already, for a considerable time, had Froulay been full of noticeable,
+stormy signs, and might any moment, one must needs fear, let the
+thunderbolt fly from him; that is to say, he was gay and mild. Thus,
+also, in the case of phlegmatic children, does great liveliness threaten
+an eruption of the chicken-pox. As he was a father and a despot,--(the
+Greeks had for both only the one word, despot,)--so was it expected of
+him, as connubial storm-maker,[138] that he would provide the usual
+storms and foul weather for his family. Connubial storm-material for the
+mere _troubling_ of marriage can never be wanting, when one considers
+how little is required even for its dissolution; for instance, among
+the Jews, merely that the woman scream too loud, burn the dinner, leave
+her shoes in the place for the man's, &c. Beside all this, there was
+much in the present case about which there was a good chance to thunder;
+e. g. Liana, upon whom one might visit the misdemeanor of the brother,
+because he obstinately stayed away and begged for no grace. One always
+loves to let his indignation loose upon wife, daughter, and son at once,
+and would rather be a land-rain than a transient shower; one child can
+more easily imbitter than sweeten a whole family.
+
+But Froulay still continued the smiling John. Nay, did he not--I have
+the proofs--carry it so far, that when, on one occasion, his daughter,
+in taking leave of the Princess, fell upon her neck,--instead of
+representing to her, with flashing eyes, how one must only accept, not
+reciprocate, familiarities with superiors, and must take care not to
+forget one's self precisely then, when _they_ do forget themselves,--and
+instead of sternly asking whether she had ever seen him, in his warmest
+love toward the Prince, offend against _the Dehors_,--instead, I say, of
+doing this, and hailing and storming the while, did he not merely break
+out that once into the fair words: "Child, thou art too affectionate
+toward thy distinguished friend; ask thy mother; she knows, too, what
+friendly _liaisons_ are"?
+
+Only Liana--although so often deceived by these calms--was full of
+unutterable hope and joy at the domestic peace, and believed in its
+permanence, especially as the paternal birthday was so near, that
+Olympiad and normal period upon which and by which the house reckoned so
+largely. During the whole year the Minister had been looking out for
+this day, in order, in the morning, when the congratulations came, not
+to forget to make believe he had forgotten it, but to be astonished on
+the subject,--all owing to business, he said; and at evening, when the
+guests came,--on account of business he never dined, he said, to
+astonish _them_. He was alternately the worshipper and image-breaker of
+etiquette, ministerial and opposition party thereof, as his vanity
+dictated.
+
+Liana importuned her brother, till he promised to do something to please
+his father; he composed, for the purpose, a family-piece, in which he
+introduced the whole confession-night between himself and Albano, only
+he converted Albano into a sister. Liana gladly studied this part also
+for the birthday, although she had to deliver the blooming vest.
+
+The Minister, contrary to expectation, accepted the vest, the Captain
+and his hand-bill for the evening's performance, graciously; for he was
+wont, on former occasions, like some other fathers, to growl the louder
+the more his children stroked him. He danced away like a Polack right
+merrily with his family, and stuck the rod[139] behind the fur. Nothing
+worse at this moment revolved in his head than the question, where it
+would be best to open the amateur theatre, whether in the _Salon de
+Lecture_ or in the _Salon des bains domestiques_; for the two halls were
+entirely distinguished from one another, and from the other chambers, by
+their names.
+
+The day came. Albano, whose invitation Charles had to extort, because
+the Minister, out of pride, hated his pride, brought with him,
+unfortunately, in his soul, the tone which Liana had given him the last
+time to carry home with him. His hope had hitherto lived upon this
+tone. O blame him not for it! The airy nothing of a sigh bears often a
+pastoral world or an orcus on its ephemeron's-wing. Everything weighty
+may, like a rock, be placed on a point, whereupon a child's finger can
+set it in rotation.
+
+But the tone had died away. Liana knew no other way than that, in the
+visiting congregation,--of whose moral pneumatophobia,[140] after all,
+she was not aware in its full extent,--one should hide every religious
+emotion behind the church fan. Boxes, pit, and farthing gallery were,
+almost at the usual play-hour, set off and filled out with Gratulantes,
+all fit to be canons. The German gentleman was made particularly
+prominent by the rich and insolent ostentation of his circumstances. Of
+the visiting-company-lane it can, in passing, only be observed, that in
+it, as in the antiphlogistic system, _oxygen_[141] played the chief
+part, which, however, was given out less by the lungs than by the heart.
+
+When the curtain rose, and Roquairol made that night of forgiveness and
+ecstasy pass by again in a still more glowing form than it had actually
+had; when this dreamy imitation seemed the first appearance of the
+actual reality, how hotly and deeply did he burn himself thereby into
+his friend's soul! (Good Albano! This art of being his own _revenant_,
+his own ghost, his mock- and mimic-self, and of counterfeiting the
+splendid edition of his own life, should have left thee smaller hopes!)
+The Count must needs, in this most grave society that ever sate around
+him, break out into an unseemly weeping. And why did Charles put
+Albano's words, of that memorable night, into the mouth of Liana, so
+bewitchingly interesting in her emotion, and thus make his love,
+wrought upon by so many charms, grow even to anguish?
+
+The German gentleman himself gave to Liana, that white swan, floating,
+tinged with rosy redness, through the evening glow of Phoebus, several
+loud, and to the Count annoying signs of approbation. The Minister was
+chiefly glad that all this happened in his honor, and that the point of
+the last act was still going to throw a very special epigrammatic
+laurel-wreath on his crown.
+
+He got the wreath. The pair of children were very favorably criticised
+by the Erlangen literary gazette[142] of spectators, and by the
+belles-lettres review, and covered over with crowns,--with noble
+martyrs' crowns. The German gentleman had and used the public right of
+ushering in the Coronation, and the Coronation-car. Base man! why should
+thy beetle's-eyes be permitted to creep gnawingly over the holy roses
+which emotion and sisterly love plants on Liana's cheeks? But how much
+gayer still was the old gentleman,--so much so that he flirted with the
+oldest ladies,--when he saw the knight bring out magnificently into full
+daylight his interest in Liana, not fantastically or sentimentally, but
+by still and steady advances and marked attention, by jokes and glances
+and sly addresses, and at last by something decisive! That is to say,
+the German gentleman drew the old man into a cabinet, and both came back
+out of it vehemently animated.
+
+The lovely Liana, withdrawn into her own heart, fled from the upas-tree
+of the laurel away to her comforting mother. Liana had preserved, in the
+midst of the stormy mill-races of daily _assemblées_, a low voice and a
+delicate ear, and the tumult had driven her inward, and left her almost
+shy.
+
+The fair soul seldom guessed anything, except a fair soul: she so easily
+divined her like; with such difficulty her counterpart. Bouverot's
+advances seemed to her the usual forward and side steps of manly
+courtesy; and his knightly celibacy did not allow her entirely to
+understand him. Do not the lilies of innocence bloom earlier than the
+roses of shame, as the purple color, in the beginning, only dyes pale,
+and not till afterward puts on the red glow, when it lies before the
+sun? She kept herself this evening near her mother, because she
+perceived in her an unwonted seriousness. When Froulay had taken off
+from his head the birthday garland, wherein were planted more thorns and
+stalks than flowers,--when he had taken off the crown of thorns, and
+stood in his night-cap amidst his family,--he addressed himself to the
+business whereupon he had been thinking all the evening. "My little
+dove," said he to his daughter, borrowing a good expression from the
+Bastile,[143]--"my little dove, leave me and _Guillemette_ alone." He
+now laid bare his upper teeth by a characteristic grin, and said he had,
+as he hoped, something agreeable to communicate to her. "You know," he
+continued, "what I owe to the German gentleman." He meant not thanks,
+but money and consideration.
+
+We love to dwell upon it as a matter of great praise in the family of
+the Quintii,[144] that they never possessed gold: I adduce--without
+arraying a thousand other families of whom the same is to be sworn--only
+Froulay's. Certain families, like antimony, have no chemical affinity
+whatever with that metal, however much they might wish it; certainly
+Froulay wished it: he looked very much to his interest (to nothing
+else), he willingly (although only in cases of collision) set conscience
+and honor aside; but he got no further than to great outlays and great
+projects, simply because he sought money, not as the end and aim of his
+ambition, but only as the means of ambition and enterprise. Even for
+some pictures which Bouverot had purchased for the Prince in Italy he
+still owed that individual the purchase-shilling which he had taken out
+of the treasury. By his bonds as if by circulars, he stood in
+widely-extended connections. He would gladly have transposed his
+marriage contract into a bond, and had, with his lady, at least that
+most intimate community--of goods; for, under present circumstances,
+divorce and bankruptcy stood in neighborly relations to each other; but,
+as was said, many men, with the best talons,--like the eagle of the
+Romish king,[145]--have nothing in them.
+
+He continued: "Now, perhaps, this _géne_ will cease. Have you hitherto
+made any observations upon him?" She shook her head. "I have," he
+replied, "for a long time, and such as were really consoling to
+me,--_j'avais le nez bon quant à cela_,--he has a real liking for my
+Liana."
+
+The Minister's lady here could draw no inference, and begged him, with
+disguised astonishment, to come to the _agreeable_ matter. Comically on
+his face did the show of friendship wrestle with the expectation that he
+should be under the necessity immediately of being exasperated. He
+replied: "Is not _this_ an agreeable matter? The knight means it in
+earnest. He wished now to be privately espoused to her; after three
+years he retires from the order, and her fortune is made. _Vous êtes, je
+l'espere, pour cette fois, un peu sur mes interêts, ils sont les
+vôtres._"
+
+Her maternal heart, so suddenly and deeply wounded, wept, and could
+hardly be concealed. "Herr von Froulay!" said she, when she had composed
+herself a little; "I do not disguise my astonishment. Such a disparity
+in years, in tastes, in religion."[146]
+
+"That is the knight's affair, not ours," he replied, refreshed by her
+angry confusedness, and, like the weather, in his coldness threw only
+fine, sharp snow, no hail. "As to Liana's heart, I beg you just to sound
+that." "O, that innocent heart? You are mocking!" "_Posito!_ so much the
+more gladly will the _innocent_ heart reconcile itself to make her
+father's fortune, if she is not the greatest egotist. I should never
+love to constrain an obedient daughter." "_N'epuiséz pas ce chapitre;
+mon coeur est en presse._ It will cost her her life, which already
+hangs by such frail threads." This allusion always struck the fire of
+wrath from his flint. "_Tant mieux_," said he; "then it will never go
+further than an engagement! I had almost said--_Sacre!_ and who is to
+blame for that? So it fares with me at the hands of the Captain too,--in
+the beginning my children promise everything, then they turn out
+nothing. But, madam," he said, swiftly and venomously collecting
+himself; and, instead of compressing his lips and teeth, merely pinching
+moderately the auditory organs of a sleeping lap-dog; "you alone indeed
+know, by your influence upon Liana, how to dress and redress everything.
+Perhaps she belongs to you by a still prior claim than to me. I am not
+then compromitted with the knight. The advantages I detail no further."
+His breast was here already warmed under the vulture-skin of rage.
+
+But the noble lady now indignantly rose, and said: "Herr von Froulay!
+hitherto I have not spoken of myself. Never will I counsel or
+countenance or consent to it,--I will do the opposite. Herr von Bouverot
+is not worthy of my Liana."
+
+The Minister, during this speech, had several times unnecessarily
+snapped-to the snuffers over the wax candles, and only beheaded the
+point of the flame; the fixed air of wrath now colored the roses of his
+lips (as the chemical does botanical ones) blue. "_Bon!_" he replied, "I
+travel; you can reflect on the subject,--but I give my word of honor,
+that I never consent to any other match; and though it were (whereupon
+he looked at the lady ironically) still more considerable[147] than the
+one just projected,--either the maiden obeys or she suffers, _decidéz_!
+_Mais je me fie à l'amour que vous portéz au pere et à la fille; vous
+nous rendréz tous assêz contens._" And then he went forth, not like a
+tempest, but like a rainbow, which he manufactured out of the eighth
+color only, namely, the black, and that with his eyebrows.
+
+After some days of resentment with the mother and the daughter, he rode,
+as Luigi's business-agent, to Haarhaar to see the princely bride. The
+oppressed mother confided to her oldest and only friend, the Lector, the
+sad secret. The two had now a pure relation of friendship toward one
+another, which, in France, in consequence of the higher respect for
+women, is more common. In the first years of the ministerial forced
+marriage, which dawned not with morning dew, but with morning frost,
+perhaps the hawk-moth[148] Cupid fluttered after them; but by and by
+children drove away this sphinx. The wife is often forgotten when she
+becomes the mother. She, therefore, with her characteristic cool and
+clear strength, took all that was ambiguous in her relation to Augusti
+forever out of the way; and he made her firmness more easy by his own,
+because he, with more love of honor than of women, grew not more red at
+any kind of braided-work than at that of a basket,[149] and erroneously
+believed that a man who receives it, has as much to be ashamed of as a
+woman who does.
+
+The Lector could foresee that she would also, after her divorce,--which
+she postponed only for Liana's sake,--remain single, if only for this
+reason, in order not to deprive her daughter of an allodial estate,
+Klosterdorf, for the reservation of which she had now for one and twenty
+years exposed herself to the battering-ram and scythe-chariot and
+blunderbuss of the old Minister. Whether she was not even silently
+intending her dear Liana for a man so firm and tender, who differed from
+her in nothing but in a worldly coolness toward positive religion, is
+another and more delicate question. Such a reciprocal gift were worthy
+such a mother and friend, who must know from her heart, that combined
+feelings of tenderness and honor prepare for a loved soul a surer bliss
+than the love which genius offers, that alternation of flying heat and
+flying cold,--that fire which, like the electric, always twice
+destroys,--in the stroke and in the rebound. The Lector himself started
+not that question; for he never made rash, unsafe plans; and what one
+would have been more so than that of such a connection, in his poverty,
+or with such a father-in-law, in a country where, as in the Electorate
+of Saxony, a statute, so beneficial (for parents), can countermand even
+a marriage of many years' standing, which has been concluded without
+parental consent?
+
+With moist eyes the Minister's lady showed him the new storm-clouds,
+which had again descended upon her and her Liana. She could build upon
+his fine eye for the world, upon his dumb lip and upon his ready hand
+for business. He said, as ever, he had foreseen all this; but proved to
+her that Bouverot, if only from avarice, would never exchange his
+knightly cross for the wedding-ring, whatever designs he might cherish
+with regard to Liana. He gave her to surmise, so far as a tender regard
+to her sore relations would tolerate, to what degree of readiness for
+compliance with Bouverot's wishes the very frailty of Liana's life might
+allure the Minister, in order to harvest it before it had done blooming.
+For Froulay could much more nimbly swallow demands against honor than
+injuries done to his vanity, as the victim of hydrophobia can much more
+easily get down solid morsels than fluids. Yet all this did not sound so
+immorally hard to the Minister's lady as readers of the middling classes
+might imagine; I appeal to the more sensible among the higher.
+
+Augusti and the Minister's lady saw that something must certainly be
+done for Liana during the Minister's absence; and both wonderfully
+coincided in their project. Liana must go into the country this pleasant
+season,--she must muster up health for the wars that were in
+prospect,--she must be put out of the way of the knight's visits, which
+now the birthday would multiply fourfold,--even the Minister must have
+nothing to object to the place. And where can this be? Simply under the
+roof of the Director Wehrfritz, who cannot endure the German gentleman,
+because he knows his poisonous relation to the Prince. But of course
+there are first still other mountains to be climbed than that which lies
+on the way to Blumenbühl.
+
+The reader himself must now get over a low one; and that is a short
+comico-tragic Extra-leaf upon
+
+
+THE GREEN-MARKET OF DAUGHTERS.
+
+The following is certain: every owner of a very beautiful or very rich
+daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt under his roof, which to himself is
+of no service, and which he must put to its first use after it has long
+lain idle, by selling it to a _Regent_.[150] Strictly and commercially
+speaking, daughters are not an article of trade; for the parental grand
+adventurers no one can confound with those female dealers in second-hand
+frippery, and stall-women, whose transit-business one does not love to
+name; but a stock, with which one gains in a South Sea, or a clod,
+wherewith one transfers symbolically (_scortatione_) real estate. "_Je
+ne vends que mes paysages et donne les figures par dessus le
+marche_,"[151] said Claude Lorraine, like a father,--and could easily
+say it, because he had the figures painted in his landscapes by
+_others_;--even so in the purchase or marriage-contract only the
+knightly seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them is
+thrown into the bargain. Even so, higher up, is a princess merely a
+blooming twig, which a princely sponsor plucks off and carries home, not
+for the sake of the _fruits_, but because a _bee-swarm_ of lands and
+people has attached itself thereto.
+
+If a father, like our Minister, has not much, then he can pawn his
+children, as the Egyptians did their parents (namely, the mummies of
+them), as mortgages and hand-pledges or imperial pawns, which are not
+redeemed.
+
+At present the mercantile order, which formerly dealt only in foreign
+products, has got possession of this branch of commerce also; methinks,
+however, they might find room enough in their lower vaults to be selfish
+and damned, without going up stairs to the daughter. In Guinea only the
+nobility can trade; with us they are cut off and debarred from almost
+all trade, except the small trade in daughters, and the few other things
+which grow on their own estates; hence is it that they hold so fast to
+this liberty of trade, and that the noblesse seem here to be a Hanse
+alliance for this delicate branch of business; so that one may, in some
+manner, compare the high standing[152] of this class with the _higher_
+one (in a literal sense) which marketable people in Rome were obliged to
+mount[153] in order to be seen.
+
+It is a common objection of young and (so-called) sensitive hearts, that
+this sort of transaction very much constrains, or in fact crushes love;
+whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation for it as this very
+thing. For when the bargain is once concluded and entered by the
+bookkeeper (the parson) in the ledger, then does the time truly come on
+when the daughter can consider and provide for her heart, namely, the
+fair season after marriage, which is universally assumed in France and
+Italy, and is gradually coming to be in Germany also, as the more
+suitable time for a female heart to choose freely among the host of
+men; her state then, like the Venetian, grows out of a commercial into a
+conquering one. The husband himself, too, is quite as little interrupted
+afterward as beforehand in his love by this short business transaction;
+all is, that now--as in Nuremberg every Jew is followed by an old
+woman--close upon the heels of our bridegroom a young one is seen. Nay,
+often, the nuptial tradesman conceives an inclination even for the
+article which he has carried home with him,--which is an uncommon piece
+of good fortune; and as Moses Mendelssohn, with his bundle of silken
+wares under his arm, thought out his _letters_ upon the _affections_, so
+do better men, amidst their business, meditate love-letters on this
+branch of trade, and deal with the virgin--as merchants in Messina[154]
+do with the holy virgin--in Co.; but of course such profitable
+connections of love with business must always be rare birds, and are
+little to be counted upon.
+
+The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with
+children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make
+something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to
+prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show
+of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous
+leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of
+apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal
+liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your
+daughters _friendship_ for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage,
+exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in
+the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or
+do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for
+training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself?
+You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves
+educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy
+inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to _them_;
+and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and
+but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under
+the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale
+as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier
+period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the
+gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being?
+
+If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they
+afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what
+is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole
+heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly _your own_; _your_ glory and
+aggrandizement, _your_ feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy
+with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your
+silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage;
+for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a
+death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial
+merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them
+sinners,[155] in order not to be yourselves robbers?
+
+Tell me not that marriages of inclination often turn out ill, and forced
+marriages often well enough, as may be seen in the instance of the
+Moravians, the old Germans, and Orientals. Name me rather all barbaric
+times and nations, in which--for both indeed only reckon the man, never
+the wife--a happy marriage means nothing more than a happy husband. No
+one stands by near enough to hear and to count a woman's sighs; the
+unheard pang becomes at last speechless; new wounds weaken the bleeding
+of the oldest. Further: the ill-luck of fancy-marriages is chargeable
+upon your very opposition to them, and your war against the married
+couple. Still further: every forced marriage is, in fact, for the most
+part, half a marriage of fancy. Finally: the best marriages are in the
+middling class, where the bond is more apt to be love; and the worst in
+the higher, where it is more a mercenary motive; and as often as in
+these classes a prince should choose merely with his heart, he would get
+a heart, and never lose nor betray it.
+
+Now, then, what sort of a hand is that into which you so often force the
+fairest, finest, richest, but rebellious one? Commonly, a black, old,
+withered, greedy fist. For decrepit, rich, or aspiring libertines have
+too much of the connoisseur, too much satiety and freedom, to steal any
+other than the most splendid creatures; the less perfect fall into the
+hands and homes of mere lovers and amateurs. But how base is a man, who,
+abandoned of his own character, backed merely by the despotic edict of a
+stranger, paying for his fortune with a stolen one, can now drag away
+the unprotected soul from the yearning eyes of a weeping love into a
+long, cold life, and clasp her to his arms as against the edges of
+frosty swords, and therein so near to his eye see her bleed and grow
+pale and quiver! The man of honor even gives with a blush, but he takes
+not with a blush; and the better lion, the beast, spares woman;[156]
+but these soul-buyers extort from constrained beings at last even the
+testimony of free-will.
+
+Mother of the poor heart, which thou wilt bless by misfortune, hear me!
+Suppose thy daughter should harden herself against the misery which is
+forced upon her, hast thou not reduced her rich dream of life to empty
+sleep, and taken out of it love's islands of the blest, and all that
+bloomed thereon; the fair days when one roamed over them, and the
+perpetual happy retrospect of them when they already lie with their
+blooming peaks low in the horizon? Mother, if this happy time was ever
+in thy breast, then snatch it not from thy daughter; and if it was
+barbarously torn from thee, then think of thy bitter pang, and bequeath
+it not!
+
+Suppose, further, she makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now
+what she might have been to its darling; and whether she does not then
+deserve anything better than to gratify a jailer, locked in with her
+forever by one shutting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well
+as this; thou wilt heap a double disaster upon thy soul,--the long agony
+of thy daughter, and the growing coldness of her husband, who by and by
+comes to feel and resent refusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time
+when man first needs the morning-sun,--namely, youth. O, sooner make all
+other seasons of the day of life cloudy; they are all alike, the third
+and the fourth and fifth decades; only at sunrise let it not rain into
+life; only this one never returning, irredeemable time darken not!
+
+But how, if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely joys, relations, a
+happy marriage, hopes, a whole posterity, to thy plans and commands,
+but the very being herself[157] whom thou constrainest? Who can justify
+thee, or dry thy tears, when thy best daughter,--for she is the very one
+who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, as the monks of La
+Trappe see their cloister burn down, without one of them breaking the
+vow of silence,[158]--when she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and
+half in the shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and pale;
+when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last can no longer conceal
+anything from thee, but for years bears round the paleness and the pangs
+of decline in the very orient of life; and when thou canst not console
+her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience cannot suppress
+the name of infanticide; and when at last the worn-out victim lies there
+under thy tears, and the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young,
+so faint, and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complaining, with
+languishing and longing looks, with painfully confused and conflicting
+emotions, sinks with her blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of
+death,--O guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed her in, who
+will comfort thee? But I would call every guiltless one, and show her
+the bitter dying, and ask her, Shall thy child also perish thus?
+
+
+59. CYCLE.
+
+It was a romantic day for Zesara, even outwardly; sun-sparks and
+rain-drops played dazzlingly through the heavens. He had received a
+letter from his father, dated at Madrid, which stamped at last the black
+seal of certainty on the threatened death of his sister, and in which
+there was nothing agreeable but the intelligence that Don Gaspard, with
+the Countess of Romeiro, whose guardianship he was now concluding, would
+travel in autumn (the Italian spring) to Italy. Two tones had been, in
+his life, stolen away from the musical scale of love; he had never known
+by experience what it was to love a brother or a sister. The coincidence
+of her death-night with that night in Tartarus, this whole clawing into
+the holy images and wishes of his heart, stirred up his spirit, and he
+felt with indignation how impotently a whole assailing world might seek
+to remove Liana's image from his soul; and again he painfully felt, that
+this very Liana herself believed in her near decline.
+
+In this situation was he found by an unexpected invitation from the
+Minister's lady herself,--sun-sparks and rain-drops played in his heaven
+also. He flew; in the antechamber stood the angel who broke the six
+apocalyptic seals,--Rabette. She had run to meet him from a bashfulness
+before company, and had embraced him sooner than he her. How gladly did
+he look into the familiar, honest face! with tears he heard the name of
+brother, when he had lost a sister to-day!
+
+The reason of her appearance was this: when the Director was at the
+Minister's lady's the last time, the latter had, with easy, disguised
+hand, opened her house to his daughter, "for the sake of a knowledge of
+empty city life, and for change,"--in order that she might hereafter
+venture to knock at _his_ door on her own daughter's behalf. He said he
+would "forward the female wild deer to her with pleasure, and all
+possible despatch." And as in Blumenbühl Rabette had answered him No,
+then Yes, then No, then Yes, and had held with her mother, even before
+midnight, an imperial-exchequer-revision, a mint-probation-day about
+everything which a human being from the country can wear in the city,
+she packed up there and unpacked here.
+
+"Ah, I am afraid in there," said she to Albano; "they are all too
+clever, and I am now so stupid!" He found beside the domestic trio the
+Princess also, and the little Helena from Lilar, that lovely medallion
+of a fine day to his stirred heart. Indescribably was he smitten with
+Liana's womanly advances to Rabette, as if he shared her with her. With
+courtesy and tenderness, a mildness also, which was without falsehood or
+pride, came to the help of the embarrassed playmate, on whose face the
+inborn gayety and eloquence of nature now singularly contrasted with her
+artificial dumb gravity. Charles, with his ready familiarity, was more
+in a condition to entangle than to extricate her; only Liana gave to her
+soul and tongue, if only by the embroidery-frame, a free field; Rabette
+could write with the embroidering needle, no illuminated and initial
+letters, indeed, but still a good running-hand.
+
+She gave--turning her face toward her brother's, in order to pluck
+courage therefrom--a clear report of the dangerous road and upsets,
+laughing all the while, after the manner of the people when they are
+telling their mishaps. Her brother was to her, at the company's expense,
+both company and world; upon him alone streamed forth her warmth and
+speech. She said she could from her chamber see him "play on the
+harpsichord." Liana immediately led both thither. How richly and
+sublimely, beyond Rabette's demands upon city-life, was the maidenly
+_hospitium_ set out, from the tulip (not a blooming one, but a
+work-basket of Liana's,--although every tulip is such a basket for the
+finger of spring) even to the piano-forte, of which she, of course, for
+the present can use no more than seven treble-keys for half a waltz?
+Five moderate trunks of clothes--for therewith she thought to come out,
+and show the city that the country too could wear clothes--represented
+to him in their well-known flower-pieces and tin bands the old
+impressions (_incunabula_) of his earliest days of life; and to-day
+every trace of the old season of love refreshed him. She made him look
+for his windows, from one of which the Librarian was fixing a hard gaze
+on a paving-stone in the street to see how often he could hit it by
+spitting.
+
+Here alone, in the presence only of the brother, Liana spoke more loudly
+to the sister the word of friendship, and assured her how happy she
+meant to make her, and how sincere she was in all that she promised. O
+look not into the flame of the pure, religious, sisterly love with any
+yellow eye of jealousy! Can you not comprehend that this fair soul even
+now distributes its rich flames among all sisterly hearts, until love
+concentrates them into _one_ sun; as, according to the ancients, the
+scattered lightnings of night gather themselves in the morning into one
+solid solar orb? She was, everywhere, an eye for every heart; like a
+mother, she never once forgot the little in the great; and she poured
+out (let no one deny me the privilege of printing this minute example)
+for little Helena the cup of coffee, which the Doctor forbade, half
+full of cream, in order that it might be without strength or harm.
+
+The impatient Princess had already looked ten times toward the heavens,
+through which now beams of light, now rain-columns flew, till at length
+out of the consumed cloud-snow the broad fields of blue grew up, and
+Julienne could lead out the delighted young people into the garden, to
+the annoyance of the Minister's lady, who did not like to expose Liana
+to the _Serein_,--five or six blasts of the evening-wind, and the wading
+through rain-water that stood a nineteenth of a line[159] deep. She
+herself stayed behind. How new-born, glistening, and inviting was all
+down below! The larks soared out of the distant fields like tones, and
+warbled near over the garden,--in all the leaves hung stars, and the
+evening air threw the liquid jewelry, the trembling earrings, from the
+blossoms down upon the flowers, and bore sweet incense to meet the bees.
+The Idyl of the year, Spring, parcelled its sweet pastoral land among
+the young souls. Albano took his sister's hand, but he listened vacantly
+to her intelligence from home. Liana went far in advance with the
+Princess, and bathed herself in the open heavens of confidential
+communion.
+
+Suddenly Julienne stood still, chatting playfully with her, in order to
+let the Count come up, and to inquire after letters from Don Gaspard,
+and after tidings of the Countess Romeiro. He communicated, with glowing
+countenance, the contents of to-day's letter. In Julienne's physiognomy
+there was a smile almost of raillery. To the intelligence of Linda's
+intended journey she replied: "That is just herself; she will fain learn
+everything,--travel over everything. I wager she climbs up _on_ Mont
+Blanc and _into_ Vesuvius. Liana and I call her, for this reason, the
+Titaness." How graciously did Liana listen, with her eyes wholly on her
+female friend! "You are not acquainted with her?" she inquired of the
+tortured one. He answered, emphatically, in the negative. Roquairol came
+up; "_Passéz, Monsieur_," said she, making room, and giving him a sign
+to move on. Liana looked very earnestly after. "_La voici!_" said
+Julienne, letting the cover of a likeness spring up, by a pressure, on a
+ring of her little hand. Good youth! it was exactly the form which
+arose, that magic night, out of Lago Maggiore, sent to thee by the
+spirits! "She is hit there, exactly," said she to the agitated man.
+"Very," said he, confusedly. She did not investigate this
+contradictory[160] "very"; but Liana looked at him; "very--beautifully
+and boldly!" he continued; "but I do not love boldness in women." "O,
+one can readily believe that of men!" replied Julienne; "no hostile
+power loves it in the other party."
+
+They passed along now through the chestnut avenue by the holy spot where
+Albano had seen, for the first time, the bride of his hopes shining and
+suffering behind the water-jets. O it was here that he would gladly,
+with that soul of his painfully excited by the mutual reaction of
+wonderful circumstances, have knelt down before the still angel so near
+him! The tender Julienne perceived that she had to spare an agitated
+heart; after a tolerably loud silence, she said, in a serious tone: "A
+lovely evening,--we'll go to the water-house. There is where Liana was
+cured, Count! The fountains must leap, too." "O the fountains!" said
+Albano, and looked with indescribable emotion upon Liana. She thought,
+however, he meant those in the flute-dell. Helena cried out behind for
+them to wait, and came tripping along after with two little hands full
+of dewy auriculas, which she had plucked, and gave them all to Liana,
+expecting from her, as collatress of benefices, the flower-distribution.
+"The little one, too, still thinks of the beautiful Sunday at Lilar,"
+said Liana. She gave the Princess one or two, and Helena nodded; and
+when Liana looked at her, she nodded again, as a sign the Count should
+have something too: "More yet!" she cried, when he had got some; and the
+more Liana gave, the more did the child cry, "More,"--as children are
+wont to do, in the hyperboles of their tendency to the infinite.
+
+They went over a green bridge, and came into a neat room. Instead of the
+piano-forte formerly there, stood a glass chapel of the goddess of
+music, a harmonica. The Captain screwed in behind a tapestry-door, and
+immediately all the confined spring-waters shot up outside with silvery
+wings toward heaven. O how the sprinkled world burned as they stepped
+out on the top!
+
+Why wast thou, my Albano, just at this hour not entirely happy? Why,
+then, do pains pierce through all our unions,--and why does the heart,
+like its veins, bleed most richly when it is heated? Above them lay the
+still, wounded heavens in the bandage of a long, white mass of cloud;
+the evening sun stood as yet behind the palace, but on both sides of it
+his purple mantle of clouds floated in broad folds away across the sky;
+and if one turned round toward the east to the mountains of Blumenbühl,
+green living flames streamed upward, and, like golden birds, the _ignes
+fatui_ danced through the moist twigs and on the eastern windows, but
+the fountains still threw their white silver into the gold.
+
+Then the sun swam forth, with red hot breast, drawing golden circles in
+the clouds, and the arching water-shoots burned bright. Julienne bent
+upon Albano--near whom she had constantly remained, as if by way of
+atonement--a hearty look, as if he were her brother, and Charles said to
+Liana, "Sister, thy evening song!" "With all my heart," said she; for
+she was right glad of the opportunity to withdraw herself, with the
+melancholy seriousness of her enjoyment, and down below in the solitary
+room to utter aloud, on the harmonica-bells, all that which rapture and
+the eyes bury in silence.
+
+She went down; the melodious requiem of the day went up,--the zephyr of
+sound, the harmonica, flew, waving, over the garden-blossoms,--and the
+tones cradled themselves on the thin lilies of the up-growing water, and
+the silver lilies burst aloft for pleasure, and from the brightness of
+the sun, into flamy blossoms, and over yonder reposed mother sun in a
+blue pasture, and looked greatly and tenderly upon her human children.
+Canst thou, then, hold thy heart, Albano, so that it shall remain
+concealed with its joys and sorrows, when thou hearest the peaceful
+virgin walking in the moonlight of tones? O when the tone which trickles
+down in the ether announces to her the early wasting away of her life,
+and when the soft, long-drawn melodies flow away from her like the
+rose-oil of many crushed days; dost thou not think of that, Albano? How
+the human creature plays! The little Helena flings up auriculas at the
+flashing water-veins, in order that she may dash one of them with the
+spray of the intercepted jet, and the youth Zesara bends far over the
+balustrade, and lets the stream of water leap off from his sloping hand
+upon his hot face and eye, in order to cool and conceal himself. The
+fiery veil was snatched from him by his sister; Rabette was one of
+those persons whom this musical tremor gnaws upon even physically, just
+as, on the other hand, the Captain was little affected by the harmonica,
+and indeed was always least moved when others were most so; there were
+no pains with which the innocent girl was less familiar than with sweet
+ones; the bitter-sweet melancholy into which she sank away in the idle
+solitude of Sundays, she and others had scolded at as mere sullenness.
+At this moment she felt all at once, with a blush, her stout heart
+seized, whirled round, and scalded through as by hot whirlpools. Besides
+it had to-day already been swayed to and fro by the meeting with her
+brother again, the leaving of her mother, and her confused bashfulness
+before strangers, and even by the sight of the sunny-red mountain of
+Blumenbühl. In vain did the fresh brown eyes and the overripe full lip
+battle against the uprending pain; the hot springs tore their way
+through, and the blooming face with the strong chin grew red and full of
+tears. Painfully ashamed, and dreading to be taken for a child,
+especially as all her companions' emotions had remained invisible, she
+pressed her handkerchief over her burning face, and said to her brother,
+"I must go away, I am not well, I shall choke,"--and ran down to the
+gentle Liana.
+
+Yes, thou needest only carry thither thy shy pangs! Liana turned, and
+saw her hastily and violently drying her eyes. Ah, hers too were indeed
+full. When Rabette saw it, she said, courageously, "I absolutely cannot
+hear it,--I must scream,--I am really ashamed of myself." "O thou dear
+heart," cried Liana, joyfully falling upon her neck, "be not ashamed,
+and look into my eye! Sister, come to me, as often as thou art troubled;
+I will gladly weep with thy soul, and dry thy eye even sooner than my
+own." There was an overmastering enchantment in these tones,--in these
+looks of love, because Liana fancied she was mourning over some eclipsed
+star or other of her life. And never did trembling gratitude embrace
+more freshly and youthfully a venerated heart than did Rabette Liana.
+
+And now came Albano. Awakened by the dying away of the cradle-song, he
+had hurried after her, leaving all the cold and other drops unwiped from
+his fiery cheeks. "What ails thee, sister?" he asked, hastily. Liana,
+still lingering in the embrace and the inspiration, answered quickly,
+"You have a good sister; I will love her as her brother does." The sweet
+words of the so deeply affected souls and the fiery storm of his being
+carried him away, and he clasped the embracing ones and pressed the
+sisterly hearts to each other and kissed his sister; when, at the sight
+of Liana's confused bending aside of her head, he was terrified and
+flamed up crimson.
+
+He must needs fly. With these wild agitations he could not stay in the
+presence of Liana, and before the cold, mirroring glances of the
+company. But the night was to be as wonderful as the day; he hastened
+with live looks, that appeared like angry ones, out of the city to the
+Titaness, Nature, who at once calms and exalts us. He went along by
+exposed mill-wheels, about which the stream wound itself in foam. The
+evening clouds stretched themselves out like giants at rest, and basked
+in the ruddy dawn of America, and the storm swept among them, and the
+fiery Briareuses started up; night built the triumphal-arch of the
+milky-way, and the giants marched gloomily under. And in every element
+Nature, like a storm-bird, beat her rustling wings.
+
+Albano lay, without knowing it, on the woodland bridge of Lilar, under
+which the wind-streams went roaring through. He glowed like the clouds
+with the lingering tinges of _his_ sun; his inner wings were, like those
+of the ostrich, full of spines, and wounded while they lifted him; the
+romantic spiritual day, the letter of his father, Liana's tearful eyes,
+his boldness, and then his bliss and remorse about it, and now the
+sublime night-world on all sides round about him, passed to and fro
+within him and shook his young heart; he touched with his fiery cheek
+the moistened tree-tops, and did not cool himself, and he was near to
+that sounding, flying heart, the nightingale, and yet hardly heard her.
+Like a sun, his heart goes through his pale thoughts, and quenches on
+its path one constellation after another. On the earth and in the
+heavens, in the past and in the future, stood before Albano only one
+form; "Liana," said his heart, "Liana," said all nature.
+
+He went down the bridge and up the western triumphal-arch, and the
+glimmering Lilar lay before him in repose. Lo! there he saw the old
+"pious father" on the balustrade of the arch, fast asleep. But how
+different was the revered form from the picture of it which he had
+shaped to himself according to that of the deceased Prince. The white
+locks, flowing richly down under the Quaker hat, the femininely and
+poetically rounded brow, the arched nose and the youthful lip, which
+even in late life had not yet withered, and the childlikeness of the
+soft face, announced a heart which, in the evening-twilight of age,
+takes its rest and looks toward the stars. How lonely is the holy sleep!
+The Death-angel has conducted man out of the light world into the dark
+hermitage built over it; his friends stand without near the cell;
+within, the hermit talks with himself, and his darkness grows brighter
+and brighter, and jewels and pastures and whole spring-days gleam out at
+last,--and all is clear and broad! Albano stood before the sleep with an
+earnest soul, which contemplates life and its riddles;--not only the
+incoming and the outgoing of life are hidden with a manifold veil, but
+even the short path itself; as around Egyptian temples, so around the
+greatest of all temples sphinxes lie, and, reversing the case as it was
+with the sphinx, he only solves the riddle who dies.
+
+The old man spoke, behind the speech-grating of sleep, with dead ones
+who had journeyed with him over the morning meadows of youth, and
+addressed with heavy lip the dead Prince and his spouse. How sublimely
+did the curtain of the venerable countenance, pictured over with a long
+life, hang down before the pastoral world of youth dancing behind it,
+and how touchingly did the gray form roam round with its youthful crown
+in the cold evening dew of life, taking it for morning-dew, and looking
+toward the east, and toward the sun! The youth ventured only to touch
+lovingly a lock of the old man; he meant to leave him, in order not to
+alarm him with a strange form, before the rising moon should have
+touched his eyelids and awakened him. Only he would first crown the
+teacher of his loved one with the twigs of a neighboring laurel. When he
+came back from it, the moon had already penetrated with her radiance
+through the great eyelids, and the old man opened them before the
+exalted youth, who, with the glowing rosy moon of his countenance,
+glorified by the moon overhead, stood before him like a genius with the
+crown. "Justus!" cried the old man, "is it thou?" He took him for the
+old Prince, who, with just such blooming cheeks and open eyes, had
+passed before him in the under-world of dreams.
+
+But he soon came back out of the dreamy Elysium into the botanical, and
+knew even Albano's name. The Count, with open mien, grasped his hands,
+and said to him how long and profoundly he had respected him. Spener
+answered in few and quiet words, as old men do who have seen everything
+on the earth so often. The glory of the moonlight flowed down now on the
+tall form, and the quietly open eye was illumined,--an eye which not so
+much penetrates as lets everything penetrate it. The almost cold
+stillness of the features, the youthful gait of the tall form, which
+bore its years upright as a crown upon the head, not as a burden upon
+the back, more as flowers than as fruit, the singular mixture of former
+manly ardor and of womanly tenderness,--all this called up before Albano
+the image of a prophet of the Eastern land. That broad stream which came
+roaring down through the alps of youth, glides now calmly and smoothly
+through its pastures; but throw rocks before it, and again it starts up
+roaring.
+
+The old man looked upon the youthful youth, the oftener the more warmly.
+In our days youth is, in young men, a bodily and spiritual beauty at
+once. He invited him to accompany him this beautiful night to his quiet
+cottage, which stands overhead there near the church-spire, that looks
+down from above into flute-dell. On the singular, mazy paths which they
+now took, Lilar was transformed to Albano's eyes into a new world; like
+flying silver clouds of night, the glimmering beauties were continually
+shifting and arranging themselves together into new groups, and
+occasionally the two companions penetrated through exotic shrubbery with
+lively-colored blossoms and wondrous odors. The pious father asked him
+with interest about his former and present life.
+
+They came to the opening of a dark passage into the earth. Spener, in a
+friendly manner, took Albano's right hand, and said this way led _up_ to
+his mountain-abode. But soon it seemed to go downward. The stream of the
+vale, the Rosana, sounded even in here, but only single drops of
+moonlight trickled through scattered mountain openings overspun with
+twigs. The excavation extended farther downward; still more remotely
+murmured the water in the vale. And yet a nightingale sang a lay that
+grew nearer and nearer. Albano was composed and silent. Everywhere they
+went along before narrow gates of splendor which only a star of heaven
+seemed to fling in. They descended now to a distant, illuminated magic
+bower of bright red and poisonous dark flowers, arched over at once with
+little peaked leaves and great broad foliage; and a confusing white
+light, partly sprinkled about by the living rays that gushed in, and
+partly flying off from the lilies only as white dust, drew the eye into
+an intoxicating whirl. Zesara entered with a dazzled eye, and as he
+looked to the right, in the direction of the fire that rained in, he
+found Spener's eye sharply fixed upon something to the left; he looked
+thither, and saw an old man, entirely like the deceased Prince, dart by
+and stalk into a side cavern; his hand quivered with affright, so did
+Spener's,--the latter pressed hastily on downward; and at last there
+glistened a blue, starry opening: they stepped out....
+
+Heavens! a new starry arch; a pale sun moves through the stars, and they
+swim, as in play, after him,--below reposes an enraptured earth full of
+glitter and flowers; its mountains run gleaming away up toward the arch
+of heaven, and bend over toward Sirius; and through the unknown land
+delights glide, like dreams over which man weeps for joy.
+
+"What is that? Am I on or under the earth?" said Albano, astounded; and
+his wandering eye fled for refuge to the face of a living man,--"I saw a
+dead man." Much more affectionately than before, the old man answered,
+"This is Lilar; behind us is my little house!" He explained the
+mechanical illusion[161] of the descent. "Here, now, have I stood so
+many thousand times, and feasted myself with so fervent a heart on the
+works of God. How looked the form, my son?" "Like the dead Prince," said
+Alban. In a startled, but almost commanding tone, Spener said, with a
+low voice, "Be silent, like me, until his time,--it was not he. Thy
+salvation and the salvation of many hangs thereon. Go no more to-day
+through the passage."
+
+Albano, half-angered by all the experience of this singular day, said,
+"Well, then, I go back through Tartarus. But what means the ghostly
+creation that everywhere pursues me?" "Thou hast," said the old man,
+lovingly and refreshingly, laying a finger on the youth's brow, "nothing
+but invisible friends about thee,--and cast thyself everywhere upon God.
+There are a great many Christians who say, God is near or far off, that
+his wisdom and his goodness appear quite specially in one age or
+another,--truly that is idle deception; is he not the unchangeable,
+eternal Love, and does he not love and bless us at one hour just as much
+as at another?" As we ought, properly, to call the eclipse of the sun an
+eclipse of the earth, so it is man who is obscured, never the Infinite;
+but we are like the people who look at the obscuration of the sun in the
+water, and then, when the water trembles, cry out, "See how the
+glorious sun struggles!"
+
+Albano stepped into the solitude of the old man's neatly ordered
+dwelling, only with heaviness, because, in the hot ashes of his volcano,
+every feeling put forth and throve the more luxuriantly. Spener
+pointed over from his mountain-ridge to the little so-called
+"Thunderhouse,"[162] and advised him to occupy it this summer. Albano
+took his leave at length, but his agitated heart was a sea, in which the
+morning sun is glowingly still half reflected, and into which, at
+evening, a lead-colored storm dips, and which swells glistening under
+the storm. He looked up from below at the old man, who was looking after
+him; but he would hardly have wondered to-day if _he_ had either sunk or
+ascended. With indignant and spirited resolutions, to stake and
+sacrifice his life for his love, at which cold hands were grasping, he
+strode without any fear through Tartarus, which, by the magnifying
+mirror of night, was distorted into a black giant armament: thus is the
+spirit-world only a region of our inner world, and _I_ fear only
+_myself_. When he stood before the altar of the heart in the dumb night,
+where nothing was audible but the thoughts, then did the bold spirit
+advise him repeatedly to call upon the dead old man, and swear aloud by
+his heart, full of dust; but when he looked up to the fair heavens, his
+heart was consecrated, and only prayed, "O good God, give me Liana!"
+
+It grew dark; the clouds, which he had taken for the shining mountains
+of a new earth, stretching away into the heavens, had reached the moon,
+and overshadowed it with darkness.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[138] _Tempestiarii_, or Storm-makers, was a name given, in the
+Middle Ages, to the master-wizards who could conjure up foul
+weather. Weather-prayers were used in the churches against them,
+and other wizard-masters called in to counteract the former.
+
+[139] The Polish dancer always carries a rod under the fur-dress,
+wherewith his partner is excused by a blow or two, when she makes
+a misstep.--_Upper Siles. Monthly Mag._, July, 1788.
+
+[140] Dread of spirits.
+
+[141] The German for this is _sauer-stoff_ (sour-stuff).--TR.
+
+[142] A noted review in Richter's day, published at Erlangen near
+Nuremberg.--TR.
+
+[143] Thus did the turnkeys name their prisoners.
+
+[144] Alexand. ab Al., v. 4.
+
+[145] To distinguish himself from the eagle of the Emperor, who
+holds something in both claws.
+
+[146] Bouverot was a Catholic.
+
+[147] He meant one with the poor Lector.
+
+[148] Literally, "twilight-bird."--TR.
+
+[149] To _get the basket_ means a refusal.--TR.
+
+[150] I do not mean (as perhaps may appear from the _selling_)
+Pitt the Minister, but Pitt the Diamond, which the father of the
+present Pitt traded away to the Duke Regent of France, and for
+whose splinters he got twelve thousand ducats into the bargain.
+
+[151] I sell only my landscapes, and throw in the figures.
+
+[152] _Stand_, in German, has the double meaning of an _estate_
+and a _stand_.--TR.
+
+[153] Plaut. Bacch., Act 4, Scen. 7, 4, 16, 17.
+
+[154] Seventh Part of the new Collection of Travels.
+
+[155] I speak more particularly of the daughters, because they
+are the most frequent and greatest victims; the sons are
+bloodless mass-offerings.
+
+[156] Pliny, Nat. Hist., VIII. 16.
+
+[157] And this is quite probable. Dr. Edward Hill reckoned that
+in England eight thousand die annually of unhappy love,--of
+broken hearts, as the Englishwomen touchingly express it. Beddoes
+shows that vegetable food--and of this such victims are
+particularly fond--fosters consumption, and that females incline
+to this. Besides, the times of longing, which of itself, even
+without disappointment, as homesickness shows, is a poisonous
+revolving leaden ball, occur in youth, when the seed of pectoral
+maladies most easily springs up. O many married ones fall, under
+misconstructions, victims to the death-angel, into whose hand
+they had, previously to marriage, put the sword they themselves
+had sharpened!
+
+[158] Forster's Views, Vol. I.
+
+[159] A line (French) is one twelfth of an inch.--TR.
+
+[160] Because he had just said he did not know her.--TR.
+
+[161] Weigel. in Jena, invented the inverted bridge (_pons
+heteroclitus_), a stairway on which a person seems to descend, by
+going up.--_Bush's Handbook of Inventions_, Vol. VII.
+
+[162] It had the name from its height and its being so often
+struck with lightning.
+
+
+
+
+THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE
+     PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TÊTE-À-TÊTE.--THE
+     RIDE TO BLUMENBÜHL.
+
+
+60. CYCLE.
+
+Out of the drops which the harmonica had wrung from Rabette's heart the
+old enchanter, Fate, is perhaps preparing, as other enchanters do out of
+blood, dark forms; for Roquairol had seen it, and wondered at the
+sensibility of a heart which hitherto had been set in motion more by
+occupations than by romances. Now he drew nearer to her with a new
+interest. Since the night of the oath, he had drawn his heart out of all
+unworthy fetters. In this freedom of victory, he went forward proudly,
+and stretched out his arms more lightly and longingly after noble love.
+He now visited his sister incessantly; but he still kept to himself.
+Rabette was not fair enough for him, beside his tender sister. She was
+an artificial ribbon-rose beside one by Van der Ruysch; she said
+herself, naively, that she looked, with her village-complexion in white
+lawn, like black-tea in white cups. But in her healthy eyes, not yet
+corroded into dimness by tragical drops, and on her fresh lips, life
+glowed; her powerful chin and her arched nose threatened and promised
+spirit and strength; and her upright and downright heart grasped and
+repelled decidedly and intensely. He determined to prove her. The
+Talmud[163] forbids to inquire after the price of a thing, when one does
+not mean to buy it; but the Roquairols always cheapen and look further.
+They tear a soul in two, as children do a bee, in order to eat out of it
+the honey which it would gather. They borrow from the eel, not only his
+dexterity in slipping away, but also the power to twine around the arm
+and crush it.
+
+And now he let all the dazzling powers of his multi-form nature play
+before her,--the sense of his ascendency permitted him to move freely
+and gracefully, and the careless heart seemed open on all sides,--he
+linked so freely earnestness and jest, glow and glitter, the greatest
+and the least, and energy with mildness. Unhappy girl! now art thou his;
+and he snatches thee from thy _terra firma_ with rapacious wings up into
+the air, and then hurls thee down. Like a vine running on a
+lightning-rod, thou wilt richly unfold thy powers and bloom up on him;
+but he will draw down the lightning upon himself and thy blossoms, and
+strip thee of thy leaves and rend thee utterly.
+
+Rabette had never conceived of such a man, much less seen one; he made
+his way by main force into her sound heart, and a new world went in
+after him. Through Liana's love for the Captain, hers mounted still
+higher; and the two could speak of their brothers in friendly
+reciprocation. The good Liana sought to bring to the help of her friend
+many a thing which would hardly take hold, particularly mythology,
+which, by reason of the French pronunciation of the names of the gods,
+was still more unserviceable to her. Even with books Liana sought to
+bring them together; so that reading was to her a sort of week-day
+Divine service, which she attended with true devotion, and was always
+delighted when it was over. Through all these water-wheels of knowledge
+streamed Roquairol's love, and helped drive and draw. How many blushes
+now flitted without any occasion over her whole face! The laugh which
+once expressed her gayety, came now too often, and betokened only a
+helpless heart, which longed to sigh.
+
+So stood matters with her when Charles once playfully stole behind her
+and covered her eyes with his hand, in order, under the mask of her
+brother's voice, to give her soft, sisterly names. She confounded the
+similar voices; she pressed the hand heartily, but her eye was hot and
+moist. Then she discovered the mistake, and flew with the concealed
+evening and morning redness of her countenance out of the room. Now he
+looked closer into the eyes of Liana, who blamed him for it, and hers
+too had wept. She would fain at first conceal from him the object of the
+sisterly emotion; but another's No was to him, of old, an auxiliary
+verb,--a fair wind blowing him into port. Liana grew more and more
+agitated; at last she related how Rabette's account of Albano's youthful
+history had drawn from her in turn the history of his early relations,
+and that she had portrayed to her the bloody night of the masquerade,
+and even shown his bloody dress. "And then," said Liana, "she wept with
+me as heartily as if she had been thy sister. O, it is a dear heart!"
+Charles saw the two linked together like two pastures, namely, by the
+rainbow which stands over both with its drops; he drew her with thankful
+love to his breast. "Art thou then happy?" asked Liana, in a tone
+ominous of something sad.
+
+She must needs disclose to him her full heart, and tell him all. He
+heard with astonishment, how that whole Tartarus-night, on which the
+unknown voice had promised Linda de Romeiro to his friend, had been made
+known to her. By whom? She held an inexorable silence; he contented
+himself, because, to be sure, it could only have been Augusti, who was
+the only one that knew of it. "And now believest thou, thou heart from
+heaven," said he, "that I and the brother of my soul could ever separate
+by robbing each other? O, it is all otherwise, all otherwise! He curses
+the mock-spirits and the object of the mimicry. O he loves me; and my
+heart will rejoice in the day when it is his!" The touching ambiguity of
+these last words dissolved him in a sacred melancholy.
+
+But she, in the midst of the heartiest overflow of feeling, took part,
+as if out of piety, with the spirits, and said: "Speak not thus of
+spiritual apparitions! They exist, that I know,--only one needs not fear
+them." Here, however, with firm hand she held fast the veil over her
+experiences; he too had known long since, that, notwithstanding her most
+tremblingly delicate feelings, which shrunk even from the sight of the
+blue veins on the lily hand, as from a wound, she had appeared
+unexpectedly courageous before the dead and in the ghostly hours of
+fantasy.
+
+Behind the waves of so different an emotion which now drove his heart up
+and down, Rabette was eclipsed. He burned now only for the hour when he
+could tell his Albano the singular treachery of the Lector.
+
+
+61. CYCLE.
+
+Even before the Captain disclosed to his friend Augusti's probable
+treachery, Albano was almost entirely at variance with his two tutors.
+In a circle full of young hearts which beat for one another, and still
+more fondly fight for one another, two always take an indissoluble hold
+of each other, and become one at others' expense.
+
+Albano boldly broke with every one whom Charles displeased. Besides,
+Schoppe had long been loved by few, because few can endure a perfectly
+free man; the flower-chains hold better, they think, when galley-chains
+run through them. He, therefore, could not bear it, when one "with too
+close a love clambered up round him so tightly that he had the freedom
+of his arms no more than if he wore them in bandages of eighty
+heads."[164] The sarcastic liveliness of his pantomime chilled the
+Captain, by having the appearance of a somewhat stricter observation,
+more than did the composed face of the Lector, who from that very
+circumstance took everything more sharply into his still eye.
+
+The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his
+intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isinglass," as he
+expressed it,--toward the tender errors of the heart, the sacred
+excesses by which man weaves into this short life a still shorter
+pleasure. On one occasion Charles walked up and down with arms akimbo
+and drooping head, as on a stage, and said, accidentally, so that the
+Titular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the
+world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody shake, in
+jest, a baker's dozen[165] of hornets, a basket of crabs, a mug of
+wood-pismires, all at once over the Librarian's skin, and take a flying
+observation of the effect of the stinging, nipping, biting; then can
+one, in a measure at least, conceive what a quivering, swelling, and
+irritation there was in him, so soon as he heard the above-mentioned
+phraseology. "Mr. Captain!" he began, drawing in a long breath, "I can
+stand through a good deal on this rusty, stupid earth,--famine,
+pestilence, courts, the stone, and fools from pole to pole; but your
+phraseology surpasses the strength of my shoulders. Sir Captain, you
+may, most certainly, use this rhetoric with perfect justice, because
+you, as you say, are not understood. But, O heavens! O devils! I hear,
+in fact, thirty thousand young men and maidens, from one
+circulating-library to another, all with inflated breast, saying and
+groaning round and round, that nobody understands them, neither their
+grandfather nor their god-parents, nor the conrector, when, in fact, the
+wrapping-paper,[166] commonplace pack does not itself understand. But
+the young man means by this merely a maiden, and the maiden a young man;
+these can appreciate each other. Out of love will I undertake, as out of
+potatoes, to serve up fourteen different dishes; let one just shear off,
+as they do off of the bears in Göttingen, its beastly hair, and no
+Blumenbach would any longer recognize it.
+
+"Mr. Von Froulay, I have somewhat often compared this cursed exaltation
+of souls, merely from low motives, with the English horsetails, which
+also always stand pointing to heaven, only because their sinews have
+been cut. Must not one be mad, when one hears every day, and reads every
+day, how the commonest souls, the very doggerels and trumpeters' pieces
+of Nature, think themselves exalted by love above all people, like cats
+that fly with hogs' bladders buckled on to them; how they rendezvous in
+the hare's form and emporium of love, the other world, as on a
+Blocksberg, and how, on this finch-ground, in this theatrical green-room
+(or dressing-room, which then becomes the opposite), they drive their
+business until they are coupled. Then it's all over; fancy and poesy,
+which now should be to them for the first time serviceable, are caught!
+They run away from them like lice from the dead, although on these the
+hair continues to sprout out. They shudder at the next world; and when
+they become widowers and widows, they do their courting very well
+without the hogs' bladders, and without the decoy-feathers, and the
+folding screen of the next world. Such a thing as this now, Sir Captain,
+provokes one, and then, in the heat, the just must suffer with the
+unjust, as your ears unfortunately attest!"
+
+Alban, who never light-mindedly forgave, silently separated himself from
+a heart, which, as he unjustly said, quenched the flames of love with
+satiric gall.
+
+In the chain of friendship with Augusti, one ring after another
+absolutely broke in twain. The Count found in the Lector a spirit of
+littleness which was more revolting to him than any bad spirit. The
+elegance of a good courtier, his propensity to keep the smallest secrets
+as faithfully as the greatest, his passion for starting up behind every
+action a long plan, his thirsty curiosity for genuine historical
+sources, at court and in the city, and his coldness toward philosophy,
+so dried up the overstrained image which Albano had formed of him, that
+it wrinkled up and grew full of rents. Such dissimilarities never rise
+among cultivated men to open feuds; but they secretly put upon the inner
+man one piece of armor after another, till he stands there in solid
+mail, and strikes out.
+
+Now, in addition to all this, the Lector bore the Captain a hearty
+grudge, because he cost the Minister's lady many anxious hours, and
+Liana, and even the Count, much money, and because he seemed to him to
+pervert the youth. The otherwise directly ascending flame of Albano was
+now, by the obstacles thrown in the way of his love, bent on all sides,
+and, like soldering fire, burned more sharply; but this sharpness
+Augusti ascribed to the friend. Albano appeared to those whom he loved
+warmer, to those whom he endured colder, than he was, and his
+earnestness was easily confounded with defiance and pride; but the
+Lector imagined that Albano's love was stolen from him by Charles.
+
+He undertook, with equal refinement and frankness, to play off on the
+Count a good map-card of the spots which were thickly sown in the
+heavenly body of this Jupiter. But he tore every map. Charles's painful
+confessions on that night extinguished all additions by other hands. And
+Albano's grand faith, that one must shield a friend entirely, and trust
+him entirely, warded off every influence. O it is a holy time, in which
+man desires offerings and priests, _without fail_, for the altar of
+friendship and love, and--beholds them; and it is a too cruel time, in
+which the so often cheated, belied bosom prophesies to itself, on
+another's bosom, in the midst of the love-draught of the moment, the
+cold neighborhood of bankruptcy!
+
+As the Lector saw perfectly that Alban, at many of his charges against
+Charles,--for instance, of his wildness and disorder,--remained cold,
+for the reason that he might deem himself to be reproached over
+another's shoulders, as the French (according to Thickness) give
+strangers praise over their own; he now, instead of the point of
+similarity, took hold of an entire dissimilarity of the Captain, his
+light-mindedness toward the sex. But this only made the matter worse.
+For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-worshipper,
+and the Lector only the one whom the coal of this fire blackens. Augusti
+cherished, in regard to love, pretty nearly the principles of the great
+world, which, merely for honor's sake, he never coined into action, and
+he assigned only the cloud-heaven near the earth to love. The Captain,
+however, spoke of a third heaven, or heaven of joy, as belonging
+thereto, wherein only saints are the blest. Augusti, after the manner of
+the great world, spoke much more freely than he acted, and sometimes as
+openly as if he were dining in the hall of a watering-place. Charles
+spoke like a maiden. The virgin ear of Albano, which was mostly closed
+in good visiting-parlors, and which in study-chambers remained open,
+united to his want of the experience that a cynical tongue is often
+found in the most continent men, for instance, in our buffoonery-loving
+forefathers, and an ascetic one in modest libertines,--these two things
+must naturally have involved the pure young man in a double error.
+
+Thus did Augusti start up within him more and more storm-birds. Both
+came often to the verge of a complete feud and challenge; for the Lector
+had too much honor to fear any one thing, and dared in cold blood as
+much as another in hot.
+
+Now, at length, did Charles disclose fully to his friend, though with
+all the tenderness of friendship, Liana's acquaintance with that
+Tartarus-night. "The otherwise reserved Lector must be after nearer
+advantages with his tattling," Albano concluded, and now the toad of
+jealousy, which lives and grows in the living tree without any visible
+way in or out, nursed itself to full size in his warm heart. Unanswered
+love is besides the most jealous. God knows whether he is not
+scenery-master of these ghost scenes working in and through each other
+with so many wheels. All these are Albano's private conclusions; open
+accusations were forbidden by his sense of honor. But his warm heart,
+always expressing itself, demanded a warmer society, and this he found
+when he followed the pious father, and went to Lilar into the
+Thunderhouse, into the midst of the flowers and summits, in order, lying
+nearer to the heart of Nature, to dream and enjoy more sweetly.
+
+There was only one warm, sun-bright spot for him in Charles's historical
+picture; namely, the hope that perhaps only the mistakes about his
+relation to the Countess, out of which Liana had been helped by her
+brother, had dictated to her the evenly cold deportment which she had
+hitherto maintained towards him. On this sunny side Rabette threw a
+billet, in which she wrote him that she was going back to her parents on
+Saturday, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence,
+the prospect of less favorable circumstances, his going to Lilar,--all
+this decided him in the purpose of snatching to himself a solitary
+moment, and therein casting off before Liana the veil from his soul and
+hers.
+
+
+62. CYCLE.
+
+Singularly did events cut across each other on the day when Albano came
+into the Ministerial house to take leave of Rabette, and (a trembling
+voice said within him) of Liana, too. Rabette beckoned to him, from the
+window, to come to her chamber. She had folded together the Icarus's
+wings of her apparel into the trunks. Over her inner being a prostrating
+storm swept to and fro. Charles had disturbed the equilibrium of her
+heart by his warmth, and had not restored it again by a word of
+recompense. Like the doves, she flutters around the high conflagration.
+O may she not, like them, escape with singed feathers, and come back
+again, and at last fall into it! She said she had longed for her
+friends, ever since she saw yesterday a flock of sheep driven through
+the city. She should accompany, on Saturday, Liana and her mother to
+attend the consecration of the church, and the interment of the princely
+couple. He begged her, so abruptly and eagerly, to contrive for him
+to-day a solitary moment with her friend in the garden, that he
+absolutely did not hear her sweet news of Liana's intention to stay
+there and make her a visit.
+
+Alas! he found with the Minister's lady that showman of magnificent
+pictures, who, like Nature, made not only a beginning of his spring, but
+an end of his autumn, with poisonous flowers,[167] Mr. Von Bouverot.
+Dian had sent him four heavenly copies from Rome; these he opened with
+dry, artistic palate. Liana received the Count again as ever. Was,
+perhaps, Raphael's _Madonna della Sedia_, in whose heaven-descended
+palladium her tender soul was absorbed, the seal-keeper of her holiest
+mystery? The all-forgetting artistic passion became her so gracefully!
+Her optic nerves had become, by her long painting, like delicate
+feelers, which closed fast around lovely forms. Certain female forms,
+like this one, stirred up her whole soul. For she had, in childhood,
+sketched in her inner heaven shining constellations of the heroines of
+romances, and in general of unseen women; great ideas of their spirit,
+their heavenly walk, their exaltation above all that she had ever seen;
+and she had felt equal shyness and longing to meet one such. Hence she
+went forth out of this colossal nympheum[168] of her fancy, so easily
+dazzled, and with such warm, heartfelt reverence, to meet pure female
+friends and the Countess Romeiro. Now certain pictures brought back
+these altar-pieces like copies. The good girl thought not of _this_, but
+her friend may well have done so, that one needed only to quicken into
+life the eyes of this loving, down-gazing Mary, and merely to warm these
+lips with tones, and then one had Liana.
+
+The German gentleman went on, and now placed beside each other Raphael's
+Joseph, telling his brothers a dream, and the older Joseph, interpreting
+one to a king, and began to translate the three Raphaels into words, and
+that with so much felicity, and not only with so much insight into
+mechanics and genius, but also with such a precise setting forth of
+every human and moral lineament, that Albano took him for a hypocrite,
+and Liana for a very good man. She seized every word with a wide-open
+heart. When Bouverot painted the prophesying Joseph, as at once
+childlike, natural, still, and firm as a rock, and glowing and
+threatening, there stood the original at her side.
+
+There also dropped from the German gentleman much thought about Da
+Vinci's boy Christ in the Temple, about the magnificently executed
+fraternization and adoption of the boy and the youth in one face. Liana
+had also copied the copy, but she and her mother were modestly silent on
+the subject.
+
+But at last Franciscus Albani disturbed the calm that had hitherto
+prevailed, by his "Repose during the Flight." While he acted the
+dream-interpreter to these picturesque dreams, and Rabette had her eyes
+fastened sharply on the Saint Joseph of this picture, sitting beside
+Mary, with an open book, Liana said, unluckily, "A fine Albani!" "I
+should think not," Rabette whispered; "brother is much more beautiful
+than this praying Joseph!" She had confounded Albani with Albano; her
+whole picture-gallery lay in the hymn-book, whose hymns she separated
+from each other with golden-red saints. The others did not comprehend;
+they knew him only as Count of Zesara,--but Liana, sweetly blushing,
+flung at Rabette a tenderly reproving glance, and looked, with mute
+endurance, more closely at another picture. Never before in Albano,--in
+whom the strongest and the tenderest feelings coupled, as the echo makes
+thunder louder and music lower,--had the bitter-sweet mingling of love
+and pity and shame wrought more warmly, and he could have at once knelt
+down before the maiden, and yet have kept silent.
+
+The German gentleman had finished, and said to the men, with a look full
+of victory, "He had, however, something more in his case, which bore
+away the palm from the Raphaels; and he would beg them to follow him
+into the adjoining apartment." On the way, he observed, that few works
+were executed with such magnificent freedom and bold abandon. In the
+room he unpacked a little bronze Satyr, against whom an overtaken nymph
+is defending herself. "Divine!" said Bouverot, and held the group by a
+thread, in order not to rub off the rust. "Divine! I set the Satyr
+against the Christ!" Few have even a moderate idea of the amazement of
+my hero, when he saw the critic set virtue and vice at once at a round
+table, without any quarrel for precedency.
+
+With a fiery glance of contempt, he turned away, and wondered that the
+Lector remained. It seems to be unknown to him that painting, like
+poetry, only in its childhood related to gods and divine service, but
+that by and by, when they grew up to a higher stature, they must needs
+stride out from this narrow churchyard,--as a chapel[169] was originally
+a church with church-music, until both were left out, and the pure music
+retained. Bouverot had the regard for pure form in so high a degree,
+that not only the smuttiest, most immoral subject, but even the most
+pure and devout, could not contaminate his enjoyment; like slate, he
+stood the two proofs of heating and freezing, without undergoing any
+change.
+
+Albano had seen the maidens through the window in the alley, and
+hastened down to take leave of his sister, and to something more
+weighty. He came, with fuller roses on his cheeks than those which
+glowed around him, to a grassy bank, where Liana, with his sister, was
+sitting behind the red parasol, with half-drooping eyelids, and head
+bent aside, softly absorbed in the harvest of evening, suffused with a
+sunny redness by the parasol, in white dress, with a little slender
+black cross on her tender bosom, and with a full rose; she looked upon
+our lover so simply, her voice was so sisterly, and all was such pure,
+careless love! She told him how delighted she was with the scenes of his
+youth, and with country life, and how Rabette would conduct her
+everywhere; and particularly to the consecration discourse, which her
+father-confessor, Spener, was to deliver on Sunday. She talked herself
+into a glow, with picturing how greatly the great breast of the old man
+would be moved by the dirge and pæan over the ashes of his princely
+friend.
+
+Rabette had nothing in her mind but the solitary minute, which she would
+fain leave her brother to enjoy with her. She begged her, in a lively
+manner, to play for her yet once more on the harmonica. Albano, at this
+proposal, plucked for himself a moderate nosegay from the--foliage of
+the tree that hung over his head. Liana looked at her warningly, as much
+as to say: "I shall spoil thy cheerfulness for thee again." But she
+insisted. At the entrance into the water-house, a light blush flitted
+across Albano, at the thought of the latest past and the nearest future.
+
+Liana speedily opened the harmonica, but the water, the colophonium[170]
+of the bells, was wanting. Rabette was just going to fill a glass down
+at the fountains, for the sake of leaving them alone; but the Count,
+from manly awkwardness about entering at once into a ruse, stepped
+courteously before her and fetched it himself. Hardly, at length, had
+the lovely, pleasing creature laid, with a sigh, her delicate hands on
+the brown bells, when Rabette said to her, she would go down into the
+alley to hear how it sounded at a distance. As if at the painful
+sunstroke of a too sudden and great pleasure, his heart started up, he
+heard the triumphal car of love rolling afar off, and he was fain to
+leap into it and rattle away into life. The credulous Liana took the
+withdrawal for a veil which Rabette wished to throw over her eye,
+sweetly breaking into tears at music, and immediately removed her hands
+from the bells; but Rabette kissed her entreatingly, pressed back her
+hands upon them, and ran down. "The true heart!" said Liana; but this
+pure, guileless confidence in her friend touched him, and he could not
+say, Yes.
+
+When, in the meadows of Persia, a happy one, who, on the luxuriant
+enamel has been sleeping down among the pinks and lilies and tulips,
+blissfully opens his eyes at the first evening call of the nightingale
+upon the still, tepid world, and the motley twilight, through which some
+gold threads of the evening sun float glowingly: that blissful one is
+like the youth Albano in the enchanted chamber,--the Venetian blinds
+scattered round broken lights, trembling green shadows; and there was a
+holy twilight as in groves around temples; only murmuring bees flew, out
+of the loud, distant world, through the silent cell, into the noise
+again. Some sharp streaks of sunshine, like lightnings before sleepers,
+were wafted romantically to and fro with the rose; and in this dreamy
+grotto, amid the rustling wood of the world, the solitude was not
+disturbed by so much as the shadowy existence of a mirror.
+
+Into this enchantment she let the tones fly out of her hands like
+nightingales,--the tones were propelled towards Albano, as by a storm,
+now more clearly, and now more faintly; he stood before her, with folded
+hands, as if in prayer, and hung with thousand looks of love on the
+downward gazing form; all at once she lifted upon him that holy eye,
+full of sympathy, but she suddenly cast it down before the sun-glance of
+his.
+
+Now the great eyelids immovably closed upon the sweet looks, and gave
+her, like a sleep, the appearance of absence; she seemed a white
+May-flower on wintry soil, hanging down its blossom-bells. She was a
+dying saint in the devotion of harmony, which she heard rather than
+made; only the red lip she took with her as a warm reflection of life,
+as a last rose, that was to deck the fleeting angel; O could he disturb
+this prayer of music with a word of his?
+
+With narrower and narrower circles did the magnetic vortex of tones and
+of love clasp him round,--and now, when the drawing of the harmonica,
+like the water-drawing of the scorching sun, licked up his heart; and
+when the lightnings of passion darted over his whole life, and illumined
+the mountain-ridges of the future and the valleys of the past, and when
+he felt his whole being concentrated into one moment, he saw some drops
+trickle out from Liana's drooping eyes, and she looked up cheerfully to
+let them fall; then Albano snatched her hand away from the keys, and
+cried, with the heart-rending tone of his longing, "O God, Liana!"
+
+She trembled, she blushed, she looked at him, and knew not that she
+still wept and looked on, and continued to play no more. "No, Albano,
+no!" she said, softly, and drew her hand out of his, and covered her
+face, started at the pause of the musical tones, and collected herself
+and again made them flow out slowly, and said, with trembling voice:
+"You are a noble being. You are like my Charles, but quite as
+passionate. Only one request! I am about to leave the city for a
+while."
+
+His alarm at this became ecstasy, when she named the place, his
+Blumenbühl. She went on with difficulty before the delighted lover; her
+hand often lay for a long time on the dissonance in forgetfulness of the
+analysis; her eyes glimmered more moistly, although she said nothing
+more than this: "Be to my brother, who loves you inexpressibly, as he
+has loved no other yet,--O be to him everything! My mother recognizes
+your influence. Draw him,--I will speak it out!--especially draw him off
+from playing deeply!"
+
+He could hardly, for his confusion, asseverate the "Yes," when Rabette
+came running in with the almost unsuitably accented tidings, that the
+mother was coming. Probably she had seen that Rabette was alone. Albano
+parted from the pair with abrupt wishes of a pleasant journey, and
+forgot, in the flurry, to answer in the affirmative Rabette's request
+for a visit. The mother, meeting him, ascribed his ardor to a brother's
+emotion at taking leave.
+
+While he hastened through the wealth of the season, he thought of the
+rich future,--of Liana's stammering and veiling: do not fair female
+souls, like those angels before the prophet, need only two wings to lift
+them, but four to veil themselves? The sea of life ran in high waves,
+but everywhere it flashed on its broad surface, and sparks dropped from
+the oar.
+
+
+63. CYCLE.
+
+Ah, on the morning following this, the evening redness of a whole heaven
+had grown, to be sure, into a sad cloudiness. For Liana walked before
+the youth in such long, thick veils. Any mystery of trouble throws up
+cold cloister-walls between hearts drawn near together; that is
+manifest. Hitherto accidents of various kinds had bent aside some
+flowers which Liana had drawn as a veil over her heart (as the ground
+stories in cities prevent looking in at the windows by flowers and
+grape-vines), and had disclosed the darkest corner of the background, in
+which something like the reverse side of a bust hung, which, turned
+round, would perhaps resemble the Count. But as yet the image hangs with
+its face toward the wall. However, a female heart is often like marble;
+the cunning stone-cutter strikes a thousand blows, without the Parian
+block showing the line of a crack; but all at once it breaks asunder
+into the very form which the cunning stone-cutter has so long been
+hammering after.
+
+On Saturday, when the Minister's lady and the pair of friends were about
+to start for Blumenbühl, in order to behold the burial and the
+consecration, the Captain came to the Count, not only full of joy,--for
+he had gladly, out of love to Rabette, helped make for Liana, not
+_wings_ indeed, but still _wing-shells_, and out of a threefold interest
+for his friend, helped tighten the fly-work,--but also full of anxiety.
+But, ye muses! why in the poetical world are there rarely any
+occurrences which have such manifold motives as often in the actual?
+
+His anxiety was simply this, lest his father should arrive earlier than
+his mother went off,--for he knew the Minister. The latter intended,
+according to his letters, to arrive on Monday or Tuesday (Saturday at
+the latest); but this might--as Froulay loved to let his friends swim in
+the broad play-room of expectation--still more certainly threaten that
+he--because, like the Basle clocks,[171] he always struck an hour too
+early, and came in the hope of catching his people at some right odious
+thing--might at any minute come driving in at the court-yard gate. If he
+came driving furiously up this forenoon, or at the moment when the
+servant was lifting the daughter into the carriage, and the mother
+already sat therein, then was this much certain, by a thousand
+conclusions from observance, that both would have to go up into the
+house again; that he would order all trunks and boxes unpacked, and, as
+to the daughter of the Provincial Director, after her ten thousand
+entreaties,--although her very second would freeze upon her lips,--he
+would, in a friendly manner, with quite jocose equanimity, let her be
+carried home, as a solitary member of a conclave, in a close carriage.
+Certain men--and he is their generalissimo--know no sweeter cordial for
+themselves, than to put under lock and key, before the very nose of
+their friends, the garden-gates of some Arcadia or other, for which they
+have not drawn up for them a map of the route and region, and judicially
+to seal them up. Besides, just before a pleasure party, most parents
+secrete gall; if Froulay, in fact, could absolutely prevent one, that
+was as much for him as if he were himself returning home from one red
+and gay.
+
+At three o'clock in the afternoon, our friends went to walk beneath the
+loveliest sky. Everything had been already arranged; Charles proposed to
+follow to-morrow; Albano not till Monday, after the general return (his
+tender motives, and the hard ones of others, decided it); and there
+floated through the whole vaulted blue no cloud but Charles's concern
+lest the second depositing of the princely corpse might draw his father
+along as early as to-day,... when he suddenly cried out, with a curse:
+"There he comes!" He knew him by the tiger-spotted post-team, and still
+more by the long line of horses tackled on tandem. A purgatorial moment
+of life! The carriage rattled swiftly down the street; the head horses
+streamed forth in a longer and quite disorderly train; the people
+stared. At last the pulling distance became an acre long,--that seemed
+quite impossible,--when Albano's eagle eye discovered that there was no
+leather connection between the post-train, and at last, that in fact
+there was merely a strange churl, with two horses, accidentally riding
+along before the carriage, and at this moment they saw the open
+triumphal car, with the female trinity slowly moving up the Blumenbühl
+heights, and the blended tulip-bed of the three parasols glimmered long
+after them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[163] Basa Metzia, c. 4, m 10.
+
+[164] The _head_ of a bandage is a technical term in
+surgery.--TR.
+
+[165] The German word _mandel_ (literally _almond_) means a
+collection of _fifteen_. There being no one word expressing it
+collectively in English, _baker's dozen_ (which means thirteen)
+seems to come near enough.--TR.
+
+[166] See Dr. Franklin's verses, comparing different classes of
+people to different kinds of paper. Sparks's edition of
+Franklin's Works, Vol. II. p. 161.--TR.
+
+[167] It is well known that spring flowers, on account of
+dampness and shade, are for the most part suspicious; as also the
+autumnal ones.
+
+[168] Museum of Nymphæ or Chrysalides.--TR.
+
+[169] In the artistic technical sense.--TR.
+
+[170] A black resin, used for violin-strings.--TR.
+
+[171] Alluding to the case where by this change of the town-clock
+the Basle people outwitted an enemy--TR.
+
+
+
+
+FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO AND LIANA.
+
+
+64. CYCLE.
+
+So many tender and holy sensibilities flutter round in our inner world,
+which, like angels, can never assume the bodily form of outward action,
+so many rich, full flowers stand therein which bear no seed, that it is
+lucky poetry has been invented, which easily treasures up all these
+inborn spirits and the flower-fragrance in its limbo. With this I catch,
+dear Albano, thy glorious perfume-breathing Sunday, and hold fast the
+invisible incense for the Schneider's-skin of the world!
+
+On Sunday he moved to the thunder-house in Lilar. The Lector kept
+himself up with the hope that the Count would very soon tread down the
+flower-parterre of the new enjoyment as flat and dead as a cross-way. It
+was a fine morning, all sprinkled with dew; a fresh wind blew from Lilar
+over the blooming grain; and the sun burned alone in a cool heaven. Over
+the Blumenbühl road a swarm of people were plodding onward, and no one
+went long alone; on the Eastern heights he saw his friend Charles, with
+bowed crest, dashing to meet the sun.
+
+The breezes of Lilar came flying to welcome him with a breath of
+orange-fragrance, and blew away the ashes which rested on the glowing
+altar-coals of that first magnificent Sunday. He went down the bridge,
+and Pollux, early in his finery, came driving a ruffled turkey-cock to
+meet him. A _Soeur Servante_ of old Spener had been already for an
+hour cooking at Chariton's, merely to see him go by. The latter ran,
+festally decked, out of the house, which opened itself gayly with all
+its windows to the whole heavens, to meet him, and, in the confusion of
+her joy, broke out with the main matter first, namely, that everything
+was ready and beautiful up there in the little house, and whether he
+would have his dinner up there. She would fain, in the midst of the
+conversation, pull Pollux out of the Count's fingers, but he let him
+swing up for a kiss, and won thereby every heart, even the old one
+behind the kitchen fire.
+
+While he marched off toward his little house through the western
+triumphal arch, he felt, with indescribable strength and sweetness, that
+the lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of gods, temples,
+and bliss,--and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals stalk through
+and strip with their talons.
+
+His blooming path ran at length into the descending and ascending
+stairway, which he had passed with Spener; single streaks of day burned
+themselves into the moist ground and painted the scattered twigs fiery
+and golden. In the mystic bower, where the dead Prince had stalked along
+before him in the by-cavern, he found no such cavern, but only an empty
+niche. He stepped out above, as out of the haunch of the earth. His
+little house lay on the crooked back of the mountain ridge. Down below
+reposed around him those elephants of the earth, the hills, and Lilar
+gloriously swelling in blossoms, and he looked from his windows into
+the camp of the giants of Nature.
+
+Meanwhile he could not now stay on the window-sill, nor near the
+inspiring Æolian harp, nor in the eye-prison of books; through streams
+and woods and over mountains fresh nature longed to sweep. That he did.
+
+There are sometimes between the every-day days of life--when the rainbow
+of Nature appears to us only broken up, and as a misshapen, motley mass
+on the horizon--certain creation-days, when she rounds and contracts
+herself into a fair form, nay, when she becomes alive, and speaks to us
+like a soul. To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years
+often pass away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along
+on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow
+fuller and fuller to meet him;--without wind, a landscape was to him a
+stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;--and now the wind rolled the solid
+land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves
+like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods
+stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances.
+Majestically swam through the blue the silvery islands, the clouds, and
+on the earth shadows stalked like giants over streams and mountains; in
+the valley sparkled the Rosana, and rolled into the oak grove. He went
+down into the warm vale; the flowery pastures foamed and their seed
+played in its cloud-fleece ere the earth caught it; the swan spread
+voluptuously his long wing; pairs of doves were pecking each other for
+love; and everywhere lay beds and twigs full of hot maternal bosoms and
+eggs. Like a glorious blue bouquet, the neck of the reposing peacock
+played off its dissolving colors in the high grasses. He stepped under
+the oaks, which with knotty arms seized hold upon heaven, and with
+knotty roots the earth. The Rosana talked alone with the murmuring wood,
+and ate away, foaming, at the rocky crags and at the decaying
+shore;--night and evening and day chased each other in the mystic grove.
+He stepped into the stream, and went out with it before a warm, busy
+plain full of villages, and out from them came the Sabbath sounds, and
+out of the grain-fields larks arose, and on the mountains human
+foot-paths crept upward,--the trees lifted themselves up as living
+things, and the distant men seemed to be fast-rooted, and became only
+little shoots on the low bark of the enormous tree of life.
+
+The soul of the youth was cast into the holy fire; like asbestos-paper,
+he drew it out quenched and blank; it was to him as if he knew nothing,
+as if he were _one_ thought; and here the feeling came upon him in a
+wonderfully new manner, that is the world, thou art on the world;--he
+was _one_ being with it,--all was _one_ life, clouds and men and trees.
+He felt himself grasped by innumerable polypus-arms, and swallowed up at
+the same time with them, and yet running on in the infinite heart.
+
+In a blissful bewilderment he arrived at his dwelling, from which little
+Pollux came rolling down the mountain to meet him, and call him to
+dinner. In the little house the very thought of his heart was expressed
+by the Æolian harp at the open window. While the child was thundering
+away with his little fist on the harpsichord, and the birds joyfully
+screamed in out of the trees, the soul of the world swept exulting and
+sighing through the Æolian strings, now lawlessly and now regularly,
+playing with the storms and they with it; and Albano seemed to hear the
+streams of life rushing between their shores, the countries of the
+earth,--and through flower-veins and oak-veins, and through
+hearts,--around the earth, bearing clouds on their bosom,--and the
+stream, which thunders through eternity, a Divine hand was pouring out
+under the veil.
+
+Albano came, with the innocent boy dancing before him, to the still
+smiling mother. Even here, between the four walls, the sails continued
+to propel him which the great morning had swelled. Nothing surprised
+him, nothing seemed to him common, nothing remote; the wave and the drop
+in the endless sea of life flowed away in indivisible union with the
+streams and whirlpools which it bore onward. Before Chariton he stood
+like a shining god, and she would gladly have veiled either him or
+herself. Never was humanity individualized in purer forms, crippled by
+no alloy of provincialism or nationality, than in this circle of joy,
+wherein childhood, womanhood, and manhood, twined with flowers, met and
+softly clasped each other.
+
+Chariton spoke constantly of Liana, out of love, not merely for the
+absent one, but also for the one who stood near; for, although she
+looked with those open eyes, which seem more to image quietly than to
+behold, more to let in than to draw in, still she was, like children,
+virgins, country people, and savages, at once open-heartedly true and
+keen. She had easily detected Albano's love, because everything is
+easier to disguise from women,--even hatred, than its opposite. She
+praised Liana infinitely, particularly her incomparable kindness; and
+"her lord had said, few men had so much heart as she, for she had often
+been, without any fear, whole nights with her in Tartarus." Certainly,
+neither was this explicable to the Count. The marvellous is the aureole
+of a beloved head; a sun, softened down to a human countenance, takes
+less powerful hold than a beloved countenance glorified into a
+sun-image.
+
+More and more heartily delighted at his delight, she offered to lead him
+into Liana's chamber. A simple little chamber,--under a green twilight
+of glimmering vine foliage, some books of Fénelon and Herder, old
+flowers still in their water-glasses, little Chinese dishes, Julienne's
+portrait, and another of a deceased youthful friend, whose name was
+Caroline, an unstained writing-stand, with English-pressed paper,--was
+what he found. The holy spring hours of the virgin passed by before him,
+dropping dew like sunny clouds.
+
+He happened to touch a penknife, when Chariton brought quills to be cut,
+"because," she said, "they had so much trouble on this score since her
+master had gone away." For a woman can more easily drive any pen--even
+the epic and Kantian--than make one; and here, as in several other
+cases, the stronger sex must lend the weaker a hand.
+
+Albano wished to see, also, the working-chamber of his teacher; but this
+she decidedly--although an hour's eating together had not given her any
+new courage--refused, because her master had forbidden it. He begged
+once more; but she smiled more and more painfully, and adhered to her
+gentle no.
+
+He now dreamed away the murmur of the morning in the magic garden, on
+whose waters and paths the moonshine and reflection of memory played.
+Out of the nine million square miles of common earth, how do certain
+poetical lands stand out to a poetical heart! On the mountain with the
+altar, where he once saw her disappear down below, the afternoon chime
+of Blumenbühl came wafted to him with the fanning of a freer ether; and
+his childhood's life, and the present scenes yonder, and Liana, gave him
+a tender heart, and he surveyed, with dimmer eyes, the transfigured
+land.
+
+At evening came happy church-goers from Blumenbühl, and praised the
+consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still
+standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he
+should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all,
+overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in
+splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song
+of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,--the constellations over Blumenbühl
+shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his
+closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened
+him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of
+slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.
+
+
+65. CYCLE.
+
+Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day
+clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same
+old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in
+order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path
+was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully
+pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the
+broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and
+shepherd-boys had not, like the grass, shot up taller during his
+absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and
+the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much
+prolonged to his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear
+alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his
+breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the
+Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even
+the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up
+both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the
+earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high
+to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that
+the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.
+
+In the castle how profusely was his heart covered with hearts, and the
+youngest love drowned by the old, from the easily weeping mother,
+Albina, even to the hand-extending old servants, who, on his account,
+stirred more briskly their petrified limbs! He found all his
+loves--Liana excepted--in Wehrfritz's study,[172] because he loved
+"young folk" and discourse, and always insisted that they should set out
+the breakfast on his table of papers, which, he said, was as good as a
+breakfast-table with varnished scrap-pictures that nobody saw. Albano
+tormented himself with the fear that the Minister's lady had been the
+church-robber of a very goddess, and carried Liana back yesterday,--till
+the Captain hastily explained the non-appearance. The good soul had had
+yesterday to atone for the commotion of her sympathizing heart with
+sick-headache. Her loved teacher, Spener, with his sublime
+soul-stillness,--those eyes, which wept no more over the earth, buried
+with the princely pair,--standing with his head under the cold polar
+star of eternity, so that now, like the pole, it no longer saw any stars
+rise or set,--calmly, and with hands apostolically folded in one
+another, speaking so all-persuasively upon the sorrow and the great end
+of this pale life, pressing, with his inspired speech, men's hearts to
+the verge of tearful emotion, and yet with exalted tenderness drawing
+them back from extreme grief, that so only the heart may weep without
+the eye,--and then the consecration of the coupled coffins and of the
+church,--O, in the delicate Liana these emotions could not surely fail
+to grow into sorrows, and all that her teacher buried in silence was in
+her spoken aloud. In addition to this, she had not taken the usual
+medicine of keeping still, but had disguised all her pangs behind active
+joy, so as to give her departing mother no pains, although herself far
+too great ones.
+
+Into the midst of this explanation she herself entered pleasantly, in a
+white morning-dress, with a nosegay of Chinese roses,--a little pale and
+tired,--looking up with a dreamy softness,--her voice somewhat low,--the
+roses on her cheeks closed into buds,--and, like a child, smiling upon
+every heart;--thou angel of heaven! who may dare to love and reward
+thee? She beheld the lofty youth;--all the lilies of her still face
+were, contrary to her wont, baptized into a heavenly morning-red of joy,
+and a tender purple lingered upon them.
+
+She asked him, with an open manner, why he had not come yesterday to the
+festivities, and disclosed, as a matter of moment, that they would all
+to-day visit the pious father, for whom she had been tying her
+dwarf-roses. He took gladly the fourth voice in the concert of the
+pleasure-party. What a magnificent hanging garden, with its loveliest
+flowers and prospects, is built out into the evening-hours! How many
+happy ones a single roof covers!
+
+The ingenuous Rabette, more brisk and busy for her still gladness, was,
+unweariedly, Liana's sick-nurse and Roquairol's lion-keeper and
+_maîtresse de plaisirs_, who made every one of the mother's ground-plans
+of pleasure broader by a half, and her whole being was so happy! Ah, her
+poor innocent heart had not yet, indeed, been loved by any one, and
+therefore it glows, with the fresh energies of the first love, so
+brightly and truly before a mighty one which seems to come down to it
+with a blessing, like a loving god, drawing after it a whole heaven!
+Roquairol saw how bewitchingly a busy activity shook aside in the
+play-room of her character and her occupations the heavily hanging
+foliage, which in the visiting parlor darkly overspread her real worth;
+she was even made more lovely by the darker, neat house-dress, since he
+by his preaching had sent back every white drapery of her brunette
+person into the wardrobe. She would not obey her mother in this matter,
+till he had demanded it. Nay, he had yesterday brought her to the point
+of really wearing about with her the watch which the proud Minister's
+lady had presented her, though she blushed like fire at the unwonted
+ornament. Meanwhile he proposed to take with her, as it were, a true
+serpentine flowery way to the altar of his love's _loud_ Yes,--the
+_silent_ one he was saying all the time;--he knew she would get in at
+once so soon as he rode forth with the conch-chariot of Venus, to which
+he had tackled a dove and a hawk.
+
+How gloriously the forenoon flew away on golden wing-shells and on
+transparent wings! The beloved Albano was introduced into all the
+changes of the house; the finest was in his study-chamber, which Rabette
+had transformed into her toilet-chamber, sewing-room, and study, and
+which again, since yesterday, had become guest-chamber and library to
+Liana. How gladly did he step to the western window, where he had so
+often caused his invisible father and the beloved one to appear, in an
+unearthly manner, in the crystal mirror of his fancy! On the panes were
+many L's and R's drawn by his boyish hand. Liana asked what the R's
+meant; "Roquairol," said he, for she did not inquire after the L. With
+infinite sweetness did the thought flow around his heart, that his
+beloved was indeed to live through some blooming days in the dreamy cell
+of his first fresh life. Liana showed him with childlike joy how she
+shared everything, that is, the chamber, fairly with Rabette, in her
+double housekeeping and chum-ship, and how she made her very hostess her
+guest.
+
+I have often admired with envy the fine, light, nomadic life of maidens
+in their Arcadian life-segments; easily do these _doves of passage_
+flutter into a strange family, and sew and laugh and visit there, with
+the daughter of the house, one or two months, and one takes the
+ingrafted shoot for a family twig; on the other hand, we _house-pigeons_
+are inhabitive and hard to transplant, and generally, after a few days,
+journey back again. Since we, as more brittle material, less easily melt
+in with the family ore; since we do not weave our work into that of
+others so easily as maidens do theirs,--because carriages full of
+working-tools must follow after us,--and since we need much and contrive
+much;--from all this our claim to a passport is very well deduced,
+without the least detriment to our characters.
+
+After a half-eternity of dressing,--since, in the neighborhood of the
+loved one, an hour of absence lasts longer than a month when she is far
+off,--the maidens entered, equipped for travelling, in the black dress
+of brides. How charmingly the roses become Rabette, in her dark hair,
+and the lace edging on the white neck, and the timid flames of her pure
+eye, and the flitting blushes! And Liana--I speak not of this saint.
+Even the good old Director, when the innocent face looked upon him so
+childlike from beneath the white veil of India muslin, sprinkled with
+gold wire, which was simply thrown over her head after the manner of the
+nuns, could not but give his satisfaction words: "Like a nun, like an
+angel!" She answered: "I wanted once really to be one with a friend; but
+now I take the veil later than she," she added, with a wondrous tone.
+
+She hung to-day with tender enthusiasm upon Rabette, perhaps from the
+weakness of ill health, perhaps from love for Albano and the parents,
+and perhaps because Rabette, in her love, was so good and beautiful, and
+because she herself was nothing but heart. She had, besides, the sacred
+fault of forming too enthusiastic conceptions of her female
+friends,--into which the nobler maidens easily fall, and which belongs
+less to married women,--carried to an unusual height; thus, for
+instance, her friend Caroline, who had met her like a heroine of romance
+only on the romantic playground of friendship and beautiful nature, she
+could not, in the beginning, without a rending away of the saintly halo,
+at all conceive of as having hands, which drove the needle and
+flat-iron, and other implements of the female field of labor.
+
+Whoso will feel the tenderest participation in joy, let him look not at
+happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never
+did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina--across whose face time had
+struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no
+step-motherly discord appeared--look oftener to and fro, and more
+benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they
+were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and
+perturbations of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the
+"hypocrisy and spiritlessness[173] of the young people now-a-days,"
+compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was
+chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day
+assigned himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the
+pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for
+as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had
+he--(others have the devil, the deuse)--the journeyman's greeting of
+genius, _Rascal_, together with the derivatives, _rascality_, &c. But
+how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the
+stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits.
+The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not
+been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of
+man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the
+higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds
+itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly
+characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not
+in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly.
+
+The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his
+glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a
+glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a
+youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing
+whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art,
+by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom!
+
+
+66. CYCLE.
+
+The carriage flew through the village with the four young people. How
+grateful to our youth was the expanse of heaven and of earth! The portal
+of life--youth--was hung with flowers and lights. They rolled along at
+the foot of the mountain by the bird-pole, the sign-post of a boyish
+Arcadia, by the cradle where, in the enraptured sleep of childhood, he
+had stretched out his boyish arm after the high heaven; and through the
+birch thicket, now dwindled in his eyes to a bush, which, on that golden
+morning, he had found so broad and long; and by the open triumphal arch
+of the east, behind which the sea of the many-shaped Lilar poured the
+tide of its charms; and when they arrived behind the mountain-wall of
+the flute-dell, they sent back the carriage.
+
+They walked on a glorious earth, under a glorious heaven. Pure and white
+swam the sun like a swan through the blue flood,--meadows and villages
+crowded up close around the distant, low mountain-ridges; a soft wind
+swayed the green waves of the crop to and fro all over the plain; on the
+hills shadows lay fast asleep under the wings of white clouds; and
+behind the summits of the heights the mast-trees of the Rhine ships
+majestically sailed away.
+
+As Albano went along so close by the side of his beloved, the purgatory
+burning under his Eden fell back deeper and deeper into the earth's
+core; full of uneasiness and hope, he cast his fiery eye now on the
+summer, now on the mild vesper-star, which glimmered so near to him out
+of the spring ether. The good maiden seemed to-day more still, serious,
+and restless than usual. As they went through a little wood, open on all
+sides, along the ridge of a hill that ran round the flute-dell, Liana
+suddenly said to the Count, she heard flutes. Scarcely could he say, he
+heard only far-off turtle-doves, when she at once collected herself as
+for something wonderful, fixed her eyes on heaven, smiled, and suddenly
+looked round toward Albano, and grew red. Then turning to him, she said:
+"I will be frank; I hear at this moment music within me.[174] Forgive me
+to-day my weakness and tenderness; it comes from yesterday." "I--you?"
+said he, passionately; for he, about whom in sicknesses only burning
+images stormed, was inspired with veneration for a being to whom, as if
+from her higher world, low tones like golden sunbeams reach down in her
+pains, and pass veiled through the rough deep.
+
+But Liana, as if for the sake of turning aside his enthusiasm, came upon
+the subject of her friend Caroline, and told how she always hovered
+before her on such days, and especially on this walk. "In the beginning
+I sought her out," said Liana, "because she resembled my Linda. She was
+my instructress, although she was only a few weeks older than I. Her
+pure, severe, unflinching character, and her readiness to sacrifice
+herself cheerfully and in silence, made her even, if I may say so,
+worthy of veneration in the eyes of her mother. She was never seen to
+weep, tender as she was, for she wished to keep her mother always
+cheerful. We were going to take the veil in company, for the sake of
+being always together; I should not live to become old, she said, and I
+must spend my short life happily and without anxiety; but also in
+preparation for the next. Ah, she herself went up before me!
+Night-watching by the sick-bed of her mother, and sorrow for her death,
+took her away. She received the holy supper, for which we were preparing
+ourselves together, only on her death-bed. Then did the angel give me
+this veil, in which I am some time to follow her. O good, good
+Caroline!" She wept unconcealedly, and pressed, with emotion, Albano's
+hand. "O, I should not have begun about this! There comes already our
+friend; we will be right cheerful!"
+
+They had now passed through a high wood of under-brush, which teasingly
+disclosed and hid by turns the landscapes that glided around them, and
+had come near to the spire which looks in upon the flute-dell, and near
+which lay a solitary church and Spener's dwelling, and in the plain
+below the open village. Spener came to meet his pupil--after the manner
+of old men--unconcerned about the others; and a young roe ran after him.
+A beautiful spot! Little white peacocks; turtle-doves at large; a city
+of bees in the midst of their bee-flora,--all bespoke the tranquil old
+man, whom the earth serves and honors, and who, indifferent towards it,
+lives only in God. He came--disappointing one's expectation of an
+ecclesiastical gravity--with a light playfulness upon the gay train, and
+laid his finger in benediction on the forehead of Liana, who seemed to
+be his granddaughter, as it were, a second tree-blossom in the late
+autumn of life. In a daughterly way, she placed the bunch of dwarf-roses
+in his bosom, and took very careful notice whether it pleased him. She
+smiled quite serenely, and all her tears seemed fanned away; but she
+resembled the rain-sprinkled tree, when the sun laughs out again,--the
+least agitation flings the old rain from the still leaves.
+
+The old man was delighted with the sympathy of the young people, and
+remained with them upon the blooming and resounding eminence, which sat
+enthroned between a wide landscape and the richly laden mountain-ridge,
+running away into Elysium. Since, as with one who ascends in a balloon,
+the tones of earth did not reach him from so great a distance as its
+forms, they let him talk more than listen, as one spares old people.
+
+He spoke soon of that in which his heart lived and breathed, but in a
+singular, half-theological, half-French, Wolfian, and poetic speech. One
+ought, of many a mystic's poetry and philosophy to give, instead of
+verbal, real translations, in order that it may be seen how the pure
+gold of truth glows under all wrappages. Spener says, in my translation:
+"He had formerly, before he found the right way, tormented himself in
+every human friendship and love. He had, when he was fervently loved,
+said to himself, that he could surely never so regard or love himself;
+and even so the beloved being could not truly so think of itself, as the
+loving one did, and though it were ever so perfect or so full of
+self-love. If every one looked upon others as upon himself, there could
+be no ardent love. But all love demands an object of infinite worth, and
+dies of every inexplicable and clearly recognized failure; it projects
+its objects out of all and above all, and requires a reciprocal love
+without limits, without any selfishness, without division, without
+pause, without end. Such an object is verily the divine being, but not
+fleeting, sinful, changeable man. Therefore must the lovesick heart sink
+into the Giver himself of this and of all love, into the fulness of all
+that is good and beautiful, into the disinterested, unlimited,
+universal Love, and dissolve and revive therein, blest in the
+alternation of contraction and expansion. Then it looks back upon the
+world and finds everywhere God and his reflection: the worlds are his
+deeds; every pious man is a word, a look, of the All-loving; for love to
+God is the Divine thing, and the heart yearns for him in every heart."
+
+"But," said Albano, whose fresh, energetic life rebelled against all
+mystical annihilation, "how, then, does God love us?" "As a father loves
+his child, not because it is the best child, but because it needs
+him."[175] "And whence," he further inquired, "comes, then, the evil in
+man, and whence sorrow?" "From the Devil," said the old man, and
+pictured out uninterruptedly, with transfigured joy, the heaven of his
+heart,--how it was always surrounded with the all-beloved, all-loving
+One, how it never desired any good fortune or any gifts from him at all
+(which one did not wish even in earthly love), but only a higher and
+higher love towards himself, and how, while the evening mists of old age
+were gathering thicker and thicker around his senses, his heart felt
+itself, in the darkness of life, embraced more and more closely by the
+invisible arms. "I shall soon be with God!" said he, with a radiance of
+love on that countenance of his, chilled with life, and breaking in
+under the weight of years. One could have borne to see him die. So
+stands Mont Blanc before the rising moon; night veils his feet and his
+breast, but the light summit hangs high in the dark heaven as a star
+among the stars.
+
+Liana, like a daughter, had not let her eye nor her hand go from him,
+and had languishingly drunk in every sound; her brother had heard him
+with more pleasure than Albano, but merely for the sake of remodelling
+more clearly and fully the mystic Hero into the mimic Mount Athos of his
+representation, and Rabette had contemplated him as in a church among
+believing by-thoughts.
+
+He withdrew now without ceremony to take care of his animals, which he
+loved, as he did everything involuntary, for instance, children, as
+coming at first hand from God. "Everything is divine," he said, "and
+nothing earthly but what is immoral." He could not bear to smoke bees
+with brimstone, let flowers dry up with thirst in the pot-cage, or see
+an overdriven wounded horse, and he passed by a butcher's stall not
+without shuddering limbs.
+
+"Shall we," said friend Charles, "take in the glorious evening on the
+magnificent mountain road, and see thy thunder-house, and cast down
+every cup of sorrow into the vales below?" Through what a magic
+neighborhood did they now pass along the sloping ridge of the
+thunder-house! On the right, as it were, the occident of nature; on the
+left, the orient; before them Lilar, glittering in the _faerie_ of
+evening,--lying in the arms of the glancing Rosana,--golden grain behind
+silver-poplars, and overhead a heaven filled with a life-intoxicated,
+tumultuous creation,--and the sun-god stalking away over his
+evening-world, and stooping a little under the midnight to raise his
+golden head in the east. Albano went forth, holding Liana's holy hand.
+"O how beautiful is all!" said he. "How the fluttering world-map rustles
+and murmurs with long streams and woods,--how the eastern mountains bask
+in steadfast repose,--how the groves climb the hills, with glowing
+stems! One could plunge down into the smoking vales and into the cold,
+glistening waves. Ah, Liana, how beautiful is all!" "And God is on the
+earth," said she. "And in thee!" said he, and thought of the word of the
+old man, that love seeks God, and that he dwells in the heart which we
+esteem.
+
+Now came rolling toward him the great waves which the Æolian-harp dashed
+out in the thunder-house; and his genius flew by before him with the
+words, "Tell her there thy whole heart!"
+
+Before the little tabernacle of yesterday's dreams his stormy heart was
+dissolved; and the sun and the earth reeled before his passionate tears.
+As he entered with her into the rosy splendor of the evening sun that
+filled the apartment, and into the spirit-like din of tones discoursing
+with one another alone, he seized Liana's hands and pressed them wildly
+to his breast, and sank down before her speechless and dazzled; flames
+and tears suffused his eyes and his cheeks,--the whirlwind of tones blew
+into his blazing soul,--the mild angel of innocence bowed herself,
+weeping and trembling, toward the burning sun-god, and a sharp pain
+twined itself like a pale serpent through the roses of the mild
+countenance,--and Albano stammered: "Liana, I love thee!"
+
+Then the serpent turned round and clasped and covered the sweet rosy
+form. "O good Albano! thou art unhappy, but I am innocent!" She stepped
+back with dignity, and quickly drew down the white veil over her face,
+and said, beside herself, "Wouldst thou love the dead? This is my
+corpse-veil; the coming year it will lie upon this face." "That is not
+true," said Albano. "Caroline, answer him!" said she, and stared at the
+burning sun as if looking for a higher apparition. Frightful moment! as
+during an earthquake the sea heaves and the air rests in fearful
+stillness, so was his lip dumb beside the veiled one, and his whole
+heart was a storm. On the strings swept by a sighing world of spirits,
+and the last ended with a sharp scream. The beauty of the earth was
+distorted before him, and in the evening clouds broad fiery banners were
+planted; and the sun's eye shut-to in blood.
+
+All at once Liana folded her hands as if in prayer, and smiled and
+blushed; then she raised the veil from her divine eyes, and the
+transfigured one, tinged with the rosy reflection, looked on him
+tenderly,--and cast her eye down,--and raised it again,--and again let
+it sink,--and the veil fell again before her, and she said, in a low
+tone, "I will love thee, good Albano, if I do not make thee miserable."
+"I will die with thee!" said he. "What then?"--And now let a holy cloud
+veil the sun-god, who moves flaming through the midst of his stars!
+
+His solitude and Liana's solution of so many wonders were suspended by
+the entrance of Rabette and Charles, who both seemed more touched than
+blessed,--she by the comforting nearness of the loved one, he by the
+singular situation and the subduing evening; for after certain beings a
+storm follows, and they must, against their will, make the steps that
+they take more rapid.
+
+When Albano, with the peace-angel of his life, with the beloved one,
+who, in the midst of the rush of her feelings, heard, nevertheless, the
+voice of her female friend, walked forth again once more alone upon the
+rocky causeway between fragrant vales of Tempe in the glimmering world,
+he felt as if he had struggled through his life like an eagle through a
+storm-cloud, and as if the black tempest were running far away below his
+wings, and the whole starry heaven burned bright above his head. Liana,
+with maidenly nobleness and firmness, gave him, before he had put a
+question, the answer: "I must now tell you a mystery, which I have
+hidden from every one, and even from my mother, because it would have
+disquieted her. I spoke just now of my never-to-be-forgotten Caroline.
+On the day of my sacrament, which I had wished to take with her, I went
+back by night from my teacher to my mother, and in fact through the
+singular, long cavern, wherein one seems to descend, when one is in
+reality going upward. My maid went before with the lantern. In the
+romantic arbor, where a concave mirror stands, I turn round toward the
+full moon which was streaming in, from a dread of the wild mirror, which
+distorts people too horribly. Suddenly I hear a heavenly concert, such
+as I often heard again afterward in sicknesses,--I think of my blessed
+friend,--and gaze, full of longing, into the moon. Then I saw her
+opposite to me, beaming with innumerable rays: in her fair eyes was a
+tender look, but yet something dissolving; the tender mouth, almost the
+only living feature, resembled a red, but transparent fruit, and all her
+hues seemed to be nothing but light. Yet only in the blue eye and red
+mouth did the angel seem like Caroline. I could sketch her, if one could
+paint with light. I became dangerously sick; then she appeared to me
+oftener, and refreshed me with inexpressibly sweet tones,--they were not
+properly words,--whereupon I always sank into a soft sleep, as into a
+sweet death. Once I asked her--more with inner words--whether I should,
+then, soon come to her into the realm of light. She answered, I should
+not die just now, but somewhat later; and she named very clearly the
+coming year, and the very day, which I have, however, forgotten.... O
+dear Albano! forgive me only a few words! I soon recovered, and mourned
+over the slow, lingering passage of time...."
+
+"No," Albano interrupted her, for his feelings were striking against
+each other like swords, "I revere, but I hate her dangerous phantom.
+Fancy and sickness are the parents of the air-born, destroying angel,
+who flies scorching, like a dumb heat-lightning, over all the blossoms
+of youth!"
+
+She answered, with emotion, "O thou good, pure spirit! thou hast never
+distressed me, thou hast ever comforted, guided, made me happy and
+holy,--a phantom is it, Albano? It even preserves me against all
+phantoms of terror, against all ghostly fear, because it is always about
+me. Why, if it is only a phantom, does it never appear to me in my
+dreams?[176] Why comes it not when I will? But it comes only in weighty
+cases; then I consult and obey it very willingly. It has already to-day,
+Albano," she added, in a lower and fainter tone, "twice appeared to me
+on the way, when I heard the inner music, and previously in the
+thunder-house, when the sun went down, and has affectionately answered
+me."
+
+"And what says it, heavenly one?" asked Albano, innocently. "I saw it
+only on the way, and asked no question," replied the childlike one,
+blushing; and here, all at once, her holy soul stood unconsciously
+without a veil before him; for she had, in the thunder-house, received
+from the invisible Caroline the yes to her love; because that being was
+her own creation, and this a suggestion of her own. Yes indeed, heavenly
+one! thou standest before the mirror with the virgin's veil over thy
+form, and when thy image softly raises its own, thou fanciest thyself
+still covered!
+
+No word can express Albano's veneration for such a sanctified heart,
+which dreamed into such distinctness glorified beings; whose golden
+flowers only grew the higher over the thought of death, as earthly ones
+do in churchyards over the reality; which, simultaneously with his own,
+invisible hands had drawn into two similar dreams;[177] to which one was
+ashamed to give common truths for its holy errors. "Thou art from
+heaven," he said, inspired, and his joy became the pearl melted in the
+eye which quenches the thirst of the human heart; "therefore thou
+wouldst go back thither!" "O, I consecrate to thee, my friend," said
+she, smilingly weeping, and pressed his hand to her pure heart, "the
+whole little life which I have, every hour to the last, and I will,
+meanwhile, prepare thee for everything which God sends."
+
+Before they entered the cottage of the pious father, Albano seized his
+friend's hand, and the sisters joined each other. The friends went
+forward for a time in silence; Charles looked upon Albano, and found the
+peace of blessedness upon his face. When the latter saw how Liana
+pressed her overfraught heart to her sister's, then were sincerity and
+joy too strong in him, and he fell without a word upon the heart of the
+dear brother of the eternal bride, and let him silently guess all from
+his tears of bliss. O, he might have guessed it, to be sure, from the
+bridal look of love which his sister more seldom removed from his
+friend, and from the heartiness wherewith she drew Rabette to her heart;
+just as if they two would soon be related to each other, as if her
+brother himself would soon speak more sweetly, since he for some time
+had no longer called her the little Linda; and consecrated her thereon
+for the heart of her brother. Not before the pious father did the
+enraptured look hold itself much in abeyance, which Albano, standing as
+if under the gate of eternity, cast into the heavens, gleaming like
+worlds one behind another; he was still and tender, and in his heart
+dwelt all hearts. O love _one_ heart purely and warmly, then thou lovest
+all hearts after it, and the heart in its heaven sees like the
+journeying sun, from the dew-drop even to the ocean, nothing but mirrors
+which it warms and fills.
+
+But in Roquairol started up immediately, when he saw the heavenly bliss
+so near, the mutinous spirit of his past, and struck with a bloody
+epilepsy the limbs of the inner man: those immortal sighings after an
+ever-flying peace again tormented him; his transgressions and errors,
+and even the hours when he innocently suffered, were painfully reckoned
+up before him; and then he spoke, (and stirred every heart, but most of
+all poor Rabette's, which he pressed against his own to warm himself,
+as, according to the tradition, the eagle does with the dove, after
+which he does not tear her to pieces,)--nobly he spoke then of life's
+wilderness, and of fate, which burns out man, like Vesuvius, into a
+crater, and then again sows cool meadows therein, and fills it again
+with fire; and of the only blessedness of this hollow life, love, and of
+the injury inflicted, when fate with its winds sways and rubs a
+flower[178] to and fro, and thereby cuts through the green skin against
+the earth.
+
+But while he thus spoke, he looked on the glowing Rabette, and would
+fain by these warmings burst open, as it were by force, the fast-closed
+flower-bud of his love, and spread its leaves out under the sun. O the
+bewildered and yearning one was surely not yet quite happy even to-day,
+and he wished not so much to affect others as himself.
+
+With what blissful presentiments did they step out again before the
+sphinx of night, who lay smiling before them with soft, starry glances!
+Did they not go through a still, glimmering, subterranean world, light
+and free, without the heavy clogging earth on their feet, while in the
+wide Elysium the warm ether only flutters because invisible Psyches fan
+it with their wings? And out of the flute-dell the old man sends after
+them his tones as sweet arrows of love, in order that the swelling heart
+may blissfully bleed of their woundings. Albano and Liana came out upon
+a prospect where the broad eastern landscape, with its light-streaks of
+blooming poppy-fields, and its dark villages, ascended the soft
+mountains, where the moon awoke, and the splendor of her garment already
+swept like that of a spirit through heaven: here they remained standing
+and waiting for Luna. Albano held her hand. All the mountain-ridges of
+his life stood in a glowing dawn. "Liana," said he, "what innumerable
+springs are there at this moment up yonder on the worlds which hang in
+the heavens; but this is the fairest!" "Ah, life is lovely, and to-day
+it is too dear to me! Albano," she added, in a low voice, and her whole
+face became an exalted, tearless love, and the stars wove and
+embroidered its bridal dress, "if God calls me, then may he let me
+always appear to thee as Caroline does to me. O, if I could only attend
+thee thus through thy whole dear life, and console and warn thee, I
+would willingly wish for no other heaven."
+
+But as he was about to express the fulness of his love, and the anger
+of his pain about the death-delusion, just then came his wild friend,
+who, like a Vesuvius, pouring out at once lava- and rain-streams over
+the credulous Rabette, had made both her heart and his own only fuller,
+not lighter; then Charles beheld the glorified beings and the blue
+horizon, where already the moon was flinging forth her glimmering light
+between the bristling mast-peaks and summits, and looked again into the
+splendor of holy love. Then could he no longer contain himself; his
+heart, full of agony, mounted to an eternal purpose, as if to God, and
+he embraced Albano and Rabette, and said: "Beloved man! beloved maiden!
+keep my unhappy heart!"
+
+Rabette clung around him compassionately, as a mother around her child,
+and gave up to him, in hot, gushing tears, her whole soul. Albano,
+astonished, enfolded in his arms the love-bond; Liana was drawn to the
+beloved hearts by the whirlpool of bliss. Unheard the flutes sounded on,
+unseen waved the white banners of the stars overhead. Charles spoke
+frantic words of love, and wild wishes of dying for joy. Albano touched
+trembling Liana's flower-lip, as John kissed Christ, and the heavy
+milky-way bent down like a magic wand toward his golden bliss. Liana
+sighed: O mother, how happy are thy children! The moon had already flown
+up into the blue, like a white angel of peace, and glorified the great
+embrace; but the blest ones marked it not. Like a sounding waterfall,
+their rich life covered them, and they knew not that the flutes had
+ceased, and all the hills were shining.[179]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[172] Museum (home of the muses) is the beautiful German name for
+it.--TR.
+
+[173] _Kopf-und Ohr-hängerei._ Hanging down of head (hypocrisy)
+and ears.--TR.
+
+[174] This self-resounding--as the Æolian-harp [_riesen-harfe_,
+giant-harp, in German.--TR.], when the weather changes, sounds
+without a touch--is common in sick-headache and other maladies of
+weakness; hence in dying; for instance, in Jacob Boehme, life,
+like a concert-clock, rung out its hours amidst surrounding
+harmonies.
+
+[175] Some disinterested love or other must from eternity have
+existed. As there are eternal truths, so must there also be an
+eternal love.
+
+[176] For the same reason, perhaps, that the poet does not see
+his, so often and distinctly beheld, creations pass in his dreams
+among the images of the day.
+
+[177] For on his and her sacrament-day he had imagined her death
+by lightning.
+
+[178] The winter stock-jelliflower.
+
+[179] Jean Paul's second volume ends here.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+MAN AND WOMAN.
+
+
+67. CYCLE.
+
+I have often in the theatre made the pleasant experience, that when
+painful scenes immediately followed the rising of the curtain, I took
+but a slight interest in them, while in joyful ones which, immediately
+after the music, came on with their own music, I took the greatest; man
+demands more that sorrow than that rapture should show its motive and
+its apology. Without hesitation, therefore, I begin a third volume[180]
+with blisses of which, to be sure, the foregoing couple have been
+preparing more than enough.
+
+At the moment where our story has arrived, among all the descendants of
+Adam who lifted a glad face to heaven, and imaged in that face a still
+fairer heaven, there must have been some one who had the highest
+heaven,--a happiest of all men. Ah yes! And to be sure, among all
+suffering creatures upon this _globe_, which our short race makes a
+_plain_, there must also have been one most unhappy; and may the poor
+man soon lie down to sleep under, not _on_, his rocky road! Although I
+could wish that Albano might not be the happiest of all,--in order that
+there might yet be a higher heaven above his,--still it is probable
+that, on the morning after that holiest night, in his present dream of
+the richest dream, deep in the threefold bloom of youth, of nature, and
+of anticipation, he bore the broadest heaven in himself which the narrow
+bosom of man can span.
+
+He looked from his thunder-house,--that little temple on whose walls
+still lingered the radiance of the goddess who had therein become
+visible to him,--out over the new-created mountains and gardens of
+Lilar; and it was to him as if he looked into his white and red blooming
+future, adorned with mountain-peaks and fruit-tree-tops, a full Paradise
+built out into the naked earth. He looked round in his future after any
+robbers of joy who might attack his triumphal chariot; he found them all
+visibly too weak to cope with his arms and weapons. He called up Liana's
+parents, and his own father, and the host of spirits which had hitherto
+been working in the air, and set them out on the road which lay between
+him and his beloved; in his muscles glowed more than sufficient power
+easily to dash through them to her, and take her with him into his life
+by main force. "Yes," said he, "I am completely happy, and need nothing
+more,--no fortune, only my heart and hers!" Albano, may thy evil genius
+not have heard this dangerous thought, so as to carry it to Nemesis! O,
+in this wildly entangled wood of thy life, no step, even in the blooming
+avenues of pleasure, is wholly safe; and amidst the very fulness of this
+artistic garden there awaits thee a strange, gloomy upas-tree, and
+breathes cold poisons into thy life! Therefore it was better as it was
+once, when men were still lowly and prayed to God even in their great
+raptures; for in the neighborhood of the Infinite One the fiery eye
+sinks and weeps, but only out of gratitude.
+
+Let no mean almanac measurement be applied to the fair eternity which he
+now lived, when he saw the beloved every evening, every morning, in her
+little village. As evening star she went forth before his dreams; as
+morning star, before his day. The interval both filled out with letters,
+which they themselves carried to each other. When they parted at
+evening, not long before they were to see each other again, and while in
+the north already the rose-bud twigs shot along low down in the heavens,
+which during men's sleep speedily grew out toward the east, in order to
+hang down from heaven with thousands of full-blown roses ere the sun and
+love came back again,--and when his friend Charles stayed with him by
+night, and he asked, in the course of an hour, whence the light came,
+whether from the morning or from the moon,--and when he sallied forth,
+while moon and morning still appeared together in the dew-dripping
+pleasure-woods,--and when the road, left only a few hours before,
+appeared wholly new and the absence too long, (because Cupid's wing is
+half a second-hand, which shows the day of the month, and half a
+month-hand, which points to the second, and because, in the neighborhood
+of the loved one, the shortest absence lasts longer than the longest
+when she is far away,)--and when at last he saw her again,--then was the
+earth a sun, from which rays proceeded: his heart stood all in light;
+and as a man, who on a spring morning dreams of a spring-morning, finds
+it still brighter around him when he awakes, so, after the blessed
+youthful dream of the beloved, did he open his eyes before her, and
+desire the fairest dream no more.
+
+Sometimes they saw each other, when the long summer day was too long,
+on distant mountains, where by appointment they looked upon the
+harvests; sometimes Rabette came alone to Lilar to her brother, that he
+might hear something from Liana. When Liana had read a book, he read it
+after her; often he read it first and she last. Whatever of divine the
+fairest, purest souls can manifest to each other when they unfold
+themselves,--a holy heart which makes one still holier, a glowing heart
+which makes one still more glowing,--that they manifested to each other.
+Albano was mild toward all, and the radiance of a higher beauty and
+youth filled his countenance. The fair realms of nature and of his
+childhood were both adorned by love, not it by either of them; he had
+mounted from the pale, light moon-car of hope upon the sounding, shining
+sun-car of living ecstasy. Even on the galleys of wooden sciences, as if
+animated by the wonder-working hand of Bacchus, masts and shrouds
+fluttered out into vine-stalks and clusters. If he went to the Froulay
+house, he always, because he went in full of tolerance, came back
+without any sacrifice of the same: the Minister, who had returned from
+Haarhaar with a veil of gay, blooming ideas on his face, imparted to him
+charming prospects of the exultation wherewith city and country would
+celebrate the approaching marriage-feast of the Prince and the gain of
+the most beautiful bride.
+
+And had he not, in addition to all, his friend too? When one stands so
+close before the flame of joy, one does indeed shun men,--because they
+easily step between us and the pleasant warmth,--but one seeks them too;
+a hearty friend is our wish and joy, who shall gently lead on, without
+chasing away, the happy dream in which we sleep and speak. Charles
+played softly into his friend's dream; he would, however, have also done
+it from sincere love for the sister.
+
+In fact, with so much youth, summer weather, innocence, freedom,
+beautiful scenery, and deep love and friendship, there may well be
+constructed, even on this low earth, something like that which up in
+heaven is called a heaven; and a celestial chart, an Elysium-atlas,
+which one should map out thereof, would perhaps look not far otherwise
+than this: in front, a long pastoral land, with scattered
+pleasure-castles and summer-houses; a philanthropist's grove in the
+middle, the Tabor mountains overhead, with herdsmen upon them, long
+Campanian vales; then the broad archipelago, with St. Peter's islands;
+over on the other side the shores of a new pastoral continent, all
+covered with Daphnean groves and gardens of Alcinoüs; behind that again,
+stretching far inward, an Arcadia; and so on.
+
+All the philosophy and stoicism that he now had in him--for he held that
+which the arm out of the clouds gave him as booty gained by his
+own--Albano applied to the purpose of taking _from_ his ecstasy the
+moderation which they impart. Moderation, he said, was only for patients
+and pigmies; and all those anxious, evenly balanced sticklers for
+temperament[181] and time-keepers had, whether in the cultivation of a
+pleasure or of a talent, profited themselves more than the world; on the
+contrary, their antipodes had benefited the world more than
+themselves.[182]
+
+He kept in view very good fundamental principles. Man, said he, is free
+and without limits,--not in respect to what he will do or enjoy, but in
+respect to what he will do without; he can, if he _will_, will to
+dispense with _everything_. In fact, he continued, one has simply the
+choice, either _always_ or _never_ to fear; for thy life-tent stands
+over a loaded mine, and, round about, the hours aim at thee naked
+weapons. Only one in a thousand[183] hits; and, in any case, I am sure I
+would sooner fall standing than bending like a coward. But, he
+concluded, in order to justify himself on the subject, is then
+steadfastness made for nothing better than for a surgeon and
+serving-maid, and not much rather for our muse and goddess? for it is
+not surely a good, merely because it helps do without something which we
+have lost, but it is intrinsically one, and a greater than the one whose
+place it supplies; even the happiest must acquire it, even without
+outward occasion or bestowal; yes, it is so much the better, if it is
+possessed earlier than applied.
+
+These deceptions or justifications were partly weapons of self-defence
+against the tragic Roquairol, who would fain heighten every pleasure,
+and even those of his friend, by sombre contrasts; and partly they were
+such as a noble man, who hitherto has plunged into sorrow without
+measuring its depth, and who would always feel his power of swimming
+through life, must necessarily fall upon, when he is inwardly aware that
+the centre of gravity of his bliss and of his hell has shifted and
+fallen out of himself into another being. "O, what if she should die?"
+he asked himself. He had not been wont to shudder so at the thought of
+any death as of this. Therefore he squeezed these thorns of fancy right
+sharply in his hand in order to crush them. At last, when the pure
+country air of love and the shepherd-dance in this Arcadia had brought
+more and more roses to Liana's cheek, then his thorns ceased to grow.
+
+To all other vipers of life, so long as they could find no entrance
+through Liana's heart, he was inaccessible. At whatever price,--and
+though he should have to forsake, give up, provoke, undertake all,--he
+would buy Liana. The phantoms of terror which came threateningly to meet
+him out of two houses,--Froulay's and Gaspard's,--he let come on, and
+dispelled them: let the foe once show himself, thought he, so am I his
+foe too. Often he stood in Tartarus, and found, in this still life of
+death _in rilievo_, peace of soul. The actual world takes more quickly
+our image than we its; even here he gained soft, broad, life-illumining
+hopes and sweet tears, which flowed from him at the thought of Liana's
+faith in her death, not because he believed in the probability, but in
+the improbability thereof, which, through love and joy and recovery,
+would daily grow greater.
+
+Only one misfortune was there for him, against which every weapon
+snapped in pieces, whose possibility, however, he held to be a sinful
+thought,--namely, that he and Liana, by some fault or time or the
+world's influence, might cease to love each other. Here, relying on two
+hearts, he boldly defied the future. O, who has not said, when, in
+reliance upon a warm eternity, he has expressed his rapture, The Fatal
+Sister may clip the thread of our life, but shall she come and open the
+scissors against the bond of our love? The very next day the Fatal
+Sister has stood before him, and snapped the scissors to.
+
+
+68. CYCLE.
+
+Once Roquairol came quite late to take Albano with him to the
+"Evening-Star Party" at the herdsman's hut, which he had arranged with
+Rabette. The Captain loved to build around the warm springs of his love
+and joy the well-curb of wholly select days and circumstances; if he
+could contrive it, for instance, he made his declarations of love, say
+on a birthday, during a total eclipse of the sun, on a valentine's day,
+in a blooming hot-house in winter, in a skating chair on the ice, or in
+a charnel-house; so, too, he loved to quarrel with others in significant
+days and places, in the church-pew, in the beginning of spring or
+winter, in the green-room of the amateur theatre, at a great fire, or
+not far from Tartarus or in the flute-dell. Albano, however, was too
+young, as others are too old, to have to season his fresh feeling with
+artificial hours and situations; he preferred to beautify the latter
+through the former.
+
+With impetuous joy Albano flew along the road to the unexpected
+pleasure. Last evening had been so rich,--the four rivers of Paradise
+had, in one cataract, poured down from heaven into his heart,--and this
+evening he would leap into its sprayey whirlpool. The evening heaven
+itself was so fair and pure, and Hesperus went with growing splendor
+down his brightly glimmering path.
+
+Rabette waited at the foot of the mountain on which stood the herdsman's
+hut (the little shooting-house), in order to lead him unsuspecting to
+the unprepared female friend, who at the window, with her gleaming eye
+on Hesperus, lay musing, and thought of the full, glowing autumn
+flowers, which, at this late time of her life, and so shortly before the
+longest night, were springing up. She was troubled to-day about many
+things. She had, in fact, sought hitherto more to deserve and to justify
+than to enjoy and increase her love, and more to bless with it another's
+heart than her own. How indescribably she longed to do deeds for
+him,--only sacrifices were to her deeds,--and she really envied her
+friend who had, every time, at least to prepare Charles a beverage. As
+she knew no other way, she expressed her devoted zeal by greater
+daughterly love and attention to Albano's parents and sister; and
+learned even to cook a little, which other ministers' daughters, who
+make nothing but salad and tea, must pardon her, especially when they
+reflect that, in Liana's case, they themselves would not have done
+otherwise, but rather have made one dish more. Yes, she accounted
+Rabette as more virtuous, because she could be more broadly and
+extensively active; Rabette, on the other hand, held Liana to be the
+better of the two, because she prayed so much the more. A similar error
+they repeated twofold in respect to the brothers; Rabette thought
+Charles the gentler, and Liana, Albano; both, according to inferences
+from their mutual reports.
+
+So long as a woman loves, she loves right on, steadily. A man has to do
+something between whiles. Liana transformed everything into his image
+and his name: this mountain, this little chamber, this, to him once
+dangerous, bird-pole, became the crayon pencils for his stereotype
+image. She always came back upon this, that he deserved something better
+than her; for love is lowliness, on the wedding-ring sparkles no jewel.
+It touched her that her early death affected him. There she saw still
+the maiden blinded by the small-pox, whom he had once unconsciously
+pressed to his heart;[184] and, with the quick apprehension of sadness,
+she felt herself to resemble the blind one also, in that incident, and
+not merely in the similar, although shorter night, which pain had once
+thrown over her eyes.
+
+As gentle as her emblem, Hesperus, dipping into the western horizon of
+life, did she seem to her lover. She never could pass immediately out of
+her own heart into the startling present; her turnings were always like
+those of the sunflower, very slow, and every sensation lived long in her
+faithful breast. Seldom, indeed, does a lover find the welcome of his
+loved one like the last image, which the farewell had imparted to him; a
+female soul must--so man desires--with all the wings, storms, heavens,
+of the last minute, sound over into the next. But Liana had ever
+received her friend shyly and softly, and otherwise than she had parted
+with him; and sometimes, to his fiery spirit, this tender waiting, this
+slow lifting of the eyelid, appeared almost as a return to the old
+coldness.
+
+To-day it seized the more ardent Count more strongly than usual. Like a
+pair of strange children who are to become acquainted with each other,
+and smile upon and touch each other, the two stood beside each other
+friendly and embarrassed. She told how she had made his sister tell her
+of his childish break-neck adventure on this mountain. A loved maiden
+knows no more beautiful, no richer history than that of her friend. "O
+even then," he said with emotion, "I looked toward thy mountains! Thy
+name, like a golden inscription, was written on my whole youth. Ah,
+Liana! didst thou haply love me as I thee, when thou hadst not yet seen
+me?"
+
+"Certainly not, Albano," answered she, "not till long after!" She meant,
+however, her blindness; and said he appeared to her in this twilight of
+the eyes, on that evening when he ate with her father, like an old
+northern king's son, somewhat like Olo,[185] and she had had a certain
+awe before him, as for her father and brother. Her high respect for men
+the fewest were hardly worthy to guess, not to say, occasion. "And how
+when thou hadst regained thy sight?" said Albano. "I just told thee
+that," she replied naively. "But when thou didst so love my brother,"
+she continued, "and wast so good to thy sister, then to be sure I quite
+took heart, and am now and henceforth thy second sister. Besides, thou
+hast lost one--Albano, believe me, I know I am surely unworthy,
+especially of thee; but I have _one_ consolation."
+
+Perplexed by this mixture of sanctity and coldness, he could only
+passionately kiss her, and was constrained, without contradicting her,
+to ask forthwith, "What consolation?" "That thou wilt one day be
+entirely happy," said she softly. "Liana, speak more plainly!" said he.
+For he understood not that she meant her death and the announcement of
+Linda by the spirits. "I mean after one year," she replied, "from the
+date of the predictions." He looked at her speechless, wild, guessing
+and trembling. She fell weeping upon his heart, and suddenly gave vent
+to the swell of inward sighs: "Shall I not then be dead at that time,"
+said she with deep emotion, "and look down from eternity to see that
+thou art rewarded for thy love to Liana? And that, too, certainly in a
+high degree!"
+
+Weep, be angry, suffer, exult, and wonder more and more, passionate
+youth! But, to be sure, thou comprehendest not this lowly soul!--Holy
+humility! thou only virtue which God, not man, created! Thou art higher
+than all which thou concealest or knowest not! Thou heavenly beam of
+light! like the earthly light,[186] thou showest all other colors and
+floatest thyself invisible, colorless, in heaven! Let no one profane
+thy unconsciousness by instruction! When thy little white blossoms have
+once fallen, they come not again, and around thy fruits only modesty
+then spreads her foliage.
+
+Painfully did the heart in Albano split into contradictions, as if into
+two, his own heart and Liana's. She was nothing but pure love and
+lowliness, and the splendor of her talents was only a foreign
+border-work, as white marble images of the gods have the variegated
+border only as decoration: one could not do anything but adore her, even
+in her errors. On the other hand, she had, in conjunction with tender,
+susceptible feelings, such firm opinions and errors; his modesty fought
+so vainly against her humility, and his clear-sightedness against her
+visionary tendency. The hostile train which this propensity drew after
+it he saw too clearly sweeping along over all the joys of her life. His
+ever-besetting suspicion, that she loved him merely because she hated
+nothing, and that she was always a sister instead of a lover, again
+charged home upon him like an armed man. Thus did all things fight
+together in this case,--duty and desire, fortune and place. Both were
+new and unknown to each other, because of love; but Liana divined as
+little as he. O how strange to each other and unlike each other two
+human beings, kindred souls, become, merely because a Divinity hovers
+between the two and shines upon both!
+
+Something remained in him unharmonious and unsolved. He felt it so
+sadly, now that the summer night glimmered for higher raptures than he
+possessed; now that, deep in the ether, the trembling evening star
+pressed on after the sun through the rose-clouds under which he was
+buried; now that the meadows of grain breathed perfume and murmured not,
+and the closed pastures grew green and did not glow, and the world and
+every nightingale slept, and life below was a still cloister-garden,
+and, only overhead, the constellations, like silver, ethereal harps,
+seemed to tremble and sound before the spring winds of distant Edens.
+
+He must needs see Liana again to-morrow, by way of tuning his heart.
+Rabette came up from the mountain with her friend, infinitely animated.
+Both seemed almost exhausted with laughing and joking; for Roquairol
+carried everything, even mirth, to the degree of pain. He had converted
+the evening star, for which he had given the invitation, into a hothouse
+and homestead of pleasant conceits and allusions. At first he would not
+come home with her, even to-morrow; but at last he consented, when
+Rabette assured him "she understood the fine gentleman well enough, but
+he must nevertheless just let her take care of things."
+
+When the ruddy dawn arose, Albano, accompanied by him, came again; but
+the garden-gate of the "manor-garden" was already open, and Liana
+already in the arbor. A stitched book of public documents (seemingly)
+lay in her lap, and her folded hands beside it; she looked rather
+straightforward, as in thought, than upwards, as in prayer; yet she
+received her Albano with so mild and distant a smile, as a man, greeting
+a guest who comes right into the midst of his prayers, smiles upon him,
+and then continues his devotion. The Count had hitherto been obliged
+always to prepare himself for a certain reserve in her reception of him.
+A misunderstanding, which returns quickly, however often it is removed,
+acts again and again as deludingly and freshly as at the first time. He
+felt very strongly that something more fixed than that first virgin
+bashfulness, wherewith a maiden will always invent for the dazzling sun
+of love, besides the dawn, a twilight too, and again another for that,
+hindered the fiery melting together of their souls.
+
+He asked what she was reading; she hesitated, covering it up. A thought,
+suddenly darting upon her, seemed to open her heart; she gave him the
+book, and said it was a French manuscript,--namely, written prayers,
+drawn up by her mother several years before, which touched her more than
+her own thoughts; but still there was ever-more looking through her
+tenderly woven face a cloistral thought, which sought to leave her
+heart. What could Albano object to this Psalmist of the heart? Who can
+answer a songstress? A praying female stands, as does also an unhappy
+one, on a high, holy place, which our arms cannot reach. But how
+miserable must most prayers be, since, although in earlier life
+possessing the attraction of charms, like the rosary, which is made out
+of sweet-smelling woods, yet afterward in advanced age they act only as
+blemishes, and like the relic or the death's-head with which the rosary
+itself ends!
+
+Without waiting for his question, she told him at once what had
+disturbed her during her prayer; namely, this passage in it: _O mon
+Dieu, fais que je sois toujours vraie et sincere_, &c., whereas she had
+hitherto concealed her love from her dear mother. She added, she would
+come now very soon, and then the closed heart should be opened to her.
+"No," said he, almost angrily, "thou mayest not; thy secret is also
+mine!" Men are often hardened by that in prose which in poetry softens
+them; for example, woman's piety and open-heartedness.
+
+Now no one hated more than he the clutching of the parental
+writing-finger, forefinger, and little finger into a pair of clasped
+hands; not that he feared, on the part of the Minister, wars or
+rivals,--he rather presupposed open arms and feasts of joy,--but
+because, to his magnanimous spirit, at once claiming and granting
+liberty, nothing was more revolting than the reflection, what smutty
+turf now for the kindling of the fire the parents might lay on the altar
+of love, or what pots they might set on to boil; how easily, then, even
+poetic parents often transform themselves with the children into prosaic
+or juristical ones, the father into an administrative, the mother into a
+financial board; how, then, to say the least, the court atmosphere makes
+one a bondsman, just as only the poetic heaven's ether makes free; and
+what perturbations his Hesperus might expect from the attracting world,
+the old Minister, who found nothing more unprofitable about love than
+love itself, and to whom the holiest sensibilities seemed about as
+useful for marriages of rank as the Hebrew is for preachers, namely,
+more in examination than in actual service. So ill did he think of his
+father-in-law, for he knew not something still worse.
+
+But the good daughter thought far higher of her mother than did a
+stranger, and her heart struggled painfully against concealing from her
+her love. She appealed to her brother, who was just entering. But he was
+wholly of Albano's mind. "Women," he added, not in the best humor, "are
+more fond of speaking _about_ love than _in_ love; men, the reverse."
+"No," said Liana, decidedly; "_if_ my mother ask me, I cannot be
+untrue." "God!" cried Albano, with a shudder, "and who could wish that?"
+For to him, also, free truth was the open helmet of the soul's nobility;
+only he spoke it merely from self-respect, and Liana out of human
+affection.
+
+Rabette came with the tea-things and a flask, wherein was tea-juice and
+elementary fire, or nerve-ether for the Captain,--arrack. He never liked
+to visit people in the morning, with whom he could not drink it till
+evening; Rabette had yesterday guessed this naughtiness, and to-day
+gratified it. "How can the soul," said the sound Albano to him often,
+"make itself a slave to the belly and the senses? Are we not already
+bound closely enough by the fetters of the body, and thou wilt still
+draw chains through the chains?" To this Roquairol had always the same
+answer: "Just the reverse! Through the corporeal itself, I free myself
+from the corporeal; for instance, by wine from blood. As long as thou
+canst never escape servitude to the bodily senses, and all thy
+consciousness and thy thinking can only, through a bodily servitude,
+attaching itself to the glebe of the earth, abide in their nobility; I
+cannot perceive why thou dost not properly use these rebels and despots
+as thy servants? Why must I let the body only work ill upon me, and not
+advantageously as well?" Albano stood to it, that the still light of
+health was more dignified than the poppy-oil flame of a slave of opium;
+and the fate of being prisoner of war to the body, which one spirit has
+to bear in common with the whole human army, more honorable than the
+cramping confinement of a personal arrest.
+
+To-day, however, not even the spirituous brimstone-smoked tea-water
+could wash away a certain discontent from Roquairol, whom night-watching
+had colored more pale, as it had the Count more red. He could not be
+reconciled to it, that the manor-garden was all shut in with a
+board-fence as high as a man, which was less intended as a
+billiard-table border, not to let the eye-ball go out, than as a
+mountebank's booth, to let nothing in, and which of course insured no
+other _prospect_ than the prospect proper; quite as little did the
+pleasure-garden commend itself to his favor by the fact that the
+turf-benches on which they sat in the arbor had not yet been mowed, that
+in all the beds only vegetables for the trimming of cooked meat flapped
+about, that nothing ripe yet hung there but one or two moles in their
+hanging death-beds, that on a bowling-green, whereupon one rolls into a
+tinkling middle-hole, the crooked return-alley let the balls run home
+again, much more easily than they could--unless one threw them--be made
+to pass over the earth-bottom of the main alley, and that no orangery
+was anywhere to be seen, excepting once, when fortunately the
+garden-gate stood open, just as a blooming orangery box passed by in a
+wheelbarrow on its way to Lilar.
+
+The Captain needed only to bring forward these particulars satirically,
+and thereby inwardly to wound the outwardly laughing Rabette,--because
+no woman can bear to hear fault found with her bodily property, whether
+it be children, clothes, cakes, or furniture;[187] and then his
+mountain-heights could gradually disencumber themselves of their clouds
+again, and Rabette become still more uncommonly gay.
+
+Albano, in this morning hour of the day, and, as it were, of childhood,
+and in this little paradise-garden of his childish years, was inwardly
+glad,--for in the first love, as in Shakespeare's pieces, nothing
+depends on the wooden stage of the performance; but to-day's afterwinter
+of yesterday's chill would nevertheless not melt. The morning-blue began
+to be filled with brighter and brighter golden fleeces; as the garden,
+like small cities, had only two gates, the upper and the lower, he
+opened like an aurora that of the morning sun; the splendor gushed in
+over the smoking green; the Rosana gliding below caught lightnings, and
+flung them over hitherward; Albano departed finally full of love and
+bliss.
+
+But the love was greater than the bliss.
+
+
+69. CYCLE.
+
+Flying Spring! (I mean love, just as one calls the after summer a
+_flying summer_) thou hurriest away of thyself over our heads with
+arrowy speed; why do authors again hurry over thee? Thou art the German
+blossoming season; which is never a blossoming month long. We read all
+winter in almanacs and similes much about its magnificence, and we pine
+for it; at last it hangs thick on the dark boughs six days long, and
+beside that, under cold May showers, sweeping bliss-month[188] storms,
+and with a dumb-session of half-frozen nightingales,--and then, when one
+comes out at length into the garden, the footpath is already white with
+blossoms, and the tree at most full of green; then it is over, till in
+winter we again hear with exaltation of heart the beginning of a tale:
+"It was just in the lovely season of the blossoming." Even so do I see
+few authors, at the long session-and-scribbling-table of romance,
+working right and left for the benefit of the reading-desk, who, after
+the long preface to love, do not so soon as, like a war, it is declared,
+forthwith conclude it; and really, there are more steps _to_ love than
+_in_ it; all that is _coming to be_,--for instance, spring, youth,
+morning, learning,--opens out more widely and in a richer variety of
+hues than fixed _being_; but is not this latter in turn a progress, only
+a higher; and this, again, a state of being, only a quicker?
+
+Albano would fain lead along more beautifully the fleeting, divine
+season, when the heart is our god; he would have it rather fly _upward_
+than fly _away_. He was angry the next day with nobody but himself. He
+tore his way through such petty and yet closely entangling troubles,
+through a condition like that of men during an earthquake, when an
+invisible vapor holds the heavy foot as a snare. "I would rather let
+myself be rained on upon mountains," said he, "than in valleys." Men of
+quick fancy more easily reconcile themselves to the loved one when she
+is absent, than when she is present.
+
+After some days, he went again to Blumenbühl just before sundown. A
+burning red cut through the night-like gloom of the foliage. His
+darkening, woody road was made, by the flames which danced about
+therein, an enchanted one. He transferred his illuminated present deep
+into a future, shady past. O, after years, thought he, when thou
+returnest, when all is gone by and changed, the trees grown up, human
+beings passed away, and only the mountains and the brook left, then wilt
+thou congratulate thyself that thou couldst once in these walks so often
+journey to thy sweetest heart, and on either hand the music and the
+glory of Nature went along with thy joyful soul, as the moon seems to
+the child to run after him through all streets. An unwonted rapture
+flung through his whole being the long, broad streak of sunshine; the
+farthest flowers of his fancy opened; all tones came through a brighter
+ether, and sounded nearer. The flowers around him, too, exhaled a keener
+fragrance, and the peal of the bell sounded nearer; and both are signs
+of foul weather.
+
+Thus inwardly happy, he made his appearance,--and, indeed, without
+Roquairol, who in fact came more and more seldom,--and found his beloved
+up in his childhood's study, her guest-chamber, which was now the usual
+scene of his visits. In a white dress, with dark trimming, as in a
+beautiful half-mourning, she sat at the drawing-table with her eyes
+sharper than usual, buried in a picture. She flew to his heart, but only
+to lead him back presently to the dear form upon which her heart hung as
+in a mother's arms. She related that her mother had been here to-day
+with the Princess, and had showed so much pleasure in her improving
+color, such infinite kindness toward her happy daughter. "She was
+obliged," continued she, "to let me take a slight sketch of her, in
+order that I might only look upon her so much the longer, and have
+something of her to keep by me. I am just finishing the outline of the
+face, but it is absolutely too poor a likeness." She could not tear her
+fancy away from the image, and still less from the original. To be sure,
+no more beautiful medallion can hang _on_ a daughter's heart, or in fact
+_in_ it, than that of a mother; but, nevertheless, Albano thought to-day
+the hanging-ring took up too broad a space.
+
+She talked only of her mother. "I certainly sin," said she; "she asked
+me in such a friendly way whether thou camest often, but I said only
+yes, and nothing further. O good Albano, how gladly would I have given
+up to her frankly my whole soul!"
+
+He answered, that the mother seemed not to be so frank; she perhaps knew
+already the whole through the Lector, and the pure draught of love would
+now be continually disturbed by foreign substances. Against Augusti he
+declared himself very strongly, but Liana quite as strongly upheld him.
+Through both that counterfeiter of the coin of truth, namely,
+suspicion,--the suspicion that she perhaps loved him as she loved
+everything, since she grew as by a living tie to everything
+good,--gained, under Albano's sensibilities, which besides had been
+to-day so warm and glad, more and more mint-stamps and currency.
+
+She suspected nothing, but she came back to the subject of her secrecy.
+"But why, then, does it make me unhappy," said she, "if it is right?
+Beloved one, my Caroline too appears to me no longer, and truly that is
+no good sign." This spectral-machinery always came on as oppressively
+and gloomily to him as a thunder-cloud in the outer world. His old
+exasperation against the teasings practised in his own case by apes of
+the air, whom he could not lay hold of, passed over into a similar
+feeling against Liana's optical self-deception. That veil presented her
+by Caroline, wherewith, in the beginning, she had so sublimely arrayed
+herself for the cloister of the tomb,--that travelling veil for the next
+world,--had long been to this Hercules a burning garment, drenched in
+the poisonous blood of a Nessus; therefore she no longer dared to wear
+it before him. The conclusion that the fancy of being destined to death
+laid the seed of the reality, and that in the deep overhanging cloud an
+accident might easily attract the striking-spark of death, fell like a
+mourning into his love festival. So are all strange sea-wonders of fancy
+(like this death-delusion) desired only _in_ fancy (in romance), but not
+in life, except once on fantastic heights; but then must such comets,
+like others, soon recede again from our heaven.
+
+He spoke now very seriously,--of suicidal fancies, of life's duties, of
+wilful blindness to the fairest signs of her recovery, among which he
+reckoned as well the disappearance of the optical Caroline as the
+blooming of her color. She heard him patiently; but through the
+Princess, who, notwithstanding her love, seldom left behind with him
+pleasant impressions, her fancy had to-day taken quite another road, far
+beyond herself and her grave. She stood only before Linda's image, of
+which Julienne had this afternoon communicated to her sharper outlines
+than maidens are wont to give of maidens. "She is a very good girl,"
+they say of each other. Linda's manly spirit, her warm attachment to
+Gaspard in connection with her contempt of the mass of men, her
+inflexibility, her bold strides in manly knowledge, her masterly and
+often severe letters, more pithy than flowery, and, most of all, her
+probably approaching arrival, took a powerful hold of Liana's tender
+heart. "My Albano must have her," was the constant thought of this
+disinterested soul; and if the Princess had had the intention of
+humiliating comparisons, she remarked it not, but fulfilled it. The good
+creature found, too, so much of a higher providence here,--for example,
+that her brother need now no longer be the rival of her lover and of his
+friend,--that she herself could portray beforehand her vigorous Albano
+to the proud Romeiro, and that certainly, despite all opposition, all
+the ghostly prophecies strikingly connected and coincided with each
+other. All this she now said (because she concealed only her sorrows,
+not her hopes) right to the Count's face.
+
+What a gnashing bite did an evil genius at this moment make into his
+tenderest life! That glowing love which neither divides nor is divided
+possessed _his_ heart, he thought, not hers. He came very near to
+showing up his inner being just as it was, all kindled at once, as if by
+a lightning stroke, into a lofty blaze. Only the innocent white brow,
+with festive roses in its little ringlets; the childishly bright
+looking-up of the pure blue pair of eyes, and the soft face, which even
+at a musical fortissimo, and at every vehemence in movement or laughter
+on the part of another, caught a sickly redness from the beating heart;
+and his indignant shame at the levity with which a man can abuse his
+omnipotence and his sex, to the terror of the tenderer, restrained him,
+like guardian spirits; and he said merely, in that noble anger which
+sounded like a tender emotion, "O Liana, thou art hard to-day!"
+
+"And yet I am indeed so tender!" said the innocent one. The two had
+hitherto been standing at the window, before the dark tempest which came
+rolling on out of Lilar. She turned suddenly round; for since the day of
+her blindness, when a dark cloud had seemed to fly towards her, she had
+never been able to look at one long; and Albano's tall form, with his
+whole live-glowing face and his soul-speaking eyes, stood illumined by
+the evening light before her. With the hand which he left free she
+softly and playfully swept aside the dark hair from his defiant
+forehead, smoothed the contracted eyebrow, and said, as his look stung
+like a sun, and his mouth shut with determination, "O, joyfully,
+joyfully, shall this fair face one day smile!" He smiled, but sadly.
+"And then shall I be still more blest than to-day!" said she, and
+started, for a lightning-flash darted across his earnest face, as over a
+jagged mountain, and showed it, like that of the god of war, illuminated
+with war-flames.
+
+He hurried away; would not be held back; spoke of a weather-cooling;
+went out into the storm; and left Liana behind in the joy that she had
+spoken to-day merely out of pure love. From the last house in the
+village Rabette flew to meet him; the torrents of the restrained tears
+rolled down his cheeks. "What dost thou want? why weepest thou?" she
+cried. "Thou art dreaming!" cried he, and hurried, without further
+answer, out into the tempest, which had suddenly, like a mantle-fish,
+flung itself stiflingly over the whole heaven. There, under the
+rain-drops and lightning-flashes, he began, first of all, to reckon up
+for himself the best proofs that Liana had saintly charms, divine sense,
+all virtues, especially universal philanthropy, daughterly, sisterly,
+friendly affection, only not, however, the glowing love for one
+person,--at least, not for him. She is so entirely and exclusively--such
+is always his conclusion--possessed and absorbed with the present
+object, whether it be myself or a broken arm of the little Pollux, that
+it hides from her heaven and earth. Hence the setting of her life's day,
+with all the attendant partings, is no more to her than the setting of a
+star. Hence it was that I stood beside her so long, with a heart full of
+the pangs of love, and she saw not into my love, because she found none
+in her own bosom. And this is what makes it so bitter, when man, pining
+in poverty among the common hearts of earth, is rendered by the noblest
+only unhappy at last.
+
+The rain pattered and trickled through the leaves, the fire darted
+through the woods, and the Wild Huntsman of the storm drove his crazy
+chase. This refreshed and rejoiced him like the cooling hand of a friend
+taking his to guide him. As he ascended, not through the cavern, but
+outside over the back of the mountain to his high thunder-house, he saw
+a thick, gray night of rain settle down heavily upon the green Lilar,
+and on the winding Tartarus rested under the flashes the illuminated
+storm. He shuddered, on entering his little house, at a cry which his
+Æolian-harp emitted under the snatches of the wind; for it had once,
+gilded by the evening sun, ethereally clothed his young love like
+starlight, and had followed it with ever-varying tones, as it went out
+over this suffering life.
+
+
+70. CYCLE.
+
+On the morning after both storms were dissolved into a still
+cloudiness.--And out of the great griefs came only errors. Weaklings
+that we are! when at our sham execution fate touches us with the rod,
+not with the sword, we sink impotently from the block, and feel the
+process of dying reach far into our life! All fevers, including
+spiritual ones, are cooled by the freshness of a new morning, just as
+sad evening stirs all their embers into a glow. Who of us has not at
+evening,--that proper witching hour of tormenting spectres,
+house-haunting ghosts and hobgoblins,--caught in the threads which he
+himself had spun, but which he took for a web spread by other hands,
+entangled himself more and more deeply the more he turned about and
+tried to extricate himself, till in the morning he saw his turnkey
+before him, namely, himself?
+
+Albano saw on the whole theatre of yesterday's war nothing left standing
+but a pale, kindly figure in half-mourning, who looked round after him
+with innocent maidenly eyes, and toward which he could not help looking
+over, albeit she was now more a bride of God than of a mortal. He felt
+now, to be sure, more strongly how high his demands upon real friends
+rose, than he once did, when he could heighten at pleasure the highest
+which he made upon the beings of his dreams, whom he always cast exactly
+into the temporary mould of his heart; and how he was possessed by a
+spirit that spared no one, that would stretch the wings of every other
+according to its own, because it could bear no individuality except that
+which was copied.
+
+He had hitherto experienced from all his loved ones too little
+opposition, as Liana had too much; both extremes injure one. The
+spiritual as well as the physical man, without the resistance of the
+outer atmosphere, is blown up and burst by the inner, and without the
+resistance of the inner is crushed by the outer; only the equilibrium
+between inner resistance and outer pressure keeps a fair play-room open
+for life and its culture. Besides, men--since only the best of them
+appreciate in the best of their own sex strong conviction--can hardly
+tolerate it in women, and would have them not merely the reflection, but
+even the echo, of themselves. They want, I mean, not merely the look,
+but also the word, that says yes.
+
+Albano punished himself with several days of voluntary absence, till the
+unclean clouds should have cleared away from within him which had
+overshadowed the gnomon of the sundial of his inner man. "When I am
+quite cheerful and good-natured," said he, "I will go back to her, and
+err no more." He errs at this moment. Whenever a strange, uncomfortable
+semitone has repeatedly intruded itself between all the harmonies of two
+natures, it swells more and more fatally till it drowns the key-note,
+and ends all. The dividing tone was, in this case, the strength of the
+man's pitch in connection with the strength of the woman's. But the
+highest love is most easily wounded by the slightest difference. O,
+little avails it then for man to say to himself, I will be another man!
+Only in the finest, only in unimpaired enthusiasm, does he propose to
+himself such a thing; but it is just when the feeling is impaired, when
+he were hardly capable of the purpose, that he has to rise to the
+fulfilment of it, and then he can hardly make the achievement.
+
+The Count went in the morning, as usual, to his lecture-rooms and
+parlors in the city. In the former it was hard for him to fix his
+instruments and his eyes upon the stars of the sciences, and to take
+sight, sailing as he was on such a sea of emotion. In the latter he
+found the Lector colder than ever, the Bibliothecary warmer, the
+household more inflated. He went to Roquairol, whom he to-day loved and
+treated still more cordially, as if by way of atonement to his offended
+sister. Charles said at once, with his sudden and tragical flinging up
+of the curtain of futurity, "All was discovered,--in the highest degree
+of probability!" As often as lovers see that their Calypso's
+island--which, to be sure, lies free on the open ocean--has at length
+come to the eyes of the seafaring world, and that they are making sail
+for it, they are astonished to an astonishing degree; for is there any
+one Paradise which has such a loose and low palisado, allowing every
+passer-by to see in, as theirs?
+
+For a long time, he related, had the Doctor's children always had
+something to fetch from the Architect's wife at Lilar,--flowers,
+medicine-phials, &c.; certainly as spy-glasses and ear-tubes of Augusti,
+who again was the opera-glass of his mother. In short, his father had,
+at least, been at the Greek woman's yesterday, but had luckily found
+only an empty package[189] from Rabette to him (Charles), which,
+according to the liberties of the ministerial Church, he had opened and
+closed.
+
+"Why _luckily_?" said Albano. "I will justify and honor my love before
+the world." "I referred to myself," he replied; "for never was my father
+more friendly to me than since he broke open my last letters. He is this
+afternoon in Blumenbühl, and it may well be more on my own account than
+my sister's."
+
+Albano had no fear that the city could drill mining-galleries under his
+childhood's land, so as to blow up in one conflagration the blessed
+isle,--could he not trust his character and courage and Liana's
+own?--but it pained him now that he had so needlessly robbed the
+childlike Liana of the joy and merit of a childlike open-heartedness.
+How he longed now for the atoning and recompensing moment of the first
+meeting again, after the next morning!
+
+He stayed by his friend as by a consolation, and did not go back till
+the evening redness floated about in the rain-clouds. When he came, he
+found already awaiting him a letter from Liana, written to-day.
+
+     "O good Albano, why camest thou not? How much I had to say
+     to thee! How I trembled for thy sake on Friday, when the
+     frowning cloud pursued thee with its thunder! Thou hast
+     weaned me too much from sorrow, so strange and heavy has it
+     become to me now. I was inconsolable the whole evening; at
+     last, when night fell, the thought sank into my mind that
+     thou hadst been oppressed as with presentiments, and that
+     the lightning loved to strike the thunder-house. Why,
+     indeed, art thou there? I hurried up, and knelt by my bed,
+     and prayed to God, although the storm had long been
+     dispersed, that he would have preserved thee. Smile at my
+     tardy prayer; but I said to him, 'Thou knewest indeed,
+     all-gracious One, that I would pray.' I was consoled, too,
+     when I looked up to the stars, and the broken ray of joy
+     trembled within me.
+
+     "But in the morning Rabette made me sad again. She had seen
+     thee weeping on the road. A thousand times have I asked
+     myself, whether I am to blame for that. Can it have come
+     from this,--for she says so,--that I afflict thee too much
+     with my death thoughts? Never more shalt thou hear them; the
+     veil, too, is laid away; but I calculated upon thee
+     according to my brother, to whom, as he himself says, the
+     dusk of death is an evening-twilight, in which forms seem to
+     him more lovely. Truly, I am quite blest; for thou art even
+     so, and yet hast so little in having me,--only a small
+     flower for thy heart, but I have thyself. Leave me my
+     grave-mound; therefrom, as from a mountain, comes better,
+     more fruitful soil into my valley. O how one loves, Albano,
+     when all around us crumbles and sinks and melts away in
+     smoke, and when, still, the bond and splendor of love stand
+     firm and inviolate on the fleeting ground of life, as I have
+     often seen with emotion, when standing by waterfalls, a
+     rainbow hover, undisturbed and unchanged, over the bursting,
+     impetuous floods! O, would that the nightingales were yet
+     singing; now I could sing with them! Thy Æolian-harp, my
+     harmonica, how gladly would I have it in my hand! My father
+     was with us, and more cheerful and friendly toward all than
+     ever. Lo, even he is kindly disposed! My parents surely send
+     no tempest into our feast of roses. I readily did him the
+     pleasure, therefore,--forgive it!--of promising him, that I
+     would receive no visits from strangers in a strange
+     house--because, he said, it was improper. I must go home for
+     some days on account of the Prince's marriage; but I shall
+     see thee soon. O forgive! When my father speaks softly, my
+     soul cannot possibly say, No. Farewell, my noble one!
+
+                                                         L.
+
+     "P. S. Soon a little leaf will come fluttering again over to
+     thy mountain. Only continue in perpetual joy! O God! why am
+     I not stronger? What beings shouldst thou then take to thy
+     heart!--Thou dear one!"
+
+How was he shamed by this full-blooming love, which never rightly knows
+when it is misunderstood, and which presupposes no other fault than its
+own! How sadly did the thought of the commanded separation affect him
+now, after the voluntary one! He could now love her as a guarding angel
+_before_ Paradise, how much more as a giving angel _in_ it! But it is
+hard for a man, as the youth felt, clearly to distinguish in the female
+heart, especially in this one, intention from instinct, ideas from
+feelings, and in this dark, full heaven to count and arrange all the
+stars. Everything like hardness, every unpromising bud, arose at last as
+a flower; and her worth unfolded itself piece-wise like spring; whereas,
+generally, from other maidens, a traveller who visits them carries away
+with him directly at his first evening's departure a little complete
+flower-catalogue of all their charms and arts, as a Brocken-passenger
+gets at the tavern a neat nosegay of the various kinds of mosses which
+are found on the mountain.
+
+He supposed she was now with her parents; and he followed, not as a
+pouting schoolboy, but as a harmonious man, the giant of destiny. In the
+garden rainy weather held sway, the crop of every heavy tempest, which,
+like a war, always devastates the scene of conflict.
+
+The promised leaflet appeared: "Only be happy. We shall see each other
+very, very soon, and then most blissfully. Forgive me! Ah, I long
+exceedingly!"
+
+Now he experienced what days they were which had _once_--that is, only a
+few days ago--passed before him as divine apparitions, and which now
+again were to come up in the East as returning stars! Why does a
+blessing, not till it is lost, cut its way like a sharp diamond so
+deeply into the heart? Why must we first have lamented a thing, before
+we ardently and painfully love it? Albano threw both past and future
+away from him, that he might dwell wholly and purely in that present
+which Liana had promised him.
+
+
+71. CYCLE.
+
+On Sunday morning, when all the blue heavens stood open, and the earth
+was festally decked with pearls and twigs, a gentle finger tapped at
+Albano's door, which could belong to none but a female hand. It was
+Liana who entered at so early an hour; Rabette and Charles without
+uttered a loud greeting. On his exulting breast fell the beautiful
+maiden, blooming from, her walk, with blessed, bright eyes, a freshly
+bedewed rose-bud. It was his finest morning; he had a clear feeling of
+Liana's love. As the Æolian-harp sounded in, she looked towards it,
+remembered with a blush that fairest evening of the covenant, and
+listened in silence, and dried her eyes when she turned them again
+towards Albano. But he could not enter into this temple of joy without
+having cleansed and healed himself by a frank confession of his late
+errors. What a sweet rivalry ensued between them of confessing and
+forgiving, when Liana lovingly exclaimed and owned that she had not
+understood him lately, that only she was the blamable one, and that she
+would begin this very moment to speak better. She could not give herself
+any comfort about the secret pangs which she had caused her friend. As
+mahogany furniture cracks in no temperature, and contracts no spots, and
+needs no polishing, so was it with this heart, Albano's felt, as he now
+swore to himself always, even when he did not understand her, to say to
+himself, She is right.
+
+She solved for him the riddle of her appearing to-day with those
+friendly looks which a good nature redoubles, when it has anything to
+sweeten,--namely, she was going back to Pestitz to-day; but the carriage
+would not come till late, till evening, in fact, about tea-time, and so
+there remained a whole day before them; and she hoped her father would
+not take this circuitous route through Lilar as a breach of her promise.
+A loving maiden grows unconsciously more bold. Thereupon she sought to
+make him quite calm about the peaceful intentions of her father, and
+represented his strictness, in subjecting himself and others to
+convenience, as the reason of his prohibition, as well as of her being
+summoned back to the wedding-festival. Albano, so soon after the oath
+which he had just sworn to himself, kept it, and said, She is right.
+
+The Captain came in with the red-cheeked Rabette, whose eyes glistened
+with joy. The small apartment did not, by narrowness and confusion, make
+the pleasure less. Charles, generally so much like Vesuvius, which in
+the first hours of morning is still covered with snow, presented already
+a warm summit; he seated himself at the instrument and thundered into
+the noisy presence with a prestissimo (which lay open) of Haydn's,--that
+true hour-caller of rejoicing hours,--and played, to the astonishment of
+the females, the hardest part so easily, at sight, that he rather played
+into it, than from it, and kept composing much (for instance, the bass)
+himself; whereas Albano, with almost comic fidelity, gave you the exact
+truth in music quite as much as in history, which, again, always became
+in Charles's mouth a piece of his own personal biography. The morning
+added wings to all their souls, whereas noon always binds men's wings
+down,--hence Aurora goes with winged steeds, and the god of day with
+wingless ones. "But how now are our seven pleasure-stations to be made
+out?" inquired Charles, "for the day lies like a garden-hall, with
+nothing but pleasure-avenues on all sides open before us." "Charles, is
+it not, then, a matter of indifference _where_ a man loves?" said
+Albano. Blessed one, whose heart needs nothing but one heart more, no
+park into the bargain, no _opera seria_, no Mozart, no Raphael, no
+eclipse of the moon, not so much as moonlight, and no read or acted
+romance!
+
+"First, I must see my Chariton," said Liana. "Yes," added her brother,
+immediately, "she can bring our dinner after us into the gothic temple."
+He proposed, namely, on this lovely day, to dine in the twelfth century,
+and to sit by a sombre, motley window-light, and on sharp-cornered,
+heavy, thick furniture, and, as it were, darkly under the earth of a
+green present, glistening overhead, to sit with blooming faces; for
+thus did he overload the fullest enjoyments with external contrasts, and
+enjoyed every happy present most in the near gleam and reflection of the
+sharpened sickle which was to mow them away.[190] "God forbid and avert
+it, friend!" said Rabette. Albano, too, deemed the friendly Greek, her
+laughing children, and the neighboring rose-fields far preferable, and,
+with the aid of Liana, prevailed. Before the embowered cottage the
+children came running to meet them, Helena, with her little apron full
+of orange-blossoms, which she had picked up, for the breaking of them
+off had been forbidden her, and Pollux, in the last, light bandage of
+his broken arm, the hand of which had now been obliged to work with its
+companion, the right hand, at puckering up and cracking the rose-leaves.
+Both gave notice: "Mother was not ready yet, and had dressed them
+first." But presently, neat and simple as a priestess destined to dance
+around the altar of gods of joy, sprang Chariton to meet her Liana, and,
+as she came, continued adjusting her hastily donned clothes by a light
+hitching and twitching. "This," said Roquairol, after he had easily
+obtained from Rabette a nodding assent thereto, because she had not
+understood his French request for the same, "is my spouse since
+yesterday,"--and he enjoyed without further circumstance the right of
+thouing her, which she, since the friendly encouragement of the
+Minister, accepted the more fondly with maidenly presentiments.
+
+When Liana kindly announced four noonday guests for Chariton, there
+stood in the dark eyes of the Greek gleams of joy, and the little face,
+with great arched Italian eyebrows, became a stereotype smile, which was
+not culinary embarrassment, but merely tongueless joy; which only made
+her white semicircle of teeth shine more broadly, when Charles spoke
+right out: "Surely thou canst help her, wife!" "Of course!" said
+Rabette, quite delighted; because her heart had no longer any other lips
+than her two hands, for which, if they could only lay hold of hard work,
+it was full as much as if they were pressed by the hand of a lover. Did
+she not again and again curse her awkward, hesitating throat, when
+Roquairol, in her presence, poured out his sounding and fiery torrents
+of speech? On this occasion, when he had again set off the surroundings
+with artificial, shadowy refinements, he insisted upon it, of course,
+that Chariton should be executive secretary, and Rabette only
+corresponding secretary. Liana, too, out of a like womanliness, would
+fain do something for her darling; but since she, as a maiden of rank,
+could not cook anything, but only bake a little, accordingly it was
+assigned her,--but reluctantly on the part of her friend, who never
+loved to see the sweet form anywhere else than, like other butterflies,
+by his side among the flowers,--at a quite late moment, and for a space
+of ten minutes, with her eyes and in extraordinary cases with her three
+writing-fingers, to co-operate in making the snow-balls, which were to
+close and crown the dessert.
+
+Never had kitchen ball-queen a broader canopy, or a more beautifully
+carved sceptre and apple, or fairer _dames d'atour_[191] than Chariton,
+and vessels and fire were quite thrown into the shade thereby.
+
+Now the happy couples--and the children too--went out into the joyful
+day, into the youthful garden, in order, like planets, with their moons,
+to stand now near each other, now far off, now in opposition, and now in
+conjunction, on their heavenly orbit around the same sun. "We will
+launch out at a venture," said Charles, in port, "and see whether we do
+not meet." Albano went with Liana after the children, who were already
+skipping along on the little houses through the rose-walks, on the
+bridge over the singing wood. He whose heart beats in such calm
+blissfulness, seeks in the invisible church no visible one: the whole
+temple of nature is the temple of love, and everywhere stand altars and
+pulpits. On the smoothly descending life-stream man stands without
+rudder, happy in his skiff, and leaves it to its own will.
+
+Then the children, mindful of the maternal prohibition against
+excursions, led the way up along the right, over the bridged eminence,
+to the western triumphal arch; and Helena, merely as guide of the little
+convalescent, ran forward quite unexpectedly and wildly with his hand.
+How gladly did Albano follow the little pilots and pointers! Heavens!
+when they looked round them on the magnificent height, and into the rich
+outspread day, and then into each other's eyes, how freely and broadly
+did the arches of their life-bridge rear themselves, and ships, with
+swollen sails and proudly towering masts, sail away beneath! Rose-trees
+clambered up the triumphal arches, the children reached up, snatched
+roses from their summits, and trudged away (working out and proving the
+unusual obedience) over four gates, in order, from the fifth, to look
+down into the smooth, shining lake, and to descend into the "enchanted
+wood," where art, like the children, played her pranks.
+
+Out of the entrance of the wood came forth Charles and Rabette, on their
+way back to Chariton over the arches, the former bound to the
+wine-cellar (he had something empty therefrom in his hand), and she
+intending to run a moment into the kitchen. He went blissfully, as if on
+wings, and said: "Life travels to-day in the constellation of the wain,
+far away through the blue." He turned round, however, to let the
+_Pleiades_ rise before them, that is, the so-called "inverted rain,"
+which ascends only for the space of five minutes, and properly only in
+an illumination. He led them all into the wondrous wood, through a light
+that lay in noonday slumber, glowing under free trees, whose stems,
+standing far asunder, only tendered each other their long twigs. At the
+focus of the picturesque paths, he let them await the play of the rain.
+The children sprang after him with their hopes, and, backed by the
+courage of the grown ones, sat down by them, on designated seats of the
+gods, or children's seats, between two little round lakes.
+
+While Charles ran swiftly up and down in zigzag, attending to the
+hydraulic and other mechanism,--nearly according to the points of the
+labyrinth-garden in Versailles,--they could fly about through the magic
+wood that rose everywhere. An all-powerful arm of the Rosana, which
+swept by without, struck in among the flowers, and bore a heavy, rich
+world; now the water was a fixed mirror, now a winding, beating vein,
+now a gushing spring, now a flash of lightning behind flowers, or a dark
+eye behind leafy veils; tapering shores, short beds, children's gardens,
+round islands, little hills, and tongues of land lay between: they held
+their motley, blooming children on arm and bosom, and the blue eyes of
+the forget-me-not, and the full tulip-cheeks, and the white-cheeked
+lilies played together like brothers and sisters apart from strangers,
+but roses ran through all. Now they heard a murmuring and purling; the
+lakes beside them bubbled up; on a peeled May-tree, fenced in on an
+island, the yellow fir-needles began to drop from above; from the
+hanging birches on the tongue of land, an inner rain dripped and glided
+down; out of the two lakes beside them water-jets flew like
+flying-fishes toward heaven. Now it gushed everywhere, and rows of
+fountains, those water-children, played with the flower-children. Like
+birds, streams fluttered with broad wings out of the laurel-hedges, and
+fell into the groups of roses. On a hill full of oaks, a water-snake
+crawled up; victoriously shot out from all the mouths of the shores
+besieging arches to the summits; suddenly the cheated spectators found
+themselves overhung with rainbows, for the lakes flung their waters high
+across over them, so that the wavering sun blazed through the
+lattice-work of drops, as through a shivered jewel-world. The children
+screamed with a terror of joy. The scared birds cruised through the
+shower; night butterflies were cast down; the turtle-doves shook
+themselves on the ground, beaten down in the torrents; the banks and the
+beds held their blooming little ones beneath the heavens.
+
+After five minutes the whole was over, and nothing remained, save that
+in all flowers and eyes the moist radiance trembled, and on the waves
+the stars continued to glisten. The children ran after the
+wonder-worker, Charles. "All is over outwardly," said Albano, "but not
+within us. I am to-day perfectly and peacefully happy; for thou lovest
+me, and the whole world, too, is friendly. Art thou, too, happy, Liana?"
+She answered, "Still more happy, and I must needs weep for joy if I told
+how happy I am." But she was weeping already. "See! drops!" said she,
+naively, as he looked upon her, and wiped _his_, which were the
+sprinklings of the rainbow, softly from his cheeks. His lips touched her
+holy, tender eye, but the other remained open, and her love looked out
+from it at him, and never did her holy soul hover nearer to him.
+
+After a few minutes this inverted heavenward shower was also over. They
+went across the middle of the free gardens to the eastern parts and
+gates. How brightly lay the coasts of the future before them, with
+thick, high green, and nightingales flying around the shores! Rapture
+makes the manly heart more womanly. The voice of his full bosom spoke
+but softly to Liana, on whose countenance, turned sidewise and
+heavenward, lay a still, pious gratitude; his fiery glance moved but
+slowly, and rested on the beautiful world; and he went without hasty
+strides around the smallest points of land. The young nightingale whet
+her well-fed bill against the twig, and shook herself merrily; the old
+one sang a short lullaby, and skipped chanting after fresh food; and
+everywhere flew and screamed across each other's paths the children of
+spring and their parents. Little white peacocks ran, without their
+pride, like little children in the grass. Blissfully floated the swan
+between her waves, with the white arch over the eyes that dipped under,
+and blissfully hovered the glistening music-fly, like a fixed star,
+undisturbed in the air, over a distant, flowery bell. The butterflies,
+flying flowers, and the flowers, fettered butterflies, sought and
+sheltered each other, and laid their variegated wings to wings; and the
+bees exchanged flowers only for blossoms, and the rose which has no
+thorns for them they exchanged only for the linden.
+
+"Liana," said Albano, "how I love the whole world to-day, on thy
+account! I could give the flowers a kiss, and press myself into the very
+heart of the full trees; I could not tread in the way of the long chafer
+down there." "Should one," she replied, "ever feel otherwise? How can a
+human being, I have often thought, who has a mother, and knows her love,
+so afflict and rend the heart of a brute mother? But Spener says, we do
+not forgive beasts even their virtues." "Let us go to him," said he.
+
+They came out through the eastern gate on the mountain-way behind the
+flute-dell, up to the house of old Spener, which lay in noonday
+brightness; but, as they heard loud reading and praying, they chose
+rather to walk by at a great distance, in order not to throw so much as
+their shadow into his holy heaven.
+
+They gazed into the fair, still flute-dell, and would fain go directly
+in; at length it spoke up to them with one flute. Their friends seemed
+to be down below there. The flute continued long to complain, as if
+lonely and forsaken; no sisters and no fountains murmured in with it. At
+last there rose, panting, in company with the flute, a timid, trembling
+singer's voice, struggling forth. It was Rabette, behind the tall
+bushes. She stirred both to the depths of the soul, because the poor
+creature, with the labor of her helpless voice, was rendering her loved
+one the meek sacrifice of obedience. "O my Albano," said Liana, twining
+around him with ecstasy, "what sweetness to think that my brother is
+happy, and has found peace of soul, and _that_ through thy sister!" "He
+deserves all my peace," said he, with emotion; "but we will not disturb
+the two, but go back the old way." For Rabette's tones were often cut
+short, but it was uncertain whether by fear, or by kisses, or by
+emotion.
+
+When they came in again through the eastern gate, the songstress and
+Charles came out of the green portal to meet them, both with wet eyes.
+Charles, stepping impetuously over living beds, and with wandering eyes,
+grasped a hand of both with his, and said, "This is, for once in this
+rainy world, a day which does not look like a night. Brother, but when
+one is so deeply blest, and catches the music of the spheres, the tones
+are such as were once heard in token that from Mark Antony his patron
+deity, Hercules, was departing." Thus are joys, like other jewels,
+mechanical poisons, which only in the distance shine, but, when touched
+and swallowed, eat into us. But Albano replied, smiling, "Since thou now
+fearest, dear friend, thou hast nothing to fear; for thou art not
+perfectly happy. I, however, alas! fear nothing." "Bravo!" said Charles;
+"now go into your kitchen, maiden!" He went into the so-called "Temple
+of Dreams," but soon hastened after her into the forbidden kitchen.
+
+Albano visited Liana's spring chamber. Here he painted to himself from
+memory that bright Sunday when Liana led him through Lilar, and he let
+the past soothingly glimmer into the present; but the latter overpowered
+the former with its beams. Out in the garden stood and shone, so it
+seemed to him, the pure pillars of his heaven, the supporters of his
+temple, the trees; and all that he here saw near him belonged again to
+his happiness, Liana's books and pictures and flowers, and every little
+mark of her tender hand.
+
+At last the saint of the Rotunda herself--suffused with a virgin blush
+at this nearness and at his blushing--stepped in, to take him away into
+the cool dining-room. It was small and dusky, but the heart needs not
+for its heaven much space nor many stars therein, if only the star of
+love has arisen. To the table-talk,--whereby alone an eating becomes a
+human one,--and to the jokes,--the finest _entremets_, the powdered
+sugar of conversation,--the children contributed their share, especially
+as they, unqualified to ascend from the forbidden _thou_ to _you_,
+always used thou-you at once. The deeply-red Chariton made extracts from
+Dian's letters and from the history of her life, and from the surgeon's
+bulletins in relation to Pollux's broken arm; she sought to extol the
+snow-balls, listened with a half-credulous, half-cunning look to the
+Captain, who spun out the sportive marriage-thou toward Rabette into
+five acts, and smiled with pleasure just where it was required.
+Especially did that music-barrel of all souls, Charles, spin joyously
+round; that Jupiter, around whom the eclipses of so many satellites were
+always flying, could show a great, serene splendor, when he and others
+wished. As often as Albano, according to the old way, would not come to
+his tragedy, he drew up the curtain of a comedy. To the good Rabette a
+word was as good as a look from him, although she only returned the
+latter, so as neither to fall into the _Thou_ nor into the _You_.
+Albano, knit with ears and eyes to one soul, could not produce with his
+lips much more than a smile of bliss; he could more easily have made a
+hymn than a _bon-mot_, a grace at meat than a dinner speech. For his
+Liana was to-day too affectionate, so contentedly and exhilaratingly did
+the sweet maiden look round with such hearty play, acting the chatty,
+bantering hostess, that a man who saw it and thought of her firm
+death-belief, would only have been so much the more deeply affected by
+this dance around the grave with flowers on the head, though he should
+remark--or rather for the very reason of his remarking--that she was
+here merely carrying on a joke with jocoseness itself for the
+sake--according to her new moral funeral arrangement--of sweetening for
+her beloved every parting-hour, as well the next as the last of all. But
+this was hard to perceive, because in female souls every show easily
+becomes reality, whether it be a sad or a gay one.
+
+How happy was her friend and every good being to think that the saint
+pronounced herself blest! And then she became, in turn, still more so.
+Thus does the radiance of joy dart to and fro between sympathizing
+hearts, as between two mirrors, in growing multiplication, and grows
+without end.
+
+
+72. CYCLE.
+
+The hour of departure came rolling on with swifter and swifter wheels;
+more constellations of joy went down than came up. Thus do the blooming
+vineyards of life always grow green on the ups and downs of a
+mountainous way, never on a smooth plain. The two lovers needed quiet
+now, not walks. They took the nearest, the path to the thunder-house.
+They stepped into the glimmering vesper-grounds as into a new land; at
+mid-day man is awakened from one dream after another, and has always
+forgotten and sees things always new. In Albano the golden splendor of
+the strings of joy still lingered under the declining sun; he told her
+gladly, how often he would visit her at her parents', and how he
+certainly hoped to find them friendly. Liana, as a daughter and a lover,
+retouched all his hopes with her own. But now she let her hitherto light
+heart, which had been rocking itself on the flowers of sport, sink back
+upon the solid ground of earnest.
+
+When there is peace and fulness in a man, he wishes not to enjoy
+anything else but himself; every motion, even of the body, jostles the
+full nectar-cup. They hastened out of the loud, lively garden into the
+still, dark thunder-house. But when, as if parted from the world, which
+lay out around the windows, brightly glistening and far receding, they
+stood alone together in the little twilight, and looked upon each
+other,--and when Albano's soul became like a sun-drunken mountain at
+evening, light, warm, firm, and fair, and Liana's soul like an
+up-gushing spring on the mountain, which glides away purely bright and
+cool and hidden, and only under the touch of the evening-beam glows in
+rosy redness,--and now that these souls had just found each other in the
+wide, unharmonious world,--then did a mighty joy thrill through them
+like a prayer, and they cast themselves upon each other's hearts, and
+glowed and wept and looked upon each other exaltedly in the
+embrace;--and, on the Æolian-harp, suddenly the folding doors of an
+inspired concert-hall flew open, and outswelling harmonies floated by,
+and suddenly again the gates shut to.
+
+They seated themselves at the breezy eastern window, before which the
+mountains of Blumenbühl and Lilar's hills and paths lay in the sunlight.
+Around them was evening shade, and all was still, and the Æolian-harp
+breathed low. They only looked at each other, and felt joy to their
+innermost being that they loved and possessed each other. How
+ecstatically did they look, from the protection of this citadel, down
+into the sounding, stirring world! Down below the wind blew the blaze of
+poppies and tulips far and wide, and in among the heavy, yellow harvest.
+The silver-poplars, wearing eternal May-snow, fluttered with uptossing
+splendor; a flock of pigeons went rustling away, and dipped into the
+blue; and overhead, amid flying clouds, stood those round temples of
+God, the mountains, in rows, beside each other, bearing alternate nights
+and days; and the pious father stood alone on his hill, and handed his
+roe tender branches.
+
+"Thus may we ever remain!" said Albano, and pressed her dear hand with
+both of his to his heart. "Here and hereafter!" said she. "Albano, how
+often have I wished thou wert at the same time my female friend, that I
+might speak with thee of thyself! Who on the earth knows how I esteem
+thee, except myself alone?" "Here and hereafter? Liana, I am happier
+than thou, for I alone believe in our _long_ life here," said he, all at
+once changed.
+
+Whatever, now, may have been the reason,--whether that man is not at all
+accustomed to be happy in a pure present, severed from all future and
+past, because his inner heaven, like the natural one, directly over his
+head and close to him, always looks dark-blue, and only round about the
+distant horizon radiant; or that there is a bliss so tender and
+unearthly as, like the moonshine, to be made too dark by every passing
+cloud, whereas a sturdy one, like daylight, can bear the broadest; or
+that Albano was too much like men who always in joy feel their powers so
+strongly that they would rather kick over the table of the gods than see
+a dish or a loaf of the heavenly bread less thereupon, rather be
+perfectly miserable than not perfectly happy;--suffice it, he could not
+and would not be guilty of longer fear and concealment.
+
+So, when Liana, instead of answering, only embraced him, and was silent,
+because she meant to remain the whole day true to her promise not to
+dash the festal tapestry of fair days with a shade of mourning-cloth,
+then, as if urged on by a strange spirit, he spoke out: "Thou answerest
+nothing? Only joys, not sorrows, shall I share? Thou hast not thy veil?
+Wilt thou spare _me_ as a weakling? and thee alone shall thy
+death-belief continue to oppress? Liana, I will have pangs, too, and all
+thine,--tell all!"
+
+"Truly, I only meant to keep my promise," said she, "and no more. But
+what then shall I say to thee, dear?"
+
+"Dost thou believe, then, that thou art certainly to die after a year,
+superstitious one?--heavenly one!" said he.
+
+"In so far as it is God's will, certainly," said she. "O my good Albano,
+how can I help my belief, much as it pains thee too?" And here she could
+no longer restrain her tears, and all the crucifixes of memory started
+up alive in the fair soul, and bled intensely.
+
+"God's will?" asked he. "Quite as well might he at this moment
+precipitate a winter as an iceberg, into this happy summer. God?" he
+repeated, looked up, knelt down, and prayed, "O thou all-loving God--But
+thou shalt not die to me!" He turned, as if in anger, towards her,
+incapable of continuing his prayer, for the cry of his heart, and wiping
+hastily with both hands over his moist face. Now he prayed on, with a
+soft, trembling voice: "No, thou all-loving One! kill not this fair,
+young life! Leave us together long in purity and in peace."
+
+She knelt involuntarily at his side;--to-day more exhausted with
+pleasures and unknown inner victories, even with long walking, so much
+the more intensely struck by a moving reality that she had been spoiled
+and softened by moving fancies, and inexpressibly afflicted at Albano's
+sorrow;--she could not speak; her head and neck bowed, as under a
+burden suddenly laid upon them; and thus, as one heavily overclouded by
+a whole life, she looked down upon the floor. The embracing death-flood
+sounded with one arm around her; then did she see, without looking up,
+her Caroline pass by somewhere in bridal dress, and with the white,
+gold-spangled veil trailing along far over life; and she saw clearly how
+the celestial shape, when Albano begged for her life, shook its head
+slowly to and fro. "Cease to pray!" she cried, inconsolably. "But listen
+to me, thou cold apparition, and only make _him_ happy!" she prayed, but
+she saw nothing more; and, with inexpressible love, she hid her face,
+marked all over with the lines of agony, upon his breast.
+
+Here her brother called up, that the carriage was ready. She threw down
+a quick, thin-voiced "Yes." "Must we part?" asked Albano; the fiery rain
+of ecstasy had now fallen back into his open soul, in the shape of a
+darker rain of ashes; and so he went on without any bounds to his
+anguish. "Then have we seen each other for the last time?" and under the
+closed eyelid his noble eye wept.
+
+"No! in the name of the All-gracious, no!" said she, and rose to go.
+"Stay!" said he, and she staid, and embraced him again. "But do not
+accompany me!" she entreated. "Not!" said he, and held her for some time
+as she withdrew, by the tips of the fingers; it pained him so much, when
+he saw the sufferings which had been brought upon this still form, that
+these white wings of innocence had beaten themselves bloody against his
+cliffs and mountain-horns. He drew her again to himself, ere he let her
+and his salvation go from him. He looked after her as she slowly stole
+down along the sunny mountain, drying her eyes under the twigs, and
+went with bowed head along all the gay, blooming paths of the forenoon's
+walk. But he gazed not after, when her carriage rolled away across the
+joyous wood; he stood at the eastern window, and saw his childhood's
+mountains tremble, because he had forgotten to dry his eyes.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[180] The Titan was originally divided into four volumes.--TR.
+
+[181] A musical term, meaning the compensation made by
+transferring to imperfect concords part of the beauty of the
+perfect ones.--TR.
+
+[182] Every partial development of course works well for the
+whole; but only for this reason, because its opposite partial one
+balances it in a higher equation and sum total, so that all
+individual men are only the limbs of a single giant, such as the
+Swedenborgian _man_ is. But in so far as, in one individual, a
+want arises which helps out an opposite one in another,--so that
+the road of humanity plagues and trips equally much by hills and
+by hollows,--it will be seen that every one-sided fulness is,
+only a cure of the times, not their health; and that the higher
+law is, after all, a culture slower in the individual, but still
+harmonious; less in amount, indeed, but impartial, and thereby,
+in the long run, even more rapid. We always forget that--as in
+mechanics power and time are mutual supplements--eternity is the
+infinite power.
+
+[183] According to Borreux, the engineer, literally only every
+thousandth shot from small-arms hits. So is it in all cases; fear
+death, and then there stand flower-pots ready to fall from
+chamber-windows, lightnings from the blue sky, air-guns going
+off, polypuses in the heart, mad dogs, robbers, every gash in the
+finger, _aqua toffana_, proud flesh, &c., in short, all
+nature--that ever-going, crushing cochineal-mill--stands with
+innumerable open scissors of fate round about thee, and thou hast
+no consolation, save this, that--nevertheless people grow eighty
+years old. Fear impoverishment: then fire, flood, famine, and
+war, banditti and revolutions, set upon thee with greedy claws
+and fangs; and yet, thou rich man! the poor man--creeping along
+under the same birds of prey--becomes at last as rich as thou.
+March, therefore, boldly through the slumbering lion-herd of
+dangers, lying on the right and left, and go up to the fountain,
+only do not wantonly wake them up; of course a hell-god drags
+down individuals who feared nothing; but so, too, does a higher
+God draw up individuals who expected nothing; and fear and hope
+are swallowed in one common night.
+
+[184] Titan, 13. Cycle.
+
+[185] At the court of King Olaus, the royal youth Olo, dressed as
+a peasant, offered himself as a champion of the daughter against
+robbers. Then did the fire of the eyes and nobleness of form tell
+as proof of a high descent; thus did Suanhita, for example,
+recognize King Regner in a herdsman's guise by the beauty of his
+eye and face. The king's daughter looked searchingly into Olo's
+flaming eye, and came near swooning; she essayed a second look,
+and was senseless; and at the third, swooned. The divine youth
+therefore cast his eyelids down but uncovered his brow and his
+golden hair and the signs of his rank. See "The German and his
+Native Land," by Rosenthal and Karg, Vol. I. pp. 166, 167.
+
+[186] For what we call light is only an intenser white. No one
+sees, by night, the luminous stream which rushes upward along by
+the earth, pouring from the sun upon the full moon.
+
+[187] This warmer, tenderer, more timid, ever-praised sex, living
+more in the opinion of others than in its own, is poisonously
+pierced by a reproach which only pricks _us_ so as to draw a
+little blood, as noxious beasts, in warm countries and months,
+poison, and in cold ones only wound. Therefore let the girls'
+schoolmaster consider that a dose which is satire upon the
+boy--who, besides, must withstand opinion--becomes a lampoon,
+when it lights upon his sister.
+
+[188] Poetic name for May.--TR.
+
+[189] In which were always enclosed letters from Liana to Albano.
+Let every one see here, by two examples, how on the harmonica of
+love a brother must stand in front as key-bank for the sister,
+who would reach the bells. There should, therefore, always be a
+couple of couples, diametrically connected in sisterhood and
+affection.
+
+[190] "Such a character," writes Hafenreffer in this connection,
+"were desirable for romancing Kotzebues, for they, as he always
+will, according to his nature, create and raise the dignity of
+the situation by the accidental place thereof, might, under the
+cloak of his personality, humor entirely their own and disguise
+the weakness of the poet under the weakness of the hero."
+Methinks this is, so far as a biographer of romancers can decide,
+very striking.
+
+[191] Tiring-women.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE SORROWS OF A DAUGHTER.
+
+
+73. CYCLE.
+
+Clouds like these last consisted with Albano less of falling drops than
+of settling dust. His life was yet a hothouse, and stood therefore
+toward the sunny side. Every day brought a new apology for the absent
+sweetheart, till at last she needed one no longer. But still he gave to
+every day its letter of indulgence for her silence; by and by they grew
+into letters of respite (moratories); finally, when she never let
+anything at all be heard or read from her; then he began to re-examine
+the afore-said apologies, and strike out many things therein.
+
+Quite as little could he find for himself, or for a note, a way of
+access to her. Even the Captain had been gone for some days on a journey
+to Haarhaar. With faint hands he held the heavy, drained cup of joy,
+which, when empty, weighs the heaviest. The wild hypotheses which man in
+such a case trots[192] through him--as in this, for instance, that of
+Liana's being sick, having caught cold, her imprisonment, absence on a
+journey--are, in their alternation and value, to be compared with
+nothing, except with the quite as great wildness and number of the
+plans which he enlists and dismisses,--that of abduction, of hate, of a
+duel, of despair.
+
+The terrible motionless time had no gnomon on its dial-plate. He stood
+as near his fate as man does to his dreams, without being able to
+recognize or prepare for its form, any more than one can for that which
+dreams will take. He went often into the city, through all whose streets
+there was riding, running, and driving, because they were about bringing
+and nailing together the beams for the grandest throne-scaffolding, on
+which the princely bride at her introductory compliment in the land,
+might look round the farthest; but he heard nothing there of his own
+bride, except that she quite often visited the picture-gallery with the
+Minister.
+
+Hereby two distressing hypotheses, that of her sickness, and that of her
+being at war with her family, seemed to lose their stings. The best,
+though the hardest thing was, to go straight to the Minister, as to
+Vesuvius, in order there to have the fairest prospect. He visited the
+Vesuvius. In fact this volcano was never more still and green. He asked
+after everything, and expressed himself upon much which immediately
+concerned the marriage festival; nor did he seek to conceal his hopes
+and wishes that the Count would help welcome the admirable bride.
+
+At last the latter, too, must venture to unfold _his_ hopes and wishes
+about the ladies. The Minister replied, with uncommon pleasantness, that
+the two had just carried back the "charming Mademoiselle von Wehrfritz"
+to Blumenbühl; and indulged himself forthwith in a eulogium of that
+"unsophisticated nature." Albano soon took his leave, but much happier
+than when he came. A few street-lamps[193] certainly were now burning on
+his path.
+
+But in the morning he fell into a little obscure alley, where there was
+not a single one; in other words, Rabette, the little reindeer, came
+running to Lilar, as she yesterday had to Pestitz,--for what is a race
+of a mile to a country-girl, else than a simple _Allemande_?[194]--and
+shook and shook her heart before him, even to its very ears, but nothing
+fell out of it except pleasant images, a few heavens, a complete
+wedding-day, a couple of parents-in-law, and a Captain's wife. "The
+Minister had been so courteous toward me, but--the mother afterward
+still more so toward my parents; and they have mentioned and praised the
+Captain so much,--in short, they of course know all, my glorious,
+heartily-loved brother!" said she,--but of Liana she had nothing to
+bring to her glorious brother, except a bill of her health; her joyous
+eye had not turned toward any dark region whatever. "We were not alone a
+minute, that is the reason of it," she added, and came again upon the
+subject of her Captain, whom the Minister had sent out on the Haarhaar
+road, as chief marshal of the escort of the Princess; yet she referred
+him to the illumination night in Lilar, when she and Liana, and the
+parents on both sides, had arranged to be there. Thou good creature! who
+is so cruel as to begrudge thee the glittering ring of joy, which thou
+contemplatest on thy brown and hard-boiled hand, and who does not fondly
+wish that its stones may never fall out?
+
+Soon after, the brother of the past festivals flew to the heart of the
+deserted one,--Charles. He repeated almost exactly Rabette's deposition,
+although not her rapture; he said,--but without special emotion,--that
+his father actually threw him the brotherly hand kiss through several
+rooms, distinguished and designated him quite particularly, and kindly
+made use of him for business purposes; and all this merely since he had
+become acquainted with his love for Rabette, and the silent assent of
+the parents; for with his father, though the heart was of no account,
+yet Rabette's fief was, especially as one could not trust, with all the
+romantic stock-jobbing of his heart, that he would not himself one day
+realize the poorest result.
+
+With a sighing breast, which would gladly have imparted more to an
+expecting one, Charles merely related that he had found Liana well and
+quiet, but not alone for one minute. The association of another's want
+with his own open, rich fortune was, so Albano believed, the fair,
+tender reason why Charles glided with such cool, fleeting pleasure over
+the parental benediction of his soul's bond. O, how he loved him at this
+moment! Could he have loved him ever so much more, he would have done
+it, though Liana had been actually lost to the sum of his happiness,
+merely to show himself and him that holy friendship wants no third heart
+in order to love a second.
+
+This cloud of silence lay fixed for weeks, and grew more and more dark
+around his fairest heights; and the guiltless one went round and round
+through the darkness in a circle of contradictions. How must this youth
+have harassed himself when he thought, as he soon did, that the parents
+would, in all probability, reject an alliance with him, as he, indeed,
+thought himself obliged rather to forget than to reciprocate their
+advances, and that they might sacrifice two hearts to political
+heartlessness; or when he let fall upon the innocent Liana the suspicion
+of giving way before parental assaults, which suspicion received
+reinforcement from the past through the conjecture that she had
+embraced him rather in poetical enthusiasm and from goodness, and more
+with wings than with arms, and that, in fact, accustomed to such long
+submissions, she could hardly distinguish sacrifices and inclinations,
+and might take one for the other; or when, as he soon and oftenest did,
+he turned the point of all these weapons against his own breast, and
+asked himself why he had such a firm confidence in friendship, and such
+a wavering one in love. Then this reproach led him to a second, upon
+every previous one, which he had cast upon the good soul merely for the
+sake, according to the proselyting system and reforming mania which men
+exercise more upon their wives than upon their friends, of melting her
+down for his own mould. This last he might rue; as Holberg[195] observes
+that men do not keep estates so well as women, because the former are
+always wanting to improve them more than the latter; on the same ground,
+also, lovers spoil women more than these do them.
+
+For the sake merely of getting more expeditiously from the tedious
+tribunal of the future his sentence of death, or a more agreeable
+document, he went again to the ministerial house. He was again smilingly
+received by the Minister, and seriously by the mother; and, in reply to
+his question, Liana was not quite well. He laid before old Schoppe (who
+now pressed his friendship upon him more warmly, and who, for some time
+near the dissecting-knife of the Doctor, had not studied any other heart
+than that which was to be spattered to pieces and prepared) a short
+question about the Doctor's visits at the Minister's. How was he
+astonished when he heard that no one out of the house any longer made
+any visits to it, (while Liana, quite blooming, went into all circles,)
+except merely the Lector, who made very frequent ones!
+
+He well comprehended that only the Medusa's-heads of the parents could
+turn the softest heart into stone against him; but even this he found
+not right. He boldly demanded that she should love him more than her
+parents, "not from egotism," said he to himself, "not on my account, but
+on her own." A lover wishes a great, indescribable love, of which he
+thinks himself always only the accidental and unworthy object, merely
+for the sake of tendering the highest himself.
+
+Even the silent Lector, who generally placed all newly rising lights
+behind light-shades and fire-screens, communicated unbidden to the Count
+the novel tidings that Liana would be, under the administration of the
+coming Princess, something--[196]maid of honor. His old jealous
+suspicion of Augusti's wishes or relations allowed him no answer to
+that.
+
+Now his spirit manned itself, and he wrote straight to the soul that
+belonged to him, and sent the letter to her brother for delivery. The
+latter came the next day, but seemed to him not to have any answer yet,
+because he would otherwise have given it with the first greeting.
+Charles introduced him to the Haarhaar court, where he had lately been;
+said every nerve there had on jack-boots, and every heart a
+hoop-petticoat; then went on to eulogize the youngest, but most
+unpopular Princess, _Idoine_; declared she possessed, in addition to all
+her other advantages,--for instance, purity, kindness, decision of
+character, which even on the throne selects for itself its own lot and
+life,--the further grace of amiableness, since even the princely bride,
+who loved no one else, hung upon her heart, and--last, not least--the
+advantage of a very deceptive similarity to Liana.
+
+"Has Liana received my letter yet?" asked Albano. Charles handed it back
+to him. "By Heaven!" said he, ardently, and yet ambiguously, "I could
+not get it to her just now. But, brother, canst thou believe, only for
+one minute, that she does not remain forever most thine?" "I do not
+believe anything at all!" said Albano, offended, and tore his leaf on
+the spot into little bits no bigger than the letters. "Only _we_ will,"
+he continued, with a tone of emotion, "remain, as we are, firm as iron,
+and flexible as iron when it comes out of the furnace." The deeply
+touched friend sought to console him with the following: "Only wait, I
+pray, the illumination evening;[197] then she will speak with thee. She
+must certainly appear, and thou wilt wonder in what character, and for
+whom." He nodded silently; he easily gathered her part from her
+resemblance to Idoine, and from her expected office at court. But what
+help was it to his fortune?
+
+With the return of his note, which he despatched against his pride, that
+same pride came back in renewed strength. Now was a hot seal stamped on
+Albano's bleeding lip; he had now nothing for and before him, except
+time, which was now his poison, and would by and by, as he hoped, be his
+antidote. Nothing was ever master over his sense of honor, when it was
+once roused. He could look forward to a scaffold on which blood spurted
+out, but he could not look upon a pillory where, under the heavy,
+poisonous, murderous pain of scorn and self-contempt, a downcast,
+distracted face hung on the sinful breast.
+
+Charles sometimes approached with a few lights the long night-like
+riddle; but Albano, however much he wished them, staggered him by
+opposition, and sought not even to hear him, much less to ask him
+questions. So he lay on hard, youthful, thorny rose-buds, which a single
+hour can open into tender roses. Victories beget victories, as defeats
+do defeats; he found now, if not a complete relief from the emotions
+which besieged him, nevertheless a mountain-fortification against them,
+provisioned for a little eternity, in the shape of an astronomical
+observatory. With an entire and firmly collected soul he threw himself
+upon theoretical astronomy, in order not to see daylight, and upon
+practical astronomy in order not to see night. The watch-tower stood
+indeed upon a mountain intermediate between the city and Blumenbühl, and
+commanded a view of both; but he cast his eyes only upon the
+constellations, not upon those rosy-red spots of the earth, where they
+now could have sucked out of the cold flower-cups only water instead of
+honey. Thus amid the festive preparations in Lilar did he go armed to
+meet the long delaying evening when the presence of the fairest soul
+should either bless or destroy him, vainly looking from time to time at
+the distant telegraph of his destiny, which was constantly moving,
+uncertain whether with peaceful or hostile significance.
+
+
+74. CYCLE.
+
+To remove the seals from the enrolled acts of the foregoing history for
+the purpose of looking into it,--or to push back the blinds and shove up
+the windows of the same,--or to uncover so many covered ways and
+vehicles,--or, in fine, the whole matter,--all that is mere
+metaphors,--and the most inappropriate ones, too,--which cannot serve
+any other purpose than only to hold off still longer and more tediously
+the long-expected solution, which they would fain describe; much rather
+and better, methinks, will the whole war and peace position in the
+ministerial palace be at once freely laid bare as follows:--
+
+Herr Von Froulay had, as has been already mentioned, come home from
+Haarhaar with a _Belle-vue_ in his face, and with a _mon-plaisir_ in his
+heart (provided these tropes do not seem more elaborate than exquisite).
+He told his lady openly, what had hitherto detained and enchanted him so
+long,--the future Princess, who had conceived for him a more than
+ordinary fancy. He threw a full, glorifying light on her enriched
+understanding,--he never praised anything beyond this in
+ladies,[198]--as well as a faint streak of shade upon his own _her's_;
+and pronounced himself fortunate in the possession of a person whose
+fine, persistent coquetry (he said) he for his part could recommend as a
+model, and whose attachment he, in fact, (that he pretended not to
+conceal,) reciprocated half-way, but only half-way, for it was perfectly
+true, what the Duke of Lauzun[199] asserted: in order to keep the love
+of Princesses, one must just hold them in right hard and short. In the
+old man accordingly there shoots up, as we see, quite late,--not unlike
+the case of fresh teeth,--which oftentimes old men do not cut till they
+are nonagenarians,--a lover's heart beneath the star; only it is more to
+be wished than hoped, he will especially play the ridiculous in the
+matter. For as he all the week long holds the helm of state, either on
+the rower's bench, to keep it in motion, or on the cabinet-maker's
+bench, to trim it down into a fine and light shape for the Prince; the
+consequence is, he is so tired when Saturday comes, that no Virgil and
+no tempest could persuade him--and though his feet had not more steps to
+take for the purpose than the number of feet in Virgil's hexameter, or
+of commandments in the Decalogue of Moses--to accompany a Dido out of
+the storm into the nearest cave. He does no such thing. He remains quite
+as free from sentimental and pathetic love as from sensual, especially
+as he apprehends that the former would in the end entangle him in the
+latter, because like a minor-tone it has quite a different returning
+scale from its ascending one. The ironical and stinging element in the
+man made every marriage--even that of souls--to him as well as to other
+world's people as disagreeable in the end as the spines of the hedgehogs
+make theirs. He lays up, therefore, in the future for the Princess only
+a cold, politic, coquettish, courtly love, such as she herself haply
+has, and such as he has occasion for, in order less to gain her than to
+gain from her, and to gain first of all the entire Prince. I promise
+myself cosmopolitan readers, who, I hope, find no offence to this
+personage in Froulay's partiality for his lady; for so soon as the
+court-preacher has but once laid his joining hand on the Princess, then
+has this house-steward made, as it were, the cut in the pea-hen,[200]
+and she can then be taken off untouched, and be feasted on in other
+places.
+
+I have already (in the second volume) intimated the anxiety of the
+Minister's lady lest the Minister, if he should (in this volume) come
+back and not find Liana at home, should chafe; but, contrary to
+expectation, he approved; her use of the country air-bath fell in
+exactly with his design of sending her into the vapor-bath of the court
+atmosphere. He told her mother that it by no means displeased him that
+she should now be entirely well, since the new Princess would select her
+for her maid of honor, whenever he should say the word. He could not for
+three minutes see a sceptre or a sceptrelet lying by him without proving
+its polarity for himself, and either attracting or repelling something
+with it. As the famous theologian, Spener,--a predecessor of our
+Spener,--prayed to God so beautifully thrice a day for his friends, one
+finds with similar pleasure that the courtier daily prays a little for
+his friends before his god, the Prince, and seeks to obtain something.
+
+The Minister's lady, never opposing his changeable plans in the sketch,
+but only in the execution, easily became reconciled with his latest one,
+because it at least seemed rather to stand in no auxiliary relation to
+the old one of the bethrothal to Bouverot.
+
+One evening, unfortunately, the fatal, anxious Lector--who pasted the
+smallest visiting-card to a Fulda's historic chart--arrived in her
+presence with his packet-ship, and came ashore having under his two arms
+the state and imperial advertisements of her two children; he had one of
+them under each; and yet why do I fly out upon the man? Could a
+double-romance, especially when played in the open air, remain better
+concealed than a single one?
+
+Her astonishment can be compared with the greater astonishment of her
+husband, who happened to have just been screwing on in the third chamber
+his tin ear,--made by Schropp of Magdeburg,--in order to listen to the
+servants, and who now caught a number of things. Nevertheless, the
+double-ear, with the broad meshes of its nocturnal lark-net, had only
+fished up from Augusti's low, whispering, courtly lips single, long,
+proper names,--such as Roquairol and Zesara. Hardly had the soft-spoken
+Lector gone out, when he stepped gayly into the chamber, with his ear in
+his hand, and demanded of her a report of the reports. He held
+it beneath his dignity either to patch up or disguise his
+suspicion,--which, even in the friendliest and gayest mood, would never
+shut its Argus ears and eyes,--or to dissemble his eavesdropping, with
+so much as a syllable or a blush of shame; the fair lilies of the most
+colorless impudence were not painted, but branded on him. The Minister's
+lady immediately seized upon the female expedient, of telling the
+truth--half-way; namely, the agreeable truth of Roquairol's
+well-received advances at the house of Wehrfritz, whose estate and
+provincial directorship had been cast into a very fitting shape for a
+father-in-law. Meanwhile the Minister had seen in his lady's face the
+mourning-border around this pleasant notification-document, far too
+clearly and broadly not to inquire about that prominent word "Zesara,"
+which his delicate tin searcher had also caught up, but he inquired in
+vain; for the mother held her good daughter too dear to set this wolf on
+the scent for her into her Eden; she hoped to get her out of it in a
+gentler way, by a divine voice and angels; and so evaded his question.
+
+But the wolf now ran farther on in his track; he got the gout in his
+stomach,--so it was reported to Dr. Sphex,--demanded of him speedy aid,
+and also some intelligence of his tenant, the Count. Doctor and Madam
+Sphex had already a grudge against the inflated youth; through their
+four juvenile envoys, as _enfans perdus_ in every sense, as four
+hearing-organs of every city rumor, much might be brought in on
+advice-yachts from Blumenbühl and Lilar. In short, the auricular organs
+fitted in so well to those of others, that Froulay, in a few days, was
+in a situation to ask, with his lily brow, the Greek woman for a letter
+to his son, which he offered to take along with him.
+
+He found one, which he broke open with great joy, without, however,
+finding anything therein from Albano's or Liana's hand, but only some
+stupid allusion of Rabette to that couple, which, to the Minister, were
+as much as if, with his sharp exciseman's-probes, he had bored into
+Liana's heart and lighted upon contraband there. Without any long,
+slavish copying of the former seal, he set a second upon the letter, and
+went away enlightened by it.
+
+We can all follow him, when we have detained ourselves only a few
+minutes for his justification, with my
+
+
+_Apology and Defence[201] in the Matter of the Second Seal upon Letters
+in State Affairs._
+
+Whether the examination of other people's letters pertains to old
+Froulay as minister or father,--(although the latter presupposes the
+former, the father of the country implying every other father and his
+own too,)--I will not decide, except by the parenthesis just inserted.
+The state which tackles on the post-horses before letters has, it
+should seem, the right to examine more narrowly, under the closed visor
+of the seal, these not so much _blind_ as blinding _passengers_,[202] in
+order to know whether it is not using its horses in the service of its
+enemies. The state, an ever-drawing light-magnet, means certainly only
+to have light in the case, and particularly light upon all light in
+general; it requires only the naked truth, without cover or covering.
+All that rides and fares through its gates must, though it were dressed
+in a surtout, just open its _red_ mouth, and say what name and business.
+
+As the common soldier must first show his letters to his officer, the
+garrison-soldier of the Bastile to the governor, the monk his to the
+prior, the American colonist his to the Dutchman,[203]--in order that he
+may burn them up, if they find fault with him,--so, surely, can no
+statesman, whether he regards the state as a barrack, or as an
+Engelsburg, or as a _monasterium duplex_, or as a _European possession
+in Europe_, deny it the right to keep all its letters as open as bills
+of lading, patents of nobility, bills of sale, and apostolic epistles
+are. The only mistake is, that it does not get hold of the letters
+before they are enveloped and sealed. That is immoral enough; for it
+necessitates the government to open and shut,--to draw the letter out of
+the case, and put it back again, as the cook with pains turns the snail
+out of his shell, and then, when he is once taken off from the fire,
+shoves him back again into it, to serve him up therein.
+
+This last is the point of the compass and cardinal wind which is to
+guide us onward; for universally acknowledged as it is, just as custom
+and observance are, that the government, on the same ground on which it
+opens the _last_ will, must have the power to unseal also the last but
+one, and the one before that, and finally the very first, before its
+heir can do it, and that a prince must be able still more readily to
+bring servants' letters into the same deciphering chancery (and into
+their antechamber, the unsealing chamber), wherein the letters of
+princes and legates fly open before the caper-spurge,[204] nevertheless
+the cork-drawing of letters,--the joint seal, the vicariate seal, the
+laborious imitation of the L. S., or _loco sigilli_,--all this is
+something very annoying and almost detestable; out of the wrong a right
+must therefore be made by constitutional repetition.
+
+Something of the kind might be brought about, I flatter myself, if it
+were commanded to write letters only on stamp-paper. An inspecting and
+stamping office appointed for that purpose would then read everything
+over beforehand.
+
+Or one might prohibit in future all private seals, just as they do
+mint-stamps for private coin. A seal-department would then interfere,
+with full rights, and seal up, as they now do the legacies of the
+deceased, so in that case those of the living.
+
+Or--which is perhaps preferable--an epistolary _censorship_ must
+commence. Unprinted newspapers, _nouvelles à la main_,[205]--that is,
+letters,--can never, inasmuch as they divulge still greater mysteries,
+demand a greater freedom of censorship than printed newspapers;
+especially as every letter, now-a-days, so easily becomes a circular,
+going everywhere. A catalogue of prohibited letters (_index
+expurgandarum_) would always be, in that case, a _word to
+correspondents_.
+
+Or let the postmasters be put under oath that they will be faithful
+referendaries of whatever they find weighty or considerable in the
+letters, which, before despatching, they have laid in the mental
+letter-balance, and closed again, with the hope, according to the
+Leibnitzian principle of the non-distinguishable seal, of speeding them
+far and wide.
+
+If the State finds all these ways of reading and closing letters new and
+difficult, then it may go on in its own way--of opening them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Froulay flew, laughing, to his lady, and assured her her falsehood
+towards him was no news to him at all. Her present plan, merely to work
+against Herr von Bouverot and himself, he understood full well. Hence it
+was that Rabette had had to come in, and the daughter to go out.
+Meanwhile he would show the hypocrite and bigot, or whoever it might be,
+that she had not merely a mother, but a father too. "She must
+immediately come home; _je la ferai damer,[206] mais sans vous et sans
+M. le Compte_," he concluded, with an allusion to the office of
+court-dame.
+
+But the Minister's lady began, in accordance with her vehement contempt
+of his projects and powers, with that coldness which would have more
+exasperated every ardent one than this cold one, to say to him that she
+must needs disapprove and oppose Liana's and the Count's love still more
+than he did; that she had merely, in an excessive and otherwise never
+disappointed confidence in Liana's openness of soul, believed her rather
+than herself, and, notwithstanding so many signs of Albano's partiality,
+let her go to Blumenbühl; that she would, however, give him her word on
+the spot to act with as much energy and spirit against the Count as
+against the German gentleman, and that she was, as surely as she knew
+Liana, almost certain of the easiest and happiest result.
+
+Of course this was unexpected to him and--incredible, especially after
+the previous concealment; only the finest man's soul distinguishes in
+the female the blending boundaries of self-deception and wilful
+delusion, weakness and deceit, accident and intent; besides, the
+Minister's lady was one of those women whom one must first love in order
+to know them, a case which is generally reversed. He readily accepted on
+the one hand the confession of her agreement and co-operation,--merely
+for the sake, hereafter, of turning it as a weapon against her;--but he
+could not conceal, on the other hand, that _there again_ (that was
+always his phrase) she had, according to her own confession, neglected
+to watch over her children from a want of jealousy. He retained the
+habit, when an open-hearted soul showed him its breaches, of marching in
+upon it through those breaches, as if he himself had made them. The
+penitent who knelt before him for forgiveness he would crush still
+lower, and instead of the key of absolution draw forth the hammer of the
+law.
+
+I owe it here to the Spaniards, who will one day become acquainted with
+me through miserable translations,[207] and to the Austrian knighthood
+of the Golden Fleece, who perhaps read the original in a counterfeit
+edition, to assign the reasons why the house of Froulay did not bespeak
+feasts of joy--instead of court-mourning--on the occasion of these
+advances by a son of their order, a Spanish Grandee, who often lays upon
+himself a German princely sceptre as a yardstick to measure himself
+withal. For every Spaniard must have hitherto wondered about this.
+
+I answer every nation. The Froulays had, in the first place, nothing
+against the union except the--certainty of separation; since on the same
+ground, which the Knights of the Fleece and the Spaniards have opposed
+to me, old Gaspard de Zesara can in no wise suffer a bridge to be thrown
+over from his Gothard to the Jungfrau [virgin]. Secondly, on this very
+ground the Minister could oppose to this romantic love a much older,
+wiser, which he bore toward the German gentleman and his moneys and
+_liaisons_, as well as the old grudge of the Knight of the Fleece.
+Thirdly, the Minister's lady had, beside these same grounds,--and
+besides several in favor of the Lector, perhaps,--one quite decisive
+one, and that was, she could not endure the Count; not merely and solely
+for the reason that she discovered a painful similarity between him and
+her son, and even husband, in pride, in excitability, in the
+characteristic fierceness of genius against poor married women, in want
+of religious humility and devoutness; but the principal reason why she
+could not well endure him was this: that she could not bear him. As the
+system of Predestination sentences some men to hell, whether they
+afterward deserve heaven or not, so a woman never takes back an enmity
+to which she has once doomed any one, all that country and city, God,
+time, and the individual's virtues may say to the contrary,
+notwithstanding.
+
+In the treaty of peace, concluding the usual chamber-war, the following
+private articles were adjusted between the married couple: The Count
+must be, on the Father's and Director's account, treated with the most
+courtly consideration, and shoved aside,--and Liana gently and gradually
+drawn away from Wehrfritz's house,--the whole dissolution of the
+engagement must seem to happen of itself without parental interference,
+merely through the breaking off of the daughter,--and the whole affair
+remain a mystery. Froulay hoped to keep the whole interlude or episode
+concealed from Liana's earlier-intended, the German gentleman,
+particularly as he, just now, in August, was more at the card-tables of
+the baths than at home.
+
+So it stood; and into this cold, awful pass the friendly Liana moved on,
+when on that warm living Sunday she left the blessed, open Lilar.
+Refined and sanctified by joy,--for every Paradise was to her a
+purifying Purgatory,--she came nobly to her mother's bosom, without
+remarking the strange seriousness of the reception by reason of the
+earnest warmth of her own. Her easy confession of the garden-company
+opened the trying scene,--almost in the _coulisse_. For the mother, who
+would fain have begun otherwise, had to mount the thunder-car at once,
+in order to thunder and lighten against such incomprehensible
+forgetfulness of female propriety; and yet she held in the
+thunder-steeds in mid-career, in order to enjoin upon Liana immediately,
+as the Minister might come any moment, a perfect silence on the subject
+of to-day's garden-party. Now she cast the deepest strengthening shade
+upon her previous mute falsehood towards a mother; for she arbitrarily
+transposed in her story the sowing and blossoming time of this love,
+even into the days preceding the journey to the country. How did the
+warm soul shudder at the possibility of such an unkindness! She led her
+mother as far as she could up along the pure, light pearl-brook of her
+history and love, and told all that we know, but without giving much
+satisfaction, because she left out precisely the main point; for, out of
+forbearance toward her mother, she felt obliged to let the apparition of
+Caroline, who in the beginning had been the image-stormer of her love
+and then its inspiring muse and bride's-maid, together with the
+death-certificate of the future, remain out of sight in the narration.
+
+She held, with fervent pressure, her mother's hand amidst more and more
+cheerful assurances, how she had always been disposed to tell her
+everything; she thought hopingly, she needed to save nothing but her
+_open_ heart. O thou hast more to save, thy warm, thy whole and living
+heart! Her mother now, from old habit, half believing her, found fault
+with nothing more than the whole affair, its impropriety, impossibility,
+folly. "O good mother," said Liana, simply remaining tender under the
+harsh picturing of the future Albano; "O he is not such, assuredly not!"
+Quite as tenderly did she far overlook the darkly-sketched future
+refusal of Don Gaspard, because to her faith the earth was only a
+blooming grave-mound hanging in the ether. "Ah!" said she, meaning how
+little time she was for this world, "our love is not so important!" Her
+mother took this word and the whole gentleness of her resistance, as
+preludes of an easy victory.
+
+At this moment Albano's father-in-law came in with a kettle-drum,
+alarm-bell, fire-drum, and rattlesnake, in his girdle, in order
+therewith to make himself audible. First he inquired,--for he had been
+listening in vain,--in a very exasperated manner, of the Minister's
+lady, where she had stowed away his ear (it was the tin duplicate ear,
+wherein, as in a Venetian lion's-head, all mysteries and accusations of
+the whole service and family met); he said, he had a little occasion for
+it just now, particularly since the newest "adventures of his worthy
+daughter there." The Siamese physicians begin the healing of a patient
+with treading upon him, which they call softening. In a similar manner
+Froulay loved to soften, by way of moral pre-cure; and accordingly
+began, with the above-mentioned speaking-machines in his girdle, to
+declare his sentiments explicitly on the subject of degenerate children;
+upon their arts and artifices; and upon intrigues behind fathers' backs
+(so that no father can accompany a volume of love-poems with a prose
+preface); backed up many points with the strongest political grounds,
+which all had reference to himself and his interest, and wound up with a
+little cursing.
+
+Liana heard him calmly, as one already accustomed to such daily
+returning equinoctial storm-bursts, without any other emotion, except
+that she often raised her downcast eye pityingly upon him, out of tender
+sympathy for the paternal dissatisfaction. In a calm he became loudest.
+"You will see to it, madam," said he, "that to-morrow forenoon she sends
+the Count what she has of his, together with a farewell, and notifies
+him of her new office, as an easy excuse; thou art to be court-dame to
+the reigning Princess, although thou didst not deserve that I should
+labor for thee!"
+
+"That is hard!" cried Liana, with breaking heart, falling upon her
+mother. He supposed she meant the separation from Albano, not from her
+mother, and asked, angrily: "Why?" "Father, I would so gladly," said
+she, and turned only her face away from the embrace, "die near my
+mother!" He laughed; but the Minister's lady herself shut to the
+hell-gates upon the flames which he still would fain have vomited forth,
+and assured him it was enough, Liana would certainly obey her parents,
+and she herself would be surety for it. The preacher of the law came
+down his pulpit-stairs with an audible ejaculation about a better
+security, calling back, as he went, that his ear must be produced
+to-morrow, and though he should have to search for it in all chests and
+cupboards.
+
+The mother kept silence now, and let her daughter softly weep on her
+neck; to both, after this drought of the soul, the draught of love was
+refreshment and medicine. They came out of each other's arms with
+cheered spirits, but both with entirely delusive hopes.
+
+
+75. CYCLE.
+
+A hard, black morning; only the outward atmospheric morning was
+dark-blue; there was nothing loud and stormy, except perchance the
+swarms of bees in the linden-thicket; the heaven's ether seemed to
+flutter away high over the stony streets, so as to settle down low in
+the bright open Lilar upon all hill-tops and tree-tops, and, blue as
+peacock's plumage, to play its hues over the twigs.
+
+Liana found on her writing-table a billet, folded in large quarto,
+wherein the Minister, ever-working, like a heart, sought even at this
+early hour of the morning, before raising out of the public documents
+for the several administration and exchequer counsellors the transient
+tempests which were necessary to fruitfulness, to descend upon his
+shuddering daughter with a cold morning rain-gust. In the decretal
+letter referred to, he developed more in detail, upon a sheet and a half
+what he had meant yesterday,--separation on the spot; and offered six
+grounds of separation,--first, his uncongenial relation with the Knight
+of the Fleece; secondly, her own and the Count's youth; thirdly, the
+approaching place of court-dame; fourthly, that she was his daughter,
+and this the first sacrifice to which he, her father, for all his
+previous ones, had ever laid claim; fifthly, she might perceive, by his
+indulgent "Yes," to the love of her brother, whose apparent improvement
+he held out to her as a model, that he lived and cared only for the
+welfare of his children; sixthly, he would send her to Fort * * * to his
+brother, the commandant, in case she were refractory, by way of exiling,
+punishing, and bringing her round; and neither weeping, nor falling at
+feet, nor mother, nor hell should bend him; and he gave her three days'
+time for reflection.
+
+Mutely, and with wet eyes, she handed to her who had been hitherto her
+comforter the heavy sheet. But the comforter had become a judge: "What
+wilt thou do?" said the Minister's lady. "I will suffer," said Liana,
+"in order that _he_ may not suffer; how could I so sorely sin against
+him?" The mother, whether actually under the old notion of her easy
+conversion, or from dissimulation, took that "He" for the father, and
+asked: "Say'st thou nothing of me?" Liana blushed at the substitution,
+and said: "Ah! poor me, I will not indeed be happy,--only true!" How had
+she during this night prayingly lived and wept amidst the fearful wars
+of all her inner angels! A love so guiltless, consecrated by her holy
+friend in heaven,--a fidelity so exceedingly abridged by early death;
+so sound-hearted a youth, shooting up with high, fruit-bearing summit
+heavenward, whom not even ghostly voices could scare or allure out of
+his faithful childhood's love toward her, insignificant one; the
+everlasting discomfort and grief which he would experience at the first,
+greatest lie against his heart; her short, straight path through life,
+and the nearness of that cross-way, at which she should wish to throw
+back,--not stones, but flowers upon the other pilgrims;--all these forms
+took her by _one_ hand to draw her away from her mother, who called
+after her with the words: "See how ungratefully thou art going from me,
+and I have so long suffered and toiled for thee!" Then came Liana back
+again out of the dusky, warm rose-vale of love into the dry, flat
+earth-surface of a life, wherein nothing breaks the monotony save her
+last mound. O how imploringly did she look up to the stars, to see
+whether they did not move as the eyes of her Caroline, and tell her
+_how_ she must sacrifice herself, whether for her lover or for her
+parents; but the stars stood friendly, cold, and still in the steadfast
+heavens.
+
+But, when the morning sun again beamed upon her heart, it beat
+hopefully, newly strengthened with the resolution to endure this day for
+Albano full many sorrows,--ah yes, even the first. Could Caroline,
+thought she, approve a love to which I must be untrue?
+
+Hardly had she left the lips of her mother with the morning greeting,
+when the latter sought, but more earnestly than yesterday, to draw up
+the roots of this steadfast heart out of its strange soil by a longer
+use of yesterday's flower-extractor. In her comparative anatomy of
+Albano and Roquairol, from the similarity of voice even to that of
+stature, she grew more and more cutting, till Liana, with a maiden's
+wit, at once asked, "But why may my brother, then, love Rabette?"
+"_Quelle comparaison!_" said the mother. "Art thou nothing better than
+she?" "She _does_, strictly speaking, much more than I," said she, quite
+candidly. "Didst thou never quarrel with the wild Zesara?" asked the
+mother. "Never, except when I was in the wrong," said she, innocently.
+
+The mother was alarmed to perceive more and more clearly that she had to
+pull up deeper and stronger roots than light flowers strike into the
+soil. She concentrated all her maternal powers of attraction and
+lifting-machines upon one point, for the upturning of the still green
+myrtle. She disclosed to her the Minister's dark plan of an alliance
+with the German gentleman, her hitherto concealed strifes and sighs on
+the subject, her thus far effectual resistance, and the latest paternal
+stratagem, to make her a garrison-prisoner with his brother, and thereby
+probably Herr von Bouverot a besieger of the citadel.
+
+For some readers and relicts of the heavy, old-fashioned, golden age of
+morality, the remark is here introduced and printed, that a peculiar,
+cold, unsparing, often shocking and provoking, candor of remark upon the
+nearest relatives and the tenderest relations is so very much at home in
+the higher ranks, that even the fairer souls, among whom, surely, this
+mother belongs, cannot, absolutely, understand or do otherwise.
+
+"O thou best mother!" cried Liana, agitated, but not by the thought of
+the rattle and the snaky breath of Bouverot, or of his murderous spring
+at her heart,--she thought with as much indifference of being betrothed
+to him as any innocent one does of his dying on a scaffold,--but by the
+thought of the long building over and crowding out of sight of the
+motherly tears, the streams of motherly love, which had hitherto flowed
+nourishingly deep down under her flowers. She threw herself gratefully
+between those helpful arms. They closed not around her, because the
+Minister's lady was not to be made weak and soft by any washing wave and
+surge of sudden emotion.
+
+Into this embrace the Minister struck or stepped in. "So!" said he,
+hastily. "My ear, madam," he continued, "cannot be found again at all
+among the domestics; I have that to tell you." For he had to-day posted
+himself upon a law-giving Sinai, and thundered into the ears of the
+service assembled at its foot the inquiry after his own ear, "because I
+must believe," he had said to them, "that you, for very good reasons,
+have stolen it from me." Then he had swept like a hail-storm, or a
+kitchen-smoke in windy weather, through the servants' apartments and
+corners, one by one, in quest of his ear. "And thou?" said he, in a
+half-friendly tone to Liana. She kissed his hand, which he, as the Pope
+does his foot, always despatched for kisses, as proxy and lip-bearer,
+agent, and _de latere nuncio_ of his mouth.
+
+"She continues disobedient," said the severe lady. "Then she is a little
+like you," said he, because the mistrustful one looked upon the embrace
+as a conspiracy against him and his Bouverot. Upon this, his ice-Hecla
+burst out, and flamed and flowed, now upon daughter, now upon wife. The
+former was absolutely a miserable creature, he said; and only the
+Captain was worth anything, whom he luckily had educated by himself
+alone. He saw through all, heard all, though they had hid away his
+ear-trumpet. There was, accordingly, as he saw, (he pointed to his
+unsealed morning-psalm,[208]) a communication between the two colleges;
+but he invoked God to punish him if he did not--"my dear daughter, pray
+answer at last!" he begged.
+
+"My father," said Liana, who, since the fraternization of Bouverot and
+the ill treatment from her mother, had begun to feel her heart wake up,
+which, however, could only despise and never hate, "my mother has to-day
+and yesterday told me all; but I have surely duties towards the Count!"
+A bolder liveliness than her parents had ever missed or found in her
+beamed under her upraised eye. "Ah, I will truly remain faithful to him
+just as long as I live," said she. "_C'est bien peu_," replied the
+Minister, astounded at such pertness.
+
+Liana listened now, for the first time, after the word which had escaped
+her; then, in order to justify the past and her mother, she conceived
+the pleasant and ridiculous purpose, of moving and converting the old
+gentleman by her ghost-visions or dream-seeings. She begged of him a
+solitary interview, and afterward--when it was reluctantly
+granted--intreated him therein for his sacred promise to be silent
+towards her mother, because she feared to show to that loving one the
+clock-wheels of her death-bell rattling so near to the fatal stroke. The
+old gentleman could only, with a comic expression,--which made him look
+like one who with a bad cold wants to laugh,--vow that he would keep his
+word so far as was necessary, because never, so far as he could
+recollect, had his word been kept by him, only he had been often kept by
+his word. In such men, word and deed are like theatrical thunder and
+lightning, which, though generally occurring in close connection, and
+simultaneously in heaven, on the stage break forth out of separate
+corners, and by means of different operators. But Liana would not rest
+till he had put on a word-keeping, sincere face,--a painted window.
+Thereupon she began, after a kissing of the hand,[209] her ghostly
+history.
+
+With unbroken seriousness, and firmly contracted muscles, he heard the
+extraordinary narration through; then, without saying a word, he took
+her by the hand and led her back into the presence of her mother, to
+whom he handed her over with a long psalm of praise and thanksgiving
+about her successful daughter's-school. "His boy's-school with Charles
+had not been blessed to him, at least in this degree," he added. As a
+proof, he frankly communicated to her--cold-bloodedly working up all
+Liana's pangs, as the coopers do cypress-branches into cask-hoops--the
+little which he had promised to bury in silence, because he always
+prostituted either himself or the other party, generally both. Liana sat
+there, deeply red, and growing hotter and hotter, with downcast eyes,
+and begged God to preserve her filial love towards her father.
+
+No sympathizing eye shall be further pained with the opening of a new
+scene, when the ice of his irony broke, and became a raging stream, into
+which flowed tears of maternal indignation, also, at the thought of a
+precious being, and her feverish, fatal, dreaming of herself away into
+the last sleep. The object and the danger almost united the married
+couple for the second time; when there is a glazed frost, people go very
+much arm in arm. "Thou hast sent nothing to Lilar?" asked the father.
+"Without your permission I certainly should not do it," said she; but
+she meant her letters, not Albano's. He took advantage of the
+misunderstanding, and said, "Thou hast, however, surely." "I will gladly
+do, and let be done everything," said she, "but only on condition the
+Count consents, in order that I may not appear to him disingenuous; he
+has my sacred word for my truth!" At this mild firmness, at this Peter's
+rock overgrown with tender flowers, the father stumbled the hardest. In
+addition to this, the transition of a haughty lover from his own wishes
+to those of his enemies, supposing they had allowed Liana the question
+to the Count, was so impossible on the one hand, and the solicitation of
+this change, whether it were granted or refused, absolutely so degrading
+on the other, that the astounded Minister's lady felt her pride rise,
+and asked again, "Is this thy last word to us, Liana?" And when Liana,
+weeping, answered, "I cannot help it; God be gracious to me!" she turned
+away indignantly toward the Minister, and said: "Do now what you take to
+be _convenable_; I wash my hands in innocence!" "Not so entirely, _ma
+chère_; but very well!" said he, "thou wilt stay after to-morrow in thy
+chamber, till thou hast corrected thyself, and art more worthy of our
+presence!" he announced, as he went out, to Liana; firing at her
+meanwhile two eye-volleys, wherein, according to my estimate, far more
+reverberating fires, tormenting ghosts, eating, devouring medicaments,
+brain and heart-borers, were promised, than a man can generally hold to
+give or bear to receive.
+
+Poor maiden! Thy last August is very hard, and no harvest-month day!
+Thou lookest out into the time, where thy little coffin stands, on which
+a cruel angel wipes away the still fresh flower-pieces of love running
+round it, in order that it may, all white, as rosy-white as thy soul or
+thy last form, be consigned to the grave!
+
+This banishment by her mother into the desert of her cloister-chamber
+was quite as frightful to her, only not more frightful than her anger,
+which she had to-day, only for the third time, experienced, though not
+deserved. It was to her as if now, after the warm sun had gone down, the
+bright evening glow had also sunk below the horizon, and it grew dark
+and cold in the world. She remained this whole day, which was yet
+allowed her, with her mother; gave, however, only answers, looked
+friendly, did everything cheerfully and readily, and--as she quickly
+dashed away, with her tiny finger, every gathering dew-drop out of the
+corner of her eyes, as if it were dust, because she thought, at night I
+can weep enough,--she had very dry eyes; and all that, in order not to
+be an additional burden to her oppressed mother. But she, as mothers so
+easily do, confounded a timid, loving stillness with the dawning of
+obduracy; and when Liana, with the innocent design of consolation,
+wished to have Caroline's picture brought for her from Lilar, this
+innocence also passed for hardness, and was punished and reciprocated
+with a corresponding on the part of the parent, namely, with the
+permission to send. Only the Minister's lady demanded the French prayers
+of her again, as if she were not worthy to lay them under her present
+heart. Never are human beings smaller than when they want to plague and
+punish without knowing _how_.
+
+As every one who rules, whether he sits on a chair of instruction or a
+princely one, or, like parents, on both, when the occupant of its
+footstool once leaves off his former obedience, imputes that obedience
+to him, not as a mitigation, but as an aggravation of his offence, so
+did the Minister's lady also toward her hitherto so uniformly docile
+child. She hated her pure love, which burned like ether, without ashes,
+smoke, or coal, so much the more, and held it to be either the author
+or the victim of an incendiary fire, particularly as her own married
+love hitherto had seldom been anything more than a showy chimney-piece.
+
+Liana at last, too heavily constrained, since on the other side of the
+wall-tapestry the serene day, the loveliest sky was blooming, ascended
+to the Italian roof. She saw how people were travelling and riding back
+contentedly from their little places of pleasure, because the earth was
+one; on Lilar's bushy path the walkers were sauntering with a blissful
+slowness home,--in the streets there was a loud carpentering at the
+festive scaffoldings and Charles's-wains for the princely bride, and the
+finished wheels were rolled along for trial,--and everywhere were heard
+the drillings of the young music, which when grown up was to go before
+her. But when Liana looked upon herself, and saw her life alone standing
+here in dark raiment,--over yonder the empty house of her loved one,
+here her own, which to her had also become empty,--this very spot, which
+still reminded her of a lovelier, rarer blossoming than that of the
+_Cereus serpens_,--and oh! this cold solitude, in which her heart
+to-day, for the first time, lived without a heart; for her brother, the
+chorister of her short song of gladness, had been sent off, and Julienne
+had for some time been incomprehensibly invisible to her,--no, she could
+not see the fair sun go down, who, so serene and white, was sinking to
+slumber with his high evening star,--or listen to the happy evening
+chorus of the long day, but left the shining eminence. O how does joy
+die a stranger in the untenanted, dark bosom, when she finds no sister
+and becomes a spectre there! Thus does the beautiful green, that spring
+color, when a cloud paints it, betoken nothing but long moisture.
+
+When she entered, soon, the asylum of day, the bedchamber, the heavens
+without flashed heat-lightning; O why just now, cruel fate?--But here,
+before the still-life of night, when life, covered with her veil, sounds
+more faintly,--here may all her tears, which a heavy day has been
+pressing,[210] gush forth freely. On the pillow, as if it bore the last,
+long sleep, rests this exhausted head more softly than on the bosom
+which reproachfully reckons up against it its tears; and it weeps
+softly, not _upon_, only _for_ loved ones.
+
+According to her custom, she was on the point of opening her mother's
+prayers, when she recollected, with a startled feeling, that they had
+been taken from her. Then she looked up with burning tears to God, and
+prepared alone out of her broken heart a prayer to him, and only angels
+counted the words and the tears.
+
+
+76. CYCLE.
+
+The father had made this chamber-imprisonment a punitory mark of her
+refusal. With deep anguish she uttered this mute no, in the very fact
+that she voluntarily stayed in the chamber, and denied her mother the
+morning kiss. She had, in the course of the night, cast many an ardent
+look at the dead image of her counsellor Caroline, but no original, no
+fever-created form had appeared to her. Can I longer doubt, she inferred
+from this, that the divine apparition, which has spoken the assenting
+word to my love, was something higher than my own creation, since I must
+otherwise have been able to form it again over against her picture?
+
+She had Albano's blooming letters in her desk, and opened it, in order
+to look over from her island into the remote orient land of warmer
+times; but she shut it to again; she was ashamed to be secretly happy,
+while her mother was sorrowful, who into these melancholy days had not
+even come, like her, out of pleasant ones.
+
+Froulay did not long leave her alone, but soon sent for her; not,
+however, to sound her or pronounce her free, but for the purpose--which,
+as may well be conceived, required an unvarnished brow and cheek, whose
+fibrous network was as hard to be colored as his with the Turkish red of
+shame--of appointing her his mistress in artistic language, and taking
+her with him to the Prince's gallery, in order to learn from her the
+explanation of these frontispieces (for such they were to him) in this
+private deaf-and-dumb institution so well that he might be in a
+condition, so soon as the Princess should come to inspect it, to
+represent something better than a mute before the beauties of the
+pictures and the image-worshipping Regentess. Liana had to transfer an
+impression of every pictured limb, with the praise or blame appertaining
+thereunto, over into his serious brain, together with the name of the
+master. How delightedly and completely did she give this kallipædeia to
+her growling old cornute,[211] and would-be _connoisseur_ in painting,
+who paid her not a single thankful look as instruction-money!
+
+At noon, for the first time, did the daughter find her longed-for
+mother, among the kitchen-servants, very serious and sad. She ventured
+not to kiss her mouth, but only her hand, and opened upon her her
+love-streaming eyes only timidly and a little. Dinner seemed a
+funeral-feast. Only the old gentleman, who on a battle-field would have
+danced his marriage-minuet, and celebrated his birthday, was in good
+spirits and appetite, and full of salt. In case of a family jar, he
+usually ate _en famille_, and found in biting table-speeches, as common
+people do in winter and in famine, a sharper zest for food. Quarrelling,
+of itself, strengthens and animates, as physicians can electrify
+themselves merely by whipping something.[212]
+
+Laughable, and yet lamentable, was it that poor Liana, who was all day
+long to keep a prison, was always called out of it just for
+to-day,--this time into the carriage again, which was to set down the
+sad heart and the smiling face before nothing but bright palaces. She
+had to go with her parents to the Princess, and look as happy as they,
+who, on the melancholy road, regarded her as if she were to be envied.
+So does the heart which has been born not far from the throne never
+bleed, except behind the curtain, and never laugh but when it rises;
+just as these same distinguished ones were formerly executed only in
+secret. The Prince, who was ridiculously loud on the subject of his
+marriage; Bouverot, just returned from card-tables or privateering
+planks, whom Liana now, since the latest intelligences, could only
+endure with a shudder; and the Princess herself; who excused her
+previous absence from her on account of the distraction of preparing for
+the festival, and who very strangely jested at once about love and
+men,--only to a Liana who guessed so little, suffered so much, and
+endured so willingly, could all these beings and incidents seem anything
+but the most intolerable.
+
+Ah, what was intolerable, but the iron unchangeableness of these
+connections, the fixedness of such an eternal mountain-snow? Not the
+greatness, but the indefiniteness, of pain; not the minotaur of the
+labyrinth, its cellar-frost, sharp-cornered rocks, and vaults, make the
+breast contract and the blood curdle therein, but the long night and
+winding of its egress. Even under bodily maladies, therefore, unwonted
+new ones, whose last moment stretches away beyond our power of
+prediction, appear to us more ominous and oppressive than recurring
+ones, which, as neighboring frontier-enemies, are ever attacking us, and
+find us in arms.
+
+Thus stood the dumb Liana in a cloud, when the exulting Rabette, with a
+bosom full of old joys and new hope, came running into the house,--that
+sister of the holy youth who had been torn away from her, that
+confederate of such glorious days. She was honorably received, and
+constantly attended by a guard of honor,--the Minister's lady,--because
+she might, indeed, as likely be an ambassadress of the Count as an
+electress of her son. The cunning girl sought to snatch some solitary
+moments with Liana by boldly begging for her company to Blumenbühl. The
+company was granted, and even that of the mother freely offered, into
+the bargain. Liana led the way to Blumenbühl over the still-blooming
+churchyard of buried days. What a torrent of tears struggled upward in
+her breast when she parted from the still happy Rabette! _She_ had
+innocently left to the house one of the greatest apples of discord for
+the evening meal which the Minister had ever plucked for his fruit-dish
+with his apple-gatherer. Therefore he supped again _en famille_. That is
+to say, a silly word had escaped Rabette about the Sunday's meeting at
+Lilar. "Of that," said Froulay, in a very friendly manner, "thou hast
+not made one word of remark, daughter." "I did to my mother
+immediately," she replied, too fast. "I should be glad, too, to take an
+interest in thy amusements," said he, saving up his fury. In the
+pleasantest mood imaginable did this raftsman of so many tears and
+hewn-down blossoming branches, which he let float down thereupon, take
+his seat at the supper-table. He first asked servants and family for his
+auxiliary ear. Thereupon he passed over to the French, although the
+plate-exchangers found a rough translation thereof for themselves, a
+_versio interlinearis_, on his face, by way of giving notice that the
+distinguished Count had been there, and had inquired after mother and
+daughter. "With good right he asked for you both," continued the moral
+glacier, who loved to cool his warm food. "You are conspired, as I heard
+again to-day, to keep silence towards me; but why, then, shall I still
+trust you?" He hated from his heart every lie which he did not utter
+himself; so he seriously regarded himself as moral, disinterested, and
+gentle, merely for this reason, that he inexorably insisted upon all
+this in the case of others. With an abundant supply of the stinging
+nettles of persiflage,--the botanical ones also come forward best in
+cold and stony soil,--he covered over all his opening and closing
+lobster-claws, as we keep brook-crabs in nettles, and took first his
+tender child between the claws. Her soft, submissive smile he took for
+contempt and wickedness. How comes this soft one intelligibly by his
+paternal name, unless one assumes the old hypothesis, that children are
+usually most like that for which the pregnant mother vainly longed,
+which in this case was a soft spouse? Then he assailed, but more
+vehemently, the mother, in order by his mistrust to set her at variance
+with his daughter; yes, in order, perhaps, to torment the latter, by
+means of her mother's sufferings, into childlike sacrifices and
+resolutions. He very freely declared himself--for the egotist finds the
+most egotists, as love and Liana find only love, and no
+self-love--against the egotism around and beside him, and concealed not
+how very cordially he cursed them both for female egotists (as the old
+heathen did the Christians for atheists). The Minister's lady,
+accustomed to live with the Minister in no wedlock so little as in that
+of souls,--as Voltaire defines friendship,--said merely to Liana, "For
+whom do I suffer so?" "Ah, I know," she answered, meekly. And so he
+dismissed both full of the deepest sorrows, and thought afterward of his
+business matters.
+
+This general distress was increased by something which should have
+lessened it. The Minister was vexed that he had daily, in the midst of
+his wrath, to consult the taste of the women upon his--exterior. He
+wanted, at the marriage festival,--for the sake of his beloved,--to be a
+true bird of paradise, a Paradeur, a _Vénus a belles fesses_.[213] Of
+old he had loved to act the double part of statesman and courtier, and
+would fain, by way of monopolizing pride and vanity, grow into a
+Diogenes-Aristippus. Something of this, however, was not vanity; but
+that tormenting spirit of the male sex, the spirit of order and
+orthodoxy, would not go out of him. He was a man who would flourish
+against his very livery the clothes-switch wherewith the servant had let
+a few particles of dust settle on the state coat; still more dangerous
+was it--because he sat between two looking-glasses, the frizzling-glass
+and the large mirror in the stove-screen--to lay the dust rightly on his
+own wool; and hardest of all was it for him to be satisfied with the
+_fixing_ of his children. Liana, as artist, had now to suggest the
+proper color of a new surtout. _Sachets_, or smelling-bags, he directed
+to be filled, and with them his pockets; and a musk-plant pot placed in
+his window, not because he wished to use the leaves for perfume (that he
+expected of his fingers), but because he wished to anoint his fingers by
+rubbing the leaves together. Patent pomatum for the hands, and English
+pressed ornamental paper also for the same (when they wished to use a
+_billet-doux_ pen), and other knickknacks, excited less attention than
+the snuff which he procured for himself; not, however, for his nose, but
+for his lips, in order to rub them red. In fact, he would have rendered
+himself quite ridiculous in the eyes of many a merry blade, if such a
+one had seen him draw privately out of his souvenir the hair-tweezers,
+and with them the hair out of his eyebrows, just where the saddle of
+life, as upon a horse's back, had worn it white; and only the Minister
+himself could look serious during the process, when he sat before the
+looking-glass, smiling through all the finest ways of smiling,--the best
+one he caught and kept,--or when he tried the most graceful modes of
+throwing one's self on the sofa,--how often he had to practise
+this!--and finally, in short, through all his operations upon himself.
+
+Fortunately for the mother, the good Lector came; from the hand of this
+old friend she had so often taken, if not a Jacob's ladder, yet a
+mining-ladder, upon which to climb out of the abyss; hopefully she now
+laid before him all her trouble. He promised some help, upon the
+condition of speaking with Liana alone in her chamber. He went to her
+and declared tenderly his knowledge and her situation.
+
+How did the childlike maiden blush at the sharp day-beams which smote
+the scented night-violet of her love! But the friend of her childhood
+spoke softly to this smitten heart, and of his equal love for her and
+her friend; of the temperament of her father, and of the necessity of
+considerate measures; and said the best was to make him a sacred vow
+that she would yield to her parent's wish of her strictly avoiding the
+Count, only until he had received from his father, to whom he himself,
+as attendant of the son, had long been obliged to communicate
+intelligence and inquiries about the new connection, the yes or no in
+respect to it; if it were "no,"--which he would not answer for,--then
+Albano must solve the riddle; if it were "yes," he himself would stand
+security for a second on the part of her parents; at the same time,
+however, he must lay claim to her profoundest silence toward them in
+relation to his inquiries, whereby they might perhaps find themselves
+compromitted. Thereby he rooted himself only the more deeply in her
+confidence.
+
+She asked, trembling, how long the answer would tarry? "Six, eight,
+eleven days after the nuptials at most!" said he, reckoning. Yes, good
+Augusti! "Ah! we are all suffering, indeed," said she, and added,
+confidentially, and out of a weeping breast: "But is he well?" "He is
+diligent," was the reply.
+
+So he brought her, burdened with two secrets, and for the present
+consenting to an interim-separation, back to her mother; but she
+bestowed only upon the Lector the reward of a friendly look. He desired,
+meantime,--after his Carthusian manner,--no other reward than the most
+good-natured silence toward the Minister on the subject of his
+interference, since the latter might hold his deserts in this connection
+much greater than they were.
+
+The eight days' improvement and abstinence was announced to the
+Minister. He believed, however,--keeping in reserve a mistrust towards
+his lady,--that he could carry the war farther into the enemy's country
+with his own weapons; nevertheless, he contented himself, at the same
+time, with the new respite and Liana's disincarceration, for the sake of
+driving his daughter before him to his beloved at the nuptial festival,
+blooming and healthy as a sparkling pea-hen.
+
+Roquairol at this moment came back, and ushered into the house a cloud
+or two full of beautiful, bright morning redness. He delivered to his
+father tidings and greetings from the Princess. To Liana he brought the
+echo of that beloved voice, which had once said to her heaven: "Let it
+be!"--ah! the last melody among the discords of the unharmonious time!
+He guessed easily--for he learned little from his mother, who neglected
+him, and nothing from her daughter--how all stood. When he was actually
+on the point of slipping Albano's letter to her, in the twilight of
+evening, into her work-bag, and she said, with an ah! of love, "No, it
+is against my word,--but at some future time, Charles!"--then he saw, as
+he expressed it, "with crying indignation, his sister, in Charon's open
+boat, sailing into the Tartarus of all sorrows." About his friend he
+thought less than of his sister. The friendly, flattering Minister--he
+presented, as a proof of it, a valuable saddle to the Captain--informed
+him of Rabette's visit, and gave hints about betrothment and the like.
+Charles said, boldly: "He postponed every thought of his own happiness,
+so long as his dear sister saw none before her." By way of drawing the
+old gentleman again into more interest for Liana, he suggested to him a
+romantic invention for the marriage festival, which Froulay did not
+dream of, when he already stood quite close to it; namely, Idoine (the
+sister of the bride) was strikingly like Liana. The Princess loved her
+inexpressibly, but saw her only seldom, because on account of her strong
+character, which once refused a royal marriage, she lived in a village
+built and governed by herself, in a courtly exile from court. He now
+proposed to his father the poetic question, whether, on the illumination
+night, Liana might not for a few minutes, in the dream-temple, which was
+entirely suited to this beautiful illusion, delight the Princess with
+the image of her beloved sister.
+
+Whether it was that love toward the Princess made the Minister bolder,
+or he was intoxicated by the desire of brilliantly introducing Liana to
+her office of court-lady; suffice it, he found in the idea good sense.
+If anything supplied tobacco for the calumet of the _ex parte_ peace
+which he had made with his son, it was this theatrical part. He hastened
+immediately to the Prince and the Princess with the prayer for his
+permission and her sympathy; and then, when he had secured both, he
+hastened on to his Orestes, Bouverot, and said: "_Il m'est venu une idée
+tres singulière qui peut-être l'est trop; cependant le prince l'a
+approuvée_," etc.,--and finally--for he must not forget her either--to
+Liana.
+
+The Captain had already sought to persuade her beforehand. The mother
+opposed the dramatic imitation from self-respect, and Liana from
+humility; such a representation seemed to her a piece of presumption.
+But at last she gave in, simply because the sisterly love of the
+Princess had seemed to her so great and unattainable, just as if she did
+not cherish a similar sentiment in her own heart; thus she always
+regarded only the image in the mirror, not herself, as beautiful; just
+as the astronomer thinks the same evening, with its red splendors and
+night shadows, more sublime and enchanting, when he finds it in the
+moon, than when he stands in the midst of it on the earth. Perhaps, too,
+there entered another element of secret sweetness into Liana's love for
+the Prince's bride, namely, a step-daughter's affection; because she
+should once have been the bride of the Knight Gaspard. Women regard
+relationship more than we; hence, too, their ancestral pride is always
+several ancestors older than ours.
+
+Thus, then, did she make ready her oppressed heart for the light plays
+of the shining festival, which the coming Cycles are to present on the
+New-Year's holiday, as it were, of a new Jubilee.
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[192] This is Jean Paul's own image.--TR.
+
+[193] That is, of course, some lights of hope.--TR.
+
+[194] A German or Suabian dance.--TR.
+
+[195] His Moral Treatises, Vol. II. p. 96.
+
+[196] The Germans call the dash the _stroke of thought_. Here it
+implies an emphatic pause, as much as to say, "What do you think
+is coming?"--TR.
+
+[197] At the Prince's marriage.
+
+[198] With the Egyptians the enchanters were only learned men;
+with him the learned women were enchantresses.
+
+[199] _Mémoires secrets sur les Règnes de Louis XIV._, etc. Par
+Duclos. Tom. I.
+
+[200] It is well known that a cut is made in a fowl left whole as
+a sign that it has been upon the Prince's table, so that it may
+not be set on again, but otherwise enjoyed.
+
+[201] In German, _Schutz- und Stich-blatt_,--literally, a plate
+to defend the hand in parrying and thrusting,--_Blatt_, meaning
+_leaf_ (of paper) also, conveys a _pun_ not easily
+translated.--TR.
+
+[202] The blind-passenger in the German stage-coach corresponds
+to our _dead-head_ in stage or steamboat.--TR.
+
+[203] See Klockenbring's collected Essays.
+
+[204] (In German, _Spring-wurzel_.) The juice of some plant
+(perhaps Devil's-milk) highly and quickly corrosive.--TR.
+
+[205] News by hand.--TR.
+
+[206] The King had to _damer_, or make a dame of an unmarried
+maiden of rank, before she could go to Versailles to court.
+
+[207] Not so miserable perhaps as a French mangling the
+translator remembers to have seen.--TR.
+
+[208] He refers to the letter he had left on Liana's table, and
+which she had shown to her mother.--TR.
+
+[209] _Fist_ in the original.--TR.
+
+[210] I.e. as in a wine-press.--TR.
+
+[211] Alluding to the horned hat once worn by graduated printers'
+apprentices.--TR.
+
+[212] Beseke discovered it. See "On the Elemental Fire," by him,
+1786.
+
+[213] Venus with beautiful thighs.--TR.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+RICHTER'S WRITINGS.
+
+
+TITAN. A ROMANCE. 2 vols. 16mo. $3.00.
+
+FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 2 vols. 16mo. $2.75.
+
+LEVANA; OR, THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+HESPERUS. 2 vols. 16mo. _Preparing._
+
+_The above volumes are printed in uniform size and style._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+IN PRESS.
+
+LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. By ELIZA BUCKMINSTER LEE. New Edition, Revised. 1
+volume.
+
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2), by 
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TITAN: A ROMANCE V. 1 (OF 2) ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2), by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2)
+
+Author: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
+
+Translator: Charles T. Brooks
+
+Release Date: March 23, 2011 [EBook #35664]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TITAN: A ROMANCE V. 1 (OF 2) ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+TITAN:
+
+A ROMANCE.
+
+FROM THE GERMAN OF
+
+_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER._
+
+TRANSLATED BY
+
+CHARLES T. BROOKS.
+
+IN TWO VOLUMES.
+
+VOL. I.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+BOSTON:
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
+1864.
+
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by
+
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
+
+in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+THIRD EDITION.
+
+
+_UNIVERSITY PRESS:_
+WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,
+_CAMBRIDGE._
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+The "Titan" is Jean Paul's longest--and the author meant it, and held
+it, to be his greatest and best--romance; and his public (including Mr.
+Carlyle) seems, on the whole, to have sustained his opinion. He was ten
+years about it, and his other works, written in the interval, were
+preparatory and tributary to this.
+
+As to the _general_ meaning of the title there can hardly, on the whole,
+be any doubt. It does _not_ refer, as the division into Jubilees and
+Cycles might, to be sure, suggest to one on first approaching it, to the
+titanic scale and scope of the work, but to the titanic violence against
+which it is aimed.
+
+It seems, indeed, from a letter of the author's, that he thought at
+first of calling it "Anti-Titan." The only question in regard to the
+_application_ of the title seems to be, whether the champion of truth
+and justice against the moral Titans in this case was meant to be
+understood as represented by the hero of the story, with his friends,
+resisting the iniquity which moved earth and hell to ruin him, or
+whether the book itself is the Anti-Titan, and an age of extravagance
+the Titan.
+
+A French critic says of the "Titan":--
+
+"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological _resume_, a satire, an elegy,
+a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization
+in the eighteenth century.
+
+"How is it to end, this civilization which exaggerates alike
+intellectual and industrial power at the expense of the life of the
+soul,--wholly factitious, theatrical,--intoxicating, consuming itself
+with pleasure, seeking everywhere new enjoyments,--exploring all the
+secrets of nature, without being able to penetrate the first causes, the
+secrets of God,--what will be the fate of these generations
+supersaturated with romances, dramas, journals, with science, ambition,
+with vehement aspirations after the unknown and impossible?...
+
+"In augmenting the sum of its desires, will it augment the sum of its
+happiness? Is it not going to increase immensely its capacity of
+suffering?
+
+"Will it not be the giant that scales heaven--
+
+"And that falls crushed to death?
+
+"TITAN!"
+
+In giving his romance the title of "Titan," says the same writer, "it is
+not Albano de Cesara the author has in view, but his antipode, Captain
+Roquairol,--that romantic being, that insatiable lover of pleasure, that
+anticipated Byron, that scaler of heaven,--who, after having piled
+mountain upon mountain to attain his object, ends in finding himself
+buried under the ruins....
+
+"Even while at work upon 'Hesperus,' he had formed the resolution of
+placing a pure man, great and noble, by the side of a reprobate, and of
+surrounding them both with a multitude of beings corresponding to them.
+He wished to concentrate in a single work all the ideas of high
+philosophy which he had disseminated in his other creations, and to show
+them followed by their natural consequences. So strong a mind could not
+stop there: he resolved to show the absurdity of exaggeration, whether
+in good or in evil, in virtue or in vice.
+
+"Hence those reproductions of the same types, those satellites
+gravitating around their respective planets; in fine, those parodies of
+the principal personages of the drama.
+
+"By the side of the coldness and the vast plans of Don Gaspard de
+Cesara, we have the no less dangerous intrigues, though upon a less
+elevated scale, of the Minister von Froulay; by the side of the
+ventriloquist Uncle, the lying Roquairol; the Princess Isabelle is
+opposed to Linda de Romeiro, the aerial Liana to her physical
+counterpart, the Princess Idoine; the comic vulgarity of Dr. Sphex
+contrasts with the more elevated buffoonery of Schoppe; and if we have
+Bouverot, we have also Dion, that Greek so elegant and so noble, happy
+mixture of the antique and the modern, that artist so sensible and so
+true....
+
+"The history of Albano, opposed to Roquairol, is the history, taken from
+his tenderest childhood to the epoch of his greatest development, of a
+being who, as the strictest consequence of a quite special education,
+goes through life, wounding himself with all its griefs, drinking at the
+source of all its lawful pleasures; suffering with nobleness, tasting of
+happiness, but only the purest kind; exposed every instant to see
+himself drawn away by fallacious principles, and nevertheless moving on
+with a steady step towards the end which his reason has marked out for
+him; sacrificing to the fulfilment of his duties all the delights that a
+debauched court can offer a young man entering into the world. While all
+the personages who gravitate around him, and who represent each a
+different aberration from the fundamental principle of the work, fall
+successively at his side, victims of the natural consequences of their
+passions, he, strengthening himself by every fall of which he is
+witness, ends by attaining the loftiest position which the ambition of
+man can desire,--a position which he could not have expected, and for
+which, consequently, he had not been able to make the sacrifices that,
+in the course of the work, he does not cease to achieve."
+
+The author whom we have thus copiously quoted alludes to Jean Paul's
+having had the idea of "Titan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us
+of a Philistine disparagement of the "Titan," that so many of the
+characters of the other work reappear here under new names. There are
+some critics who ought to object to the full moon, that she is only the
+same old moon that we had, in her first quarter or half, several nights
+ago. However, as we have not yet had "Hesperus" in English, nor are
+likely to for some time, this kind of objection will not trouble English
+readers of "Titan."
+
+Jean Paul has been justly praised for his success in drawing and shading
+female characters. Our French critic says: "Richter has the rare merit
+of placing on the stage in the same work six female personages, who have
+not a shadow of resemblance to each other, and who, from the moment of
+their appearance on the scene to that of their quitting it, never
+deviate a single minute from the character the author has given them."
+
+The fate of his Titanide, Linda, created a loud remonstrance in Germany;
+and one can hardly, indeed, help feeling as if poetic justice had been a
+little caricatured, at least, in Richter's disposal of that half
+strong-headed and half headstrong woman. Painful, however, as her end
+is, the Translator could not listen an instant to the suggestion of
+omitting a line of the scenes in which that terrible tragedy is brought
+to a close.
+
+When the "Titan" first appeared, complaint was made by some that there
+was too much of drollery, by others that there was not enough; some
+found too much sentimentality, others too much philosophy; the
+Translator has found it full, if not of that brevity which is the soul
+of _wit_ (not, however, of humor), yet of that variety which is the
+spice of life.
+
+The Translator (or Transplanter, for he aspires to the title) of this
+huge production, in his solicitude to preserve the true German aroma of
+its native earth, may have brought away some part of the soil, and even
+stones, clinging to the roots (_stones of offence_ they may prove to
+many, stones of stumbling to many more). He can only say, that if he had
+made Jean Paul always talk in ordinary, conventional, straightforward,
+instantly intelligible prose, the reader would not have had _Jean Paul
+the Only_.
+
+And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of
+metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd
+digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that
+characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a
+broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in
+this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost
+tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose _heart_ (to use
+the homely phrase) is ever _in the right place_.
+
+It has seemed necessary to give a few notes, and only a few. Properly to
+furnish such a work with annotations would require Jean Paul's own
+voluminous un-commonplace-books of all out-of-the-way knowledge, and
+that _Dictionary to Jean Paul_ which one of his countrymen began, but
+unfortunately carried only through one of his works, the work on
+Education, _Levana_.
+
+The Translator desires emphatically to express his obligations to his
+friend, Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and to _his_ friend, the
+accomplished scholar, Mr. Knorr, to whose kind and patient care whatever
+of accuracy or felicity there may be in his version of the first Jubilee
+is largely due; also, to Rev. Dr. Hedge, and all the friends who have
+helped him with suggestion and encouragement in this large and difficult
+undertaking, he makes his warmest acknowledgments;--and he closes by
+commending the Titan to all lovers of the humanities, confident (in the
+words of Mrs. Lee, in her Life of Jean Paul) that "the more it is read,
+the more it will be acknowledged a work of exalted genius, pure
+morality, and perennial beauty."
+
+                            C. T. B.
+    NEWPORT, R. I.
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+THE FOUR LOVELY AND NOBLE SISTERS ON THE THRONE.[1]
+
+_THE DREAM OF TRUTH._
+
+
+Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia once looked down into the
+clear-obscure of earth, and, weary of the ever-bright but cold Olympus,
+yearned to enter in beneath the clouds of our world, where the Soul
+loves more because it suffers more, and where it is sadder but more
+warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, with which Polyhymnia passes
+invisibly up and down the low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our
+hearts; and they mourned that their throne stood so far from the sighs
+of the helpless.
+
+Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and to clothe themselves
+in our mortal form. They came down from Olympus; Love and little loves
+and genii flew playfully after them, and our nightingales fluttered to
+meet them out of the bosom of May.
+
+But, as they touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of
+light, and cast no shadows, then the earnest Queen of gods and men,
+Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and said: "The immortal becomes mortal
+upon the earth, and every spirit becomes a human being!"
+
+So they became human beings and sisters, and were called _Louisa_,
+_Charlotte_, _Theresa_, _Frederica_; the little loves and genii
+transformed themselves into their children, and flew into their maternal
+arms, and the motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love in
+a great embrace. And when the white banner of the blooming spring
+fluttered abroad, and more human thrones stood before them,--and when,
+blissfully softened by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon
+each other and their happy children, and were speechless for love and
+bliss,--then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by over them, and
+recognize them, and gave them the tones wherewith the heart expresses
+and awakens love and joy.
+
+And the dream was ended and fulfilled; it had, as is always the case,
+shaped itself after waking reality. Therefore, be it consecrated to the
+four fair and noble sisters, and let all which is like it in _Titan_ be
+so consecrated too!
+
+                               JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] The Titan was published during the years 1800-1803. The four
+sisters were the four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, viz.
+the Duchess of Hildburghausen, the Princess von Solms, the
+Princess of Thun and Taxis, and the Louisa who afterward became
+Queen of Prussia, and was so in the Liberation War.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+
+FIRST JUBILEE.
+                                                               PAGE
+
+PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--THE
+PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE
+EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF
+BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE
+TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE
+FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING
+OF FANCY                                                          1
+
+
+SECOND JUBILEE.
+
+THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE
+FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A
+STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING
+CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE TORTURE
+SOUPE.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD, BUT
+WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION                                 70
+
+
+THIRD JUBILEE.
+
+METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR
+PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN
+OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.                           110
+
+
+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                                   128
+
+
+FIFTH JUBILEE.
+
+GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER
+OF THE KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE
+DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD
+AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY
+PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION
+FOR TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE            161
+
+
+SIXTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE TEN PERSECUTIONS OF THE READER.--LIANA'S EASTERN
+ROOM.--DISPUTATION UPON PATIENCE.--THE PICTURESQUE CURE         197
+
+
+SEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF
+POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL
+"MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON
+BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE                215
+
+
+EIGHTH JUBILEE.
+
+LE PETIT LEVER OF DR. SPHEX.--PATH TO
+LILAR.--WOODLAND-BRIDGE.--THE MORNING IN
+ARCADIA.--CHARITON.--LIANA'S LETTER AND PSALM OF
+GRATITUDE.--SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A GARDEN.--THE
+FLUTE-DELL.--CONCERNING THE REALITY OF THE IDEAL                238
+
+
+NINTH JUBILEE.
+
+PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER
+TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF
+ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN
+THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE
+CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN                                268
+
+
+TENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF
+FRIENDSHIP                                                      310
+
+
+ELEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES      334
+
+
+TWELFTH JUBILEE.
+
+FROULAY'S BIRTHDAY AND PROJECTS.--EXTRA-LEAF.--RABETTE.--THE
+HARMONICA.--NIGHT.--THE PIOUS FATHER.--THE WONDROUS
+STAIRWAY.--THE APPARITION                                       351
+
+
+THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE
+PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TETE-A-TETE.--THE
+RIDE TO BLUMENBUeHL                                              384
+
+
+FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO AND LIANA                                                405
+
+
+FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+MAN AND WOMAN                                                   432
+
+
+SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE SORROWS OF A DAUGHTER                                       481
+
+
+
+
+TITAN.
+
+FIRST JUBILEE.
+
+     PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--THE
+     PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE
+     EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF
+     BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE
+     TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE
+     FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING
+     OF FANCY.
+
+
+1. CYCLE.
+
+On a fine spring evening, the young Spanish Count Cesara came, with his
+companions, Schoppe and Dian, to Sesto, in order the next morning to
+cross over to the Borromaean island, Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore. The
+proudly blooming youth glowed with the excitement of travelling, and
+with thoughts of the coming morrow, when he should see the isle, that
+gayly decorated throne of Spring, and on it a man who had been promised
+him for twenty years. This twofold glow exalted my picturesque hero to
+the form of an angry god of the Muses. His beauty made a more triumphal
+entry into Italian eyes than into the narrow Northern ones from the
+midst of which he had come; in Milan many had wished he were of marble,
+and stood with elder gods of stone, either in the Farnese Palace or in
+the Clementine Museum, or in the Villa of Albani; nay, had not the
+Bishop of Novara, with his sword at his side, a few hours before, asked
+Schoppe (riding behind) who he was? And had not the latter, with a droll
+squaring of the wrinkle-circle round his lips, made this copious answer
+(by way of enlightening his spiritual lordship): "It's my Telemachus,
+and I am the Mentor. I am the milling-machine and the die which coins
+him,--the wolf's tooth and flattening mill which polishes him down,--the
+man, in short, that regulates him"?
+
+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 Borromaeans, 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 Blumenbuehl, 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. Borromaeus,[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 Blumenbuehl, 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. Borromaeus 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 Blumenbuehl 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 Borromaean 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 Verite_
+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 _frappe_ 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-allongees_, 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 Roesel,--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 Blumenbuehl 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 Cyropaedia."
+
+
+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 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 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
+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
+_god_ 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-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
+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 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 Blumenbuehl; 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.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Scale.--TR.
+
+[3] This statue, thirty-five ells high, on a pedestal of
+twenty-five ells, in whose head twelve men can find room, stands
+near Arona, and is exactly of a height with Isola Bella, which
+stands over against it, and which rises on ten gardens or
+terraces built one upon another.--_Keysler's Travels, &c._, Vol.
+I.
+
+[4] The old Kremnitz ducats have the infant Jesus on the right
+arm; but the new and _lighter_ ones on the left.
+
+[5] Franklin advised the preserving and corking up of vessels
+from which all the liquor had been drunk, in order thereby to
+keep the ship afloat.
+
+[6] The horse, in the funeral procession of a prince, that comes
+last, and is decked out gayly for the successor of the
+deceased.--TR.
+
+[7] Gray-league (Grau-buenden), the Swiss Canton of the
+Grisons.--TR.
+
+[8] Pictures by Peter Molyn, who, on account of his fine storms,
+was called only Tempesta.
+
+[9] The Pasquino is notoriously mutilated.--Delia Porta was a
+great restorer of old statues.
+
+[10] I. e. to be pressed between two wooden cylinders and a
+metallic one.
+
+[11] This pill consists of Antimonia Regia, and by reason of its
+hardness may be swallowed over and over again with the same
+effect each time; only a little wine is sprinkled on it before
+each repetition of the experiment.
+
+[12] _Tirare di primavere_, the people call it; and Peter Schoppe
+translated it grandly enough, _Electrical pistol-firing of
+spring_.
+
+[13] Quotation-marks.--TR.
+
+[14] A good Wouwermann means, in painters' language, a
+well-executed horse, the sight of which has an influence on the
+beauty of the future colt.
+
+[15] This name is given to the quantum which is withheld from the
+associate judges of the Supreme Court when they have not worked
+enough.
+
+[16] The Ipecacuanha belongs to the Violet species.
+
+[17] Of the order of St. Paul, or _memento mori_, which died in
+France in the seventeenth century. The above address is its usual
+greeting.
+
+[18] The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the
+power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the
+earth.
+
+[19] According to the account of some astronomers, that the sun,
+when eclipsed, has sometimes shone through an opening of the
+moon, Ulloa, e. g., assures us that he once witnessed.
+
+[20] In Calabria (1785) a thousand and four earthquakes happened
+in the space of three fourths of a year.--_Muenter's Travels, &c._
+
+
+
+
+_INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMME_
+
+TO TITAN.
+
+
+Before I dedicated Titan to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor and Feudal
+Provost of Flachsenfingen, Mr. Von Hafenreffer, I first requested
+permission from him in the following terms:--
+
+"Since you have assisted far more in this history than the Russian Court
+did in Voltaire's Genesis-History of Peter the Great, you cannot confer
+any handsomer favor upon a heart longing to thank you, than the
+permission to offer and dedicate to you, as to a Jew's God, what you
+have created."
+
+But he wrote me back on the spot:--
+
+     "For the same reason, you might still better, in imitation
+     of Sonnenfels, dedicate the work to yourself, and, in a more
+     just sense than others, combine in one person author and
+     patron. I beg you then (were it only on Mr. Von **'s and
+     Mrs. Von **'s account) to leave me out of the play, and
+     confine yourself to the most indispensable notices, which
+     you may be pleased to give the public, of the very
+     mechanical interest which I have in your beautiful work; but
+     for the gods' sake, hic haec hoc hujus huic hunc hanc hoc hoc
+     hac hoc.
+
+                                        "VON HAFENREFFER."
+
+
+The Latin line is a cipher, and shall remain dark to the public.
+What the same public has to demand in the way of Introductory
+Programme consists of four explanations of title, and one of
+fact.
+
+The first nominal explanation, which relates to the _Jubilee Period_, I
+get from the founder of the Period, the Rector Franke, who explains it
+to be an Era or space of time, invented by him, of one hundred and
+fifty-two Cycles, each of which contains in itself its good forty-nine
+tropical Lunar-Solar years. The word _Jubilee_ is prefixed by the Rector
+for this reason, that in every seventh year a lesser, and in every seven
+times seventh, or forty-ninth, a greater, Jubilee-, Intercalary-,
+Indulgence-, Sabbath-, or Trumpet-year occurred, in which one lived
+without debts, without sowing and laboring, and without slavery. I make
+a sufficiently happy application, as it seems to me, of this title,
+Jubilee, to my historical chapters, which conduct the business-man and
+the business-woman round and round in an easy cycle or circle full of
+free Sabbath-, Indulgence-, Trumpet-, and Jubilee-hours, in which both
+have neither to sow nor to pay, but only to reap and to rest; for I am
+the only one who, like the bowed and crooked-up drudge of a ploughman,
+stand at my writing-table, and see sowing-machines, and debts of honor,
+and manacles, before and on me. The seven thousand four hundred and
+forty-eight tropical Lunar-Solar years which one of Franke's Jubilee
+periods includes are also found with me, but only dramatically, because
+in every chapter just that number of ideas--and ideas are, indeed, the
+long and cubic measure of time--will be presented by me to the reader,
+till the short time has become as long to him as the chapter required.
+
+A Cycle, which is the subject of my second nominal definition, needs by
+this time no definition at all.
+
+The third nominal definition has to describe the _obligato-leaves_,
+which I edit in loose sheets in every Jubilee period. The
+obligato-leaves admit absolutely none but pure contemporaneous facts,
+less immediately connected with my hero, concerning persons, however,
+the more immediately connected with him; in the obligato-leaves,
+moreover, not the smallest satirical extravasate of digression, no, not
+of the size of a blister, is perceptible; but the happy reader journeys
+on with his dear ones, free and wide awake, right through the ample
+court-residence and riding-ground and landscape of a whole, long volume,
+amidst purely historical figures, surrounded on all sides by busy
+mining-companies and Jews'-congregations, advancing columns on the
+march, mounted hordes, and companies of strolling players,--and his eye
+cannot be satisfied with seeing.
+
+But when the Tome is ended, then begins--this is the last nominal
+definition--a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no
+narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long
+bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I
+name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private
+gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my _honey-moons_,
+because I make less honey therein than I eat, busily employed, not as a
+working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb.
+Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily
+distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the
+undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked
+myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity
+to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the
+readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'Horen,'
+Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a
+wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened?
+
+As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the
+_contrat-social_ among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a
+crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound
+than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under
+date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always
+stick to the subject-matter,--which is the history,--because otherwise
+people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this,
+that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty
+volumes, or even a longer one,--as in this, for instance,--thinks or
+laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in
+the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,--which sentence
+has been already executed on me more than once.
+
+Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in
+the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and
+digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as
+the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present
+reduced to a prescriptive right and confirmed into a servitude, the
+reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of
+Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but
+honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in
+former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and
+begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,--as I
+do here,--have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a
+matter of course, not only the _tribute_ as _alms_, but also the _don
+gratuit_ as _quarterly assessment_. So does not merely the cultivated
+Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the
+traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.
+
+I come now to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor, Von Hafenreffer, who is
+the subject of my promised _expose of fact_.
+
+It must have been formerly learned from the 45th Dog-Post-Day, who
+governs Flachsenfingen, namely, my revered father. This striking
+promotion of mine was, at the bottom, more a step than a spring; for I
+was, previously, no less than a Jurist, consequently the germ or bud of
+an embryo Doctor _utriusque_, and consequently a nobleman, since in the
+Doctor the whole spawn and yolk of the Knight lies; therefore the
+former, as well as the latter, when anything chances by, lives upon his
+saddle or stirrup, although less in a robber's castle than in a robber's
+chamber; I have, therefore, since the preferment, changed less myself
+than my castle of residence;--the paternal seat in Flachsenfingen is at
+present my own.
+
+I care not now to eat my sugar-cake at court with sin,--although one
+earns sugar-cake and manna more comfortably than ship-bread,--but I
+represent, in order to make a profit upon my adventure, the whole
+Flachsenfingen Department of Foreign Affairs at home here in the castle,
+together with the requisite deciphering chancery. This, then, is what we
+shall do: we have a Procurator in Vienna, two Residents in five Imperial
+cities, a Secretary of the Comitia in Ratisbon under the
+Cross-Bench,[21] three Chancery-clerks of the circle, and an
+Envoye-Plenipotentiary at a well-known and considerable court not far
+from Hohenfliess, who is no other than the aforementioned Mr. Feudal
+Provost Von Hafenreffer. To the latter my father has even advanced a
+complete silver-service, which we lend him, till he shall have received
+his recall, because it is for our own interest that a Flachsenfingen
+ambassador should, while abroad, do extraordinary honor, by his
+extravagance, to the princely hat or coronet of Flachsenfingen.
+
+Now it is no joke to stand on such a post as this of mine; the whole
+legation-writing-and-reading company write to me under frank, the
+_chiffre banal_ and the _chiffre dechiffrant_ are in my hands, and I
+understand, as it seems to me, the whole mess. It is unutterable, all
+that I thus learn: it could not be read by men nor drawn by horses, if I
+were disposed to hatch, biographically, and feed and reel off the whole
+silk-worm seed of novels, which the corps of ambassadors send me every
+post-day in closely-sealed packages. Yes (to use another metaphor), the
+biographical timber which my float-inspection launches for me from up
+above,--now into the Elbe, now into the Saale, now into the
+Danube,--stands already so high before me in the ship-yard, that I could
+not use it up, supposing I drove on the aesthetical building of my
+biographical fools'-ships, masquerade-balls, and enchanted castles, day
+and night, year out and year in, and never danced, nor rode, nor spoke,
+nor sneezed again in my life....
+
+Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against
+many another spawn, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man
+should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from
+himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and
+hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my
+legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports,
+would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean
+cloister-passages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now,
+for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent
+women of the world, veimers[22] ministers of justice, as well as jesters
+pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the
+Pointeurs.[23]
+
+I come back to my ambassador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned
+distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies
+me--without neglecting other duties--from month to month with as many
+personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his
+legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;--the smallest trifles
+are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different
+way of thinking from that of other ambassadors, who in their reports
+make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance
+into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every _cul de sac_,
+servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his
+opera-glass of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's
+virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a
+hand-and-horse service of good luck, no one of us can wonder,--that is,
+I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,--with
+such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,--with
+such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,--in
+short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, or
+Montgolfiers,[24]--it cannot of course be anything but just what is
+expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain
+height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which
+will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much)
+on the Sun, on Uranus and Sirius, and for which even the lucky
+quill-scraper who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints
+the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself,
+and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy _tooth_ of
+time,--especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by
+the tooth-saw of the critical file,--shall be able to make any
+impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of
+humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but
+unhappily every nature holds itself,--as Dr. Crusius does the
+world,--not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.
+
+The present _Titan_ enjoys, besides, the further advantage that I at
+this moment inhabit and grace the paternal court, and accordingly, as
+draughtsman, have certain sins near and bright before my eyes in a
+position most favorable for observation, of which at least Vanity,
+Libertinism, and Idleness will stay and sit for their likeness; for fate
+has sowed these mushrooms and mosses as high as possible among the upper
+classes, because in the lower and broader they would have spread too
+much, and sucked them dry,--which seems to be the pattern of that same
+foresight by which ships always have their assafoetida which they
+bring from Persia hanging overhead on the mast, in order that its stench
+may not contaminate the freight on deck. Moreover, I have up here in the
+court all the new fashions already around me for my observation and
+contempt, before they have been, down below there, only traduced, not to
+say commended,--e. g. the fine fashion of the Parisians, that women
+shall by a slight tuck in their dress show their calves, which they do
+in Paris, in order to let it be seen that they are not gentlemen, who,
+as is well known, walk on wooden legs,--this fashion will to-morrow or
+day after to-morrow (for it has arrived on an individual lady) be
+certainly introduced. But the females of Flachsenfingen imitate this
+fashion on quite another ground,--for gentlemen among us have no
+defect,--and that is, as a way of proving that they are human beings,
+and not apes (to say nothing less), since, according to Camper and
+others, man alone has calves. The same proof was adduced ten years ago,
+only on higher grounds. For since, according to Haller, man is
+distinguished from monkey in no other respect than by the possession of
+a posterior, the female officers of the crown, the dressing-maids,
+sought as much as possible to magnify in the persons of their mistresses
+this characteristic of their sex by art,--by the so-called _cul de
+Paris_; and, with such a penultimate of the ultimate, it became then a
+jest and an amusement to distinguish at a distance of two hundred paces
+a woman of the world from her female ape,--a thing which now many who
+know their Buffon by heart will venture to do, when they are no nearer
+to her than too near.
+
+Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I maintain in several
+of the German cities;--my honored father pays for them;--in most places
+one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as
+many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much
+like perspective-glasses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that
+is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author,
+from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household
+operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles
+distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that
+a staid, quiet man, whom nobody knows but his barber, and whose course
+of life is like a dark, unfrequented _cul de sac_, but whom one of my
+envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror,
+which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all,
+into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,--the case may
+occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up
+to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there
+smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair,
+buttons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three
+hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of _Indian_ plants
+which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter.
+
+People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the
+people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no ambassadors
+near me.
+
+But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but
+from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into
+cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out.
+No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery,
+and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge, has seemed thus far
+to avert the discovery of the _true_ names of my histories, and, indeed,
+with such success, that of all the manuscripts which have hitherto been
+despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject,
+not one has smelt the mouse,--and truly fortunate for the world; for so
+soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first
+volumes of Titan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic
+chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.
+
+Nothing is to be inferred from the names which I use, for I press into
+the service God-parents for my heroes in the most singular ways. Have I
+not, e. g., often of an evening, during the marching and countermarching
+of the German armies, who made their crusades to the holy sepulchre of
+freedom, gone up and down through the lanes of the camp, with my
+writing-tablets in my hands, and caught and entered the names of the
+privates,--which, just before bedtime, were called out aloud, like the
+names of saints,--just as they fell, in order to distribute them again
+among my biographical people? And has not merit been promoted thereby,
+and many a common soldier risen to be a nobleman fit for table and
+tournament, and have not provost-marshals been raised to ministers of
+justice, and red-cloaks to _patribus purpuratis_? And did ever a cock
+crow in all the army after this corps of observation slinking round
+mobilized on two legs?
+
+For authors who wish at the same time to narrate and disguise true
+anecdotes, I am, perhaps, on the whole, a model and file-leader. I have
+studied and imitated longer than other historical inquirers those little
+innocent stretching and wrenching processes which can make a history
+unrecognizable to the very hero of the same, and I fancy I know how one
+is to make good biographies of princes, protocols of high traitors,
+legends of saints, and auto-biographies; no stronger touches decide the
+matter than those slight ones, by which Peter of Cortona (or Beretino)
+in the presence of Ferdinand of Tuscany transformed a weeping child into
+a laughing one, and the reverse.
+
+Voltaire demands more than once, as he always does,--for he gave
+mankind, like an army, every order of march three times, and repeated
+himself and everything else most indefatigably,--that the historian
+shall arrange his history after the law-table of the drama, to a
+dramatic focal point. It is, however, one of the first dramatic rules
+which Lessing, Aristotle, and the Greek models give us, that the
+dramatic poet must lend to every historical circumstance which he treats
+all that is favorable to the poetic illusion, as well as keep clear of
+everything opposite, and that he must never sacrifice beauty to truth,
+but the reverse. Voltaire gave, as is well known, not only the easy
+rule, but the hard model also; and this great theatre poet of the
+world's theatre, in his _benefit_ dramas of Peter and Charles, never
+stuck to the truth where he was sure he could attain sooner to illusion.
+And that is properly the genuine romantic history corresponding to the
+historical romance. It is not for me, but for others,--namely, the
+Provost and the Secretaries of Legation,--to decide how far I have
+treated a true history illusorily. It is a misfortune that the true
+history of my hero can hardly ever see the light; otherwise the justice
+might be done me that connoisseurs would confront my poetical deviations
+with the truth, and thereafter give each of us more easily his own, as
+well the truth as myself. But this reward is what all royal
+historiographers and scandalous chroniclers must resign _nolens volens_,
+because the true history never appears in conjunction with their works.
+
+But in the composition of a history an author must also keep a sharp
+look-out upon this point, that it shall not only hit and betray no real
+persons, but also no false ones, and in fact nobody at all. Before I, e.
+g., choose a name for a bad prince, I must look through the genealogical
+index of all governing and governed families, in order not to use a name
+which some person or other already bears; thus, in Otaheite, even the
+words which sound like the name of the king are abolished after his
+coronation, and supplied by others. Now, as I was formerly acquainted
+with no living courts at all, I was not in a situation, when preparing
+the battle-pieces and night-pieces which I painted of the Cabals, the
+Egoism, and the Libertinism of biographical courts, to succeed in
+skilfully avoiding every resemblance to real ones; yes, for such an
+idiot as I, it was a miserable help, even, to be often laying
+Machiavelli open before me, in order, with the assistance of the French
+history, by painting from the two, to turn off the edge of the
+application at least upon countries in which no Frenchman or Italian
+ever had the influence that is generally attributed to both of them upon
+other Germans; just as Herder, in opposition to those naturalists who
+derive certain misshapen tribes of men from a half-parentage of apes,
+makes the very good remark that most of the resemblances to apes--the
+retreating skull of the Calmucks, the prominent ears of the Pevas, the
+slender hands in Carolina--appear just in those countries where there
+are no apes at all. Formerly, then, as was said, striking unlikenesses I
+could not succeed in hitting; now, on the contrary, every court around
+which my legation-flotilla coasts is well known to me, and therefore
+secure from accidental resemblances, particularly every one which I
+describe,--that of Flachsenfingen, that of Hohenfliess, &c. The
+theatrical mask which I have on in my works is not the mask of the Greek
+comedian, which was embossed after the face of the individual
+satirized,[25] but the mask of Nero, which, when he acted a goddess on
+the stage, looked like his mistress,[26] and when he acted a god, like
+himself.
+
+Enough! This digressive introductory programme has been somewhat long,
+but the Jubilee-period was so, too: the longer the St. John's day of a
+country, the longer its St. Thomas's night. And now let us dance along
+together into the book,--into this free ball of the world,--I first as
+leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me; so
+that, amidst the sounding baptismal and funeral bells in the Chinese
+house of this world-building,--welcomed by the singing-school of the
+muses,--serenaded from on high by the guitar of Phoebus,--we may dance
+gayly from Tome to Tome, from Cycle to Cycle, from one digression to
+another, from one dash to another,--till either the work comes to an
+end, or the workman, or everybody!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] _Querbank_,--Bench for Protestant Bishops in the Germanic
+Diet.
+
+[22] _Veimer_,--old Westphalian judges.
+
+[23] Tellers in faro-banks.
+
+[24] The inventor of the balloon.--TR.
+
+[25] Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie, etc. de Dubois, Tom. I.
+Sect. 42.
+
+[26] Sueton. Nero.
+
+
+
+
+SECOND JUBILEE.
+
+     THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE
+     FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A
+     STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING
+     CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE
+     TORTURE-SOUPE.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD,
+     BUT WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION.
+
+
+10. CYCLE.
+
+In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful
+prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the
+full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cluster and the olive often
+ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan
+(Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all
+things which belong to May--in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May
+butter--he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood
+itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a
+princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of
+counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that
+mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent
+clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and
+fencing-schools, all anticipation of the coming riddles and conflicts of
+his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with his heart full of the
+glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms
+no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double
+conquest.
+
+The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke
+around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in
+full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he
+revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook
+their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;--the
+Librarian sought a _physical_ solution of the acoustic and optical
+illusion; the Lector sought a _political_ one: he could not at all
+comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially
+meant by it all.
+
+This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was
+directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he
+could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar.
+"Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I
+should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I
+would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit
+and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during
+the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too
+few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve
+in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls
+curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain
+beats gladly a free heart.
+
+At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and
+nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they
+approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and
+now the Principality of _Hohenfliess_ lay only one principality distant
+from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the
+first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been
+merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is
+known to geographical readers, _Haarhaar_. The Lector told the
+Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the
+two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much
+because they were _diplomatic_ relatives--although it is true that,
+among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than
+brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old
+folks among the Brandenburghers--as because they were really relatives,
+and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were
+disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two
+courts,--which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,--with all their
+heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him,
+namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the
+principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last
+hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to
+wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the
+land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned
+advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political
+mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told
+for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so
+generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial
+estate of Hohenfliess--its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and
+breed of horses--in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the
+highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great
+intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to
+population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of
+Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not
+even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the
+shepherd's-flute; not of the _energies_ and _matrimonial prospects_ of
+others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must
+ruin!"
+
+As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an
+excursion to Blumenbuehl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a
+look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his
+cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the
+city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which
+besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the
+conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness
+of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at
+his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short,
+that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of
+Blumenbuehl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the
+world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high
+life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy
+and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.
+
+It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee,
+because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go
+to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however,
+to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates
+against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they
+stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the
+church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned
+round, the tower of Blumenbuehl below them to the east; from the one and
+from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his
+future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village,
+and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which
+gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days.
+He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life,
+and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the
+Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.
+
+But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red
+shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy
+day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood,
+when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod,
+over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with
+him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and
+become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so
+sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.
+
+
+11. CYCLE.
+
+It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day--and likewise on the
+birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not
+received the title yet--that this same director--that was to be--had
+his chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pestitz, and see the
+Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the _flail_ of the
+state, by way of experiment, into a _drill-plough_. He was a brisk,
+bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill
+to others, and to whom nothing made time pass heavily but pastime. "In
+the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it,
+for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist
+in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an
+Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,--little as there was in
+it,--and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.
+
+But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to
+the reader?
+
+Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had
+chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to
+mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted
+with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has
+generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only _inborn_ not _acquired_
+sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not
+to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclopaedia of
+all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say,
+the rector of the place,--named Wehmeier, better known by the title of
+Band-box-master,--after schooling the village youth for the usual number
+of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest _Struve's spare hours_, his
+_Otia_ and _Noctes Hagianae_, in teaching Albano, and driving into the
+mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy--impelled by internal
+streams--alphabetic pins,--so as to make it the barrel of a
+speech-organ. Of course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something
+heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the
+language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a
+hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of
+counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither
+note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering
+pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the
+Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself
+so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So,
+also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it
+were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary,
+sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery
+of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent
+its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often
+in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed
+of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from
+quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which
+would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests,
+only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating _aura
+seminalis_ to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider,
+you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the
+thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the
+flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups,
+instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,--and who
+grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the
+dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the
+vine-dressers, with your hoeing and your dunging and your clipping. O,
+can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe
+organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all,
+alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt
+ourselves to the perception of her beauty,--can you ever, in any way,
+make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had
+they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with
+their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence
+it is that your _eleves_ so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in
+spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow
+and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.
+
+Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards
+him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and
+made the mark ["with care"] with which merchants commend valuable boxes
+of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery
+child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had
+confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the
+centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without
+hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own
+off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at
+evening before the new teacher from the city.
+
+Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all
+that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark
+and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the
+creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those
+king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in
+reference to her companion, may be compared with Luke, and mine with
+Matthew.[28] Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family
+feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great
+good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which
+installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid
+up against this day as a birthday christening present.
+
+But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano
+stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting
+out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house;
+for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him
+than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to
+Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at
+least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will,
+however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister,
+Rabette, that annoying _foster_) said, without thinking, No, although
+she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn
+little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will
+and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,--then
+the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and
+pleaded for him, without knowing why,--then Albina protested at least he
+should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,--then he
+marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the
+female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition,
+gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the
+presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.
+
+
+12. CYCLE.
+
+Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules
+strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed
+them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years.
+Exultingly did his new and old Adam--they flew side by side--flap their
+wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring
+ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a
+journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the
+butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned
+herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a
+shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a
+shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the
+upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party
+and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted
+and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their
+dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for
+the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and
+although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and
+earnings,--because an honest man like him finds always in the body
+politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the
+stone _drapery_ remains,--nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and
+feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was
+just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.
+
+The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I
+offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the
+herdsman's mountain fortification, and received from the soldier's wife
+the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all
+eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the
+wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry
+chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the
+windows and looked in beckoning,--when Albano beheld, under the window
+toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on
+which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun
+shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,--when at the western window
+he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the
+Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,--when he
+placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!"
+then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must
+needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.
+
+The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat.
+The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden
+full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the
+cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to
+sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet
+ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who,
+blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she
+dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano
+stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley,
+and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish
+longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself
+away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself free and
+passive into the broad ether!--and so plashing up and down in the cool,
+all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and
+unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,--or to sweep
+after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured
+assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn
+between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to
+little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the
+peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun,
+and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into
+his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at
+last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter,
+intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red
+clouds!...
+
+Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones?
+Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the
+slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,--just as
+if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low
+earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its
+chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the
+horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through
+the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the
+presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the
+chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness,
+and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it
+must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the
+body the body also can lift up the soul.
+
+The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade
+along with the brook, which was running away into the pale-green birch
+thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown
+him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,[29] and he loved to go
+with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would
+itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook,
+deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out
+through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He
+could not accomplish it,--the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the
+brook broader,--the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high
+overhead;--but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic
+polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus,
+for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so
+agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as
+the longest; but the day after either was fatal.[30]
+
+At last, after the progress of some hours in time and space, he heard,
+beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of
+the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by
+two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent
+to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called
+out on all sides of him, but in a cry;--it was his private patron saint,
+the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his
+account at the foot of the mountain.
+
+He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with
+a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch
+of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of
+passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant
+lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the
+landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white,
+glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,--when
+he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town--views of which hung in
+the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the
+mountains--distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates
+for him were closed,--and when, indeed, everything seemed flying
+westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the
+grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away
+over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the
+oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned
+Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great
+fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero
+the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the
+subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood--ah yes, every
+age--often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every
+other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's.
+Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of
+consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye
+turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than
+they show or we imagine.
+
+Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved
+tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner,
+and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the
+bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,--and the thought that
+this was the birthday of his foster-father,--and his inexpressible love
+for his afflicted mother, upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when
+he was alone,--and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to
+weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the
+Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his
+seeking mother.
+
+He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind
+Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly
+through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a
+fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons
+from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her
+arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young
+gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and
+from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.
+
+Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep
+only their promises, but never a threat,--resembling the forest-officers
+of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws,
+impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to
+one hundred kreutzers.[31] They, however, like Solon, who gave out his
+laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the
+proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.
+
+
+13. CYCLE.
+
+I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a
+grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute
+among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself, were I
+not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying
+back of the table dinner-service.
+
+Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and
+phosphorescing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the
+blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the
+morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender
+emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,--even as
+at evening we remember the morning,--and the forms of Nature drew nearer
+to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present
+offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is
+the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With
+what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the
+eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the
+screaming of the cocks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper
+and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again
+on the shore of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the
+valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead
+in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy
+lamb-clouds!
+
+Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes
+and groping too far into the garden,--besides, the blind girl did not
+see,--holding his arms open before him so as not to run against
+anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up,
+he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside,
+stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one,
+holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"--and as she, with a
+modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down
+on her bowed head with sweet emotion.
+
+Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money
+and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by
+him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,--from whose
+ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically
+possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give
+them back,--she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound
+off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But
+the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an _inner_, finer band, and the
+blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so
+overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of
+Dresden into her apron, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one
+on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came
+trudging up the Pestitz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly,
+to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of
+exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a
+magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind
+eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink
+herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and
+would rather please herself in the glass than others out of it. The
+merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought
+up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a
+piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into
+short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair
+down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon,
+and a very serviceable leather queue of Wuerzburg fabric into the
+bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,--so was Lea with
+hope,--the Jew said he must pack up,--besides, the hair-queue which he
+had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the
+first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every
+morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the
+poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French Insigne, and
+buckled on the Wuerzburg sheath.
+
+And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise
+of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very
+pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue
+actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living
+scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-god,
+to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.
+
+By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real
+wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had
+her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of
+pure _monkery_ and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape,
+and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires
+of Pestitz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not
+now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor
+any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....
+
+But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the
+shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's
+wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious
+lady,--for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the
+male support of _Titan_, firmly planted by some farmers' boys--to whom,
+moreover, Albina has intrusted the _remarche-reglement_ of hastening his
+return--on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of
+the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying
+horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the
+arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could
+not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his
+picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and
+coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half
+as much as the last bird.
+
+I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff
+dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous
+Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green
+Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine
+figure!
+
+The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at
+the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the
+Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned
+bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.
+
+
+14. CYCLE.
+
+Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form
+and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil
+lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy
+shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of
+a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every
+minute his _eleve_ fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments,
+like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus; "and this too,
+now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far
+along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore
+scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the
+sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a
+lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of
+the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the
+master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a
+real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God!
+Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of
+bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there
+better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting--like
+a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge--that
+children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are,
+and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of
+village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet,
+in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble
+chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly
+bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be
+outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years
+old,--supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.
+
+When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and
+the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor
+had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the
+locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps.
+The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the
+Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in
+the way of his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a
+forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The
+soldier's wife wrung her hands,--the servants arranged themselves for
+the taking down from the cross,--the poor little fellow, in a fever,
+drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose
+and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole."
+He would have done it--and put an untimely end to his life and my
+Titan--merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal
+insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the
+chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide
+and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet
+proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at
+that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the
+key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably
+exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an
+Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;--ah,
+Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler,
+end in a discord?--and, secondly, because he had there a
+singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant
+house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as
+spectator of this _debut_. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round
+before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his
+pockets;--the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated
+Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard,
+and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another
+has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in
+his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The Band-box master was best off;
+for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of
+agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his
+consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.
+
+Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with
+him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its
+finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and
+the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and
+highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes
+from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and
+from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides
+turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and
+sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and
+energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to
+behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the
+ground below.
+
+Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had
+it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it,
+from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as
+if they could eat him,"--as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He
+voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted
+him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the
+work-shop,--and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned,
+controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's
+harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's
+mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his
+staving through a window, and firing, from the port-hole, a few of the
+most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.
+
+By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and
+boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came
+slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth
+of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down
+along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line
+of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of
+a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the
+Wuerzburg queue like a tail-feather.
+
+Wehmeier stared at the _cauda prehensilis_ (the ring-tail), and by his
+attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as
+much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of
+his--Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day
+with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten,
+home.
+
+
+15. CYCLE.
+
+The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of
+her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous
+spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might
+transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,--yes, as a
+sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had
+packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the
+cabinet of the dining-room,--and for Albano Albina had already contrived
+an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the _vocation_ of
+the Province. Ah, but what did the lady get from it all but flames,
+which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in
+his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the
+sprinkling of the magister?
+
+Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband
+for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in
+the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as
+ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness,
+because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,--then step by step she
+took back the right,--but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as
+nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their
+mouths,--and at last said he should just give the child up to her.
+
+But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the
+Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in
+reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast
+in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened
+evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own,
+and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a
+teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him--though he himself
+dared and did too much--to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback,
+or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not
+just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose
+educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter
+condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner,
+and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?
+
+Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his
+defiant way to the father's study, and therefore to the court-martial
+punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from
+behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him
+down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning,
+tied on the _vena cava_ of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up
+to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited
+him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical
+mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and
+hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and
+impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally
+she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"
+
+He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated,
+into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant.
+Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice
+of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its
+unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the
+table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad
+habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation
+with wine.
+
+In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by
+their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time
+had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the
+violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a
+low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world
+that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to
+be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of
+the dulcimer let his musical hammer fall on the stringed floor.
+Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the
+whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and
+waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the
+cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs,
+ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their
+leather aprons and _culs de Paris_, to take themselves off instantly.
+
+Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her
+sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew
+he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she
+represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present
+child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in
+which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the
+absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying
+and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his
+waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person
+before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he
+had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle,
+who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would
+certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man
+the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned
+into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul
+in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to
+drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing,
+convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones.
+After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal
+evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon himself by his rides and
+his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on
+every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely,
+herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony
+throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day
+think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.
+
+Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had
+been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed
+upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained
+cold and hard,--for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point,
+the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just
+before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue,
+which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in
+the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Wuerzburg appendage off over his head.
+Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment,
+with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and
+say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in
+future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified
+tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned
+immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with
+too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all
+torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him,
+"and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly
+done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him,
+but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she
+had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair
+as an act of obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children
+in high life.
+
+Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his
+long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping
+before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and
+thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off,
+the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing
+more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay
+thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and
+while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes
+himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with
+his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly
+and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then
+will the old man read the _Decretum_ over again still more slowly, so as
+almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with
+indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it,
+make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness
+and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him
+thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy
+downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry
+cheeks,--then will he look a pretty long time after his departing
+darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over
+the address of the diploma at his will.
+
+Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?
+
+
+16. CYCLE.
+
+Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above
+the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of
+discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf
+of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he
+shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and
+if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary
+partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he
+would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in
+his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.
+
+Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her
+his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna,
+he said not, as usual, _nolo episcopari_; he did not say he was hemmed
+round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that
+perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of
+fortune,--instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more
+common to brides,--he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told
+Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked
+what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the
+Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and
+Rabette, and all.
+
+But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through
+Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the
+arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the
+greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as
+entertaining _acteur_ of the table, he had so much to do with
+conversing, _savoir vivre_, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in
+proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he
+was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers,
+chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting
+them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard
+fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's
+pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the
+feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague,
+and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume
+to himself the magnificent _winter crop_ in Alban's sowed field as his
+own _summer crop_. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all
+the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the
+aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]
+
+With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own
+hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a
+three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his
+entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some
+time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir,"
+replied coldly and gravely the _paradeur_ of a Falterle by the side of
+our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well
+at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to
+scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a
+cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."
+
+What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two
+brothers-in-office!--the master of accomplishments with the motley
+scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow
+outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the
+waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a
+roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him,
+and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of
+candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle
+had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and
+every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were
+the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master
+wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former
+in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,--the one flapping up like
+a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with
+the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial
+root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his
+green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A
+magnificent set-off, I repeat!
+
+The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led
+forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But
+now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his
+napkin open first,--which became now, as it were, introductory programme
+and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "_Posement,
+Monsieur_," said he to the novice, "_il est messeant de deplier la
+serviette avant que les autres aient deplie les leurs_." After some
+minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one _a la
+Brittaniere_, with rings. "_Il est messeant, Monsieur_," said
+the master of accomplishments, "_de souffler sa soupe_." The
+Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from
+the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short,
+frightened into a dead calm.
+
+When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on
+the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced
+veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed
+more inwardly than outwardly.
+
+After the bomb, came in a pike _au four_, to which, as is well known,
+the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly
+give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher
+what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "_Pardonnez,
+Monsieur_," said his rival gourmand, "_c'est du brochet au four, mon
+cher Compte; mais il est messeant de demander le nom de quelque mets
+qu'il soit,--on feint de le savoir_."
+
+It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced
+through the Magister's marrow and bone; the _instruments of passion_
+which lay in the cut-off head of the pike _au four_, as in an armory,
+continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he
+thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them,
+and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as
+he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs
+despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he
+was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with
+the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine,
+and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed him most
+lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him
+the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official
+brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and
+the pike _au four_, and could not help laughing up there on his planet,
+to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of
+brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken
+pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out
+of him every day as that other fellow raked in.
+
+We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this
+lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably
+delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a
+diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all
+diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and
+more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,--at
+which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the
+little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,--until at least with one word he
+had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's
+concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company
+how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for
+any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry
+soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer
+punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but
+quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he
+had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son;
+but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense
+for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like
+vines and bees. Besides, deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of
+their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have
+satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by _opera
+supererogationis_ in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than
+win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g.
+Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest
+achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a
+geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried
+on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith
+they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not
+this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself
+a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being
+children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin
+bow?
+
+But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very
+friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the
+magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but
+with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble
+Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard,
+clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the
+ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the
+life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the _frere terrible_, wherewith they
+kept him under,--but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his
+crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling;
+however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.
+
+Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all
+corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a
+favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as
+himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old,
+speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano
+has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of
+Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not
+yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which
+made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes,
+cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the
+circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on
+amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour
+making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets
+there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite
+our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider,
+ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle
+said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody,
+because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I,"
+that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he
+harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly,
+not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only
+honey (i. e. a little praise).
+
+"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he
+had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer
+shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister
+sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much
+for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with
+the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow;
+and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat
+cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went
+slowly out.
+
+The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his
+Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom
+he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement
+was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the
+last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high
+things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the
+close, drowsy cradle of childhood,--he had sprung at once out of the
+warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,--he
+saw the _toga virilis_ hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and
+said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"
+
+Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too
+easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation,
+resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of
+the fig-tree seeming _fruits_ sprout forth, which are only the fleshy
+rinds of the _blossoms_!
+
+And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and
+exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,--just now
+must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his
+bosom,--he determined to pass through the coming years as through a
+white colonnade of monumental pillars,--already a mere Alumnus from the
+city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic
+author,--and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely
+accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father?
+Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and
+the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of his inner world into a sweltry
+mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,--rush
+into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again
+without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a
+night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered
+at the little pilgrim without a hat.
+
+But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party.
+This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching
+the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.
+
+The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of
+Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and
+enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins,
+wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but
+African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When
+the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common
+boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous
+system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed
+his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by
+chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and
+the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round
+by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer
+both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste--because
+she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on
+the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that
+stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping
+hands--demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta
+haughtily turned upon him her splendid back, covered with ringlets;
+beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came
+back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he
+stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill
+himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a
+little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk
+with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the
+fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the
+whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled
+the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,--so that
+nothing more can be hung on that,--and grazed the side of his head. She
+instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down,
+bleeding, and was carried home.
+
+This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted
+up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her
+quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and
+the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy
+without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of
+anxiety, out through the village. A good genius--the yard-dog,
+Melak--had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the
+fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather
+that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who
+oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves,
+should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted
+reasons,--namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy,
+whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed,
+could not give him a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog
+right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees
+except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these
+inversions,--during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and
+seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and
+every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,--he was found by his
+innocent mother.
+
+"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in
+the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he
+had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a
+vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his
+overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in
+tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but
+merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the
+anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's
+situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then
+so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably
+Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied
+through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately,
+strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards
+Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender
+emotion.
+
+When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a
+little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his
+defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his
+countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling
+threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun.
+He placed himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept
+his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a
+double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered
+fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,--the sign of
+the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.
+
+Verily, I have often formed the wish--and afterwards made a picture out
+of it--that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world,
+because no love moves us so deeply as _returning_ love. It must touch
+Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely
+asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,[34] they will
+tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer
+element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the
+distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain
+Immortals when they behold us under the violent _tempests_ of life
+arrayed against each other on the _battle-field_ of enmity, under double
+blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that
+nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[27] I have already said that he was brought up there, under the
+Provincial Director, _Von Wehrfritz_.
+
+[28] With this Evangelist, as is well known, an angel is
+associated.
+
+[29] Compass.
+
+[30] Odious, or tabooed.--TR.
+
+[31] To a German President of Finance, Vol. I. p. 296.
+
+[32] For Boyle found in his experiments that ranunculi, mints,
+&c., which he suffered to grow large in the water, developed the
+usual aromatic virtues.
+
+[33] Some would rather hear this word than _breeches_.
+
+[34] The female Valisneria lies rolled up under the water, out of
+which it lifts its bud, to bloom in the open air; the male then
+loosens itself from the too short stalk and swims to her with its
+dry blossom-dust.
+
+
+
+
+THIRD JUBILEE.
+
+     METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR
+     PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN
+     OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.
+
+
+17. CYCLE.
+
+If we open the two school-rooms, we shall see the Band-box-master, in
+the forenoon, sitting and brooding upon the two-yolked eggs of the
+_eleve_, and the accomplishing master, in the afternoon, just as the
+cock-pigeon guards the nest the former part of the day, and the female
+the latter.
+
+Now Wehmeier, as well as his competitor, was fain to take possession of
+his pupil with wholly new instructions; but what were new to him were
+new to himself. Like most of the older schoolmasters, he knew--of
+astronomy, except the little that was found in the book of Joshua, and
+of physics, except the few errors which existed in his rather-forgotten
+than torn-up manuscript books, and of philosophy, except that of
+Gottsched, which required, however, a riper pupil, and of other real
+sciences--strictly speaking, nothing, except a little history. If
+ever--in the literary Sahara, to which the tormenting screw of
+school-lessons, without end, and the beggar's or cripple's wagon of a
+life without pay, that had been turned rather into dross than into ore,
+had exiled him--new methods of teaching or new discoveries came to his
+ears (they never came to his eyes), he noted, at the moment, that they
+were his own, only with a shade of variation; and he concealed from no
+one the plagiarism. I heartily beg, however, all silken and powdered and
+curly-haired Princes' instructors, blame not too sorely my poor
+Wehmeier, so deeply overlaid with the heavy, thick strata of fate, for
+his subterranean optics and his crookedness of posture, but reckon his
+eight children and his eight school-hours and his approaching fifties in
+his life's grotto of Antiparos, and then decide whether the man can,
+under these circumstances, come out again into light?
+
+But yet of history he knew, as was said, something; and this he seized
+upon as pedagogical lucky-bone and Fortunatus's wishing-cap. Had he not
+already, in that epical, picturesque style of paraphrase,--whereby he
+could relate the smallest market-town history in such an interesting and
+fictitious way, (for whence will a good story-teller draw the thousand
+lesser but necessary touches but from his head?)--lectured out to his
+Albano Huebner's Biblical History, in a manner extremely touching? And
+which wept most during the delivery, teacher or scholar?
+
+Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike
+into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in
+the world,--the history of countries. But only the British and the
+French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the
+earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg
+princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat
+for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history,
+on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer, most
+disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in
+Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in
+Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?
+
+The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses
+in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according
+to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the
+22d October,[35] hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's
+and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the
+29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to
+the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is
+compelled to listen to the case.
+
+This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange.
+He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the
+rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us
+more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the
+heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives
+from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace
+for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works
+of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against
+every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning,
+walk along several times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen,
+ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within,
+although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,--the
+biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,--not the shadowy world of
+states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy
+family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with
+which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher,
+as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds
+of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and
+descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the
+whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that
+blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could
+he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality?
+Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the
+Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato
+and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was
+cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the
+eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard
+nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible
+effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so,
+from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting
+which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,--hair, moss,
+roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,--was hidden by
+the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like
+the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full
+of broken inscriptions.
+
+
+18. CYCLE.
+
+The reader is now curious about the afternoon, when the _eleve_ is sent
+into the polishing-mill of the Viennite, in order to know what sort of a
+polishing he gets there. It cannot but make him still more curious, when
+I repeat that Wehmeier, who, like other literati, resembled the elephant
+in clumsiness and sagacity, found nothing more agreeable to think
+of--and, therefore, to describe--in ancient history, than a great man,
+who had on little, as, for instance, Diogenes, or went barefoot, like
+Cato, or unshaven, like the philosophers; nay, he hit the very
+Mittel-Mark, and drew out for himself Frederick the Second's clothes,
+whereby he gained as much as Mr. Page in Paris, and carried _his_
+shirts, like the noble Saladin's, and with similar proclamations, on
+poles for show, and sketched, as a second _Scheiner_, the best map we
+have of the sun-spots of snuff on Frederick. Then he took these naked,
+rough colossi, and piled them together into one scale, and threw into
+the other the light, wainscoted figures, like Falterle and the nice
+Nuremberg Kinder-gaerten of modern courts, and besought the scholar to
+take notice which way the swaying tongue of the balance would
+incline....
+
+I am not wholly on thy side here, Magister, since vigorous youths too
+easily, without any prompting, tear in pieces the thin plate of the
+ceremonial law, and often the platers, the head masters of ceremonies,
+into the bargain. For weaklings, the method is good.
+
+Now, when Albano came to the accomplishing master, he could but faintly,
+on account of the loud resonance of the previous lesson,--for children
+of a certain depth, like buildings of a certain size, give an
+_echo_,--apprehend what Falterle commanded; and only when he remained
+some days without the historical sensation was he more widely open to
+the lesser instructions, as gilded things cannot be silvered over till
+the gold is worn off. The misfortune was, too, that he had to go through
+his task-dances in the very next room to the study of the Director, who
+was there occupied with his own. It often happened that Wehrfritz, when
+Alban was as _distrait_ and inattentive in the Anglaise as a partner in
+love, would cry out, while he was dictating in there, "In the name of
+the three devils, chassez!" Quite as many cases might one reckon in
+which, when the music-master, like a bass-drum, with everlasting
+exhortations glided away through adagio into piano, the man had to call
+out in there, with the strongest imaginable fortissimo, "Pianissimo,
+Satan! pianissimo!" Sometimes he was obliged to rise from his labors,
+when, in the fencing-lesson, all admonitions to "quart!" availed
+nothing, and open the door, and, grim with fury, say to him of Vienna,
+"For God's sake, sir, don't be a hare! Prick his leather soundly, if he
+doesn't mind!" Whereupon the courtly fencing-master would only gently
+encourage him to "quart thrust."
+
+Nevertheless, he learned much. In such early years one cannot rise above
+the finery nor the fine arts of a Falterle, who, besides, was reinforced
+with the magical advantage of having shone and taught in the forbidden
+metropolis. Only the loud stride and the boots were not to be taken from
+the pupil; but the shoulders soon grew horizontal, and the head
+perpendicular; and the oscillating fingers, together with the restless
+body, were steadied with Stahl's eye-holder. In general, men with a
+_liberal_ soul in a finely-built body have already, without Falterle's
+espalier-wall and scissors, an agreeable shape and stature. Moreover,
+he felt toward the neat, friendly Falterle that holy _first love for
+men_ wherewith a child's heart twines round all inmates of his home and
+village; and simply for this reason, that a lady could wind the Viennite
+about her ring-finger,--yes, inside of the gold ring itself,--and
+because he spoke and lied about the Knight of the Golden Fleece as about
+a king, and because he was the most agreeable creature that ever trod
+the earth.
+
+As I mean in my biographies to teach tolerance and even-handed justice
+toward all characters, I must here lead the way with a pattern of
+toleration, by remarking of Falterle, that his poor, thin soul had not
+the power to develop itself under the stone table of the laws of
+etiquette, and under the wooden yoke of an imposing station. To whom did
+the poor devil ever do any harm? Not even to ladies, for whom indeed he
+was always laboring before the looking-glass, like a copperplate
+engraver, upon his dear self, but only, like other sculptors, by this
+artistic work, to display pure beauties, not to mislead them. The
+sea-water of his life--for he is neither a millionnaire, nor even the
+greatest _savant_ of the age, although he has read about among many
+circulating libraries--is sweetened by the water of beauty, wherein he
+hourly bathes. He swills and gormandizes scarcely at all. If he curses
+and swears, he does it in foreign languages, as the Papist makes his
+prayers, and flatters very few except himself.
+
+The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate vain persons much too
+violently; for such persons, after all, are more diseased in the head
+than in the will. I can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader,
+whether he ever, even when he was going about with an uncommonly vain
+feeling, remembers to have detected any deep qualms of conscience or
+discords in himself, which, however, were never wanting, when he lied
+very much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such occasions,
+experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking of his inner man in the
+cradle of state. Hence a vain man is as hard to cure as a gambler; but
+for this further reason,--most sins are occasional sermons and
+occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to
+the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word,
+cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness
+against himself, any more than he can play ninepins or fight a duel with
+himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter-Fair or
+New-Year's Day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal,
+margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life; many
+never at all,--for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost. On the
+contrary, one can praise and crown himself inwardly day and night,
+summer and winter, in every place,--in the pulpit, in the Prater, in the
+general's tent, on the back seat of a sleigh, in the princely chair, in
+any part of Germany,--for instance, in Weimar. What! and must one let
+this perennial balsam-plant, which continually perfumes the inner man,
+be plucked up or lopped off?
+
+
+19. CYCLE.
+
+All these occupations and thorns were to Albano right good, sharp
+earthquake-conductors, since in his bosom already more subterranean
+storm-matter circulated than is needed to burst the thin wall of a man's
+chest. Now he began to get on deeper and deeper into the wild
+thunder-months of life. The longing to see Don Zesara caught new warmth
+from the Roman history, which lifted up on high before him Caesar's
+colossal image, and wrote under it, "Zesara." The veiled Linden-city was
+carried over by his fancy and set upon seven hills, and exalted to a
+Rome. A post-horn rang through his innermost being, like a Swiss Ranz
+des Vaches, which builds out into the ether all summits of our wishes in
+long and shining mountain-chains; and it blew for him the signal of a
+tent-striking, and all cities of the earth lay with open gates and with
+broad highways round about him. And when, at this period, on a cool,
+clear summer morning, he marched along metrically by the side of a
+regiment on its way to Pestitz, so long as he could hear the sound of
+the drums and fifes, then did his soul celebrate a Handel's Alexander's
+Feast; the past became audible,--the rattling of the triumphal cars, the
+movement of the Spartan bands and their flutes, and the clear trumpet of
+Fame,--and, as if at the sound of the last trumpets, his soul arose
+among none but glorified dead on the unbolted earth, and, with them,
+still marched onward.
+
+When History leads a noble 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 Blumenbuehl, 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 Pestitz, 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 sex, 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 pass 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 damnation, 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
+documents relating to the case, for the catalogue of petals, which I for
+my own private use am stitching 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 Goddess 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 God? 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 gods than by men; and the ideal foreruns the reality, as, with some
+trees, the tender _blossoms_ anticipate 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 mass
+into the loveliest form.
+
+Circumstances 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 circumstance; 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,
+assailed 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 passing, 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 passions 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 grass 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 space 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 passage 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 Passion-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 goddess,--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
+butterfly,--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 glass 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 peacocks, 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 Pestitz; 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, fag-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 sanctity 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 Uranus, 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 passionate expression, for which, in his own name,
+before so many stoic classical heroes, he could not for shame muster up
+the courage. But in this way the classics could not touch him.
+
+The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass
+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,
+godlike 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 gods 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 butterfly
+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 gods 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 space, 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 passed, 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 snatches 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-assured
+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 Pestitz, 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 Pestitz 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.
+The magic circles of the mount rose ever smaller and smaller out of the
+leaves into the blossoms,--two naked children, among myrtles, had twined
+their arms caressingly about each other's bent head,--they were statues
+of Cupid and Psyche,--rosy night-butterflies were licking, with their
+short tongues, the honey-dew from the leaves, and the glowworms, like
+sparks struck off from the glow of evening, went trailing like gold
+threads around the rose-bushes; he climbed amid summits and roots behind
+the aromatic balustrade toward heaven; but the little spiral alley
+running round with him hung before the stars purple night-violets, and
+hid the deep gardens with orange summits; at length he sprang from the
+highest round of his Jacob's-ladder, with all his senses, out into an
+uncovered, living heaven; a light hill-top, only fringed with variegated
+flower-cups, received and cradled him under the stars, and a white altar
+gleamed brightly beside him in the moonlight.
+
+But gaze down, fiery man, with thy fresh heart, full of youth, on the
+magnificent, immeasurable, enchanted Lilar! A second twilight-world,
+such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out
+before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine
+walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon
+lingers now only on the groves and triumphal gates, and on the
+silver-dust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all
+waters and vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm
+of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like
+Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands
+of our present world,--wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage,
+and all is one lovely, magic confusion. What mean those high, open doors
+or arches, and the pierced groves and the ruddy splendor behind them,
+and a white child sleeping among orange-lilies and gold-flowers, from
+whose cups delicate flames trickle,[43] as if angels had flown too near
+over them? The lightnings reveal swans, sleeping on the waves under
+clouds drunk with light, and their flaming trains blaze like gold after
+them in among the thick trees,[44] as goldfishes turn their burning
+backs out of the water,--and even around thy summit, Albano, the great
+eyes of the sunflowers turn on thee their fiery looks, as if kindled by
+the sparks of the glowworms.
+
+"And in this kingdom of light," thought Albano, trembling, "the still
+angel of my future hides himself and glorifies it, when he appears. O
+where dwellest thou, good Liana? In that white temple? or in the arbor
+between the rose-fields? or up there in the green Arcadian
+summer-house?" If love makes even pangs to be pleasures, and exalts the
+shadowy sphere of the earth into a starry sphere, O what an enchantment
+will it lend to delight! Albano could not possibly, in this outer and
+inner splendor, think of Liana as sick; he represented to himself just
+now only the blissful future, and with a yearning embrace knelt down at
+the altar; he looked toward the glittering garden, and pictured to
+himself how it would be when he should one day tread with _her_ every
+island of this Eden,--when holy Nature should lay his and her hands in
+one another upon these altar-steps,--when he should sketch to her on the
+way the Hesperia of life, the pastoral land of first love, and then its
+holy exultation and its sweet tears, and how he should not then be able
+to look round into the eyes of that most tender heart, because he should
+already know that they were overflowing with bliss. Just then he saw, in
+the moonshine above the triumphal arches, two illuminated forms move
+like spirits; but his glowing soul went on with its painting, and he
+imagined to himself how, when the nightingales trilled in this Eden, he
+should look up to her and say, in a delirium of love, "O Liana, I bore
+thee long ago in my heart,--once upon that mountain, when thou wast
+sick."...
+
+This startled him, and he came to himself; he was indeed on the
+mountain,--but he had forgotten the sickness. Now, kneeling, he threw
+his arms around the cold stone, and prayed for her whom he so loved, and
+who, also, surely had prayed here; and his head sank, weeping and
+darkened, upon the altar. He heard human steps approaching down below on
+the winding hill, and, with trembling joy, he thought it might be his
+father; but he boldly remained on his knees. At last there stepped in
+across the flowery border a tall, bent old man, like the noble bishop of
+Spangenberg; his calm countenance smiled full of eternal love, and no
+pains appeared upon it, and it seemed to fear none. The old man, in mute
+gladness, pressed the youth's hands together as a sign that he should
+pray on, knelt down beside him, and that ecstasy to which frequent
+prayer transfigures one spread its saintly radiance over that form full
+of years. Singular was this union and this silence. The fragment of the
+moon, which was all that yet jutted above the earth, burned darklier,
+and at last went down; then the old man rose, and, with that easiness of
+transition which comes from being habituated to devotion, put questions
+about Albano's name and residence; after the answer, he merely said,
+"Pray on thy way to God, the all-gracious,--and go to sleep before the
+storm comes, my son!"
+
+Never can that voice and form pass away out of Albano's heart; the soul
+of the old man peered, like the sun in an annular eclipse, shining, full
+circle, out over the dark body, which strove to hide it with its
+earth-mould. Deeply struck, to the very roots of his nerves, Albano
+rose, and the broadening flashes of the lightning showed him now, down
+below near the enchanted garden, a second dark, entangled, horrible one,
+a sort of Tartarus to the Elysium. He departed with singular and
+conflicting emotions,--the future, and the beings therein, appeared to
+him, on his way, to stand very near, and already to run to and fro like
+theatre lights behind the transparent curtain,--and he longed for some
+weighty enterprise as a refreshment for his inflamed heart; but he had
+to rest his head, full of this heath-fire, on the pillow, and the high
+thunder, like a god of the night, mingled with its first claps in his
+dreams.
+
+
+24. CYCLE.
+
+THE unknown old man lingered many days in Albano's soul, and would not
+stir. In fact, the channel of his life now needed a bend, to break the
+stress of the stream. Fate can educate men like him only by a change of
+circumstances, just as it can weak ones only by a continuance of the
+same. For if it went on much longer in this way, and the chandelier in
+his temple should, by inner earthquakes, be thrown into ever increasing
+vibrations, the consequence would be, at last, that no candle could any
+longer burn therein. What Imperial-Diet-grievances did not Wehrfritz and
+Hafenreffer already jointly present on the subject, when the shipmaster
+Blanchard, in Blumenbuehl, went up with his aerostatic soap-bubbles, and
+Zesara could hardly, by almost the absolute despotism of the Director,
+be kept back from embarking! And how divine a thing does he not imagine
+it would be, not only to hurl down to the earth its iron rings and
+arrest warrants, and soar away, perpendicularly, above all its
+market-rubbish and boundary-trees and Hercules'-pillars, and sweep
+around it as a constellation, but also to hover above the magic Lilar
+and the hermetically-sealed Linden-city with devouring eyes, and to lift
+a whole, full, heavy world to his thirsty heart, by the handle of a
+single look!
+
+But fate broke the fall of this swift stream. Namely, as good luck would
+have it, the Blumenbuehl church had this long time been daily threatening
+to tumble down,--and I was wishing the Whitsuntide lightning had gone in
+there, and had made ears and legs for the building committee,--when by
+still greater good luck the old Prince was taken sick. Now in the church
+was the hereditary sepulchre of the Prince, which could not conveniently
+serve, on the other hand, as the hereditary sepulchre of the church.
+
+About this time it must needs happen that the old Princess, with the
+Minister Froulay, passed through the village. The two had long since
+commissioned themselves as Imperial vicars, business-agents, and
+sceptre bearers of the State, because the feeble old gentleman had been
+glad to give up the amusements and burdens, the glitter and weight of
+the crown, and admit those two feudal guardians into the hereditary
+office of the sceptre. In short, the age of the church, together with
+that of the princely couple, decided the building of a new roofing and
+covering for the vault.
+
+The Provincial-Director was one of the inspecting committee, and invited
+the distinguished company to his house; among whom, the Provincial
+architect, Dian, and the Counsellor of Art, Fraischdoerfer, as artists,
+and the little princess as naturalist, are particularly to be noticed.
+
+The poor dancing-master got wind of the procession through a telescope,
+just as he was stretching his feet, full of _pas_, into a warm
+foot-bath. It will not gratify anybody, that the Vienna gentleman had
+but one thing in common with the old Magister,--what the Devil shares
+with the horse, namely, the foot, which measured its good foot and a
+half, Paris measure, and that, therefore, his double root, in the narrow
+forcing-pots of shoes, shot out into a fruit-bearing, knotty-stock, full
+of inoculating eyes, i. e. corns. To-day he would have cut these gordian
+knots in a foot-bath; but, as it was, he must, on occasion of such a
+visit,--although he had never stretched them,--put on his tightest
+children's shoes, for effect. Thus are men often caught with too tight
+shoes, as monkeys are with too heavy ones.
+
+Albano, on the contrary, stood in buskins. In general, every one who
+simply came from Pestitz, had, in his eyes, consecrated holy earth on
+his soles; and here he looked with the loving reverence of a village
+youth upon a somewhat oldish, but red-cheeked and tall-built princess,
+whose chin was bent up by time, and whose friendly face--perhaps, by way
+of hiding the many wrinkles--was buried deep in a whole bush of
+millinery. She kept this head moving to and fro with a smiling
+comparison, as of brother and sister, between him and Rabette; for
+mothers always look, in mothers, for the children first. He should have
+further known that he had before him a friend of Liana in the
+frizzle-headed _little_ princess, who, although already of his age, yet
+with a friendly liveliness, which can never be subscribed to by the
+court-marshalship, looked up at all, and even took Rabette by the hand,
+and drew from her an indescribably good-natured and stiff smile. The
+formidable one of the party was to him the Minister, a man full of
+strong parts, both of body and soul, full of furious, murderous
+passions, only that they lay bound with flowery chains, and with respect
+to whom, although his hard face was written over only out of courtliness
+with the twelve friendly signs of the zodiac of love, it would not be
+specially apparent how one could be father and guide to the weak-nerved
+Liana, when the iron parts, of which man carries more in his blood than
+any other animal, had settled, not as in the case of Goetz of
+Berlichingen, into his hand, but into his brow and heart.
+
+I give merely a flying glance at the only member of the company who was
+intolerable to Albano,--the art-counsellor, Fraischdoerfer, who had
+thrown off his face, like the drapery of the ancients, into folds of
+simple and noble greatness. This man, I must explain, had wanted for
+many years to have our bashful little hero sit to him, even to the very
+pit of his stomach, in order to represent, whether in a crayon likeness
+or a medallion I know not, his face, and the broad, high, Plato-like
+breast shining out from his shirt-frills. But the bashful child played
+about himself with his hands and feet so lustily, that nothing could
+possibly be caught and copied except the naked face without the
+pedestal, the thorax. Before me, on the contrary, dear academy, must
+thou now for years keep thyself on the model-stand, like a stylite, and
+expose to my drawing-pen thy head and thy breast, together with its
+cubic contents, not to mention the groupings at all.
+
+He had, perhaps, to thank his noble form for it, that the beautifully
+built, straight-nosed, and magnificently slender Dian--with his raven
+hair and black, eagle eye, who in every pliant motion showed a higher
+freedom of carriage than is gained in ball-rooms and court-saloons--came
+up to him warmly, and, with very few glances, saw to the green bottom of
+the deep but clear sea of the young man, and discerned the pearl-banks
+there. Albano, with his too loud, vehement voice,--with his respectful
+but sharply-moving eyes,--with his rooted posture,--expressed an
+agreeable mixture of inward culture and ascendency with external rustic
+modesty and mildness, like a tulip-tree not as yet cut up for a
+tulip-bed,--a rural hermitage and log-house with golden furniture. He
+had the faults of youth in its recluseness; but men and winter radishes
+must be sowed _far apart_, in order that they may grow _large_: men and
+trees that stand near together have, it is true, a more slender and
+tapering trunk, but no power to brave the tempest, nor such a rich crown
+and branching as those that stand free. With the most unembarrassed
+heartiness, the architect disclosed to the glowing youth, "They should
+from this time forth see each other every week, since he was to come
+daily to oversee the building of the church."
+
+The whole Wehrfritz household is now peeping out after the majestic
+procession, even to the last disappearing chariot-wheel, and is, of
+course, eager to say three words upon the lavender-water of joy that
+leaves such a fragrance behind it, which the procession had sprinkled
+into all corners and upon all pieces of furniture. From the Master of
+exercises--who, with the compression-machines on his feet, stood only so
+far as the excrescences in Purgatory, but from there up to the crown of
+his head in heaven (because the affable Princess had remembered very
+well his five positions)--even to the modest Rabette, the eulogist of
+her victorious rival,--and even to Albina, who was agreeably impressed
+with such warm, motherly love in a Fuerstinn toward the Princess,--and
+even to the Director, who looked back with pleasure on the nobly
+sustained blade- and anchor-proof of his foster-son and the universal
+probity of this converted portion of the great world, because the man
+never observed that Princes and Ministers, just as they have in their
+wardrobes mountain- and mining-habits, so also carry about in their
+dressing-chamber Directorate-dresses, furred gowns of justice,
+consistorial sheep-skins, and women's opera-dresses;--from all these,
+even to the Director, the glad echo swelled, to die away in Zesara with
+an alarm-cannon. His ambition took arms; his liberty-tree shot forth
+into blossoms; the standards of his youthful wishes were consecrated and
+flung to the breeze of heaven; and on the myrtle crown he covered a
+heavy helm with a glittering, high-waving, plumed crest....
+
+The following Cycle is composed merely for the purpose of showing how
+all this is to be taken.
+
+
+25. CYCLE.
+
+It is also my opinion that the antiphonious double choir of the two
+educational colleagues, Wehmeier and Falterle, had hitherto trained our
+Norman, as well as two similar gymnasiarchs, Governess England and
+domestic French instructress France, have actually educated the
+charity-school-girl Germany according to the best school-books, so that
+now we, in our turn, are in a condition to school the Poles, and, with
+the ferule, from the desk of our princely schools, to kantschu them down
+as much as is necessary.
+
+But now too much had waked up in Albano. He felt overswelling energies
+which found no teacher. His father, roving round through Italy, seemed
+to be neglecting him. That seat of the muses, Pestitz,--which now had
+_one_ more muse added to its number,--seemed to be unjustly barred
+against him. Often he knew not how to stay away. Fancy, heart, blood,
+and ambition were at boiling heat. In such a case, as in every
+fermenting cask, nothing is more dangerous than an empty space, whether
+from a want of knowledge or of occupation.
+
+_Dian filled up the cask._
+
+He came each week from the city, as if he had to arrange the hammer-work
+of the church, according to plans, as well as the building of its walls.
+A youth who sees his first Greek cannot, at the outset, rightly believe
+it at all; he takes him for a classic glorification,--a printed sheet
+out of Plutarch. And if his heart burns like that of my hero, and if his
+Greek is of Spartan descent, like Dian,--namely, an unconquered
+_Mainotte_, who has been brought up in the classic double choir of the
+aesthetic singing-schools in Atiniah (Athens) and Rome,--then is it
+natural that the inspired youth should stand every day in the dust-and
+rubbish-clouds of the falling church-walls, and wait to see his
+commander come forth from behind the cloudy pillar.
+
+Dian accompanied his beloved in his walks, often read half the night
+with him, and took him with him on the architectural journeys which he
+had constantly to make into the country. He introduced him with inspired
+reverence into the holy world of Homer and of Sophocles, and went with
+him among the loftier beings of this twin Prometheus, those nobly
+formed, completely developed men, yet unperverted by a partial
+provincial culture, who, like Solomon, had a time for everything
+human,--for laughing, weeping, eating, fearing, and hoping,--and who
+shunned merely rude immoderateness; who sacrificed on the altars of all
+gods, but on that of Nemesis first of all. And Dian, whose inner man was
+a whole, from which no member is torn away, no one swollen, and all
+fully grown, himself went round with his darling as such a Greek of
+Homer and Sophocles. While Wehmeier and the foster-parents were always
+running after him with a pulpit and a pew, at every passionate
+expression of anger, or desire, or exultation, he, on the contrary, with
+fair, liberal freedom, made room for him to unfold himself to his full
+breadth and height. He respected in the youth the St. Elmo's or St.
+Helena's fire, as he did frost in an old man: the heart of vigorous men,
+he thought, must, like a porcelain vase, in the beginning, be turned too
+large and too wide; in the furnace of the world it would soon enough
+shrink up to a proper size. I too require of youth, at first,
+intolerance, then, after some years, tolerance,--that as the stony, sour
+fruit of a strong young heart, this as the soft winter-fruit of an older
+head.
+
+But while the Architect drew with him, and with him examined casts of
+the antiques and works of art, he at the same time made manifest most
+beautifully to the youth his love for the artistical _sign of the
+Balance_ in man (who ought to be his own work of art), and his aversion
+to every paroxysm, which breaks the outward beauty as well as the inward
+into folds and wrinkles, and his desire to regulate his form and his
+heart after the lofty pattern of repose on the antiques.
+
+The Architect, as artists often do, and the Swiss still oftener,
+preserved European culture and rural _naivete_ and simplicity side by
+side, like his beloved profession, wherein, more than in other arts,
+beauty and surveying reason border upon each other; he therefore at
+first let Albano look in and listen at the window of the philosophical
+lecture-hall from without, standing in the open air. He led him, not
+into the stone-quarry, lime-pit, and timber-yard of metaphysics, but
+directly into the ready-made, beautiful oratory, formed of the materials
+thence collected, otherwise called Natural Theology. He did not let him
+forge and solder ring after ring of any iron chain of reasoning, but
+showed such a one to him as a deep-reaching well-chain, whereby Truth,
+sitting at the bottom, is to be drawn up; or as a chain hanging from
+heaven, whereby the lower gods (the philosophers) are to draw Jupiter
+down. In short, the _skeleton_ and _muscle-preparation_ of metaphysics
+he concealed in the _God-man_ of religion. And so it should be (in the
+beginning); grammar is learned from language more easily than the latter
+from the former; criticism from works of art, the skeleton from the
+body, more easily than the reverse; although we always do reverse it.
+Unfortunate is it for the youth of our day, that they are obliged to
+shake the drops and the insects from the tree of knowledge, before the
+fruit.
+
+And now he boldly threw open to him all the chamber-doors of the
+philosophical schools, i. e. the three heavens; for in this youthful
+season one still takes the wick of every learned light of the world for
+asbestos, as Brahmins dress themselves in asbestos; and the masses of
+ice around the poles of our spiritual world represent, at this early
+age, like the actual ones in the visible world, cities and temples on
+azure-blue columns.
+
+Now when Albano had read himself to the flaming point upon some great
+idea or other, as Immortality or Deity, he had then to write upon it;
+because the Architect believed, and I too, that in the educational world
+nothing goes beyond writing,--not even reading and speaking; and that a
+man may read thirty years with less improvement than he would gain by
+writing a half. It is just in this way that we authors mount to such
+heights; hence it is that even the worst of us, if we hold out, become
+somewhat, at last, and write ourselves up from Schilda to Abdera, and
+from there away up to Grub Street.
+
+But what a glowing hour then came on for our darling! What are all
+Chinese lantern-festivals to the high festival for which an inflamed
+youth lights up all the chambers of his brain, and in this illumination
+throws out his first essays?
+
+In the forepart, and on the very threshold of the essay perhaps, Albano
+still crept along step by step, and made use merely of his head; but as
+he got further on, and his heart quivered with wings, and like a comet
+he must needs sweep along before only shimmering constellations of great
+truths, could he then restrain himself from imitating the rosy-red
+Flamingo, who, in his passage towards the sun, seems to paint himself
+into a flying brand, and to clothe himself in wings of fire? When at
+length he reached the practical application, verily every one was like
+the others; in each he formed and sowed an Arcadia full of human angels,
+who in three minutes could cross over on a Charon's pontoon thrown in
+for the purpose, and land in the Elysium which floated so near: in every
+one of these practical applications all men were saints, all saints
+beatified; all mornings blossoms, and all evenings fruit; Liana
+perfectly well, and he not far from it--her lover;--all nations ascended
+more easily the noonday heights; and he upon his own, like men upon
+mountains, saw everything good nearer to him. Ah! the whole boggy
+present, full of stumps and blood-suckers, had he kicked aside, and was
+now encircled only with floating green worlds, full of pastures, which
+the sun-ball of his head had projected into the ether.
+
+Blissful, blissful time! thou hast long since gone by! O, the years in
+which man reads and makes his first poems and systems, when the spirit
+creates and blesses its first worlds, and when, full of fresh
+morning-thoughts, it sees the first constellations of truth come up
+bringing an eternal splendor, and stand ever before the longing heart,
+which has enjoyed them, and to which time, by and by, offers only
+astronomical newspapers and refraction-tables on the morning-stars, only
+antiquated truths and rejuvenated lies! O, then was man, like a fresh,
+thirsty child, suckled and reared with the milk of wisdom; at a later
+period he is only cured with it, as a withered, sceptical, hectic
+patient! But thou canst, indeed, never come back again, glorious season
+of _first love_ for the truth, and these sighs can only give me a
+warmer remembrance of thee; and if thou ever shouldst return, it
+certainly could not be down here in the low mine-shaft of life, where
+our morning splendor consists of the little flames that play upon the
+quartz crystals, and our sun is a mine-lamp,--no; but it may happen
+then, when death reveals us, and tears away from over the heads of the
+pale-yellow workmen the coffin-lid of the mine-shaft, and we now again
+stand as first men on a new, full earth, and under a fresh, immeasurable
+heaven!
+
+Into this golden age of his heart fell also his acquaintance with
+Rousseau and Shakespeare, of whom the former exalted him above his
+century, and the latter above this life. I will not say here how
+Shakespeare ruled, sovereign, in his heart,--not through the breathing
+of living characters, but by lifting him up out of the loud kingdom of
+earth into the silent realm of infinity. When one dips his head at night
+under water, there is an awful stillness round about him; into a similar
+supernatural stillness of the under-world does Shakespeare introduce us.
+
+What many schoolmasters may blame in Dian is this, that he gave the
+youth all books indiscriminately, without any exact course of reading.
+But Alban asked, in later years: "Is such a course anything but folly?
+Is it possible? For does Fate ever arrange the appearance of new books,
+or systems, or teachers, or outward circumstances, or conversations, so
+according to paragraphs, that one needs nothing more than to transcribe
+all that passes upon the memory, and he shall have the order into the
+bargain? Does not every head need and make its own? And does more depend
+on the order in which the meats follow each other, or on the digestion
+of them?"
+
+
+26. CYCLE.
+
+While Dian was causing a nobler temple to go up in the heavens than the
+stone one in the village, the Princess, whose _castrum doloris_ this was
+to be, died; they had, therefore, to deposit her remains for a time in
+the accommodations of a Pestitz church. This changed one or two thousand
+things. The Crown-prince of Hohenfliess, Luigi, must now, will he nill
+he, come back from Italy, to the princely chair, in which the old man,
+bent up with years, had, for a long time, diminutive and speechless,
+been rather lying than sitting,--although the Minister standing behind
+the princely arm-chair took off his figure and voice in a sufficiently
+lively manner. Don Gaspard, who had not listened to any of the previous
+letters of Albano, now despatched to him the following orders, which
+rushed like fiery wine through his veins: "On my way back from Italy we
+meet, in thy birthplace, _Isola Bella_. Thou wilt be sent for." Even
+readers who have not had a week's practice in folding and sealing
+letters of a diplomatic corps, will easily observe that the Knight of
+the Fleece is thinking to bring his son acquainted with the young
+prince, and to establish and insure their first Pestitz connections.
+
+But I beg the world now to measure the Paradise of a man, who after so
+long seafaring at last sees the long shores of the new world stretch out
+into the ocean. Was not life at this moment open to him in a hundred
+directions? Laurel-wreaths, ivy-wreaths, flower-wreaths, myrtle-wreaths,
+wheat-garlands,--all these crowns overhung the great gate of Pestitz and
+its house-doors. Thou brother, thou sister, (I mean Roquairol and
+Liana,) what a full, yearning soul was marching to meet you! and what a
+dreaming and innocent one! Homer and Sophocles, and the ancient history
+and Dian, and Rousseau, that magus of youth,--and Shakespeare and the
+British weeklies (wherein a higher and more human poesy speaks than in
+their abstract poems),--all these had left behind in the happy youth an
+everlasting light, an unparalleled purity, wings for every Mount Tabor,
+and the fairest but most difficult wishes. He resembled, not the urbane
+French, who, like ponds, reflect the hue of the nearest bank, but those
+loftier men, who, like the sea, wear the color of the boundless heavens.
+
+In fact, now was the ripest, best point of time for his change. Through
+Dian and his journeys, even Albano's _exterior_ man had been trained to
+grace in fashionable saloons. Men, like bullets, go farthest when they
+are smoothest; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond-points
+enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is wounded, and even uncommon
+worth is an uncommon fault,--as _high_ towers, for that very reason,
+appear _bent over_. Zesara learned, even outside the circle of country
+youngsters, a readiness of ideas and words, which formerly stood at his
+service only in a state of enthusiasm; for wit, generally a foe of the
+latter, was with him merely a servant and child thereof. He did not,
+like witty sucklings, coquette with all ideas, but he was either beset
+by them or not touched at all; hence came that silent, slow,
+unostentatious ripening of his power; he resembled mountains of a
+gradual ascent, which always yield more booty than those which rise
+abruptly. With great trees, the seed is smaller and in spring the
+blossoms later than in the case of small bushes.
+
+The time ere Gaspard's messenger came to take him away was to the
+detained youth an eternity, and the village a prison; it shrivelled up
+to the household-buildings of a convent. The hidden plan of his life,
+written, however, by encaustic into his brain, was, as with all such
+young men, this, to be and do nothing more than--everything; that is to
+say, to bless, to glorify, and to enlighten at once himself and a
+country,--to be a Frederick II. upon the throne; in other words, a
+storm-cloud, which should contain thunders of excommunication for the
+sinner, electrical light for the deaf, blind, and lame, showers for the
+insects, and warm drops for thirsty flowers, hail for enemies, an
+attraction for everything, for leaves and dust, and a rainbow for the
+end. Now, as he could not succeed Frederick II., he proposes to be
+hereafter minister at least,--especially as Wehrfritz made so much out
+of this by-sceptre,--this offshoot and chip of the mother sceptre,--and
+in his spare hours a great poet and philosopher withal.
+
+I shall be delighted, Count, if thou shouldst become a second Frederick,
+the second and only; my book will profit by it and I myself mould my
+future thereby as a rare historiographer, compounded of Zenophon,
+Curtius, and Voltaire!
+
+
+27. CYCLE.
+
+Zesara will never forget the spring evening, on which he saw a passenger
+in a greatcoat,--a little limping and covered with brown
+travelling-paint, to which his white eyeballs formed a shining
+contrast,--wade across the shallow brook beside the high bridge, and
+how, further, the passenger took with him a watch-man's cane which the
+then Lieutenant of the Beggar's Police had just leaned against his
+house-door, a vicarious fellow-laborer, and handed the said cane, on his
+way, to a cripple, with the words: "Old man, I have nothing by me
+smaller than the stick. If anybody asks you about it, just tell them you
+are keeping guard in the village against the confounded beggar tribe,
+but have not eyes enough." At the same time our pilgrim reached out to a
+rector's little son, who needed it for about three minutes, his
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+It was of course our old Librarian by title, Schoppe, whom Don Gaspard
+had despatched with the note of invitation for Isola Bella. Albano's
+delight was so great, that only some days later did the youth mistake
+the odd humorist, whereas the latter soon correctly weighed the light,
+ardent, still wildling. Did it not fare still worse with the old
+Provincial Director, who, merely because he rated the _body_ politic of
+the Empire as high as if he were the installed _soul_ therein, upon
+Schoppe's sallies against the constitution, came out in a patriotic
+fury: "Sir," said he, in an excited manner, "even if there were a flaw
+anywhere, still a true German would be bound to maintain a profound
+silence on the subject, unless he can help the matter, especially in
+such cursed times."
+
+The finest of all was, that, at Luigi's request, the Architect had to
+set out at the same time, for the purpose of fetching casts of antiques
+from Rome.
+
+And now march on, that soon ye may come back again, and we may at last
+for once fairly enter Pestitz! It may well be expected that thou, good
+child (I should rather say, wild-bee), wilt take thy flight from the
+rural honey-tree into the glass beehive of the city, with deeper pangs
+than thou hadst imagined beforehand,--has not even the old foster-father
+gone off on his journey without saying his farewell, only to escape
+thine?--and, as to thy good mother, it seems to her as if one of the
+angry Parcae were tearing a son from her breast, as if his tender
+love-bond, woven only of childish familiarity, would not stretch out
+into the far future,--and thy sister locks herself up in the attic, her
+rustic heart raging with fiery torments, and cannot say anything to
+thee, nor give thee anything, but a letter-case previously and privately
+worked by her with the silken circumscription: "Remember us!" and even
+on thy laurel-seeking head will the triumphal arch or rainbow of
+leave-taking, when thou passest under it, fling down heavy, heavy drops,
+(ah, they will continue to hang longer on the eyes that look after
+thee!) thy honest old teacher Wehmeier will pour out upon thee the last
+stream of his words and tears, and say, and thy tender heart will not
+smile at it: "He is a worn out, old fellow, and has now nothing before
+him but the hole (the grave); thou, on the contrary, art a fresh, young
+blood, full of languages and antiquities and magnificent, god-given
+talents,--of course he shall not live to see thee make a famous man, but
+his children well may; and these poor worms,--thou must one day adopt
+them, young master!"
+
+Thou pure soul, on every familiar house, on every dear garden and valley
+will sorrow, indeed, sharpen her clasp-knife, and tear open therewith
+softly gushing wounds in thy glowing, tender heart. What do I say? even
+from thy friendly morning- and evening-heights, the nunnery-gratings of
+thy holiest hopes, and from Liana herself, thou wilt seem to be stealing
+away.
+
+But cast thy weeping eyes over the broad, blue Italy, and dry them in
+the spring breezes. Life begins,--the signals for the martial exercises
+and tournaments of manly youth are given, and, in the midst of the
+Olympic battle-games, thou wilt hear the music of neighboring concert-
+and dancing-halls magnificently pealing around thee.
+
+What phantasies are these I am playing here? What! is it not more than
+too well known to all of us, that he has been gone this long time, ever
+since the very first Jubilee-period,--yes, and come back again, and has
+already, ever since the second--and we are now counting the fourth--been
+sitting in company with the Librarian and the Lector, on horseback,
+before Pestitz, unable to get in, on account of the barricade of
+the----
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[38] In Catania, the veil of St. Agatha is the only antidote to
+Etna.
+
+[39] Allusion to the torches, before which the Colosseum and the
+Antiques and the glaciers, which are both, are seen magically
+gleaming.
+
+[40] As the Queen of Heaven, Juno is always, by the ancients,
+clothed in a blue veil.--_Hagedorn on Painting._
+
+[41] An old machine that fires many shots at once.
+
+[42] In Italy the stars look not silvery, but golden.
+
+[43] In a tempestuous atmosphere, little flames are emitted by
+orange-lilies, gold-flowers, sunflowers, Indian pinks, &c.
+
+[44] Probably on fluttering gold plates after the birds.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTH JUBILEE?
+
+GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER OF THE
+KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL
+GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY
+PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION FOR
+TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE.
+
+
+28. CYCLE.
+
+When he came to the fork of the road, of which the right prong points to
+Lilar, Albano, with a somewhat heavy heart, spurred his horse across,
+and flew up the hill, till the bright city, like an illuminated St.
+Peter's dome, blazed far and wide in this spring night of his fancies.
+It lay, like a giant, with its shoulders (the upper city) resting on the
+heights, and stretched its other half (the lower city) down into the
+valley. It was noon, and not a cloud in heaven; at noonday a city stands
+before you in full, white disk, whereas a village does not, until
+evening, come out of its first quarter into full light. It was well
+fortified, not by Rimpler or Vauban, but by a blooming palisade of
+lindens. The long wall of the palaces of the mountain-city gleamed from
+above a welcome to our Albano, and the statues, on their Italian roofs,
+directed themselves towards him as way-guides and criers of joy; over
+all the palaces ran the iron framework of the lightning-rods, like a
+throne-scaffolding of the thunder, with golden sceptre-points; down
+along the side of the mountain lay camped the lower city, by the side of
+the stream between shady avenues, with its gay facades towards the
+streets, and its white back turned toward Nature; carpenters were
+hammering away like a forge on the green-sward among the peeled trunks
+of trees, and the children were clattering round with the birch-bark;
+cloth-makers were stretching out green cloths like bird-nets in the sun;
+from the distance came white-covered carriers'-wagons jogging along the
+country-road, and by the sides of the way shorn sheep were grazing under
+the warm shadow of the rich, bright linden-blossoms,--and over all these
+groups the noonday chime of bells from the dear, familiar towers (those
+relics and light-houses that gleamed out of the dusk of his earlier
+days), floated like one all-embracing and animating soul, and called
+together the friendly throngs of people.
+
+Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the
+open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who
+knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be
+standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be
+unravelled,--where all household gods and household fates of his nearest
+future lie hid,--where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of
+Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching
+close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in
+the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of
+light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner
+mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of
+the best.
+
+Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have
+happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were
+singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the
+passers below, and a building-orator,[45] on the ridgepole of a new
+house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his
+own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding;
+yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation
+of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the
+Muses,[46] who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery
+eye to find his Roquairol,--after all this, when we reach his future
+residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.
+
+It came from the Land-physicus[47] Sphex, his future landlord, who is to
+resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his
+cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper
+city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are
+domiciled the students and the _city_. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex
+was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat
+upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's
+drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his
+drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had
+turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he
+soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but
+during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"
+
+The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the
+house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to
+stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly,
+"Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor
+of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a
+picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the
+dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his
+rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on
+the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his
+foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had
+been sent after him,--fair reflections from the still land of youth,
+left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only
+concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be
+planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the
+goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the
+clare-obscure, made the forms of youth--many of them armed, many
+crowned, a troop of fates and graces--beset his heart, which had
+hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft
+and languid _for three minutes_; verily, to a youth, especially this
+one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring
+volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer,
+are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the
+physical.
+
+Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared
+his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired
+the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation
+to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son,
+who, with two others, named Boerhave and Galen, had hitherto been
+acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind
+a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some
+connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days
+he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?"
+asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked
+anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears,
+and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.
+
+The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary,
+prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old
+prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful
+event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz,
+and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with
+lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son,
+and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people
+had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the
+prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had
+his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death,
+postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving
+sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the
+case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his
+white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that
+time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether
+a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much
+silk in a period of such political embezzlement. "But," replied
+Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs,
+like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still
+they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is
+generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no
+easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and
+corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal
+death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal
+graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children,
+the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new
+inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies,
+we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it
+does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal
+Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means,
+to announce."
+
+Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while,
+brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open,
+with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover;
+but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like
+a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was
+his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his
+head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the
+impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury
+to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to
+conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a
+flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner
+twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook
+his head still more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from
+the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap
+almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from
+this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other
+of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the
+intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to
+conceal.
+
+At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the
+tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the
+events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of
+the letter!
+
+
+29. CYCLE.
+
+When Sphex opened the Librarian's room for him, the said room was
+already occupied with a box of vipers (also arrived from Italy), with
+three-quarters of a hundred weight of flax, a white hoop-petticoat, and
+three silk shoes, with the holes punched, belonging to the doctoress,
+and a supply of camomile. The medical married couple had thought the
+pedagogical couple nested together; but Schoppe replied admirably well,
+and almost with some irony toward the more politely treated Augusti:
+"The more powerful and intellectual and great two men are, so much the
+less can they bear each other under one ceiling, as great insects, which
+live on _fruits_, are unsocial (for example, in every hazel-nut there
+sits only one chafer), whereas the little ones, which only live on
+_leaves_,--for instance, the leaf-lice,--cleave together nest-wise."
+Zesara would by all means have been glad to hold to his insatiable heart
+the friend whom fate had placed thereupon, constantly in every situation
+and season as a brother-in-arms; but Schoppe has the right of it.
+Friends, lovers, and married people must have everything else in common,
+but not a chamber. The gross requisitions and trifling incidents of
+bodily presence gather as lamp-smoke around the pure, white flame of
+love. As the echo is always of more syllables the farther off our call
+starts, so must the soul from which we desire a fairer echo not be too
+near ours; and hence the nearness of souls increases with the distance
+of bodies.
+
+The Doctor caused his noisy children to run like a cleansing stream
+through the Augean stable; but he went down again to the drummer, with
+whom, according to his own story, his connection stood thus: Sphex had
+already, several years before, ventured certain peculiar conjectures
+upon the secretion of fat and the diameter of the fat-cells, in a
+treatise which he would not publish till he could append to it the
+anatomical drawings thereunto appertaining, for which he was awaiting
+the dissection and injection of the drummer that sat there. This sickly,
+simple, flabby man, named _Malt_, he had a year since, when certain
+symptoms of the fat-eye attached to him, taken to board gratis, on
+condition that he should let himself be dissected when he was dead.
+Unfortunately Sphex has found, for a considerable time, that the corpse
+daily falls away and dries up from the likeness of an eel to a
+horned-snake; and he cannot possibly make out what does it, since he
+allows him nothing emaciating, neither thinking, nor motion, nor
+passions, sensibility, vinegar, nor anything else.
+
+As to the drum, the corpse is obliged--since he is full as hard of
+hearing as he is of comprehending, and never can adopt a reason, for the
+very reason that he never hears one--to carry that round, strapped to
+him, because during its vibration he can better apprehend what his
+employer and prosector has to censure in him.[49] The Doctor now began
+to scold at him down below--Schoppe stood listening at the window--in
+the following wise: "I would the Devil had taken your cursed father of
+blessed memory before he had died. You shrink up like army-cloth under
+your lamentation, and yet never wake him up, though you cried your nose
+away. Drum better, church-mouse! Don't you know, then, scrub, that you
+have made a contract with another, to grow into fat as well as you can,
+and that it's expensive maintaining a fellow that steals his wages in
+this way, till he becomes available? Others would gladly grow fat, if
+they had such a chance. And you! speak, rope!" Malt let the drum-sticks
+clatter down under his thighs, and said: "Thou hast hit the true secret
+of thy trouble with me,--there is no real blessing upon our grease,--and
+one of us silently wears away at the thought. As to my blessed father,
+verily, I send him out of my head, let him happen in when he will."
+
+
+30. CYCLE.
+
+The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs,
+when translated, thus:--
+
+"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a
+letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence
+of thy sister's asphyxias; it was written on Good Friday, and looked
+forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the
+event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of
+the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes
+some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain.
+I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful,
+armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the _jongleur_ fast; but
+bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in
+Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old
+Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!
+
+                                  "G. DE C."
+
+"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion,
+and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was
+denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see
+each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and
+smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand
+so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the
+melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and
+decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had
+carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that
+she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood
+contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What
+destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that
+voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and
+boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals.
+"Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not, however, in this
+case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed
+terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced
+for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the
+most beloved.
+
+In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their
+household arrangements,--which, however, had never yet been able to
+efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of
+the Linden-city,--the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary
+prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day
+copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him
+there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the
+world a bill of fare _raisonne_ of all the show-dishes in the gallery;
+but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over
+whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame
+would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly
+covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban,
+in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of
+his mother's,[50] and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had
+no one been there.
+
+But the Princess Julienne was there, whom he (as we all do) still
+recognized right well as a Blumenbuehl acquaintance, as she also did him.
+She was truly full of youthful charms, but one did not find these out
+till one had been for two days violently in love with her; that made her
+every minute afterward prettier, as in fact love is rather the father
+than the son of the goddess of grace, and his quiver the best casket of
+jewels and the richest toilet-box, and his bandage the best _mouchoir
+de Venus_ and beauty-patch that I know.
+
+She was just sketching the gypsum-cast of a noble old head, which seemed
+to the Count as if it must have been drawn from the antique-cabinet of
+his memory, and toward which his swelling heart flowed out right
+lovingly; but he could not recall the original. At last Julienne, in
+despite of etiquette, said, looking up most kindly, "Ah, dear Augusti,
+my father lies dead in Lilar." The word Lilar suddenly colored, in
+Albano, the pale image of recollection,--perfectly like this white bust
+had the old man in the moonshine looked, who, in that poetical
+summer-night, pressed Zesara's hands together on the mountain for
+prayer, and said, "Go home to sleep, dear son, ere the storm comes." Now
+another would have inquired after the name of the bust, and then, and
+not till then, have disclosed the nocturnal history; but the Count, in
+his warmth, did merely the latter, after waiting a short time for the
+conversation to run out. Augusti, when Albano began the history--to
+_him_ a foreign one--of his acquaintance with the original, was on
+thorns to interrupt him; but Julienne gave him a nod, to let him go on,
+and the youth true-heartedly communicated to the sympathizing soul the
+beautiful meeting, with a tenderness of emotion and fire, both of which
+increased when her eyes flowed over into her smiles. "It was my
+father,--that is his cast," said Julienne, weeping and glad. Albano,
+after his manner, clasped his hands together, with a sigh, before the
+bust, and said, "Thou noble, heartily-beloved form!" and his large eye
+gleamed with love and sorrow.
+
+The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and
+she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life
+is truly only a longer _punishment of bearing arms_ (as, according to
+the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are
+true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is
+there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female
+pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,--but
+the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the
+eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve
+times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and
+others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count
+(while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more
+brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more
+childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not
+possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut
+himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at
+Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever,
+and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),--and how she
+and Fraeulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the
+half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion
+to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber
+of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved;
+how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever
+slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every
+hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as
+one going to bed.
+
+We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again,
+like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the
+grave; and when, like flowers sleeping at evening, they become
+_undistinguishable_, and grow all alike, even before death makes them
+so.
+
+The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these
+funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation
+by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana.
+But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this
+friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in
+which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her
+bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of
+blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to
+portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.
+
+The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other
+through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other
+without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as
+the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but
+they loved each other intensely,--with eyes, lips, and hearts,--like two
+good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made
+it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same
+with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily
+imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once
+painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano,
+as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For
+Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates
+to the highest heavens in his innermost being!
+
+Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself
+without the fee-provost Hafenreffer), have been able to observe
+anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in
+his face, and rapidity of utterance.
+
+
+31. CYCLE.
+
+Into the midst of these delineations and enjoyments the successor, or
+rather the _afterwinter_ of the cold old man, Luigi, suddenly entered.
+With a flat, carved work of spongy face, on which nothing expressed
+itself but the everlasting discontent of life-prodigals, and with a
+little full-grown miniver[51] on his head (as forerunner of the
+wisdom-teeth), and with the unfruitful superfetation of a voluminous
+belly, he came up to Albano with the greatest courtliness, in which a
+flat frostiness towards all men stood prominent. He immediately began to
+dust about him with the bran of empty, rapid, disconnected questions,
+and was constantly in a hurry; for he suffered almost more ennui than he
+caused; as in general, there is no one with whom life drags so
+disagreeably as with him who tries to make it shorter. Luigi had run
+over the earth as quickly as through a powdering room, and had, as in
+such a room, become decently gray; the milk-vessels of his outer and
+inner man had, because they were to be converted into cream-pots and
+custard-cups, for that very reason, perverted themselves into
+poison-cups and goblets of sorrow. As often as I pass along before a
+painted prince's-suite in a corridor, I always fall upon my old project,
+and say, with entire conviction: "Could we only contrive for once, like
+the Spartans and all the older nations, to get a regent to the throne in
+a _healthy_ state, then we should have a _good_ one into the bargain,
+and all would go well. But I know these are no times for such a thing.
+It is a sin, that only at torture do surgeons and physicians assist, not
+at joy, to point out nicely the degree of pleasure as they do of the
+rack, and to indicate the innocent conditions."
+
+Albano, a stranger in the company and in the eyes of this class of men,
+looked upon the gulf between himself and Luigi as much less deep than it
+was; it was merely annoying and uncomfortable to him, as it is to
+certain people, when, without their knowledge, a cat is in the chamber.
+The progress of moral enervation and refinement will yet so cleanse and
+equalize all our exteriors,--and according to the same law, indeed, by
+which _physical weakness_ throws back the _eruptions of the skin_ and
+drives them into the _nobler_ parts,--that verily an angel and a satan
+will come at last to be distinguishable in nothing except in the heart.
+Alban had already brought with him from Wehrfritz, whom he always heard
+contending for the right of the province against the prince, an aversion
+to his successor; so much the more easily flamed up in him a moral
+indignation, when Luigi turned toward the pictures and drew aside the
+curtains or aprons from several of the most indecent, in order, not
+without taste and knowledge, to appraise their artistic worth. A copied
+Venus of Titian, lying upon a white cloth, was only the forerunner.
+Although the innocent hereditary prince made his _voyage pittoresque_
+through this gallery with the artistical coldness of a gallery inspector
+and anatomist, and sought more to show than to enrich his knowledge,
+still the inexperienced youth took it all up with a deaf and blind
+passionateness, which I know not how to vindicate in any way, not even
+by the presence of the princess, and so much the less, because in the
+first place she busily divided her soul only between the gypsum-bust
+and its copy, and because, secondly, in our day, ladies' watches and
+fans (if they are tasty) have pictures on them which Albano would want
+other fans to hide. The two flames of wrath and shame overspread his
+face with a glowing reflection; but his awkward honesty of scorn
+contrasted with the ease of the Lector, who with his cold tone, quite as
+precise as it was light, preserved independence and protected purity.
+"They please me not, one of them," he said, with severity: "I would give
+them all away for a single storm of Tempesta's." Luigi smiled at his
+scholar-like eye and feeling. When they stepped into the second
+picture-chamber, Albano heard the Princess going away. As this apartment
+threatened him with still more rent veils of the _un_holiest, he took
+his leave without special ceremony, and went back without the Lector,
+who had to-day to give a reading.
+
+Never did Schoppe grasp his throbbing hand more heartily than this time;
+the aspect of an abashed young man is almost fairer (especially rarer)
+than that of an abashed virgin; the former appears more tender and
+feminine, as the latter appears more strong and manly, by a mixture of
+the indignation of virtue. Schoppe, who, like Pope, Swift, Boileau,
+forced into combination a sacred reverence for the sex with cynicism of
+dress and language, emptied the greatest vials of wrath upon all
+libertinage, and fell like a satirical Bellona upon the best free
+people; this time, however, he rather took them under his protection,
+and said, "The whole tribe love the blush of shame in others decidedly,
+and defend it more willingly than shamelessness, just as (and on the
+same kind of grounds) blind persons prefer the _scarlet_ color. One may
+liken them to _toads_, who set the costly toad-stone (their heart) on
+no other cloth as they do upon a _red_ one."
+
+The Lector--who with all his purity and correctness would, nevertheless,
+without hesitation, have helped a Scarron write his ode on the seat of a
+duchess--when he would treat the matter of the Count's flight, was at a
+loss what to make of it, when the latter sprinkled him with some
+rose-vinegar, and said, "The bad man's father is lying on the board, and
+one lies before his own iron brow: O, the bad man!" Certainly the
+physical and moral nearness of the two fair female hearts, and his love
+for them, had done most to excite the Count against Luigi's artistic
+cynicism. The Lector merely replied, "He would hear the same at the
+Minister's and everywhere; and his false delicacy would very soon
+surrender." "Do the saints," inquired Schoppe, "dwell only _upon_ the
+palaces and not _in_ them?" For Froulay's bore upon its platform a whole
+row of stone apostles; and on one corner stood a statue of Mary, which
+was to be seen from Sphex's house among nothing but roofs.
+
+Youthful Zesara! how does this marble Madonna chase the blood-waves
+through thy face, as if she were the sister of thy fairer one, or her
+tutelar and household goddess! But he took care not to hasten his
+entrance into this _Lararium_ of his soul, namely, the delivery of his
+father's letter of introduction, by a single whisper, for fear of
+suspicion; so many missteps does the good man make in the very gentile
+fore-court of love; how shall he stand in the fore-court of the women,
+or get a footing in the dim Holy of Holies?
+
+
+32. CYCLE.
+
+The Court now caused to be made known in writing (it could not speak for
+sorrow) that the dead Nestor had departed this life. I set aside here
+the lamentation of the city, together with the rejoicing of the same
+over the new perspective. The Land-physicus Sphex had to eviscerate the
+Regent like a mighty beast,--whereas we subjects are served up with all
+our viscera, like snipes and ground-sparrows, on the table of the worms.
+At evening, there reposed the pale one on his bed of state,--the
+princely hat and the whole electrical apparatus of the throne-thunder
+lay quite as still and cold beside him on a Tabouret; he had the
+suitable torches and corpse-watchers around him. These Swiss-guards of
+the dead (the sound of the word rings through me, and I at this moment
+see Liberty lying on her bed of state in the Alps, and the Swiss
+guarding her) consist, as is well known, of two regency-counsellors, two
+counsellors of the exchequer, and so on. One of the
+exchequer-counsellors was Captain Roquairol. It can be only touched upon
+here, in the way of interpolation, how this youth, who of financial
+matters understood little more than a treasury-counsellor in ----h,[52]
+arose, nevertheless, to be a counsellor in war-matters there,--namely,
+against his own will, through old Froulay, who (in himself no very
+sentimental gentleman) was always reviving and retouching the youthful
+remembrances of the old Prince, because, in this tender mood, one could
+get from him by begging what one would. How odious and low! so can a
+poor prince have not a smile, not a tear, not a happy thought, out of
+which some court-mendicant, who sees it, will not make a door-handle to
+open something for himself, or a dagger-handle to inflict a wound; not a
+sound can he utter which some forester and bugle-master of the chase
+shall not pervert to the purpose of a mouth-piece and tally-ho.
+
+Julienne, at nine o'clock in the evening, visited the only heart which,
+in the whole court, beat like hers and for hers,--her good Liana. The
+latter gladly offered her forehead to her commencing sick-headache, and
+sought only to feel and to still another's pain. The friends, who,
+before strangers' eyes, only displayed pleasantry, and before each other
+only a tender, enthusiastic seriousness, sank more and more deeply into
+this mood before the severe and religious lady of the Minister, who
+never found in Julienne so much soul as in the soft hour after weeping,
+as stock-gilliflowers begin to scent the air when they are sprinkled.
+Not the struggle, but the flight of pain, beautifies the person; hence
+the countenance of the dead is transfigured, because the agonies have
+cooled away. The maidens stood enthusiastically together at the window,
+the waxing moonlight of their fancy was made full moonlight by that of
+the outer world; they formed the nun's-plan to live together, and go in
+and out together for life. Often it seemed to them, in this still hour
+of emotion (and the thought made them shudder), as if the murmuring
+wings of departed souls swept by over them (it was only a couple of
+flies, who, with feet and wings, had caught a few tones on the harp of
+the Minister's lady); and Julienne thought most bitterly of her dead
+father in Lilar.
+
+At last she begged the sister of her soul to ride with her this night to
+Lilar, and to share and assuage the last and deepest woe of an orphan.
+She did it willingly; but the "yes" was hard to extort from the
+Minister's lady. I see the gentle forms step, from their long embrace in
+the carriage, out into the mourning chamber at Lilar,--Julienne, the
+smaller of the two, with quivering eyes and changing color; Liana, more
+pale with megrim and mourning, and milder and taller than her companion,
+having completed her growth in her twelfth year.[53]
+
+Like supernatural beings the two maidens beamed upon Roquairol's soul,
+already burning in every corner. A single tear-drop had power to bring
+into this calcining oven boiling and desolation. Already this whole
+evening had he been glancing at the old man with fearful shudderings at
+the childish end of that faded spirit, which once had been as fiery as
+his own now was; and the longer he looked, so much the thicker
+smoke-clouds floated from the open crater of the grave over into his
+green-blooming life, and he heard therein a thundering, and he saw
+therein an iron hand glowing and threatening to grasp at human hearts.
+
+Amidst these grim dreams, which illuminated every inner stain of his
+being, and which sternly threatened him that a day would come, when, in
+his volcano too, there would remain nothing fruitful but the--ashes, the
+mournful maidens entered, who, on their way, had wept only over the face
+that had grown _cold_, and now wept still more heavily over the form
+that had grown _beautiful_; for the hand of death had effaced from it
+the lines of the last years,--the prominent chin, the fire-mounds of the
+passions, and so many pains underscored with wrinkles, and had, as it
+were, painted upon the earthly tabernacle the reflection of that fresh,
+still morning light which now invested the disrobed soul. But upon
+Julienne a black taffeta-plaster on the eyebrows, which had been left
+behind by a blow,--this sign of wounds made a more violent impression
+than all signs of healing: she observed only the tears, but not the
+words of Liana. "O, how beautifully he rests there!" "But why does he
+rest?" said her brother, with that voice, murmuring from his innermost
+being, which she recognized as coming from the amateur-stage; and
+grasped her hand with agitation, because he and she loved each other
+fervently, and his lava broke now through the thin crust: "for this
+reason,--because the heart is cut out of his breast, because the wheel
+is broken at the cistern, because the fire-wheel of rapture, the
+fountain-wheel of tears, moves therein no more!"
+
+This cruel allusion to the opening of the body wrought terribly on the
+sick Liana. She must needs avert her eyes from the covered breast,
+because the anguish cramped the breath in her lungs; and yet the wild
+man, desolating others as well as himself, who had hitherto been silent
+by the side of the stiff corpse-guard, went on with redoubled crushing:
+"Feel'st thou how painfully this cricket-ball of fate, this Ixion's
+wheel of the wishes, rolls within us? Only the breast without a heart is
+calm."
+
+At once Liana took a longer and more intense look at the corpse; an
+ice-cold edge, as if of death's scythe, cut through her burning
+brain,--the funeral torches (it seemed to her) burned dimmer and
+dimmer,--then she saw in the corner of the chamber a dark cloud playing
+and growing up;--then the cloud began to fly, and, full of gushing
+night, rushed over her eyes,--then the thick night struck deep roots
+into her wounded eyes, and the affrighted soul could only say, "Ah,
+brother, I am blind!"
+
+Only hard man, but no woman, will be able to conceive that an aesthetic
+pleasure at the murderous tragedy found its way into Roquairol's
+frightful anguish. Julienne left the dead, and her old sorrow, and, with
+the new one, flung herself around her neck, and moaned: "O my Liana, my
+Liana! Seest thou not yet? Do look up at me!" The distracted and
+distracting brother led on the sister, upon whose pale cheeks only
+single drops fell like hard, cold water, with the sharp question: "Does
+no destroying angel, with red wings, whiz through thy night; hurls he no
+yellow vipers at thy heart, and no sword-fish into thy network of
+nerves, in order that they may be entangled therein, and whet their
+saw-teeth in the wounds? I am happy in my pain; such thistles scratch us
+up,[54] according to good moralists, and smooth us down too. Thou
+anguish-stricken blind one, what say'st thou,--have I made thee truly
+miserable again?" "Madman!" said Julienne, "let her alone: thou art
+destroying her." "O, he is not to blame for that," said Liana; "the
+headache long since made it misty to my eyes."
+
+The friends took their departure in double darkness, and therein will I
+leave it with all its agonies. Then Liana begged her maiden to say
+nothing of it to her mother so little time before sleep, since it might,
+perhaps, go away in the night. But in vain; the Minister's lady was
+accustomed to close her day on the bosom and lips of her daughter. The
+latter now came in, led along, and sought her mother's heart with a
+groping, sidelong motion, and, in this beloved neighborhood, could no
+longer refrain from a softer weeping; then, indeed, all was betrayed and
+confessed. The mother first sent for the Doctor before she, with wet
+eyes and with her gentle arms around her, heard her afflicted daughter's
+story. Sphex came, examined the eyes and pulse, and made no more of it
+than a nervous prostration.
+
+The Minister, who had everywhere in the house leading-hounds with
+fine--ears, came in, upon being informed; and while Sphex stood by, he
+made, except long strides, nothing but this little note, "_Voyez,
+Madame, comme votre le Cain[55] joue son role a merveille_."
+
+As soon as Sphex had gone out, Froulay let loose several
+billion-pounders and hand-grenades upon his lady. "Such," he observed,
+"are the consequences of your visionary scheme of education (to be sure
+his own, in respect to his son, had not turned out specially well). Why
+did you let the sick ninny go?" He would himself have still more gladly
+allowed it from courtly views; but men love to blame the faults which
+they have been saved the trouble of committing; in general, like
+head-cooks, they had rather apply the knife to the _white_- than to the
+_dark_-feathered fowl. "_Vous aimez, ce me semble, a anticiper le sort
+de cette reveuse un peu avant qu'il soit decide de notre._"[56] Her
+silence only made him the more bitter. "_O, ce sied si bien a votre art
+cosmetique que de rendre aveugle et de l'etre, le dieu de l'amour s'y
+prete de modele._" Wounded by this extreme severity,--especially as the
+Minister himself had chosen and commanded this very _cosmetic_ education
+of Liana, against the maternal wishes, to gratify his political
+ones,--the mother had to go and hide and dry her wet eyes in her
+daughter's bosom. Married men and the latest literati regard themselves
+as flints, whose power of giving _light_ is reckoned according to their
+_sharp corners_. Our forefathers ascribed to a diamond belt the power to
+kindle love between spouses. I also still find in jewels this power;
+only this stone (which appertains to the flint species) leaves one,
+after the marriage-compact, as cold and hard as it is itself. Probably
+Froulay's marriage-bond was one of such precious stone.
+
+But the lady only said, "Dear Minister, leave we that! only spare you
+the sick one." "_Voila precisement ce qui fut votre affaire_," said he,
+laughing scornfully. In vain did Liana eloquently and touchingly pour
+out to him her mistaken yet moving convictions, (aimed at the wall,
+however,) and plead for her brother, which everlasting advocacy of all
+sorts of people (which proved too much) was her only failing;--all in
+vain, for his sympathy with an afflicted one consisted in nothing but
+fury against the tormentors, and his love toward Liana showed itself
+only in hatred of the same. "Peace, fool! But _Monsieur le Cain_ comes
+not into my house, madam, till further orders!" Out of forbearance, I
+say nothing further to the old conjugal bully than go--to the devil, or
+at least to bed.
+
+
+33. CYCLE.
+
+The German public may still remember the _obligato-sheets_ promised in
+the Introductory Programme, and ask me what has become of them. The
+foregoing Cycle was the first, most excellent Public; but see through
+the matter, how it is with obligato-sheets, and that perhaps as much
+history lies therein as in any one Cycle, however it may be called.
+
+The Count had not yet learned anything of Liana's misfortune, when he,
+with the others, went down to the dinner of the Doctor, who to-day was
+very hospitable. They found him seized with a most violent fit of
+laughter, his hands thrust into his sides, and his eyes bent over two
+little ointment vessels on the table. He stood up, and was quite
+serious. The fact was, he found in Reil's Archives of Physiology, that,
+according to Fourcroy and Vauquelin, tears dye violet-juice green, and
+therefore contain alkali. In order to prove the proposition and the
+tears, he had thrown himself into a chair, and laughed in right hearty
+earnest, so as afterward to cry and get a drop or two for the
+brine-gauge of the proposition; he would gladly have wrought himself
+into another kind of emotion, but he understood his own nature, and knew
+that nothing could be got out of it so,--not a drop.
+
+He left the guests alone a moment,--the lady was not yet to be
+seen,--Malt sat on an ottoman,--the children had satirical looks,--in
+short, Impudence dwelt in this house as in her temple. Ridicule had no
+effect upon the old man, and he only countermanded what displeased
+himself, not what displeased others.
+
+At length the rosy-cheeked wife of the physician flourished into the
+apartment,--as preparatory course or preamble of the dinner,--with three
+or four _esprits_ or _feathers in her cap_,--with a dapple
+neck-apron,--in a red ball-dress, from which waltzing had taken out the
+color in which she had rouged,--and with a perforated fancy-fan. If I
+wished, I could be interested in her; for, touching these _esprits_
+(since the _esprit_, like the brain in Embrya, often sets itself upon
+the brain-pan, and there suns itself), she thought women and partridges
+were best served up at table with feathers on their heads; touching the
+fan, she meant to have it understood she had just come from a morning
+call (whereby she very clearly implied that ladies could no more go
+through the streets without their fan-stick than joiners without their
+rule); touching the rest, she knew the guest was a Count. Accordingly,
+it appears that she belongs to the honorables, who (for the most part),
+like rattlesnakes, are never better to be enjoyed than when one has
+previously put the head out of the way; but that we have still time
+enough to believe, when we come to understand her better.
+
+The beautiful Zesara was for her blind, deaf, dumb, destitute of smell,
+taste, feeling; but there are many women whom one cannot, with the
+greatest pains and tediousness, displease; Schoppe could do it more
+easily. Sphex, for his own personal predilections, made more out of a
+cell of fat in Malt than out of the whole cellular texture of a lady,
+even of his own; like all business people, he held women to be veritable
+_angels_, whom God had sent for the ministration of the saints (the
+business men).
+
+The dinner course began. Augusti, a delicate eater, enjoyed much, and
+took not only to the fine service, but to the torn napkins; the like of
+which he had often had in his lap at court, because there, in morals and
+in linen, rents are preferred to plasters. Soon, as usual, came forth
+even the outposts and first skirmishes of miserable dishes, the common
+prophets and forerunners of the best tit-bits, although at a hundred
+tables I have cursed them, that they did not, like good monthly
+magazines, give the best pieces first, and the most meagre last. The
+Doctor had already said to the three boys,--"Galen, Boerhave, Van
+Swieten, what is the polite way of sitting?" and the three physicians
+had already shoved three right hands between the waistcoat buttons, and
+three left hands into the waistcoat pockets, and sat waiting, "bolt
+upright" when good chap-sager was brought in for the dessert Sphex
+partly expressed pleasure in cheese, partly a horror of it, just as he
+found it in the way of his shop-business. He remarked, on one hand, how
+joiners, in their glue-pot, had no better glue than what stood here
+before them,--it had just that binding quality in a man,--yet he would
+rather, for his own individual self, with Dr. Junker, apply it
+externally, like arsenic; but he also confessed, on the other hand, that
+the chap-sager for the Lector was poison. "I would pledge myself for
+it," said he, "that you, if one could examine you, would be found
+hectic! the long fingers and the long neck speak in my favor, and
+particularly are white teeth, according to Camper, a bad sign. Persons,
+on the contrary, who have a set of teeth like my lady there may feel
+safe."
+
+Augusti smiled, and merely asked the Doctor's lady, at what time one
+could best gain access to the Minister.
+
+Such poisonous reflections, as well as cats'-dinners,[57] he gave out,
+not from satirical malice, but from mere indifference to others, whom,
+like an honest man, he never suffered in the least to sway him in his
+actions. With the liberty-cap of the doctor's hat on his head, he
+received, from his medical indispensableness, so many academic freedoms,
+that he, between his four house-walls, ate and acted not more freely
+than between the showy, bristling pale-work of the court. Did he ever
+there--I ask that--let a drop of sweet wine pass his lips without
+previously drawing out an Ephraimite, which did not itself outlive the
+probation-day, and hanging it in the glass, merely to prove before the
+court whether the Ephraimite therein did not grow black? And if the
+silver did so, was there not as good as a demonstration of the wine
+being oversmoked, and could not the physician have _applied_ the whole
+right neatly, court, sweetness, blackening, poisoning, and oversmoking,
+if he had been the man to do it?
+
+The Lector's accidentally inquiring about the time of seeing the
+Minister was what Albano had to thank for saving him from first learning
+the painful misfortune in the house of the Minister, or in the presence
+of the blind girl herself. "You can," answered Sara, the Doctoress,
+"also despatch the servant; he will subscribe for you all; I, however,
+pity none as I do the daughter." Now broke loose a storm of questions
+about the unknown accident. "It is so," began the physician, sulkily;
+but soon (because he saw in some eyes water for his mill, and because he
+sought to roll off all medical blame from himself upon Captain
+Roquairol) he set himself as well as he could to pathetic detail, and
+lied almost like a sentimentalist. With an unobserved hint to the
+_affected_ lady, he pushed an empty dish towards her as a lachrymatory,
+in order that nothing might be lost. From the eclipsed eyes of the
+vainly struggling youth, this first woe of his life snatched some great
+drops. "May recovery be possible?" asked Augusti, exceedingly troubled,
+on account of his connection with the family.
+
+"Certainly; it is a mere affection of the nerves," replied Schoppe,
+briskly, "and nothing more." Whytt relates, that a lady who had too much
+acid in her stomach (in the _heart_ it were still worse) saw everything
+in a _cloud_, as girls do at the approach of sick-headache. Sphex, who
+had lied only for the sake of pathos and alkali, and who was vexed that
+the Librarian should have been of his private opinion, answered just as
+if the latter had not spoken at all. "The highest degree of consumption,
+Mr. Lector, often winds up with blindness, and it were well, in this
+case, to prescribe for both. Meanwhile I am acquainted with a certain
+periodical nervous blindness. I had the case in a lady[58] whom I
+brought out of it merely by blood-letting, smoke of burnt coffee, and
+the evening fog from the water; this we are now trying again in the case
+of our nervous patient. A dutiful physician will, however, always wish
+the devil would take mother and brother."
+
+In other words, the return of Liana's periodical malady almost
+distracted him. Offences against his honor, his love, his sympathy,
+never wrought the Physicus into a heat; through all such he kept on his
+glazed frost surtout; but disturbances of his cures heated him even to
+the degree of flying to pieces; and so are we all a kind of
+Prince-Rupert's-drops, which can bear the hammer and never break, till
+one just breaks off the little thread point, and they fly into a
+thousand splinters; with Achilles, it was the heel, with Sphex, the
+medical D.'s ring-finger, with me, the writing-finger. The Doctor now
+shook out the contents of his heart, as some call their gall-bladder; he
+swore by all the devils he had done more for her than any and every
+physician,--he had, however, already foreseen that such a stupid
+education--merely to look well and pray and read and sing--would prove a
+cursed poor economy,--he had often longed to break the harmonica-bells
+and tambour-needles,[59]--he had often called the attention of the
+mother, with sufficient distinctness and without indulgence, to Liana's
+so-called charms, and to her sensibility, her bright redness of cheeks,
+and velvet-soft skin; but had seemed to himself, by so doing, almost to
+gratify more than to distress her. The only thing that delighted him
+was, that the maiden had, some years before, caught a deadly sickness
+from the first holy sacrament, from which he had tried to keep her away,
+because he had already experienced, in the case of a fourth patient, the
+most melancholy consequences from this holy act.
+
+To the astonishment of every one my Count took part against all with
+Roquairol. Ah, thy first spring-storms were even now whirling round
+imprisoned in thy bosom, without a friendly hand to give them an outlet,
+and thou wouldst cover thy bloody grief! And wast thou not seeking a
+spirit full of flames, and eyes full of flames for thine own, and
+wouldst thou not rather have entered into brotherhood with a thundering
+hell-god than with an insipid pietistical saint, forever gnawing like a
+moth? Sharply he asks the Doctor, "What have you done with the Prince's
+heart?" "I have it not," said Sphex, startled; "it lies in
+_Tartarus_,[60] although it would have been more profitable to science
+had one been permitted to put it among one's preparations; it was large
+and very singular." He was thinking how often--when he could--he had, as
+an augur, during the dissection, secretly slipped aside one or another
+important member--as a princely or a cavalier-robber, _a la
+minutta_--for his study,--a honey-bag which he gladly cut out for
+himself with his anatomical honey-knife.
+
+"Has the young lady, then, an unhappy passion, or anything of the sort?"
+inquired Schoppe. "More than one," said Sphex; "cripples, idiots, young
+orphans, blind Methusalems,--all these passions she has. Sports and
+young gentlemen, I often say to the old lady, would be better for her
+health."
+
+But on this point, in the requirement of cheerfulness, I give in to him.
+Joy is the only universal tincture which I would prepare; it works
+uniformly as _antispasmodicum_, as _glutinans_ and _astringens_. The oil
+of gladness serves as ointment for _burns_ and _chills_ at once. Spring,
+for example, is a spring-medicine; a country-party, an oyster-medicine;
+a recreation at the watering-places is, in itself, a glass of _bitters_;
+a ball is a _motion_; a carnival, a _course_[61] of medicine;--and hence
+the seat of the _blest_ is at the same time the seat of the _immortals_.
+
+"Yes, he had finally," the Doctor concluded,--"as they were people of
+rank,--prescribed a dose of _pride_ (of the meadows), which manifests
+all the officinal healing powers of joy; taken in a stronger dose, it
+works fully as well as enjoyment itself, enlivens the pulse, steels the
+fibres, opens the pores, and chases the blood through the long venous
+labyrinth.[62] In the case of his weakly lady, such as they saw her
+there, he had used, he said, this medicament long ago by dresses and a
+doctor's rank, and had helped her to her legs thereby. But he would
+rather cure sixty common women than one distinguished one,--and he
+should regret, as family physician, merely his receipts and medical
+opinions, in case, as he certainly believed, the fair Liana should go
+hence."
+
+The first question which Albano, who never missed anything that was
+said, put to Augusti on the way back from the Doctor's, was, What the
+Doctor's wife meant by the subscribing servant? He explained it. There
+is, namely, in Pestitz, as in Leipsic, an observance, that when a man
+dies or falls into any other misfortune, his family place a blank sheet
+of paper, with pen and ink, in the entrance-hall, in order that persons,
+who take and show a nearer interest, may send a lackey thither, to set
+their names on the paper as well as he knows how; this merchant-like
+indorsement of the nearer interest, this descending representative
+system by means of servants, who are generally, now-a-days, the
+telegraphs of our hearts, sweetens and alleviates for both cities great
+sorrow and sympathy through pen and ink.
+
+"What! is that it? O God!" said Alban, and grew unusually indignant, as
+if people were forcing servants upon him as chrysographs and
+business-agents of his feelings. "O ye egotistical jugglers! through the
+pen of scribbling lackeys do ye pour yourselves out? Lector, I would
+condole with Satan himself more warmly than thus!"
+
+Why is this veiled spirit so lively and loud? Ah, everything had moved
+him. Not merely lamentation over poor Liana, persecuted by all the
+nightly arrows of destiny, entered like iron into his open heart, but
+also amazement at the gloomy intermingling of fate with his young life.
+Roquairol's ever-recurring expression, "_Breast without a heart_,"
+sounded to him as if it must be familiar; at last the converse of the
+expression came to his thoughts, the word of the Sphinx on the island,
+"_Heart without a breast_." So, then, even this riddle was solved, and
+the place fixed, when he was to hear, contrary to every expectation, the
+prophecy of the loved one; but how incomprehensible,--incomprehensible!
+
+"O yes! Liana she is called, and no God shall change the name," said his
+innermost soul. For in earlier years even the most vigorous youth
+prefers, in maidens, interesting delicacy of health and a tender fulness
+of feeling and a moisture of the eye,--just as, in general, at Albano's
+age, one values the flood (later the ebb) of the eyes too highly,
+although, too often, like an over-rich inundation, they wash away the
+seed-corns of the best resolutions;--whereas, at a later period,
+(because he proposes to himself marriage and housekeeping,) he looks out
+rather for bright and sharp than after moist eyes, and for cold and
+healthy blood.
+
+As Albano, for the most part, drew down the fire from his internal
+clouds on the discharging chains of the harpsichord strings,--seldomer
+into the Hippocrene of poetry,--so did he now unconsciously make out of
+his inner _charivari_ a passage on the harpsichord. I transpose his
+fantasy into my fancy in the following manner. On the softest
+minor-tones the blindness, with its long pains, passed by, and in the
+whispering-gallery of music he heard all the soft sighs of Liana
+repeated aloud. Then harder minor-tones led him down into Tartarus, to
+the grave and heart of the friendly old man who had once prayed with
+him, and then, in this spirit-hour, fell softly, like a dew-drop from
+heaven, the sound, Liana! With a thunder-clap of ecstasy he fell into
+the major-key, and asked himself, "This delicate, pure soul could fate
+promise to thy imperfect heart?" And when he answered himself, that she
+would perhaps love him, because she could not see him,--for first love
+is not vain; and when he saw her led by her gigantic brother, and when
+he thought of the high friendship which he would give and require of
+_him_; then did his fingers run over the keys in an exalting war-music,
+and the heavenly hours sounded before him, which he should enjoy, when
+his two eternal dreams should pass over livingly out of night into day,
+and when brother and sister should furnish at once, to his so youthful
+heart, a loved one and a friend. Here his inner and outer storms softly
+died away, and the evenly-balanced _temperament_ of the instrument
+became that of the player....
+
+But a soul like his is more easily appeased with sorrow than with joy.
+As if the reality had already arrived, he pressed on still further;
+indescribably fair and unearthly, he saw Liana's image trembling in her
+cup of sorrow; for the crown of thorns easily ennobles a head to a
+Christ's head, and the blood of an undeserved wound is a redness on the
+cheek of the inner man, and the soul which has suffered too much is
+easily loved too much. The tender Liana appeared to him as already spun
+into the funeral veil for the Flora of the second world, as the tender
+limbs of the bee-nymph lie transparently folded over the little
+breast,--the white form of snow, which had once, in his dream, melted
+away on his heart, opened the bright little cloud again, and looked,
+blind and weeping, upon the earth, and said, "Albano, I shall die before
+I have seen thee."--"And even if thou shouldst never see me," said the
+dying heart in his breast, "yet will I still love thee. And even if thou
+shouldst soon pass away, Liana, still I gladly choose sorrow, and walk
+faithfully with thee till thou art in heaven."... Heaven and hell had
+both at once drawn aside their curtains before him,--only a few notes,
+and those the same as before, and only the highest, and that only
+interruptedly and faintly, could he any longer strike; and at last his
+hands sank down, and he began to weep, but without too severe pangs,--as
+the storm which has unburdened itself of its lightnings and thunders
+stands now over the earth only as a soft, diffused rain.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[45] One who dedicated a new house (somewhat as we name a ship).
+The _glass fire-bucket_ which _quenched the inner conflagration_
+was probably the wine-glass or beer-tumbler.--TR.
+
+[46] Collegians.--TR.
+
+[47] Provincial Physician.--TR.
+
+[48] According to Camper, hectic patients have very white and
+fair teeth.
+
+[49] Derham (in his Physico-Theology, 1750) observes that the
+deaf hear best under a noise; e. g. one hard of hearing, under
+the sound of bells; a deaf housewife, under the drumming of the
+house-servant. Hence when princes and ministers, who for the most
+part hear badly, are passing through the country, kettle-drums
+are beat and cannon fired, so that they can hear the people more
+easily.
+
+[50] In whose wall the lady with the souvenir sits.
+
+[51] A kind of gray fur.--TR.
+
+[52] Baireuth.--TR.
+
+[53] This precocious completion of growth I have observed in many
+distinguished women, just as if these Psyches should resemble
+butterflies, which do not grow after coming out of the chrysalis
+state.
+
+[54] Cloth is roughened with thistles, i.e. scratched up, in
+order to the better shearing of it afterwards.
+
+[55] A distinguished actor of tragedy.
+
+[56] He means here their divorce, which was only deferred by the
+mutual wish to keep Liana.
+
+[57] Poor dinners, just as cat-silver is an inferior metal.--TR.
+
+[58] A weak-nerved lady (I know not whether it is the same) who
+had much religion, fancy, and suffering, became, as she tells me,
+blind in the same way, and was cured in the same way.
+
+[59] The eternal pricking of the sensitive finger-nerves by
+knitting, tambour, and other needles, perhaps as much as the
+touching of the harmonica-bells, makes one, by stimulating, weak
+in the nerves.
+
+[60] Tartarus is the melancholy part of Lilar.
+
+[61] Kursus--corso.--TR.
+
+[62] Pride of the meadows quickens the circulation of the blood
+even to frenzy. This whole observation on the pharmaceutic value
+of pride of the meadows is taken from Tissot's "Traite sur les
+Nerfs."
+
+
+
+
+SIXTH JUBILEE.
+
+     THE TEN PERSECUTIONS OF THE READER.--LIANA'S EASTERN
+     ROOM.--DISPUTATION UPON PATIENCE.--THE PICTURESQUE CURE.
+
+
+34. CYCLE.
+
+Postulates--apothegms--philosophems--Erasmian adages--observations of
+Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Lavater, do I in one week invent in countless
+numbers, more than I can in six months get rid of by bringing them into
+my biographical _petits soupes_ as episode-dishes. Thus does the
+lottery-mintage of my _unprinted_ manuscripts swell higher and higher
+every day, the more extracts and winnings I deal out to my reader
+therefrom in print. In this way I creep out of the world without having,
+while in it, said anything. Lavater takes a more rational course; he
+lets the whole lottery-wheel, filled with treasures, under the title of
+manuscripts (just as we, inversely, despatch manuscripts to the
+publishers by mail under the title of printed matter) circulate even
+among the _literati_.
+
+But why shall I not do the same, and let at least one or two lymphatic
+veins of my water-treasure leap up and run out? I limit myself to ten
+persecutions of the reader,--calling my ten aphorisms thus, merely
+because I imagine the readers to be martyrs of their opinions, and
+myself the Regent who converts them by force. The following aphorism, if
+one reckons the foregoing as the first persecution, is, I hope, the
+
+
+_SECOND._
+
+Nothing sifts and winnows our preferences and partialities better than
+an imitation of the same by others. For a genius there are no sharper
+polishing-machines and grinding-disks at hand than his apes. If,
+further, every one of us could see running along beside him a duplicate
+of himself, a complete Archimimus[63] and repeater in complimenting,
+taking off the hat, dancing, speaking, scolding, bragging, &c.; by
+Heaven! such an exact repeating-work of our discords would make quite
+other people out of me and other people than we are at present. The
+first and least step which we should take toward reflection and virtue
+would be this, that we should find our bodily methodology, e. g. our
+walk, dress, dialect, our oaths, looks, favorite dishes, &c., no better
+than those of all others, but just the same. Princes have the good
+fortune that all courtiers around them station themselves as faithful
+supernumerary copyists and pier-mirrors of _their_ selves, and propose
+to improve them by this Helot-mimicry. But they seldom attain their good
+end, because the Prince,--and that were also to be feared of me and the
+reader,--like the principle of _non-distinguendum_, does not believe in
+any real twins, but imagines that in morals, as in catoptrics, every
+mirror and mock rainbow shows everything _inverted_.
+
+
+_THIRD._
+
+It is easier and handier for men to flatter than to praise.
+
+
+_FOURTH._
+
+In the centuries before us humanity appears to us to be growing up; in
+those which come after us, to be fading away; in our own, to burst forth
+in glorious bloom: thus do the clouds, only when in our zenith, seem to
+move straight forward, those in front of us come up from the horizon,
+the others behind us sail downward with fore-shortened forms.
+
+
+_FIFTH._
+
+What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes then
+cease.[64]
+
+
+_SIXTH._
+
+The old age of women is sadder and more solitary than that of men;
+spare, therefore, in them their years, their sorrows, and their sex! In
+fact, life often resembles the trap-tree with its spines directed
+upward, on which the bear easily clambers up to the honey-bait, but from
+which he can slide down again only under severe stings.
+
+
+_SEVENTH._
+
+Have compassion on Poverty, but a hundred times more on Impoverishment!
+Only the former, not the latter, makes nations and individuals better.
+
+
+_EIGHTH._
+
+Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's.
+
+
+_NINTH._
+
+When two persons, in suddenly turning a corner, knock their heads
+together, each begins anxiously to apologize, and thinks only the other
+feels the pain and that he himself has all the blame. (Only I excuse
+myself without any embarrassment, for the very reason that I know, by my
+persecutions, how the other party thinks.) Would to God we did not
+invert this in the case of moral offences!
+
+
+_LAST PERSECUTION OF THE READER._
+
+Deluded and darkened man, living on from the mourning veil to the
+corpse-veil, thinks there is no further evil beyond that which he has
+immediately to overcome; and forgets that after the victory the new
+situation brings a new struggle. Hence, as before swift ships there
+swims a hill of water and a corresponding billowy abyss glides along
+close behind, so always before us is there a mountain, which we hope to
+climb, and behind us still a deep valley out of which we seem to have
+ascended.
+
+Thus does the reader vainly hope now, after having stood out ten
+persecutions, to ride into the haven of the story, and there to
+lead a peaceable life, free from the troubled one of my
+characters; but can any spiritual or worldly arm, then, protect
+him against scattered similes,--against hemispherical
+headaches,--whimsies,--reviews,--curtain-lectures, --rainy
+months,--or in fact honey-moons, which come in at the end of
+every volume?--
+
+Now for our History! In the evening Albano and Augusti went with the
+paternal letter of credit to the Minister's. The frostiness and pride of
+that individual the Lector endeavored, on their way, to varnish over by
+praising his laboriousness and discernment. With a knocking at his heart
+the Count seized the door-knocker to the heaven- or hell-gate of his
+future destiny. In the antechamber--that higher servant's apartment and
+_Limbus infantum et patrum_--there were still people enough, for
+Froulay regarded an antechamber as a stage, which must never be empty,
+and on which, as in the Jewish temple, according to the Rabbins, for
+those who kneel and pray, it is never too close. The Minister's lady was
+not present as a patient here, merely because she was looking after one
+of her own elsewhere. The Minister also was not here,--because he made
+few ceremonies, and only demanded uncommonly many,--but in his
+working-cabinet; he had heretofore had his head under the warm
+throne-canopy and taken a deep bite into the forbidden apple of the
+Empire, therefore he willingly made a sacrifice (not _to_ others, but
+_of_ others), and let himself, as a saintly statue, be hung round with
+votive limbs, without having to bestir his own, and, like St. Franciscus
+at Oporto, with letters of thanks and petitions which he never opens.
+
+Froulay came, and was--as ever, _aside_ from business--as courteous as a
+Persian. For Augusti was his home friend,--i. e. the Minister's lady was
+_his_ home-friend,--and Albano was not a good person to run against;
+because one had occasion for his foster-father in the votes of the
+Province, and because the youth by a peculiar and proper pride of his
+own commanded men. There is a certain noble pride through which merits
+shine brighter than through modesty. Froulay had not the most
+comfortable part before him; for the Court of Haarhaar was as
+disaffected toward the Knight of the Fleece, as he was toward it;[65]
+but Haarhaar was to be without doubt (according to all Italian
+_surgical_ reports) and in a few years (according to all _nosological_
+ones) the heir of his inheritance and throne. Now the bad thing about it
+was, that the Minister, who, like a good Christian, looked mainly to the
+future, had to creep along between the German Herr von Bouverot, on the
+one hand, who was secretly a creature of Haarhaar, and the demands of
+the present moment, on the other.
+
+He received the Count, I said, in an uncommonly obliging manner, as well
+as the Lector, and disclosed to the two that he must present to them his
+lady, who desired their acquaintance. He sent word to her, but, without
+waiting an answer, conducted them both into her apartment. Now was it to
+the youth as if the heavy door of a still and holy temple turned on its
+hinges. Even I too, at this moment, during their passage through the
+rooms, share so in his foolishness that I fall into full as great
+anxiety, as if I went in behind them. When we entered the eastern room,
+which was extended out at pleasure by picturesque paper-tapestry into a
+latticed arbor of woodbine, there sat merely the Minister's lady, who
+received us pleasantly, with firm and cold reserve in look and tone. Her
+severely closed and faintly-marked lips mutely spoke a seriousness which
+is the gift of a good heart, and a stillness which is the ornament of
+beauty,--as many wings, only when they are folded, shower down
+peacocks'-eyes,--and her eye gleamed with the good-will of reason; but
+the eyelids had been, by stern years, drawn deeply in, with a sickly
+expression, over the mild sight. Ah, as oftentimes between newly-married
+people a dividing sword was laid, so did Froulay grind daily at a
+three-edged one which separated him and her! Singularly did the impure
+roil on his face contrast with the aftersummer serenity on hers,
+although before witnesses, as it seemed, he took away the irony from his
+courteousness towards her, and kept hatred, as others do love, only for
+solitude.
+
+Fortunately this nut-tree, which threw an unwholesome, frosty nut-shadow
+on the whole flowerage of love and poetry, soon transplanted itself back
+again among more congenial guests. The Minister's lady, after the first
+expressions of courtesy, directed herself more to the Lector, whose
+correct, civilian's measure accorded entirely with her religious one;
+especially as only he could ask and condole with her about Liana. She
+replied, that this room of Liana's had been left exactly as it was the
+evening the blindness came on, in order that, when she recovered, it
+might remain for her a pleasant remembrancer, or a mournful one for
+others, if she did not. O, deeply moved Albano, if every absence
+glorifies, how much more must it do so with so many traces of the
+beloved object's presence! I confess, except a loved one, I know of
+nothing lovelier than her sitting-room in her absence.
+
+On Liana's work-table lay a sketched outline of a Christ's head near the
+open Messiah,--a folded walking-veil, together with the green
+walking-fan, with inscribed wishes of female friends,--some cut-out
+envelopes,--the gossiping letter of one of Froulay's tenants,--a whole
+lacquerwork sheep-fold, with wagon, stalls, and house, with whose
+Lilliputian Arcadia she had proposed to please Dian's children,[66]--a
+plucked leaf from the thinning album of a female friend, which she had
+trimmed with an India-ink flower border and then planted full of fair
+wishes, of which fate had robbed her own life. Ah, beautiful heart, how
+fondly would I sketch and hand round something like a tabular view of
+all the little mosaic of thy lightsome past, had the fee-provost entered
+more intimately into these matters! But what moves me and the Count more
+deeply is a framed embroidery, on which her needle, like an
+ingrafting-knife, had, on that dark day, ingrafted a rose with two buds,
+and which wanted nothing more but the thorns. O, _these_ had destiny
+only too fully developed on thy roses of joy, and then pressed them so
+deeply through thy breast even to the heart!
+
+At no hour of his life was Albano's love so tender and holy as at this,
+or his sympathy so fervent. Fortunately, the Minister's lady was all the
+time looking out of the window into the garden, and did not perceive his
+emotion. At last she went on to point out Liana's harmonica, which stood
+near; then was his heart too full and visible; he started with the hasty
+words, _he had never yet heard one_, and stepped before it. Ah, he was
+fain to touch something whereon her finger had so often rested. He laid
+his hand, as upon a sacred thing, on those prayer-bells which had so
+often trembled under hers for pious thoughts; but they gave him no
+answer, till the Lector, a connoisseur in the A B C as in the technology
+of all arts, gave him in three words the indispensable instructions. Now
+did he drink into his soul, full of sighs and struggles, the first
+tri-clang, the first plaintive syllables of that mother-tongue of the
+pining breast,--ah, of those _mutes'-bells_ which the inner man shakes
+in his hand, because he has no tongue! and his veins beat wildly like
+wings which wafted him up from the ground, and bore him to a higher
+prospect than that which opens into the last joy or the last agony. For
+in strong men great pains and joys become overlooking heights of the
+whole road of life.
+
+I know not whether many readers will believe the fault _possible_, which
+he now _actually_ committed. The Minister's wife, in the course
+of conversation, had very naturally--_apropos_ of Liana and
+Roquairol--fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary
+to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be
+broken in childhood or the heart in old age. Ah, she and her daughter
+themselves knelt, indeed, full of patience, before fate, whether loading
+or armed; although the mother's was a pious patience, which looked more
+to Heaven than to the wound, Liana's a loving patience, which resigns
+itself to new sorrows as to old sicknesses, as a queen does on
+coronation-day to the pains and friction of her heavy jewelry, and like
+a child that sweetly sleeps away and more sweetly dreams away his scars.
+But Zesara, who like a wolf fled the very clanking of a chain, and new,
+exasperated, against everything of the kind, from the light carcanets
+and chains of knighthood even to the heavy harbor-chains which obstruct
+the passage of youth out into the laboring sea, could not restrain
+himself, especially with that heart of his so full of emotions, from
+saying, in too great warmth: "Man must defend himself; sooner would I,
+in a free struggle, empty all my veins on the stirring battle-field than
+shed one drop from them bound to the rack."--"Patience," said the
+Minister's lady, who was full of it, "contends and conquers also, only
+in the heart."--"Dear Count," said Augusti, alluding not merely to
+Arria,[67] "the women must always say to the men, 'It does not hurt!'"
+
+I have not till now had an opportunity to make known this fault of
+Albano, that he never spoke his opinion more freely and strongly than
+just then when he had reason to fear losing one or two heavens of his
+life by the stake; in cases of less danger he could be more yielding.
+Although, therefore, he observed that the Minister's lady was painfully
+reminded thereby of the muscular, but also hard-grasping, hand of her
+wild son,--or much rather _for the very reason_ that he observed it, and
+because he proposed to be armor-bearer to this future friend,--he stuck
+to his opinion, threw all instruments for breaking in the young manly
+will out of the school-rooms into the street, and said, in his strongly
+relieved style: "The Goths preferred never to send their children to
+school, in order that they might remain lions. Even if maidens must be
+soaked in milk a day before planting them out in the civil world, boys,
+however, must be stuck, like apricots, with the stony shell in the
+earth, because they will soon enough throw off and forsake the stone by
+their rooting and growth."--The Lector, with his fine openness,--a
+crystal vase with golden edge,--remarked, with a gentle reprimand of
+Alban's impetuosity, that at least the way in which they had severally
+adduced their proofs was one of those very proofs themselves; and women
+needed and showed more patience with persons, and we more with things.
+
+The Minister's wife, who imagined herself listening more to her son than
+to his friend, was silent, and stepped nearer to the window. Amid these
+war-troubles the evening had wheeled her resplendent moon up over the
+eastern mountains, and the streams of her light flowed in at this
+moment, from all quarters, through the whole garden that lay stretched
+out before the eastern room, and lay in its broad alleys and
+flower-circles, when all at once a little round house appeared through
+upshooting water-jets, kindled into triumphal arches by the moon-light,
+and stood, even to its Italian trellised roof, all in a blaze. With soft
+emotion, the Minister's lady said: "On that water-house stands my Liana;
+she is trying the evaporation of the fountain; the physician promises
+himself much therefrom. And Providence grant it!"
+
+But the agitated Zesara, with all his sharp eyes, could not, however, in
+the full dazzling light of the level moon, and behind the quivering
+nunnery-grate of confined silver-or lymphatic-veins, individualize
+anything at this moment from the glimmering Eden, except an
+undistinguishable, still, white form. But it was enough for a weeping
+and burning heart. "Thou angel of my youthful dreams," thought he, "may
+it be thou! I greet thee with a thousand woes and joys. Ah! can there
+then be sorrows in thee, thou heavenly soul!" And it came over him, that
+if she were here in the room, with her afflicted and enchanting form,
+she would melt his whole being with sympathy, and he could now have cast
+off the embrace of the brother, by whose hand fate had closed her soft
+eyes in that long dream.
+
+The stifling air of the most painful sympathy caused him to look away,
+and turn round, and fasten on the open Messiah those eyes whose drops he
+would not show; but the recollection that he was repeating her last
+reading-pleasure made them fall only hotter and thicker. Suddenly
+something darkening, which fluttered down before the window like a
+falling raven, directed his look again to Liana, over whom stood a fully
+illuminated little cloud, as if it were a risen or descending saintly
+halo. Immortals seemed to dwell thereupon as on Ossian's clouds,
+awaiting their sister; and when she at length moved and slowly sank down
+into the water-house, seemed it not then as if her garment of flesh
+were passing into the earth, and her peaceful spirit into the cloud?
+
+Here Augusti, as the mother had to follow the returning invalid into the
+sick-chamber, gave him the hint for departure, which he took willingly;
+his love contented itself for the present with solitude, and with the
+hope of another meeting. Young love and young birds need, in the
+beginning, only to be _warmed_ by _covering_, and not till later to be
+_nourished_.
+
+But a paraclete or comforter whispered softly in the ear of the youth's
+heart as they departed: to-morrow thou wilt see her only a few steps
+from thee in the garden! And that is very easily brought about; he has
+only, at evening-twilight to-morrow, when the evening-walker makes use
+of her eye-medicine, to repair to the alley, and from among the leaves
+look freely up into the magic countenance, and then drink in the whole
+doctrine of felicity in one paragraph, one passage, breath, moment;--but
+what a prospect!
+
+The Count begged the Lector not to sit long with the busy Minister. When
+they found him again, he hardly--behind a pile of public
+documents--remembered, after considerable (perhaps counterfeited)
+thought, that they had been there, and deeply regretted that they were
+going away. Ah, the comforter is whispering all the evening and all
+night,--To-morrow, Albano!
+
+
+35. CYCLE.
+
+As the juggling night threw our Albano from one side and vision to the
+other,--for not the near past but the near future wearies us with
+rehearsals of our waking acts, with dreams,--how glad he was, in the
+morning, that his fairest future had not yet gone by. Two very
+Eulenspiegelish wishes often lodge in man: I often form the wish with my
+whole heart, that some real joy of mine, e. g. a master-work, a
+pleasure-journey, &c., might yet at last have an end; and, secondly, the
+wish above referred to, that one or another pleasure might stay away a
+little longer.
+
+The evening came with the greatest pleasure of all, when Zesara, like Le
+Gentil starting for the East Indies, set off for the eastern park of the
+Minister, to observe the transit of his evening star Venus; but only
+through the moon. Before the lighted windows of the palace he stopped
+among the people, and reflected, whether it were quite allowable thus to
+run into the garden; but really, had he been turned back, his thirsting
+heart would have carried him in through a whole Clerus and Diplomatic
+Congress posted before the gate. Boldly he strode along through the
+noisy palace before a barricade of tackled carriages, turned the iron
+lattice-gate, and stepped hastily into the nearest leafy avenue. Here,
+attended by a torch-dance of gleaming hopes, he went to and fro, but his
+eye was a telescope, and his ear was a hearing-trumpet. The green avenue
+wound up over the garden till it grew into another near the bath-house;
+into this he entered so as not to meet the blind one, or rather her
+attendant.
+
+But nothing came. To be sure he had not, like the moon,--as was, indeed,
+to have been expected of him,--come a half-hour too late, but in fact a
+half-hour too early. The moon, that star which leads wise men full of
+incense to the adoration, at last let fall broad, long, silver-leaves,
+like festive tapestry, into Liana's eastern room,--the Madonna on the
+palace was arrayed in the halo and nun's-veil of her rays,--the
+Minister's wife stood already at the window,--Nature played the
+larghetto[68] of an enchanted evening in deeper and deeper
+strains,--when Albano caught nothing further except a smaller one, made
+up of mere tones, which came from the bath-house, the pleasure-seat of
+all his wishes, and which, dying, would fain breathe its last with the
+spring-day. But he could not guess who played it. One might have
+inferred that it was Roquairol, merely because he afterward, as I shall
+relate, according to the April-like nature of his musical temperament,
+sprang up out of pianissimo into a too wild fortissimo. The brother,
+exiled by his father, could at least in the bath-house see and console
+his dear sister, and show her his love and his penitence; although his
+stormy repentance makes a second necessary, and at last became only a
+more pious repetition of his fault.
+
+Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every
+world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the
+sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the
+larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high
+waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art)
+dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with
+a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to
+the Selam-cipher, signify _hopes_; but really one after another was
+short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his
+perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,--he kept plucking
+away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves
+from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening
+windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was
+impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the
+bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance,
+when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo,
+and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of
+sparkling silver. Albano looked out....
+
+Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering
+water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage
+before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly
+beautiful form! As Grecian gods stand and look unearthly before the
+torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad
+glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw
+irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation
+and no effort had as yet cast a wave,--and the thin, tender,
+scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,--and the face like a perfect
+pearl, oval and white,--and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the
+May-flowers over her heart,--and the delicate grace's-proportions,
+which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,--and the ideal
+stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a
+finger upon the balustrade, as if the Psyche only floated over the
+lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,--and the large
+blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such
+inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in
+distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow!
+
+Thou too fortunate man!--to whom the only visible goddess, Beauty,
+appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her
+heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,--the past
+fades away,--the near tones seem to steal from the depth of
+distance,--the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with
+splendor the mortal breast!
+
+Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty
+heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or
+later?--and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow?
+
+For Liana--into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle
+through--was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its
+own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she
+thought a linden-top concealed it;--and this uncertain inclination so
+suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick
+pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and
+pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why
+from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away?
+And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her
+companion, and--O God! she knows not where they stand."
+
+But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely
+on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon
+the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor
+of the next life.
+
+A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the
+distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with
+single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana,
+and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so
+that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked down, and Albano started
+back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face,
+upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink,
+tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling
+tones of the brother and of the nightingale,--the eyelids quivered
+oftener over the gleaming eyes,--and at last the gleam became a quiet
+tear,--it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which
+the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs,
+though unwounded, weep.
+
+There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always
+begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment,
+in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir
+itself,--that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink
+of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,--kneel
+before her,--tell her thy whole heart;--what though thou then art lost
+forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!--and then cool
+and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he
+thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah!
+before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good
+spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be
+silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."
+
+Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall,
+and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As
+he passed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half
+latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure
+Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a shining
+lily[69] from the next world, which, to herself, is a sign that she is
+soon to pass thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling
+the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest
+veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe
+them.
+
+Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last
+had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and
+then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now shines
+to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O,
+at some future time after yet many years, when this _glowing_
+rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and
+magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it,
+glimmer after thee as a _white_ rose-parterre of memory!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[63] The title of a man, among the Romans, who walked behind the
+corpse and acted out the looks and character which the deceased
+had when living.--_Pers._, Sat. 3.
+
+[64] As Solomon says, "Desire shall fail."--TR.
+
+[65] It had formerly refused to give the Spanish knight the hand
+of the Princess; but I have had the promise of satisfactory
+documents on this weighty article.
+
+[66] Dian's family reside at Lilar.
+
+[67] Roman Arria, who stabbed herself to show her Poetus how to
+die.--TR.
+
+[68] A movement in music a little more than two degrees quicker
+than adagio.--TR.
+
+[69] It used to be believed that a lily lying in the
+singing-seats signified the death of the person to whom it
+belonged.
+
+
+
+
+SEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF
+     POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL
+     "MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON
+     BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE.
+
+
+36. CYCLE.
+
+If the Feudal-Provost Von Hafenreffer had no existence except as a
+creature of my fancy, I should certainly proceed with my history, and
+tell the world, as matter of fact (and the whole romance-writing set
+would go to the death upon it[70]), that Albano was sitting there the
+next morning, blind and deaf, behind the broad bandage which the
+bandage-maker Cupid had bound before his eyes,--that he had not been
+able to count more than _five_, except at evening, when he cast up the
+strokes of the clock, in order, afterward, to run in a magic circle
+round the Froulay water-house, like one who sets out to _charm the fire_
+which glides snake-like after him,--that he had, through those two
+blow-holes[71] wherewith sentimental whales blubber right out in
+bookstores, spouted out considerable streams,--for the rest, had never
+looked at another book (except some leaves in the book of Nature), nor
+at another human being (except a blind man),--"and to this my surgeon's
+certificate of erotic wound-fevers (I would say at the conclusion of my
+lies) Nature manifestly sets her privy seal."
+
+That she does not, says Hafenreffer; these are nothing but confounded
+lies; the case is quite otherwise, thus:--
+
+Zesara never stole a second time into Froulay's garden; a proud blush of
+shame darted over him at the very thought of the painful blush with
+which he should come in contact, for the first time, with a mistrustful
+or inquiring eye.
+
+But in this wise the dear soul remained hid from him until her recovery,
+as the May-month did from her; and he silently tormented himself with
+reckonings up of her sufferings and doubts of her cure. He was ashamed
+to be taking any pleasure during her period of sadness, and forbade
+himself the enjoyment of spring and the visiting of Lilar: ah! he knew
+too, full well, that the loving spring and Lilar, where she had received
+so many joys and the last wound, would make his heart too ungovernable
+and too full.
+
+His thirst for knowledge and worth, his pride, which bade him stand in a
+glorious light with his father and his two friends, impelled him onward
+in his career. With all his native fire he threw himself upon
+jurisprudence, and took no longer any other walks than between the
+lecture-room and his study-chamber. To this zeal he was driven by a
+characteristic passion for completeness; everything imperfect was to him
+almost a physical horror; he was shocked at defective collections,
+broken sets of monthly magazines, lawsuits left to sleep, libraries,
+because he could never read them out, people who died as aspirants for
+office, or in the midst of building-plans, or without a rounded system
+of thought, or as journeymen clothiers' boys or shoemakers' apprentices,
+and even Augusti's flute-playing, which he only took up _by the way_. It
+was the same energy which made him hold the bridle of Psyche's winged
+horse tight, and stick the rowel of the spur into him; even when a child
+he had experimented on this kind of force, in the holding of his breath,
+or in the painful pressure of a sore spot,--and, by Heaven! he now,
+figuratively, did both again. There dwelt in him a mighty will, which
+merely said to the serving-company of impulses, Let it be! Such a will
+is not stoicism, which rules merely over internal _malefactors_, or
+_knaves_, or _prisoners of war_, or _children_, but it is that genially
+energetic spirit, which conditions and binds the healthy _savages_ of
+our bosoms, and which says more royally to itself, than the Spanish
+regent to others, I, the king!
+
+Ah, of course (how could his warm soul do otherwise?) he often stood, at
+midnight, before the breezy window, and looked tearfully at the white
+Madonna of the ministerial palace, silvered by the pure moon. Yes, in
+the daytime, he often sketched in his souvenir (it happened to be a
+fountain and a form behind it, nothing more), or he read in the Messiah
+(naturally going on with the canto which he had already begun at the
+house of the Minister's lady), or he informed himself about nervous
+maladies, (was he, perhaps, with all his studying, guarded against
+them?) or he let the fire of his fingers run over the strings,--nay, he
+would have plucked nothing but roses, although with thorns, had this
+been their blooming season.
+
+And this sighing, stifled soul must shut itself up! O, he began already
+to fear every key of the harpsichord would become a stylus, the
+instrument itself a box of letters, and all actions treacherously
+legible words. For he must keep silent. The first young love, like that
+of business people (those of the Electorate of Saxony excepted), needs
+no instruments of speech, at most only a portable inkstand and pen. Only
+worldly people, who repeat their declarations of love quite as often as
+the players, are in a situation--and on similar grounds--to publish
+them, just as the players do. But in the holier season of life the image
+of the most beloved soul is hung, not in the parlor and antechamber, but
+in the dim, silent oratory: only with loved ones do we speak of loved
+ones. Ah, it was with reluctance that he even heard others speak of his
+saint; and he often stole (with the altar of incense in his bosom) out
+of the room where people were carrying round for her a censer more full
+of coal-smoke than of frankincense.
+
+
+37. CYCLE.
+
+They were expecting every day in Pestitz the return of the German
+gentleman M. de Bouverot, who had been in Haarhaar, putting the last
+retouching hand to the almost sketched marriage contract between Luigi
+and a Haarhaar princess, Isabella. Augusti was not partial to him, and
+even said Bouverot had no _honnetete_;[72] and related the following,
+but with the soft irony of a man of the world:
+
+Some years before, Bouverot had been sent by the court of Haarhaar[73]
+to the Pope at Rome, in relation to certain canonical difficulties;
+just at the time when Luigi also made the princely procession to Rome,
+together with his Romish indictions.[74] Now Haarhaar, which in truth
+already went _chapeau-bas_ with the princely hat of Hohenfliess, and had
+every possible officinal prospect of wearing it, would not, for this
+very reason, present the appearance of looking with cold eyes on the
+extinction of the race of Hohenfliess, the more, as the very male
+support of the line, Luigi, even in his first years, was not a hero of
+any great nervous significance. Nay, it must needs be a matter of some
+consequence to the court of Haarhaar that the good thin autumn-flowerage
+should return, if possible, _otherwise_ than it went out; and even on
+such grounds it privily instructed the German gentleman to
+rule and watch over all his pleasures and pains as _maitre de
+plaisirs_,--especially with _maitresses de plaisirs_,--in such a manner
+as to give perfect satisfaction in this respect. Meanwhile, if our
+princely abiturient[75] had started pure as a foetus, unhappily he was
+brought back ground down to a _punctum saliens_, especially as, by
+sundry caprioles and other leaps through the hoop of pleasure, he was
+spoiled for the leap into the knight's saddle. It may be possible that
+the German gentleman was too sanguine in his expectations of the
+rejuvenescence of the Prince; yes, he may have imitated the
+youth-restoring, wondrous essence of the Marquis d'Aymar,[76] whereby an
+innocent old lady, who anointed herself with the elixir more than her
+years required, was, through the excessive renovation, reduced to a
+little child. In short, by this crusade under the Knight of the Cross,
+Bouverot, the princely seat of Hohenfliess--as is often the consequence
+of crusades--will be left open at the proper time, and Haarhaar will
+seat itself thereon.
+
+I confess reluctantly that Albano, in the beginning,--because, with all
+his sharp-sightedness, his purity was quite as great,--comprehended the
+fact only confusedly; but when he did get the idea, it was to him
+_pharmaceutic_ manna, as it was to Schoppe _Israelitish_. "The Knight of
+the Cross," said the latter, "beareth not his cross in vain,--it does
+him quite as much service as one daubed on the houses in Italy does to
+them: not a soul may do on either of them what even in Rome may be done
+before every antechamber."
+
+Not long after that our three friends were going out into the street
+just at the hour when the noisy carriages rolled along to tea and play,
+when a litter was carried by before them with the seat _backward_,
+whereupon, however, a man was sitting. "Holy Father!" cried Schoppe, "in
+there sits, bodily, Cephisio, from Rome, who must sometime or other give
+me a sound drubbing."--"Softly, softly!" said Augusti, "that is the
+German gentleman; Cephisio is his Arcadian name."[77]--"Well, I rejoice
+so much the more that I once in my life had a hearty, downright set-to
+with the red-nose," said he, turning round and accompanying the litter,
+with his arms thrust under it, for almost ten paces, in order to get a
+better view of the caged bird, before the latter snatched-to the
+curtains. Albano caught a glimpse within the litter, as it passed
+swiftly along, only of a sharp eye drawn like a dagger, and a
+red-glowing nose-bud.
+
+Schoppe came back and related the transactions in Rome. He said,
+against all mortal sinners, blood-guilty men, and imps of iniquity he
+bore no such bitter and grim wrath as against professional bankers,
+_croupiers_,[78] and _Grecs_; if he had a canker-worm-iron wherewith he
+might scrape away this vermin from the earth, or a cochineal-mill
+wherewith he might grind them to powder, he would do it most cordially.
+"O heavens!" he then broke out, "had I in fact my foot just stretched
+out over the curling, coiling worm-stalk (and though that foot had the
+gout in it), I would gladly dash it down upon them, and tread out the
+vile filth." But what he could, he did. Being his own travelling
+servant, and a decoy-spider, darting to and fro through all Europe, he
+had full often the pleasure of getting these faro-leaf-caterpillars and
+leaf-sappers under his thumb,--of becoming their pretended
+associate,--learning their tactics,--and then rolling some fire-wheel or
+other into their hissing snakes'-hole. I am not intimately instructed
+whether it is known in Leipsic who the ringleader was that, a short time
+since, at the fair, played a mock-police with mimic-constables, and
+broke up a bank;--at least the bankers were altogether out on the
+subject, because they were expecting the real police the next day, and
+were begging for some indulgences and _il_legal-benefits; but I am in a
+condition here to name the thief-catcher: it was Schoppe. The spoils he
+applied mostly to the purpose of running new mines under the
+faro-tables.
+
+With Cephisio he had played his cards otherwise. He stepped up before
+his bank, and looked on for some minutes, and at last presented a card
+with a shield-louis-d'or. It won, and he showed behind the card a long
+roll of louis. Bouverot would not pay this roll. "He had not seen
+anything," he said. "What is your _croupier_ sitting there for, then?"
+said Schoppe, and pronounced them swindlers, if they did not pay. To
+escape greater damage, they paid him his winnings. He took the money
+coldly, and departed, with these words to the Pointeurs: "Gentlemen, I
+assure you, you are playing here with finished cheats; but they have
+paid me only because I knew them." Amidst the increasing stiffness and
+paleness of the partners he turned, and slowly, with his
+broad-shouldered, compact figure, and his knotty cudgel, walked away
+unscathed.
+
+Augusti wished from his heart--for the persecution's sake--that Bouverot
+might not know the Librarian again. They found at home an invitation
+from the Minister to tea and supper. "The poor daughter!" said Augusti;
+"for the sake of this Bouverot, the half-blind one must go to-morrow to
+the table." Meanwhile, our youth will then surely see her again at last,
+and only a spring-day separates him from the dearest object! If Augusti
+is right, then my observation fits in here, that a good sound villain is
+always the motive-pike which sets the still, quaker-like carp-tribe in
+the pond to swimming; the hidden pock-matter, which brings cold children
+at once to life.
+
+
+38. CYCLE.
+
+Liana's eyes healed, but only slowly: Nature would not lead her at once
+out of her sombre prison into the sun; she could now, like the
+philosophers, just recognize light rather than forms. Nevertheless, the
+Minister issued cabinet orders that she should day after to-morrow play
+on the harmonica, appear at the _souper_, and even make the salad, and
+thereby mask her blindness. He sometimes commanded impossible things, in
+order to meet with as much disobedience as his anger needed for the
+purpose of venting itself in punishment. Certain people keep themselves
+all day long full of vexation beforehand for some coming event or other,
+like urinal phosphate, which always boils under the microscope, or
+forges, wherein every day fire breaks out.
+
+The Minister's lady pronounced her soft, firm, No. About the harmonica
+she said she had asked the Doctor, in his name, who had strictly
+forbidden it; and the rest was an impossibility. Here he could already,
+he felt so like it, be angry at several things, especially at the asking
+of the Doctor, which, however, had not yet taken place; he grew mad
+enough, and swore he should act according to _his own_ principles, and
+devil a bit did he care for _other_ people's.
+
+This _principle_ was in the present case the German gentleman. That is
+to say, the above-mentioned anecdote--Bouverot's guardianship of the
+hereditary Prince on his travels, or the design of the thing--had at
+both courts come to be the common talk in assemblies and at tables, and
+was hidden only from the Prince Luigi; for on thrones, there are almost
+no mysteries to any one excepting him (hardly his wife) who sits
+thereupon, as in whispering-galleries the people in distant corners hear
+everything aloud, only not he who stands in the middle. The German
+gentleman was, therefore, in the Hohenfliess system, the important
+port-vein and pulmonary artery wherewith even Froulay would water
+himself. The latter is obliged throughout to serve the present and the
+future, or two masters, of whom the one of Haarhaar might very soon be
+his.
+
+Bouverot was attached not merely to Froulay the minister, but to Froulay
+the father; a man like him, who causes to be sent after him from Italy a
+whole cabinet of Art, and whose acquaintance with the arts has so long
+knit together even him and the Prince, must know how to prize a Madonna
+of such carnation as Liana, and of the Romish school, and, what is more,
+who, detached from the canvas, moved as a full, breathing rose. As to
+marrying the rose, that he could not propose to himself, because he was
+a German Herr.
+
+He had not seen her since his Italian tour,--nor had the Count
+either,--to both the Minister wished to show her as a round pearl of
+special whiteness and figure. Froulay had--which after all happens
+oftener than we imagine--quite as much vanity as pride; the latter to
+repel blame, the former to court praise. But I should have now to write
+a tournament-chronicle to tell posterity the half of all his raging and
+racing and lance-thrusts, in a fight wherein he served under the banners
+of enmity, vanity, and avarice. He was no more to be hunted to death
+than a wolf. All weapons were alike to him, and he was ever taking
+sharper and more poisonous ones. In the old _judicial_ duels between man
+and wife, the man stood commonly up to his stomach in a pit, in order to
+bring his strength down to a level with the woman's, and she struck at
+him with a stone tied up in a veil; but in the _matrimonial_ duels the
+man seems to stand in the free air and the woman in the earth, and she
+often has only the _veil_ without the stone.
+
+In this combat there stepped between the two a shining peace-angel who
+caught the wounds, namely, Liana. The daughter, who had an enthusiastic
+love for her mother, and the womanly reverence for the stronger sex
+toward her father, and who suffered so endlessly under their strifes,
+fell upon her mother's neck and begged her to allow her what her father
+demanded; she would certainly do everything so as not to excite
+observation; she would take the greatest pains and practise herself
+specially beforehand,--ah, he would otherwise only be still more unkind
+to her poor brother,--this discord, merely on her account, was so
+painful to her, and perhaps more injurious than playing on the
+harmonica.
+
+"My child, thou knowest," said the mother, for now she _had_ asked,
+"what the physician said yesterday against the harmonica; the rest is at
+thine own risk!" Liana kissed her joyfully. She must needs be led to her
+father, that she might make known to him aloud the gladness of her
+obedience. "I thank you, and be hanged," said he, softly; "it is simply
+your cursed duty." She left him with her joy dissipated to atoms, but
+without any great pangs; she was already accustomed to this.
+
+
+39. CYCLE.
+
+The Lector, while they were yet on their way to the Minister's, begged
+Albano to moderate the fire of his assertions and his pantomimes. He
+made known to him only so much of the family-jar as was necessary, in
+order that he might not, by a mistaken idea of her restoration, throw
+Liana into embarrassment. As they entered the card-room, everything was
+already in full blaze.
+
+As, at this time, no one is presented to him, I must do it; they are
+disciples (at least _twelfth_ disciples) of the Minister.
+
+And first, I introduce to thee the holy President of Justice, Von
+Landrok, a good apothecary's-balance of Themis, which weighs out
+scruples, and wherein no false weights lie; but what is quite as bad,
+much smut, rubbish, and rust. Those at the ombre-table near by are the
+lords and ladies of Vey, Floel, and Kob, sleek, fine souls, like minerals
+in cabinets, polished off on the show-side, but on the concealed base
+still jagged and scratching.
+
+Go with me to the entrance of the next apartment; here I have to present
+to thee the young but fat canon Von Meiler, who, in order to line and
+stuff out and pad his inner man with a thick, warm, outer one, needs to
+fleece no more peasants yearly than the number of linden-trees the
+Russian peels for his bark-shoes, namely, one hundred and fifty.
+
+The apartment into which thou art looking I present to thee as a
+fly-glass full of courtiers, who, in order to enter into the _kingdom of
+heaven_, have become not merely _children_, but in fact _embryons_ of
+four weeks, who, as is well known, look like flies; if Swift desires of
+his servants nothing more than the _shutting-to_ of the doors, these
+wish nothing of their employer and bread-provider but the _leaving-open_
+of the same.
+
+I have the honor to set before thee yonder--it is he who is not
+playing--the holy Church-Counsellor, Schaepe, who would fain be chief
+chaplain to the court; a soft scoundrel, who soaks and softens the
+seed-corns of the divine and human word, like melon-seed (they are
+thereby to spring up sooner in the heart), so long in sugared wine, that
+they rot in it; a spiritual lord who never in his life _offered_ any
+other prayers than the two which he always refuses, the _fourth_ and
+_fifth_.[79]
+
+But the Lector will soon name to thee, at the window, every one of the
+lords and dames, coldly, gently, and without pantomime. At present the
+Minister himself conducts thee to a gentleman, one of the players, with
+a cross on, who drinks water with saltpetre, and is continually licking
+his dry mouth; it is _Bouverot_,--he is just rising in thy presence;
+examine the cold, but impudent and cutting, sharply-ground eye, whose
+corners resemble a pair of open tinman's-shears, or a trap set,--the red
+nose, and the hard, lipless mouth, whose reddish crab's-claw, worn off
+by whetting, pinches together,--the cocked-up chin, and the whole
+stocky, firm figure. Albano does not surprise him; he has already seen
+all men, and he inquires about no one.
+
+The Minister refreshed the youth, whose inner being was one snarl, with
+the promise that at supper he would present to him his daughter. He
+offered him a game; but Alban replied, with a too youthful accent, he
+never played.
+
+He could now roam round through the lanes of the card-tables, and survey
+whatever he wished. In such a case one posts himself, if there is no one
+of the company whom he can endure, exactly before or beside the face he
+detests the most, in order inwardly to lash himself into vexation at
+every word and every feature of the countenance. Albano might have had
+many visages in his eye which were, at least in a small degree,
+intolerable, and by which he might have stationed himself;--nay, no
+sufficient reasons could have been assigned why he should not have given
+his whole attention to a certain chaffy, dried up paste-eel, a weakling
+full of impertinence, who was observing through an eye-glass the card
+constellations as they came up, while Albano could extend the feelers
+of his optic nerves even to the spots on the cards in the second
+apartment;--there would, indeed, have been no reasons, had not the
+German gentleman been there; before him he must place himself; of him he
+knew the most and the worst; he stood in distant connection with
+Schoppe, even with Liana. Furies! in the neighborhood of certain faces
+the pinions of the soul crumple up and mew themselves as swans' and
+pigeons' feathers are crushed before eagles' quills; it was as
+uncomfortable and close for all the innocent feelings in such a roomy
+breast as Albano's, as it is to a flock of pigeons into whose cote some
+one has thrown the tail of a polecat.
+
+I cannot disguise the fact, he muttered and growled inwardly at all the
+man did and had,--whether it was his having fingers whose points were
+finely shaved for the faro-game, and whose nails had been somewhat
+peeled off by an altogether worse game of _hazard_ yet,--or his looking
+occasionally through the hair of his eyebrows,--or (only once) squashing
+a fly by a sudden snapping to of his lips like a fly-trap,--or his
+uttering now a line of German and now of French, which I expect of good
+circles, whereas only low people never bring out a German word, except a
+few, such as _Lansquenet_,[80] _canif_ (kneif), _birambrot_ (bier am
+brod), excepted. Suffice it, he thought always of Schoppe's fine
+expression: "There are men and times at which and with whom nothing
+could be more refreshing to an honest man than--to give them a sound
+drubbing." Duelling is quite as good, thought the Count.
+
+However, Schoppe must here be justified by an authority. Namely, the
+author himself, otherwise such a soft, warm swan-skin, could never stand
+behind card-table-chairs without becoming a complete game-cock, and
+spreading out his scratching, bristly wing the wider the longer he idly
+looked on; the reason is this, that in general one finds only those
+people more and more tolerable and better upon acquaintance, with whom
+one pursues and purposes the same kind of objects.
+
+Albano wished heartily he had his brother-in-arms Schoppe with him now;
+he went often, it is true, to Augusti to vent himself; but _he_ always
+sought to pacify him; yes, by keeping himself constantly engaged with
+the church-counsellor, he cut off from him the opportunity of betraying
+his youthful, inexperienced soul to listeners. Moreover, the Lector
+chose afterward for half an hour--what familiar friends often do in the
+absence of familiar female friends--the latter (namely, absence).
+
+The Count stood some time behind Bouverot's seat, and looked into a
+Chinese mirror, japanned on the inside with grotesque figures, and
+changed his position constantly, till he brought Cephisio's face to
+appear therein right beside a painted dragon, just by way of
+comparison;--all this went on, interrupted, however, by constantly
+increasing heart-beatings for Liana, when the servants opened the doors
+to the supper-hall; and now his heart thumped even to pain, and his
+form, already so blooming with youth, hung all full of the roses of
+happy and modest confusion.
+
+
+40. CYCLE.
+
+With beating heart and burning cheek he made his way into the midst of
+the motley promenading throng with some old lady or other, who, in her
+vanity, misunderstood him, and at once hung on his arm like a
+spring-bracelet, and who got nothing from him but--answers. With flying
+and piercing glances he stepped into the bright hall, which seemed as if
+it were made of crystallized light, and into the sea of heads. He was
+just making some answer when he caught, in the tumult behind him, the
+low words, "I certainly hear my brother,"--and immediately the still
+lower refutation, "It is my Count." He turned round; between the Lector
+and her mother stood the dear Liana, a modest, timid, pale-red angel, in
+a black silk dress, over which ran only the glittering spring-frost of a
+silver chain, and with a light ribbon in her blond hair. The mother
+presented her to him, and the tender cheek bloomed more redly,--for she
+had, indeed, confounded the similar voices of the guest and the
+brother,--and she cast down those beautiful eyes which could see
+nothing. Ah, Albano, how violently thy heart trembles now that the past
+has become present, the moonlit night a spring morning; and this still
+form, now so near thee, works far more mightily than in any dream! She
+was too holy in his sight for him to have been able to utter a lie
+before her about the apparent recovery; he preferred silence;--and thus
+the warmest friend of her life came to her the first time only veiled
+and dumb.
+
+The Lector soon led her away to her seat under the second lustre;
+opposite her sat her mother (probably, for this reason, that the good,
+unconscious daughter, who surely could not always be letting her eyelids
+fall, might raise them with friendliness and propriety towards a beloved
+being); the German gentleman, as an acquaintance, seated himself,
+without further ceremony, on her right, Augusti on her left,--Zesara, as
+Count, came far up above beside the highest lady.
+
+Deuse take it! that is, unfortunately, so often my own case! I assert
+the upper seat of honor,--and observe, a mile below me, the daughter,
+but, like a myops, only half of her, and can bring about nothing the
+whole evening. Do pray transpose me without any scruples down beside
+her,--you have to deal with nothing more than a puffed-up man,--why, on
+earth, as in the heavens, must, then, the largest planets be placed
+exactly the farthest from their sun?
+
+I now draw my readers to the Minister's table, not to show them the
+ministerial pomp ingrafted upon avarice, or his dance of honor hemmed in
+between the parallel lines of etiquette, or even his family arms, which
+were carried round on every chafing-dish and salt-cellar, and with the
+ice and mustard,--enough for us to know the ubiquity of the insignia
+upon his flower-pots, shirts, bed-clothes, dog's cravats, and all his
+thoughts; but the reader shall just now look only at my hero.
+
+He is very prominent. Upon such a new-comer, people, in a
+residence-city, have already, before he has fairly given the driver his
+drinking-money, got all possible light of nature and revelation;
+nineteen of the company were fastened upon him as his moral odometers.
+The boldness of his nature and his rank made up with him for worldly
+tact, which was missed nowhere except in this, that he never took sides
+except in the very strongest manner, and always ran off into general and
+cosmopolitan observations. But see, I pray you!--O, I wish Liana could
+see it,--how the rosy glow and the fresh green of his healthiness shines
+among the yellow sicklings of the age, out of whom, as from ships on the
+African coast of youth, all the pitch that held them together had run
+out,--and how the cheek-redness of spiritual health, a tender,
+ever-returning suffusion (from anxiety about Liana) graces him, whereas
+most of the world's people at the table seem, like cotton wool, to take
+all colors more easily than _red_!
+
+He looked and listened, against the salvation-laws of visiting, too much
+to Liana. She ate, under the heightened redness of a fear of mistaking,
+only sparingly, but without embarrassment; the Lector, with easy hand,
+barred up against her the smallest road to error. What astonished him
+was, that she covered such a sensitive and easily weeping heart with
+such an unembarrassed cheerfulness of countenance and conversation.
+Young man! _that_ is, with the most delicate maidens, free from pangs of
+love, no covering and disguise, but an enjoying of the moment and
+habitual courtesy! She retained so considerately (what she had probably
+learned beforehand) the relative rank of the familiar voices, that she
+never directed her answer to the wrong place. She, however, looked often
+to her mother with full eyes, and smiled then still more serenely, not,
+however, for the purpose of deceiving, but from real, hearty love.
+
+Touching her salad, the best and most fit to be a prince's table-guest
+among my female readers, who had seen her mix it, would have taken
+several fork-loads thereof. Uncommonly charming was it, when, growing
+more earnest and red, she drew off her glove before the blue, celestial
+hemisphere of glass; with white hands and supple arms, without a silken
+fold, worked away in the green, between the blue of the glass and the
+black of the silk; considerately felt for the vinegar-and oil-castors,
+and poured out as much as her practice (and the deciphered advice of the
+Lector,--at least so it seems to me) directed. By heavens! the dressing
+is, in this case, the salad; and the vain Minister, who had no
+understanding of pictures, had a great eye for things that would make
+good pictures.
+
+The mother seemed scarcely to look at the leaf-mixing. To the Count, the
+Minister's lady seemed to-day to have only good-breeding and no pious
+strictness; but he did not yet sufficiently know those polished women,
+who have refinement without wit, sensibility without fire, clearness
+without coldness; who borrow of the snail his feelers, his softness, his
+coolness, and his dumb gait, and who demand and deserve more confidence
+than they obtain.
+
+At this moment came in Cephisio, like an angel among three men in the
+fiery furnace, but a dark angel. To the Count, his contiguity of seat,
+and every word he addressed to Liana, was already a crucifixion,--only
+to pass with a look from her to him was an agony, little different from
+that which I should have, if I had spent a day at Dresden in the antique
+Olympus of ancient gods, and then, on going out, should fall into a
+refectory full of swollen monks, or into a naturalist's cabinet full of
+stuffed malefactors' skins and bottled embryo-spiders. However he was
+pacified--in my opinion, only deceived--by one thing, that the German
+gentleman did not blaze away in lyrics beside her, was neither in heaven
+nor out of his head, but in his head, and quite composed and very
+polite. There are no pigeons, Count,--ask the farmers,--which the hawks
+oftener pounce upon than the _glossy white_ ones!
+
+The German gentleman now produced a snuff-box, with a neat picture of
+Lilar, and asked Liana how it pleased her; he liked the sentimentality
+of it particularly.
+
+The Lector was terrified, leaned forward toward the box-piece, and threw
+out a few opinions beforehand which should guide the half-blind one in
+forming her own; but after she had passed it two or three times
+obliquely against the lights and near before her eyes, she was able to
+express an original opinion herself, that the child illuminated by the
+half-sunken sun, who is drawn aloft by a flower-chain under the
+triumphal arch, was, to her feelings, "so very lovely." Here--and I have
+observed the same case in a half-blind lady of powerful fancy and
+receptive sense of art--the effort and the artistic sense, or the
+spiritual eye, came to meet the bodily half-way. The box, as well as its
+snuff, was presented farther on, and came down along to the Counsellor
+of Arts, Fraischdoerfer, upon whom the new Prince's love of the arts and
+the favorite's knowledge in them now placed new crowns; he found fault
+with nothing but the white of the blossoms. "Spring," said he, "is, by
+reason of its wearisome whiteness, a mere monochrome; I have visited
+Lilar only in autumn." "There is the nightingale's song, too, which we
+of course cannot paint, but yet we can hear it," said Liana, cheerfully;
+he was her teacher, and now, in the technology of painting, even her
+father's. Over all her acquisitions and inner fruits and blossoms the
+rose of silence had been painted; to that her tyrannical father had
+entirely accustomed her, and especially before men, in whom she always
+revered copied fathers.
+
+When the landscape came to Albano, and he held before him in miniature
+that spring night when Lilar and the noble old man appeared to him so
+enchantingly,--and as he touched what the dear soul had handled,--and
+now in his own soul all accordant strings trembled,--just then the Devil
+struck again a dissonant chord of the seventh:--
+
+"The Prince, gracious sir," said the Minister to the German gentleman,
+"was yesterday buried in private; only eight days hence we have the
+public interment. We are obliged to hasten, because the suspension of
+the court-mourning lasts until the inauguration, on _ascension-day_, is
+gone by." I am too much excited to express myself upon the eternal
+master of ceremonies, Froulay, who would have raised a lantern-tax in
+the sun, and bridge-toll before park-bridges and asses'-bridges; but
+Albano, dazzled by so many side-lights and glancing rays,--reminded of
+Liana's sorrow over the old man, of his birthday, of the heart without a
+breast, and of the madness of the world,--was not in a condition,
+however much he had intended appearing in gentleness and lambs' clothes
+before Froulay, to keep the latter on; but he must needs (and louder
+than he meant), in opposition to his next neighbor, the Church
+Counsellor, Schaepe, with too great youthful exasperation (not lessened
+by the eager listening of Liana for the brotherly voice) declare himself
+against many things,--against the everlasting dead sham-life of
+men,--against the ceremonial haughtiness of a soulless form,--against
+this starving on love merely from making false shows of it;--ah, his
+whole heart burned on his lip!
+
+The honest Schaepe, whom I just now called a scoundrel, took, with
+several expressions of countenance, Albano's part. But I do not by any
+means, friend Albano!--thou hast yet to learn for the first time that
+men, in respect to ceremonies, modes, and laws, like a flock of sheep,
+will, in a body, provided the bell-wether can only be got to leap over a
+pole, continue to leap carefully over the same place when the pole has
+been taken away;--and the most and highest leaps, in the state, are
+those we make without the pole. But a youth would be an ordinary one who
+should love civil life very early, however certain it is that he and we
+all judge too bitterly the faults of every office which we do not
+ourselves hold.
+
+The company listened in silence, and, out of politeness, only inwardly
+admired; on Liana fell a tender seriousness.
+
+They rose,--the closeness vanished,--so did his zeal;--but, whether it
+came from the speaking, or the contemplation of the loved object, or
+from a youthful over-leaping of the hedges of visiting-propriety,--(it
+arose not, however, from want of manners),--the fact is not to be denied
+(and I do my best, too, to give it exactly) that the Count left the poor
+old lady who had been escorted in by him,--Hafenreffer himself knows not
+her name,--left her standing, and, I believe unconsciously, took Liana
+under his escort. Ah, her! What shall I say of the magic nearness of the
+dreamed-of soul,--of the light resting of her hand, felt only by the arm
+of the inner man, not of the outer,--of the shortness of the heavenly
+way, which should have been at least as long as Frederick Street?
+Verily, he himself said nothing,--he thought merely of the abominable
+Inhibitorial-room, where their separation must take place,--he trembled
+at every effort to speak. "You have, perhaps," said Liana, lightly and
+openly, who loved to hear the friendly voice, especially after the warm
+discourse, "already visited our Lilar?"--"Truly not; but have you?" he
+said, too much confused. "My mother and I have made it our favorite home
+every spring."
+
+Now were they in the parting-chamber. Alas! there and thus he stood with
+her, who saw nothing, for some seconds immovable, and looked straight
+before him, wanting to say something, till he was aroused by her mother,
+who was eagerly seeking, for her affection, which the whole evening had
+been nourishing, a sequestered hour on her daughter's heart,--and so all
+was over, for both vanished like apparitions.
+
+But Alban was as a man who is deserted by a glorious dream, and who all
+the morning is so inwardly blest, but remembers the dream no more. And
+yet, stands not Lilar open to him, and will he not surely see it, so
+soon as ever Liana can see it too?
+
+Never was he more gentle. The attentive Lector, in this warm, fruitful
+seed-time, threw in some good seed. He said, as they looked out together
+into the moonlit night, Albano had this evening hardly brought forward
+anything but thorny and exaggerated truths, which only imbitter, but do
+not enlighten. At another time the Count would have asked him whether he
+should have carried himself like Froulay and Bouverot, who, with all
+possible tolerance, presented theses and antitheses to each other, like
+an academical respondent and opponent, who previously prepare in concert
+logical wounds and plasters of equal length;--but to-day he was very
+kindly disposed towards him. Augusti had so delicately and
+affectionately cared for mother and daughter,--he had, without
+blackening or whitewashing, said much good, but nothing hastily, and his
+expositions had been calmly listened to: he had neither flattered nor
+offended. Albano, therefore, replied, softly: "But it is surely better
+to imbitter, dear Augusti, than to put to sleep. And to whom shall I
+then say the truth but to those who have it not nor any faith in it?
+Surely not to others." "One can speak any truth," said he, "but one
+cannot reckon as truth every mode and mood in which he speaks it."
+
+"Ah!" said Albano, and looked up; beneath the starry heaven stood the
+marble Madonna of the palace, like a patron saint, softly
+illuminated,--and he thought of her sister,[81]--and of Lilar,--and of
+spring,--and of many dreams,--and how full his heart was of eternal
+love, and that he had as yet no friend and no loved one.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[70] Lit. "Let themselves be struck dead thereupon," i. e. lay
+their life that it was so. We have a vulgarism: "I'll be shot if
+it's not so."--TR.
+
+[71] _Blase-loecher_, mouth-pieces.--TR.
+
+[72] _Honnetete_ entirely excludes, in the higher classes,
+murder; _des honnetete_, lying, &c., except in a _certain_
+degree.
+
+[73] This court is Catholic, but the country Lutheran; and to
+this latter confession that of Hohenfliess also subscribes.
+
+[74] Or convocations every fifteen years.--TR.
+
+[75] A departing graduate.--TR.
+
+[76] See Count Lamberg's Day-book of a Man of the World.
+
+[77] Whoever goes to the Academy of the Arcadians, takes an
+Arcadian name.
+
+[78] One who watches the card and takes up the money at the
+bank.--TR.
+
+[79] Give us our daily bread, and forgive us our debts.--[? TR.]
+
+[80] Lanzknecht.--TR.
+
+[81] Liana.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+EIGHTH JUBILEE.
+
+     LE PETIT LEVER OF DR. SPHEX.--PATH TO
+     LILAR.--WOODLAND-BRIDGE.--THE MORNING IN
+     ARCADIA.--CHARITON.--LIANA'S LETTER AND PSALM OF
+     GRATITUDE.--SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A GARDEN.--THE
+     FLUTE-DELL.--CONCERNING THE REALITY OF THE IDEAL.
+
+
+41. CYCLE.
+
+I Sat up all last night till towards morning,--for I cannot suffer any
+strange _dechiffreur_ in the case,--in order to cipher out the Jubilee
+to the very last word, so enchained was I by its charms; I hope,
+however, as the mere thin leaf-skeleton from Hafenreffer's hand has
+already done so much, that now, when I run through its veins with
+sap-colors and glossy green, the leaf will do absolute miracles.
+
+With the Count it had been troubled weather since last evening. For the
+patient, modest form which he had seen shone, like the purpose of a
+great deed, before all the images of his soul; and in his dreams, and
+before he sank to slumber, her gentle voice became the Philomela of a
+spring-night. Withal, he heard them continually talking about her,
+especially the Doctor, who every morning announced further progress of
+the ocular cure, and at last placed Liana's setting out for Lilar nearer
+and nearer. To hear of a loved one, however, even the most indifferent
+thing, is far mightier than to think of her. He heard further, that her
+brother, since the murder of her eyes, had withdrawn entirely from the
+city, in which he would not again appear except on a so-called
+festive-steed at the Prince's funeral;--and around this Eden, or rather
+around its creatress, so high a garden-wall had been run, and he went
+round the wall and found no gate.
+
+I know nothing more odious than this; but in what residence-city is it
+otherwise? If I ever wrote a Romance (of which there is no probability),
+one thing I affirm openly, there is nothing which I would so sedulously
+shun as a residence-city, and a heroine in it saintly enough for a
+canoness. For the conjunction of the upper planets is more easily
+brought about than that of the upper class of lovers. Does _he_ wish to
+speak alone with _her_ at Court or at tea or in her family, there stands
+the Court, the tea-party, the family close by;--will he meet her in the
+park, she rides, like the Chinese couriers, double, because we give a
+consciousness to maidens, as nature gives all important organs,
+duplicate, just as we give good wine double bottom;--will he meet her at
+least accidentally in the street, then there stalks along behind her (if
+the street lies in Dresden), a sour servant as her plague-vinegar,
+soul-keeper, _curator sexus_, _chevalier d'honneur_, genius of Socrates,
+contradictor, and Pestilentiary. In the country, on the other hand, the
+parson's daughter takes a run (that is all), because the evening is so
+heavenly, about the fields of the parsonage, and the candidate needs do
+nothing more than put on his boots. Really, among people of rank, the
+mantle of (erotic) love seems in the beginning to be a Dr. Faust's
+mantle, which swears to soar over everything, whereas it merely covers
+over everything; only, at last, there stands a Schreckhorn, a Mount
+Pilate, and a Jungfrau, before one's nose.
+
+Blessed hero! On Friday came the Lector, and reported, that on Monday
+the illustrious deceased--namely, his empty coffin--is to be buried, and
+Roquairol rides the festive-steed,--and Liana is almost well, for she
+goes with the Minister's lady to-morrow to Lilar, in all probability to
+escape some sad black-bordered notes of condolence,--and, on the
+following ascension-day comes the consecration and masquerade....
+
+Blessed hero! I repeat. For hitherto what hast thou possessed of the
+blooming vale of Tempe, except the barren heights whereon thou stood'st
+looking down into the enchantment?
+
+
+42. CYCLE.
+
+On the May-Saturday-evening, at 7 o'clock, every vapor disappeared from
+the sky, and the brightly departing sun went to meet a glorious Sunday.
+Albano, who then, at length, meant to visit the unseen Lilar, was, on
+the evening before, as sacredly happy as if he were celebrating
+confession eve before the first holy supper;--his sleep was one constant
+ecstasy and awaking, and in every dream a mimic Sunday morning rose, and
+the future became the dark prelude of the present.
+
+Early on Sunday he was about to sally forth, when he had to pass by the
+half-glass door of the Doctor. "Sir Count, one moment!" cried he. When
+he entered, the Doctor said, "Directly, dear Sir Count!" and went on
+with what he was about. To the painters, who, in future centuries, will
+draw from me as they have hitherto from Homer, I present the following
+group of the Doctor as a treasure; he lay on his left side; Galen was
+smoothing down his father's back with a little scratch-brush, while
+Boerhave stood near him with a broad comb, and kept dragging that
+instrument perpendicularly (not obliquely) through the hair. He always
+said he knew nothing that cheered him up so, and was such a good
+aperient, as brush and comb. Before the bed stood Van Swieten in a thick
+fur, which the correctioner had to wear when the weather was warm and
+his behavior bad, in order that he might, thus arrayed, be laughed at,
+as well as half roasted.
+
+Two girls stood waiting there in full Sunday gala, and were thinking of
+going out into the country to see a parson's daughter, and to the
+village church; these he first mauled, limb by limb, with the hammer of
+the law. He loved to make his children antipodes of Romish defendants,
+who appear in rags and tatters, and so he set them in the pillory, all
+ruffled and tasselled, especially before strangers. The Count had
+already this long time, on the red children's account, been standing
+with his face turned toward the open window; he could not, however,
+refrain from saying, in Latin, "Were he his child, he would long ago
+have made way with himself; he knew nothing more degrading than to be
+scolded in finery." "It takes so much the deeper hold," said Sphex, in
+German, and fired only these few farewell shots after the girls: "You
+are a pair of geese, and will do nothing in church but just cackle about
+your rags and tags; why don't you mind the parson? He is an ass, but he
+preaches well enough for you she-asses; in the evening do you tell me
+every word of the sermon."
+
+"Here is a laxative drink, Sir Count, which, as you are going to Lilar,
+I beg you to give the Architect's lady for her little toads; but don't
+take it ill!" By the deuse! that is what precisely those people most
+frequently say, who, themselves, never take anything ill. The
+Count,--who at another time would have contemptuously turned his back
+upon him,--now blushing and silent before the preserver of his Liana,
+put it into his pocket, because, too, it was for the children of his
+beloved Dian, to whose spouse he wished to bear greetings and news.
+
+
+43. CYCLE.
+
+Lilar is not, like so many princely gardens, a torn-out leaf
+of a Hirschfeld,--a dead landscape-figurant and mimic- and
+miniature-park,--one of those show-dishes which are now served up and
+sketched at every court, of ruins, wildernesses, and woodland-cottages,
+but Lilar is the _lusus naturae_ and bucolic poem of the romantic and
+sometimes juggling fancy of the old Prince. We shall soon enter in a
+body behind our hero, but only into _Elysium_. _Tartarus_ is something
+entirely different, and the second part of Lilar. This separation of the
+contrasts I praise even more than all. I have long wanted to go into a
+better garden than the common chameleonic ones are, where one hands you
+China and Italy, summer-house and charnel-house, hermitage and palace,
+poverty and riches (as in the cities and hearts of the proprietors), all
+on one dish, and where day and night, without an aurora, without a
+mezzotinto, are placed side by side. Lilar, on the contrary,--where the
+Elysium justifies its happy name by connected pleasure-tents and
+pleasure-groves, as the Tartarus does its gloomy one, by lonesome,
+veiled horrors,--_that_ is drawn right out of my heart.
+
+But where is our youth now going with his dreams? He is yet on the
+romantic road that leads into Lilar, properly the first garden-walk of
+the same. He strolled along an embowered road, which gently rose over
+hills, with open orchards, and into yellow-blooming grounds, and which,
+like the Rhine, now forced its way through green, ivy-clad rocks, and
+now opened its flying, smiling shores behind the twigs. Now the white
+benches under jessamine bushes and the white country-seats became more
+frequent; he drew nearer, and the nightingales and canary-birds[82] of
+Lilar came roving along, like birds announcing land. The morning blew
+fresh through the spring, and the indented foliage yet held fast its
+light, ethereal drops. A carrier lay sleeping on his rack-wagon, which
+the beasts, browsing right and left, safely drew along the smooth road.
+Albano heard, in the Sunday stillness, not the war-cry of oppressive
+labor, but the peace-bells of the towers: in the morning chime the
+future speaks, as in evening chimes the past; and at this golden age of
+the day there stood, also, a golden age in his fresh bosom.
+
+Now the fork-tailed chimney-swallows began to quiver with their purple
+breasts over the heavenly blue of the wild germanders, announcing the
+approach of our dwellings as well as their own; when his road seemed
+about to pass through an old, open, ruined castle, overhung with rich,
+thick leaves, like scales, at whose entrance, or egress, a red arm,
+pointing aside with the white inscription, "Way out of Tartarus into
+Elysium," stretched out toward a neighboring thicket.
+
+His heart rose within him at this double nearness of such opposite days.
+With long steps he pressed on toward the Elysian wood, which seemed to
+be cut off from him by a broad ditch. But he soon came out of the
+bush-work before a green bridge, which flung its arch like a giant
+serpent across the ditch, not, however, on the earth, but among the
+summits of the trees. It bore him in through a blooming wilderness of
+oaks, firs, silver-poplars, fruit-trees, and lindens. Then it brought
+him out into the open country, and now Lilar, from the east, flung, over
+the wide-extending spikes of grain, the splendor of a high golden ball
+to meet him. The bridge sank gently with him again into fragrant,
+glimmering broom, and beneath and beside him sang and fluttered
+canary-birds, thrushes, finches, and nightingales, while the well-fed
+brood slept under the covert of the bridge. At last, after passing an
+arched avenue, it came up again to the light, and now he saw the
+blooming mountain cupola with the white altar, whereon he had knelt on a
+night of his youth; and farther to the south behind him, the veil and
+dividing-wall of Tartarus, a high-reared wood; and as he stepped onward,
+Elysium opened upon him more broadly,--a lane of small houses with
+Italian roofs full of little trees, smiled joyfully and familiarly upon
+the sight out of the green world-map of dells, groves, paths, lakes; and
+in the east five triumphal gates opened passages into a wide-extending
+plain, waving on like a green-glistening sea, and in the west five
+others stood opposite to them with opened lands and mountains.
+
+As Albano passed down along the slowly-descending sweep of the bridge,
+there came forth into view, now blazing fountains, now red beds, now new
+gardens enfolded in the great one, and every step created the Eden anew.
+Full of awe he stepped out, as upon a hallowed soil, on the consecrated
+earth of the old Prince and the _pious father_[83] and Dian and Liana;
+his wild course was arrested, and entangled, as if by an earthquake; the
+pure paradise seemed made merely for Liana's pure soul; and now for the
+first time a timid question about the propriety of his hasty journey,
+and the loving fear of meeting for the first time her healed eye, made
+his happy bosom grow uneasy.
+
+But how festal, how living, is all around him! On the waters which gleam
+through the groves swans are gliding; the pheasant stalks away into the
+bushes, deer peep curiously behind him out of the wood through which he
+has come, and white and black pigeons run busily under the gates, and on
+the western hills hang bleating sheep by the side of reposing lambs;
+even the breast of the turtle-dove in some hidden valley trembles with
+the _languido_ of love. He strode through a long, high-bushed
+rose-field, that seemed a settlement and plantation of hedge-sparrows
+and nightingales, which hopped out of the bushes on the growing
+grass-banks, and ran out in vain after little worms; and the lark sailed
+away on high over this second world, made for the more innocent of God's
+creatures, and sank behind the gates into the grain-fields.
+
+Intoxicate thyself more and more, good youth, and link thy flowers into
+a chain as closely as the boy toward whom thou art hastening. For,
+overhead, on the Italian roof, before whose balustrade-breastwork
+silver-poplars, girdled about with broad vine-leaves, played, and which,
+in the spring-night, he had taken for a bower in roses, stood a
+blooming boy bent forward, who was letting down a chain of marigolds,
+and kept fastening on new rings to the too short green cable. "My name
+is Pollux," he answered briskly to Alban's soft question, "but my sister
+is named Helena,[84] but my little brother is named Echion." "And thy
+father?" "He is not here now, he is away off there in Rome; just go in
+to mother Chariton, I am coming immediately." On what fairer day, in
+what fairer place, with what fairer hearts could he come into the holy
+family of the beloved Dian, than on this morning, and with this mood?
+
+He went into the bright, laughing house, which was full of windows and
+green Venetian blinds. When he entered into the spring-room he found
+Chariton, a young, slender woman, looking almost like a girl of
+seventeen,[85] with the little Echion at her breast, defending herself
+against the sickly and excitable Helena, who, standing in a chair under
+the window, kept swinging in a many-leaved sling of a vine-branch, and
+trying to girdle and blind therewith the eyes of her mother. With
+charming confusion, wishing at once to rise, with her left hand to
+remove the leafy fetters without tearing, and to cover up the suckling
+more closely, she stepped forward, inclining her head, to meet the
+beautiful youth, with childlike friendliness and warmth, but with
+infinite shyness, not on account of the rank indicated by his dress, but
+because he was a man, and looked so noble, even like her Greek. He told
+her, with an enchanting love, which, perhaps, she had never seen so
+magnificently pictured, on his strong countenance, his name, and the
+gratitude which his heart kept in store for her husband, and the news
+and greetings which he had brought from him. How the innocent fire
+blazed out of the dark eyes of the timid creature! "Was then my lord,"
+so she called her husband, "very well and happy?" And so she began now,
+unembarrassed as a child, a long examination all about her husband.
+
+Pollux came dancing in with his long chain. Alban playfully took out the
+Doctor's medicine from his pocket, and said, "This is what you are to
+take." "Must I drink it right down, mother?" said the hero. Here she
+inquired quite as naively after the detailed prescriptions of the
+Doctor, until the little suckling at her breast rebelled, and drove her
+into a by-room to sit over the cradle. She excused herself, and said the
+little one must go to sleep, because she was going to walk with Liana,
+for whom she was looking every minute.
+
+Children love powerful faces. Alban was at once the favorite of children
+and dogs, only he could never act with the little jumping troop, on the
+childish playground, when grown spectators were in the boxes.
+
+"I can do a good many things!" said Pollux. "And I can read, sir!"
+rejoined Helena to her brother. "But then only in German; but I can read
+Latin letters splendidly, you!" replied the little man to her, and ran
+round through the room after readings and specimens; but in vain. "Man,
+wait a little!" said he, and ran up-stairs into Liana's chamber, and
+brought one of Liana's letters.
+
+
+43a. CYCLE.
+
+Albano knew not that Liana had the upper--so bloomingly shaded--chamber
+reserved for her own private use, wherein she frequently--especially
+when her mother remained behind in the city--drew, wrote, and read. The
+childlike Chariton, inspired with the love-draught of friendship, did
+not know at all how she could possibly so much as show her warmth of
+kindness to the fair, affectionate friend: ah, what was a chamber? Now
+into this always open room came the children, whom Liana sometimes heard
+read; and thus was Pollux able on the present occasion to fetch out of
+the solitary room the sheet which she had written this morning.
+
+While Albano, during the errand, sat so alone in the keeping-room of the
+far-off friend of his youth, near _his_ still, pale daughter, who looked
+now at him and now at a toy sheep-fold, as well known to him as Liana's
+eastern chamber, when the morning breeze swept in the glorious hum
+through the cool window, especially when, in the light cut-work of the
+floor the Chinese shadows of the vine and poplar foliage crinkled into
+each other, and when, at length, Chariton began to sing the suckling to
+sleep with a quicker, louder lullaby, which sounded to him like her
+echoing sigh after the fair land of her youth; then was his full heart,
+which had been already so stirred by all the events of the morning,
+wondrously moved, and--especially by the flickering sham-fight of the
+shadows--almost to tears; and the child looked up more and more
+meaningly into his face.
+
+Then came Pollux back with his two quarto leaves, and now set himself at
+once to his lesson. The very first page composed the melody to Alban's
+inner songs; but he could neither guess the authoress nor the date of
+the letter, except further along, by a desultory sort of reading to and
+fro. The leaves belonged to previous ones; not so much as a grain of
+writing-sand evinced their recent birth (for Liana was too courtly to
+use any); further, all the names were disguised; that is to say,
+Julienne, to whom they were directed, had unfortunately in Argenson's
+_bureau de decachetage_, where she resided, i.e. at court, demanded them
+in cipher, and she accordingly took the name of Elisa; Roquairol was
+called Charles, and Liana her little Linda. Linda, as will be well
+remembered, is the baptismal name of the young Countess of Romeiro, with
+whom the Princess on the day of that (for Roquairol) so bloody
+masquerade had established an eternal heart- and letter-alliance; Liana,
+to whose pure, poetic eyes every noble woman became a blessed saint and
+heroine, the opaque jewel a bright, pure, transparent one, loved the
+high Countess as if with the heart of her brother and her female friend
+at once, and the gentle soul named herself, unconscious of her worth,
+only the little Linda of her Elisa.
+
+Nor did Albano recognize the delicate running-hand; Julienne loved the
+French language even to its letters, but Liana's resembled not the
+scrawled Gallic protocols, but the neatly-rounded handwriting of the
+English.
+
+Here is her leaf at last. O thou lovely being! how long have I thirsted
+for the first sounds of thy refreshing soul!
+
+
+                                          "Sunday Morning.
+
+     "... But to-day, Elisa, I am so profoundly happy, and the
+     evening-mist is transformed to an aurora in heaven. I ought
+     not to give thee yesterday's work at all. I was too much
+     troubled. But might not my dear mother, who had come hither
+     merely for my sake, become thereby still sicker, whatever
+     appearances of tolerable health she might, for that very
+     reason, assume with me? And then came thy form, beloved one,
+     and all thy sorrow and the painful neighborhood,[86] and our
+     last evening here. O how reproachfully did all that pass
+     before my heavy heart! So, as we stopped before the house of
+     dear Chariton, and she kissed my mother's hand with tears of
+     joy; then was I so weak that I too turned aside and shed
+     tears, but other tears,--I wept for the rejoicing one
+     herself, who indeed could not know whether at that hour her
+     precious friend in Rome might not be sick or dying.
+
+     "But now the dark, gray mist is wholly blown away from the
+     flower-garden of thy little Linda, and all the blossoms of
+     life shine in their pure, high colors before her. After
+     midnight my mother's headache passed almost entirely away,
+     and she was still sleeping so sweetly this morning. O, what
+     were my feelings then! Soon after five o'clock I went down
+     into the garden and shrunk back at the splendor which burned
+     in the dew and between the leaves; the sun was just looking
+     in under the triumphal gates,--all the lakes sparkled in a
+     broad fire,--a gleaming haze floated like a saintly halo
+     around the edge of the earth which the heaven touched,--and
+     a high waving and singing streamed through the splendor of
+     morn.
+
+     "And into this unlocked world I had come back restored and
+     so happy. I wanted continually to cry out: 'I have thee
+     again, thou bright sun! and you, ye lovely flowers! and ye
+     proud mountains, ye have not changed! and ye are green
+     again, and, like me, renewed, ye sweet scented trees!' I
+     floated, as if transfigured, in an endless felicity, Elisa,
+     weak, but light and free; I had, so it seemed to me, put off
+     this burdensome clay under the earth and kept only the
+     beating heart, and in my enraptured bosom warm
+     tear-fountains gushed down, as if over flowers, and covered
+     them with brightness.
+
+     "'Ah, God!' said I, trembling at the very greatness of my
+     joy, 'was it then a mere sleep, that immovable repose of
+     mother?' and I must needs (smile on!) before I went further,
+     go up to her again. I crept breathless to the bedside, bent
+     listeningly over her, and my good mother opened slowly her
+     still gently dozing eyes, looked upon me languidly but
+     affectionately, and closed them again without stirring, and
+     gave me only her dear hand.
+
+     "Now could I right blissfully return to my garden; I bore,
+     however, a morning-greeting to the ever-cheerful Chariton,
+     and told her that I might be found on the broad way to the
+     _altar_,[87] if I should be wanted for anything. Ah, Elisa,
+     what feelings then were mine! And why had I not thee by the
+     hand, and why could not my distressed Charles see that his
+     sister was so happy? As, after a warm rain, the evening-red
+     and the liquid sunlight run from all the gold-green hills,
+     so stood a quivering splendor over my whole inner being and
+     over my past, and everywhere lay bright tears of joy. A
+     sweet gnawing consumed away my heart as if to death, and all
+     was so near to me and so dear! I could have answered the
+     whispering aspen and thanked the spring-breezes which fanned
+     so coolingly my hot eye! The sun had laid itself with a
+     motherly warmth on my heart, and brooded over us all,--the
+     cold flower, the naked young bird, the stiff butterfly, and
+     every creature. Ah, such should man be too, thought I; and I
+     took the sandy path, and spared the life of the poor little
+     blade of grass and the flower that peeped so lovingly, which
+     truly breathe and wake like us. I drove not away the thirsty
+     white butterflies and pigeons which stood beside each other
+     and bent down from the moist turf to drink. O, I could have
+     stroked the waves ... this creation is truly so precious and
+     from God's hand, and every the smallest-shaped heart has
+     surely its blood and a longing, and into every little
+     eye-point under the leaf the whole sun and a little spring
+     enter and abide!
+
+     "I leaned, a little exhausted, under the first triumphal
+     arch, ere I ascended to the altar, and looked out into the
+     glimmering landscape full of villages and orchards and
+     hills; and the glistening dew, and the ringing of the
+     village-bells, and the chime of the herd-bells, and the
+     floating of the birds over all, filled me with peace and
+     light. Yes, in such peace and seclusion and serenity will I
+     spend my fleeting life, thought I: does not the little
+     Sad-cloak persuade me, who, before my eyes, with his wings
+     torn by autumn, nevertheless flutters again around his
+     flowers; and does not the night-butterfly admonish me, who
+     clings, chilled, to the hard statue, and cannot soar to the
+     blossoms of day? Therefore will I never stir from my mother;
+     only let the precious Elisa stay with us as long as her
+     Linda lives, and call her noble friend soon,[88] that I may
+     see and heartily love her!
+
+     "I went up the green-shaded mountain, but with pain: joy
+     weakens me so much. Think of me, Elisa: I shall some time
+     die of a great joy or of a great, all too great woe! The
+     spiral path to the altar was painted with the hues of the
+     blossom-dust, and overhead, not colored and stationary, but
+     shifting, burning rainbows quivered through the twigs of the
+     mountain. Why stood I to-day in a splendor such as I never
+     knew before?[89] And when the morning breeze fanned and
+     lifted me, and when I dipped myself deeper into the blue
+     heaven, then said I, 'Now thou art in Elysium.' Then it was
+     to me as if a voice said, 'This is the earthly Elysium, and
+     thou art not yet sanctified for the other.' O, how ardently
+     did I then form the purpose to disentangle myself from so
+     many faults, and especially to renounce that too hasty
+     imagination of offence, which I may indeed conceal from
+     others, but through which I nevertheless injure them. And
+     then I prayed at the altar, and thanked the Eternal
+     Goodness, and wept unconsciously; perhaps too much, but yet
+     without my eyes smarting.
+
+     "At last I wrote the poem of thanks which I append to this,
+     and which I will put into verse, if the _pious father_
+     approves.
+
+
+"POEM OF THANKS.
+
+"'Do I then gaze again with blessed eyes into thy blooming world, thou
+All-loving One, and weep again, because I am happy? Why did I then fear?
+When I went under the earth in the darkness like the dead, and caught
+only a distant sound of the loved ones and of spring above me, why was
+my feeble heart in fear that there was no more hope for life and light?
+For thou wast by me in the darkness, and didst lead me up out of the
+vault into thy spring; and around me stood thy joyous children, and the
+serene heavens, and all my smiling loved ones! O, I will now hope more
+steadfastly! Continue thou to break off from the sick plant all rank
+flowers, that the rest may more fully ripen! Thou dost indeed lead thy
+human creatures into thy heaven and to thyself over a long mountain; and
+they go through the storms of life along the mountain, only
+overshadowed, not smitten, by the clouds, and only our eye grows wet.
+But when I come to thee, when Death again throws his dark cloud over me,
+and draws me away from all that I love into the deeper cavern, and thou,
+All-gracious, settest me free once more, and bearest me into thy
+spring,--into a still fairer one than this, which is itself so
+magnificent,--will then my frail heart, near thy judgment-seat, beat as
+gladly as to-day, and will the mortal bosom dare to breathe in thy
+ethereal spring? O, make me pure in this earthly one, and let me live
+here, as if I were already walking in thy heaven!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If even you, ye friends, who have never seen her, are yet won and
+touched by the patient, pure form, which can resignedly rejoice that the
+storm-cloud has, after all, only sent down rain-drops upon it, and no
+hailstones, how must she then have agitated the deeply-moved heart of
+her friend! He felt a consecration of his whole being, just as if Virtue
+came down incarnate in this shape from heaven, to hallow him with her
+smile, and then flew back in a shining path, and he followed, inspired
+and exalted, in her track.
+
+He urged the boy instantly to carry back the leaves, in order to spare
+her and himself--as she might appear any moment--the most painful of
+surprises; yet he firmly resolved--cost what it might--to be true, and
+confess to her, this very day, what he had done.
+
+The little fellow ran up stairs and down again, remained a long time
+before the door, and came in with Liana by the hand, who was dressed in
+white, with a black veil. She looked in and around a little perplexed,
+as she with both hands pushed back the veil from her friendly face; but
+she heard Chariton's lullaby. She did not know him till he spoke; and
+then her whole beautiful being reddened like an illuminated landscape
+after an evening shower: she had the pleasure, she said, of knowing his
+father. Probably she knew the son still better by Julienne's and
+Augusti's pictures, and on more congenial sides; her sisterly heart was
+certainly moved, too, by his brotherly voice; for the charm, and even
+preferableness, of resemblance and copy is so great, that one who looks
+like even an indifferent person becomes more dear to us, like the echo
+of an empty sound, merely because, in this case as in the imitative art,
+the past and absent, shining through the fancy, become a present.
+
+The gradually lowering tone of the mother's lullaby announced the
+sinking of the infant to slumber, and at last the diminuendo died away,
+and Chariton, with glistening eyes, ran to take Liana's hand. A frank
+and serene friendship bloomed between the innocent hearts, and held them
+entwined, as the vine does the neighboring poplars. Chariton related to
+her what Albano had related, with a reliance upon her most fervent
+sympathy. Liana listened to her friend with eager attention; but that
+was quite as much as if she were looking at the historical source itself
+that was so near at hand.
+
+
+44. CYCLE.
+
+At last they began a journey through the garden. Pollux very
+reluctantly, and only after Liana's promise to draw him a horse again
+to-day, stayed behind as patron-saint of the cradle. Alban said, to the
+extreme joy of the Architect's wife, who could now show the beautiful
+man everything, that he had seen but little of Lilar yet. How
+bewitchingly the two forms, linked in friendship, walked before him side
+by side! Chariton, although a matron, yet of a Grecian slenderness,
+fluttered along as a younger sister beside the lily-form of her somewhat
+taller Liana. The former seemed, according to the classification of the
+landscape-painters, nature in motion; Liana, nature in repose. As he
+joined Liana again, by whose left hand Helena was running along,--the
+mother on the right,--he found her softly-descending profile
+indescribably touching, and around the mouth he recognized lines which
+sorrow had drawn, the scars of returning days; while the lovely maiden,
+on the sunny side of the front face, as in her easy conversation,
+manifested a free, benignant cheerfulness, which Albano, who had never
+knocked at the school-room door of any young ladies' academy, found it
+hard to reconcile with her tearful poetry. O, if the tear of woman
+passes away lightly, so flutters away still more lightly woman's smile;
+and the latter, still oftener than the former, is only appearance!
+
+He tried, from a longing of the thirsty heart, to catch the little one's
+hand, but she hung with both upon Liana's left; presently, however, she
+skipped away, and plucked three iris-flowers,--which, like her,
+resembled butterflies,--and gave one to her mother, and two to Liana,
+with the words, "Give _him_ one too!" And Liana handed it to him,
+lifting her friendly face upon him as she did so with that holy
+maiden-look which is bright and attentive, but not searching, expressive
+of childlike sympathy without giving and demanding. Nevertheless,
+several times during the day did she let those holy eyes sink down; but
+what compelled her to it was, that on Zesara's rocky face, softened
+though it was by love, there rested a physiognomical right of the
+stronger: he seemed to look upon a shy soul with a hundred eyes, and his
+two true ones blazed as warmly, although quite as purely, as the sun's
+eye in the ether.
+
+The iris-flowers have this peculiarity, that one smells them, another
+not; only to these three beings in one did the cups open themselves
+equally wide, and they rejoiced long over this community of enjoyment.
+Helena ran forward and disappeared behind a low bush; she sat on a
+child's bench by a child's table, awaiting, with a smile, the grown
+people. The good old Prince had low moss-benches, little garden-chairs,
+little table- and pot-orangeries, and the like, placed everywhere, for
+the children, about the resting-places of their elders; for he loved to
+draw these refreshing open flowers of humanity near to his heart! "One
+wishes so often," said Liana, "to live in the patriarchal time, or in
+Arcadia, or in Otaheite; children are, indeed,--do you not believe
+so?--everywhere the same, and one has already in them what only the most
+remote time and the most remote region can insure." He indeed believed
+it, and gladly; but he kept asking himself, How can such an unstained
+Aphrodite be born out of the dead sea of a court, as pure dew and rain
+arise out of the briny water of the ocean?
+
+While speaking, she occasionally drew an uncommonly graceful--how shall
+I write it--_H'm!_ after her words, which, although a grammatical
+blunder at court, betrayed an unspeakable good nature; but I describe
+it, not in order that all my fair readers may let this attractive
+interjection be heard the very next Sunday.
+
+"The same," replied Albano,--but he meant it well,--"holds of the
+animals: the swan yonder is like the one in Paradise." She took it just
+as it was meant; but the reason was the pious Father Spener, her
+teacher; for at Albano's question touching Lilar's abundance of
+beautiful and gentle creatures, she answered: "The old Lord loved these
+creatures with a real tenderness, and they could often bring him even to
+tears. The pious Father thinks so too; he says, since they do everything
+at God's behest by instinct, accordingly it seems to him, when he
+contemplates the care of the parents for their young, just as if the
+Infinitely Gracious One were doing it all himself." They ascended now a
+half-shaded bridge, over a long water-mirror hung round with quivering
+poplars, wherein Liana's emblem, namely, a swan, slept on the
+water-rings, the bent neck beautifully nestled on the back, the head
+upon the wing, and gently wafted more by the breezes than by the waves.
+"So reposes the innocent soul!" said Alban, and thought, perhaps, of
+Liana, but without the courage to confess it. "And thus it awakes!"
+Liana added with emotion, as this white magnified dove slowly raised its
+head from the wing; for she thought of her mother's waking on this very
+day.
+
+Chariton, as if all made up of salient points, was continually turning
+to Liana, and asking: "Shall we go this way? or in through there? or out
+through here? If my lord were only here! he knows all about it." She
+would gladly have led him round every fount and every flower, and looked
+into the youth's face as lovingly as into that of her friend. Liana said
+to her, on the cross way at the bridge: "I think the flute-dell yonder,
+with the gleaming gold ball, will perhaps be pleasantest, especially for
+a lover of music; and, besides, they will look for me there, when they
+bring the harp to my mother." She had promised to come back to her as
+soon as that arrived. She shunned every path toward the south, where
+Tartarus frowned behind its high curtain.
+
+Liana spoke now of the contest between painting and music, and of
+Herder's charming official report of this strife. She, although a votary
+of the pencil, gave in her vote, as was natural to the female and the
+lyric heart, entirely for tones, and Albano, although a good pianist,
+was rather for colors, "This magnificent landscape," said Albano, "is in
+fact a picture, and so is every fair human form." "Were I blind," said
+Chariton, naively, "then I should not see my lovely Liana." She replied:
+"My teacher, the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdoerfer, also set painting
+above music. But to me, when I hear music, it is as if I heard _a loud
+past_ or _a loud future_. Music has something holy; unlike the other
+arts, it cannot paint anything but what is good."[90] Verily, she was
+herself a moral church-music, the angel-stop in the organ. The pure
+Albano felt, by her side, the necessity and the existence of a yet
+tenderer purity; and it seemed to him as if a man might injure, even
+unconsciously, a soul like this, whose understanding was hardly anything
+more than a finer feeling,--as window-glasses of pure transparency are
+often broken, because they appear as if they were not. He turned round
+mechanically, because he was always one step in advance, and not only
+the blooming Lilar, but also Liana's full form, shone at once and
+transfigured into his soul. To clasp her to his heart was not now his
+yearning, but to snatch this being, who had so often suffered, from
+every flame; to rush for her, sword in hand, upon her foe, to bear her
+mightily through the deep, cold hell-floods of life;--that would have
+illuminated his existence.
+
+
+45. CYCLE.
+
+They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped
+from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when
+Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with
+her into a pathless oak-grove;--she looked upon him so contentedly and
+open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of
+being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the
+words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial
+Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting
+eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's
+breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with
+the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola
+Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning
+had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears.
+Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,--but like an
+angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been
+compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain
+address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!
+
+They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion
+never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye
+was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,--into that
+resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have gone round freely,
+without sleep. Chariton--from her earnestness much more busy--had, after
+a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let
+certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the
+blooming veil, which retired as they approached;--and Albano beheld now
+the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one
+in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before
+him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the
+higher terrace,--everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs,
+from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down
+below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which
+wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and
+mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains
+placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver
+rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold
+globe beside the sun,--the last mirror of his dying evening-glance.
+"Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually
+repeating.
+
+Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered
+with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey
+the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high
+pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an
+auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height,
+behind a statue of a Muse,--for the Nine Muses beamed from the green
+Tempe,--seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My
+brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile
+with the knitting-work which she had taken from her friend, "wishes
+very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its
+holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from
+embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your _Charles_
+like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did
+not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.
+
+All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and
+out of the bowers,--more and more continually joined them,--they
+quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,--at last
+flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared
+toward heaven;--they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps,
+and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue
+spring,--and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted
+on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of
+May,--and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering
+rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.
+
+Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar
+to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her
+eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as
+the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid
+summer-night;--but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the
+sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,--certainly not against sun
+and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated
+form, played--a sublime contrast to himself--with the ringlets of the
+little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big
+tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.
+
+At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and
+asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other
+ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the
+dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more
+strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.
+
+A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the
+vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of
+raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of
+his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,--by heaven, I must
+say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with
+trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been
+in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it
+all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder
+history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept
+saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said
+Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with
+heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the
+agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely
+to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read
+anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up
+soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed
+from him.
+
+O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this
+heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou,
+this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel
+among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err, so
+hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for
+once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the
+sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and
+hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with
+the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love
+in their hearts,--if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust
+each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry
+months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the
+other,--"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life,
+before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like
+thee!"--O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!
+
+The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was
+working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters
+and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something
+violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he
+had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled
+occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and
+stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange!
+how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the
+outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he
+could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his
+father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the
+gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path,
+and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the
+heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and
+perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried along after
+them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the
+awakened strings as from an AEolian harp, and bore them onward with it;
+and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of
+swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale
+continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and
+hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his
+ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked
+over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the
+distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping.
+And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!
+
+But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the
+loved objects only _in_, and not _on_, your bosoms, am I not, like the
+Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble
+sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the _Archimime_,
+who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your
+soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead
+of a past, has only given a future,--wilt thou not one day say to me, I
+should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies,
+for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it
+not been for these Phoenix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished
+lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then
+caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me
+than with the rest of you?
+
+Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really
+live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in _memory_, or
+beforehand in _hope_, you would, therefore, rather have the present day
+without either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of
+time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of
+the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the
+middle; but as to the past and the future,--neither of which can any man
+live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our
+heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,--you
+will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in
+order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.
+
+By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so
+that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and
+then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso
+would fain translate _poetic_ dreams into waking reality[91] is more
+foolish than the North American, who realizes his _nightly_ ones: he
+proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew
+into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch,
+bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us
+one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our
+present ideals,--as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love
+here below, which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner
+becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but _then_--no, for the Then
+of the life hereafter, this little _Now_, has no voice; but if, I say,
+here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral
+life, and every dream a day,--ah, even then would desire still remain
+enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a
+higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;--in _Arcadia_ we
+should pine after _Utopia_; and on every sun we should see an
+unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should--sigh as we
+do here!
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[82] They have a whole room for winter quarters, of which in
+summer the windows are merely thrown open.
+
+[83] Such was the general title of the secluded Emeritus, the
+court preacher, Spener, who resided there, and who was related to
+the noble old pious Spener, not only on the paternal side, but
+also on the spiritual.
+
+[84] They had these names as twins.
+
+[85] The grammar seems to require "a still almost maidenly
+looking woman of seventeen years," but the translator did not
+dare to think Jean Paul could have meant that, consistently with
+the ages of the three children, though, as an Oriental, Chariton
+may have married _very_ young.
+
+[86] The Tartarus with Julienne's father's heart.
+
+[87] Such is the name of that mount which Albano found in the
+well-known spring night.
+
+[88] Linda de Romeiro.
+
+[89] The reason is, that after her recovery she was still
+short-sighted, and to a short-sighted person the dew is so much
+the more brilliant.
+
+[90] This proposition, that pure music, without text, cannot
+represent anything immoral, deserves to be more investigated and
+developed by me.
+
+[91] It cannot be objected to me, that in fact the scenes of my
+book have been actually experienced, and that no one would wish
+to experience any better; for in the representation of fancy
+reality assumes new charms, charms with which every other faded
+present magically glimmers through the memory. I appeal here to
+the sensations of the very characters who figure in _Titan_,
+whether they would not in my book--in case they should ever light
+upon it--find in the pictured scenes, which, however, are their
+own, a higher enchantment, which has gone from the real, and
+which, to be sure, might produce such an effect--but altogether
+illusorily--that my characters could wish to live _their own
+life_.
+
+
+
+
+NINTH JUBILEE.
+
+     PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER
+     TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF
+     ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN
+     THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE
+     CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN.
+
+
+46. CYCLE.
+
+Ripening love is the stillest: the shady flowers in this spring, as in
+the other, shun sunlight. Albano spun himself deep into his
+Sunday-dreams, and drew, as well as he could, the green poppy-leaf of
+reality into his web,--namely, the Monday, which was to show him, at the
+state-burial of the Prince, the brother of his maiden-friend.
+
+This day of festive sadness, at which the third but greatest princely
+coffin was to be conveyed to its repose, at last broke, and had been
+made momentous already by the preparatory festival, at which the two
+first coffins, together with the old man, had been interred, somewhat as
+virtues are buried in the very beginning of a century, and not till its
+end their empty names and wrappages and half-bindings. At the rehearsal-
+and prefiguring-burial of the illustrious deceased, the old pious Father
+Spener too, his last friend, had gone down with him into the vault, in
+order to have opened the wooden and tin casing of the run-down
+wheel-work, and to cover over upon the still breast of the dear sleeper
+his youthful portrait and his own with the colored side down, without
+speaking or weeping; and the court made much of this morning- and
+evening-offering of friendship.
+
+Everything swells up monstrously for man, of which they are obliged to
+talk a long while,--all Pestitz societies were auxiliary funeral
+societies, and full of burial-marshals,--every scaffolding of the
+neighboring future was a mausoleum, and every word a funeral sermon or
+an epitaph upon the pale man. Sphex, as his physician in ordinary,
+rejoiced in his part of the sorrow and the procession,--the Lector had
+already tried on the court mourning, in the place of his cast-off
+winter-garb, and found it to fit,--the court-marshal had not a minute's
+rest, and the last day, which opens all graves and closes none, had come
+to him now before its time,--the Minister, Von Froulay, whom the cold
+Luigi willingly left to do everything, was, as a lover of old princely
+pomp, and as convoking director of the present occasion, as much in
+heaven himself as was the illustrious deceased,--the women had risen
+from their beds this morning as to a new life, because to these busy
+_drapery-paintresses_ a long chain of coats and of their wearers
+probably weighs as much as a span of blood-related horses does to their
+husbands.
+
+Albano waited impatiently at the window for Liana's brother, and loved
+the invisible one more and more ardently; like two connected wings,
+Friendship and Love stirred and lifted each other within him. The
+mourning-spool, namely, the empty coffin, had been fixed in Tartarus,
+and was gradually wound off, and now the dark mourning-ribbon would soon
+be ready to be stretched to the upper city. Already, for an hour and a
+half before the arrival of the procession, the saltpetre of the female
+crowd had been crystallized on the walls and the windows. Sara, the
+Doctor's wife, came up with the children and the deaf Cadaver into
+Schoppe's chamber, the second door of which stood open into Albano's,
+and, with an ogling, amorous look, spoke in to the Count: "Up here one
+can overlook the whole much better, and his excellency will pardon it."
+"You just stay together there, and don't you trouble M. the Count," said
+she, turning back to the children, and was on the point of entering the
+Count's chamber, at whose threshold Schoppe, just coming from Albano,
+caught and stopped her.
+
+Now Sara was one of those common women who are more carried away
+themselves by their own charms than successful in carrying others away
+therewith. She would merely set her face in the chair, and let it kindle
+and singe and burn, while she on her part (relying on her _lazy
+Jack_[92] of a visage) quietly and coolly worked away at other things,
+either simple trash or vile scandal; and then when she had been a
+_clothes'-rod_ of women, as Attila was a Heaven's rod of nations, she
+looked round and surveyed the damage which the fire of her face had done
+in the male tinder-boxes. Particularly on the rich and beautiful Count
+had she an eye,--under Cupid's bandage. Her head was full of good
+physiognomical fragments; and Lavater's objection, that most
+physiognomists unfortunately study nothing in the whole man but the
+face, could not hit in any point her pure physiognomical sense.
+
+Schoppe, readily divining that with this female soul-dealer the walk or
+_gang_ was a press-gang,[93] the white linen, hunting-gear, the shawl, a
+bird-net,[94] and the neck, a swan's-neck for any fox that happened to
+be near, caught her by the hand at the threshold of the two chambers,
+and asked her, "Do you, also, take as much interest as I in the
+universal joy of the land, and the long-desired court-mourning? Your
+eyes indicate something like it, Mrs. Provincial Physician." "What
+interest do you mean?" said the medical lady, struck quite stupid. "In
+the pleasure of the courtiers, who, in general, are distinguished from
+monkeys, as the orang-outangs are, by the fact that they seldom make
+leaps of joy; at least, like young performers on the piano-forte, they
+drum away, without the smallest emotion, their most mournful and their
+merriest pieces one after the other. O, if only nothing bitter should
+spoil the mourning of the court-household! Do you wish the dear ones to
+have arrayed themselves in vain in the black robes of joy, wherein, like
+the grandsons of those who were left behind in the battle of Leuctra,
+they go to meet the jubilee of a new prince? What!" Unluckily she
+replied, in a sarcastic tone: "Black is, in these parts, the
+mourning-color, Mr. Schoppe." "Black, Mrs. Doctor!" (he bounced back
+with astonishment.) "Black?--black is a travelling-color, and
+bridal-color, and gala-color, and, in Rome, a princely-children's color;
+and, in Spain, it is a law of the empire that the courtiers, like the
+Jews in Morocco,[95] shall appear in black.
+
+"Pestalozzi, madam--but there's Malt, does he understand me?" Schoppe
+turned round to the man, who had his drum on, and meant secretly to tap
+it during the procession, so as to catch something of the muffled
+funeral drums, and exhorted him to give a beat or two, in order that he
+might profit by the discourse. "Malt," said he, louder, "Pestalozzi
+remarks very justly, that the great ones of our time, in face, dress,
+posture, image-worship, superstition, and love for charlatans, approach
+daily nearer and nearer the Asiatics; it speaks in favor of Pestalozzi,
+that they borrow of the Chinese, who dress themselves in black for joy,
+and in white for mourning, not merely temples and gardens and
+caricatures, but also this very black of joy."
+
+Among the children,--of whom the uneducated alone were not
+ill-bred,--Boerhave, Galen, and Van Swieten made themselves most
+prominent by the inlaid work and designs of the present company, which
+they were engraving on their bread and butter; and Galen showed his
+satirical projection of Mama, saying, "Only see what a long nose I have
+made Mama have!"
+
+The Librarian, who was turning something similar, arrested her, as she
+offered to go in, assuring her he would not let her pass till she
+surrendered to his views: the funeral column of march could hardly have
+got an acre's distance out of Tartarus, and would give him time enough.
+He continued:--
+
+"Genuine mourning, on the contrary, my dear, always, like anger, makes
+one party-colored, or, like terror, white; e. g. the creatures of a dead
+Pope mourn violet, so does the French king, his lady chestnut brown, the
+Venetian Senate, for their Doge, red. But to a regent you cannot, more
+than I, allow any mourning whatever; to the high-priest and a Jewish
+king[96] it was wholly forbidden; why should we allow the household more
+than the master? And must not a sovereign, my best one! who should
+permit the expensiveness of public mourning, manifestly open afresh the
+closed wounds of private sorrow? And could he, when, like Cicero,[97] he
+had, by his exile, thrown twenty thousand people into mourning weeds,
+answer it to his conscience, that his last act was a _Droit d'Aubaine_,
+a robbery, and that the dying-bed, whereupon one formerly bequeathed
+clothing to servants and the poor, should now strip them thereof? No,
+madam, that does not look like regents at least, who often, even by
+their dying, as Marcion[98] asserted of Christ's journey to hell, bring
+up a Cain, Absalom, and several others of the Old-Testament culprits out
+of hell into the heaven of the new administration.
+
+"You do not yet give in, and the Cadaver looks at me like a cow; but
+consider this: peruke- and stuff-weavers have frequently besought
+crowned heads to wear their manufactures, in order that they might get a
+sale for them;--an hereditary and crown-prince, on the first happy
+consecration- and regency-day, when he deposes, that is, deposits his
+predecessor in the ground, puts on coal-black, because the black wool is
+not good for much, and does not sell well, and such an example at once
+strikes the whole metropolis,--even cattle, drums, pulpits, black. Only
+one word more, love: I assure you there is nothing coming yet but the
+company of choristers. For this very reason has the princely corpse,
+which might easily spoil the whole pleasure of the funeral, been
+previously disposed of, and only a vacant box is carried along, in order
+that the procession may have no other _pensees_ than _Anglaises_[99]....
+O dearest, one last word: What can you see, then, in the corps of
+equerries and pages? Well, go now! I too rejoice to see at once so many
+people, and the prince so happy in the midst of his children."
+
+But the longer he saw the procession growing, that loose juggler's
+thread, by which they were letting down the empty but figured chest of
+Cypselus[100] into the family vault, so much the more indignant became
+his mockery. He applied his hypothesis to every sable member of the dark
+chain. He praised them for opening the _bal masque_ of the new
+administration with these slow minuet steps, and preparing themselves
+for the waltz of the wedding and the grandfather's-dance of the
+allegiance-day. He said, as one loved on festive days to make everything
+easy for himself and his beast, as, accordingly, the Jews, on the
+Sabbath, would not allow themselves or their cattle to carry anything,
+not even the hens to carry the rags sticking to them; so he saw with
+pleasure, that in the ceremony-carriages, and in the parade-box, and on
+the mourning-horses, nothing was suffered to lie or sit; yes, that even
+the trains of the mourning-mantles were borne by pages, and the four
+points of the bier-cloth by four stout gentlemen. The only fault he
+found was, that the soldiery in their joy had seized their guns upside
+down, and that precisely the persons of the highest rank, Luigi,
+Froulay, Bouverot, as they came from a hasty funeral potation at once
+into the open air, were obliged, by reason of their staggering, to be
+led along and held up on both sides.
+
+
+47. CYCLE.
+
+In Albano another spirit spoke than in Schoppe, but the two soon met. To
+the Count the night-like forms of crape, the still funeral banners, the
+dead-march, the creeping sick-man's-walk, and the tolling of the bells,
+opened wide all earth's charnel-houses, especially as before his
+blooming eyes these death plays came for the first time: but one thing
+more loudly than all--one will hardly guess what--proclaimed before him
+the partings of life,--namely, the beat of the drum stifled by the
+funeral cloth; a muffled drum was to him a broken reverberation of all
+earthly catacombs. He heard the dumb, strangled complainings of our
+hearts,--he saw higher beings looking down from above on the lamentable
+three hours' comedy of our life, wherein the ruddy child of the first
+act fades in the fifth to the old man in jubilee, and then, grown up and
+bowed down, vanishes behind the falling curtain.
+
+As, in spring, we think more of death, autumn, and winter than in
+summer, so also does the most fiery and energetic youth paint out to
+himself in _his_ season of life's year, the dark leafless one oftener
+and more vividly than the man in that stage which is nearest to it; for
+in both springs the wings of the ideal unfold widely and find room only
+in a future. But before the youth, Death comes in blooming, Greek form;
+before the tired, older man, in Gothic.
+
+Schoppe generally began with _comic_ humor, and ended with _tragic_; so
+also now did the empty mourning-chest, the crape of the horses, their
+emblazoned caparisons, the Prince's contempt of the heavy German
+Ceremonial; in short, the whole heartless mummery, lead him up to an
+eminence, to which the contemplation of a multitude of men at once
+always impelled him, and where, with an exaltation, indignation, and
+laughing bitterness hard to describe, he looked down upon the eternal,
+tyrannical, belittling, objectless and joyless, bewildered and oppressed
+frenzy of mankind, and his own too.
+
+Suddenly a gay, shining knight broke the dark chain: it was Roquairol,
+on the parading gala-horse, who agitated our two men, and none besides.
+A pale, broken-down face, glazed over with long inward fire, stripped of
+all youthful roses, lightening out of the diamond-pits of the eyes under
+the dark, overhanging eyebrows, rode along in a tragic merriment, in
+which the lines of the veins were redoubled under the early wrinkles of
+passion. What a being, full of worn-out life! Only courtiers or his
+father could have set down this tragic exultation to an adulatory
+rejoicing over the new regency; but Albano took it all into his heart,
+and grew pale with inward emotion, and said, "Yes, it is he! O, good
+Schoppe, he will certainly become our friend, this distracted youth. How
+painfully does the noble one laugh at this gravity, and at crowns, and
+graves and all! Ah, he too has, indeed, once died." "There the rider is
+right," said Schoppe, with quivering eyes, and suddenly tapped Albano's
+hand and then his own head; "my very skull here appears to me like a
+close _bonsoir_, like a light-extinguisher, which death claps upon
+me,--we are neat silvered figures, kept up in an electrical dance, and
+we leap up with the spark; fortunately I am still alive and
+kicking,--and there is our good Lector creeping along, too, and
+trailing his long crape,"--in which respect Augusti's citizenly-serious
+mood contrasted very strongly with the humanly-serious one of the
+Librarian.
+
+All at once Schoppe, out of patience with this general emotion, said:
+"What a masquerade for the sake of a mask! Rag and tag for a piece of
+rag-paper! Throw a man quietly into his hole, and call nobody to see. I
+always admire London and Paris, where they toll no alarm-bells, nor set
+the neighborhood stirring, when the undertaker carries one, who has
+fallen asleep, to bed." "No, no," said Zesara, full of capacity for
+grief, "I admire it not: to whomsoever the holy dead are of no
+consequence, to him the living are so too;--no, I will gladly let my
+heart break into one tear after another, if I can only still remember
+the dear being."
+
+O, how did the neighborhood accord with his heart! In a cistern, before
+which the coffin of the coffin passed by, there stood a bronze statue of
+the old man on horseback, who saw pass by below him the unsaddled
+mourning-horses, and the mounted festive-steed; a deaf and dumb man was
+stopping from door to door, and making, with his bell, a begging jingle,
+which neither he nor the buried one could hear: and was not the
+forgotten Prince laid in the earth all unseen, and more lonesome than
+any one of his subjects? O Zesara! it sank into thy heart, how easily
+man is forgotten, whether he lies in the urn or in the pyramid; and how
+our immortal self is regarded, like an actor, as _absent_, so soon as it
+is once behind the scenes, and frets and fumes no longer among the
+players on the stage.
+
+But had not the gray hermit, Spener, laid upon the sunken breast of that
+deeper hermit a double youth? O, in this frosty hour of pomp and
+pageantry, counts not the faithful Julienne every tone of the funeral
+bell with the beads of her tears,--that poor daughter whom sickness has
+exempted from the ceremonials, not from pain, who now has lost her _last
+but one_, perhaps her _last_ relative, since her brother is hardly one?
+And will not Liana, in her Elysium, guess the farce of sorrow which is
+acted so near to her over behind the high trees in Tartarus? And if she
+suspects anything, O how profoundly will she mourn!
+
+All this the noble youth heard in his soul, and he thirsted hotly after
+the friendship of the heart: it was to him as if its mountain- and
+life-air floated down from eternity, and blew the grave-dust away from
+his life-path, and he saw, up yonder, the Genius place his inverted
+torch upon the cold bosom, not to extinguish the immortal life, but to
+enkindle the immortal love.
+
+He could not now do otherwise than go forth into the open air, and, amid
+the flying tones of spring and the deep, hollow murmur of the receding
+dead march, write the following words to Liana's brother, in which he
+said to him, after a youthful style, Be my friend!
+
+
+                "TO CHARLES.
+
+     "Stranger! At this hour, when, in the dead sea and through
+     our tears, the triumphal columns and thrones of men and
+     their bridge-posts appear to us _broken_, a true heart puts
+     a question to thee frankly, and let thine answer it
+     willingly and in truth!
+
+     "Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee,
+     stranger, and hast thou thy friend? Do thy wishes and nerves
+     and days grow together with his, like the four cedars on
+     Lebanon, which can bear nothing around them but eagles?
+     Hast thou two hearts and four arms, and livest thou twice
+     over, as if immortal, in the battling world? Or standest
+     thou solitary and alone upon a frosty, dumb, slender,
+     glacier-point, having no human being to whom thou canst show
+     the Alps of creation, and with the heavens arching far above
+     thee and abysses yawning below? When thy birthday comes,
+     hast thou no being to shake thy hand, and look thee in the
+     eye and say, We still cleave together faster than ever?
+
+     "Stranger: if thou hast had no friend, hast thou deserved
+     one? When spring kindled into life, and opened all her
+     honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the hundred gates
+     of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bitterly looked up and
+     begged of God a heart for thine? O when, at evening, the sun
+     went down like a mountain, and his flames departed from the
+     earth, and now only his red breath floated upward to the
+     silvery stars, hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of
+     friendship which sank together on battle-fields, like stars
+     of one constellation, stealing forth through the bloody
+     clouds out of the old world, like giants; and didst thou
+     think of _this_,--how imperishably they loved each other,
+     and thou, like me, wast alone? And, solitary one, when
+     night--that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid
+     climes, _toils_ and _travels_--reveals her cold suns above
+     thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the
+     distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, and
+     immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feelest, upon
+     the cold earth, that thy heart beats against no breast but
+     only thine own,--O beloved! weepest thou then, and most
+     bitterly?
+
+     "Charles, often have I reckoned up, on my birthday, the
+     increasing years,--the feathers in the broad wing of
+     time,--and thought upon the sounding flight of youth: then I
+     stretched my hand far out after a friend, who should stick
+     by me in the Charon's skiff wherein we are born, when the
+     seasons of life's year glide by along the shore before me,
+     with their flowers and leaves and fruits, and when, on the
+     long stream, the human race shoots downward in its thousand
+     cradles and coffins.
+
+     "Ah, it is not the gay, variegated shore that flies by, but
+     man and his stream: forever bloom the seasons in the gardens
+     up and down along the shore; only _we_ sweep by once for all
+     before the garden, and never return.
+
+     "But our friend goes too. O, if thou at this hour of death's
+     juggleries art contemplating the pale Prince, with the
+     images of youth on his breast, and thinking of the gray
+     friend who secretly bewails him in Tartarus, then will thy
+     heart dissolve, and in soft, warm flames run round through
+     thy bosom, and softly say: 'I will love, and then die, and
+     then love--O Almighty, show me the soul which longs and
+     languishes like mine!'
+
+     "If thou say'st that, if thou art thus, then come to my
+     heart: I am as thou. Grasp my hand, and hold it till it
+     withers. I have seen thy form to-day, and on it the marks of
+     life's wounds: hasten to me; I will bleed and struggle at
+     thy side. I have long and early sought and loved thee. Like
+     two streams will we mingle and grow, and bear our burdens,
+     and dry up together. Like silver in the furnace, we will run
+     together with glowing light, and all slags shall lie cast
+     out around the pure shimmering metal. Laugh not, then, any
+     longer so grimly, to think what _ignes-fatui_ men are; like
+     _ignes-fatui we_ burn and fly away in the rainy storm of
+     time. And then, when time is gone by, we find each other
+     again, and it will be again in the spring.
+
+                              "ALBANO DE CESARA."
+
+
+
+
+48. CYCLE.
+
+How gloriously,--before all the beating veins of the inner man, like
+those of the outer in old age, have stiffened into gristle, and all the
+vessels have become inflexible and earthy, and the moral pulse, like the
+physical, hardly makes sixty strokes in a minute, and before the shy old
+fool, at every emotion, reserves a piece of his nature which he keeps
+cold and dry, and which is to wait for another occasion, as sprinkled
+raspberry leaves always remain dry on the rough side,--how gloriously, I
+say, before this period of espionage, does a youth, especially an
+Albano, step along his path, how freely, boldly, and exultingly! and
+seeks with equal confidence the friend and the foe, and closes with him,
+to fight either for him or against him!
+
+Let this excuse Albano's fiery letter! The next day he received from
+Roquairol this answer:--
+
+     "I am as thou. On ascension-evening I will seek thee among
+     the masks.
+
+                                 "CHARLES."
+
+
+
+The redness of mortification rushed over the Count's face at this
+artificial postponement of the acquaintance; he felt that, after such a
+tone from the heart, _he_ would have immediately, without a dead interim
+of five days, and without an _homage-day masquerade_ in a double sense,
+gone to his friend and become his. But now he swore no longer to run to
+meet him, but only to wait for him. However, the roused indignation soon
+subsided, and he began to invent fairer and fairer mitigations for the
+first leaf of the so-long-sought favorite. Charles might certainly, e.
+g. not wish to mix up the holy time of the first recognition with this
+bustle of taking the allegiance-oath,--or that first suicidal masquerade
+might have made every succeeding one an inspiring era of a new second
+life,--or he knew, perhaps, in fact, about Albano's birthday,--or,
+finally, this glowing spirit chose to run or fly on his own track.
+
+Meanwhile, his note made the Count reproach himself for his own letter,
+as if it had been a sin against his Schoppe; he held it to be a sin, in
+one friendship, to yearn after another; but thou mistakest, fair soul!
+Friendship has steps which lead up on the throne of God, through all
+spirits, even to the Infinite: only love is satiable, and, like truth,
+admits no three degrees of comparison; and a single being fills its
+heart. Moreover, Albano and Schoppe, in such a mutual metempsychosis of
+their ideas, and such a near relationship of their pride and nobility,
+held each other far more dear than they showed to each other. For, as
+Schoppe, in fact, showed nothing, one could love him in return only with
+the finger on the lip, but, perhaps, so much the more strongly. Albano
+was a burning-hot concave mirror, which has its object near, and
+represents it erect behind itself; Schoppe one which holds the object
+far off, and throws an inverted image of it into the air.
+
+On the evening before his birthday, and the day of allegiance, Albano
+stood alone at his window, and pondered his past,--for a last day is
+more solemn than a first: on the 31st of December I reckon up three
+hundred and sixty-five days and their fates; on the first of January I
+think of nothing, because, in fact, the whole future is transparent, or
+may be all out in five minutes;--while the vesper-bell pealed over the
+fast-closing twentieth year of his life, and the vesper-hour rose within
+him, he measured the _abside-line_[101] of his moral being, and looked
+up at the towering pile of the approaching morrow, which hung full
+either of spring-showers or hailstones. Never yet had he so tenderly
+surveyed the circle of his beloved beings, or glanced through the open
+doors of futurity, as at this time.
+
+But the fair hour was spoiled by Malt, who burst in with the information
+that the limping gentleman had leaped overboard. From the dormer-window
+might be seen a returning village funeral-procession, conglomerated
+around the spot on the bank where Schoppe had plunged in. With frightful
+wildness--for in Albano indignation was next-door neighbor to terror and
+pain--he dragged along with him, as he flew to the rescue, the lazy
+provincial physician, and even threatened him with hard words; for Sphex
+was going to wait for a carriage, and meanwhile represent to himself the
+possible cases of too late preparations for a rescue, and besides,
+perhaps, cherished a hope of serving up Schoppe, on the anatomical
+table, as Doctor's-feast of science.
+
+The youth ran out with him,--through corn-fields, amidst tears and
+amidst curses,--with alternate clenched fist and outspread palm, and his
+eye grew more and more dim and dizzy, and his heart hotter and hotter,
+the nearer they approached the dark circle. At last they could not only
+see the Librarian, but also hear him; in good case he turned towards
+them his curly head from among the reeds, and, occasionally, as he was
+haranguing the mourning-retinue, he flung up, in a fiery manner, his
+hairy arm above the water-plants.
+
+Of course the case stood thus:--
+
+His sorites, as long as he lived, was the following: "He had come into
+the world, not feet foremost, but head foremost, and, accordingly,
+carried his head and nose high and lofty,[102] because he could not help
+it. Now he knew of no more genuine freedom than health;--every malady
+shuts up and warps the soul, and the earth is, merely for that
+reason, a universal block-house, _la salpetriere_ and house of
+bruises;[103]--whoso made use of an oyster-snail-viper medicine was
+himself a slimy, snaky, sticking viper, oyster, snail, and therefore the
+ever-free savages killed their invalids, and the vigorous Spartans gave
+no patient an office, least of all the crown;--and strength was
+especially necessary, in our degenerate days, in order to maul qualified
+subjects, because, to his certain knowledge, the fist with some
+substance in it was the best plaintiff's plea and _actio ex lege
+diffamari_ which a citizen could institute."
+
+Therefore he bathed summer and winter in ice-cold water, just as he, for
+the same reason, kept himself temperate in all things.
+
+Now, then, in this odious May-weather, he had merely, in his gray
+hussar-cloak,--at home, his night-gown,--and with shoes down at the
+heel, gone to the water-side; he had previously stripped himself at the
+house so as to be ready as soon as he should arrive at the bank. The
+mourning-company, who saw him go at his swift pace down to the water,
+and at last throw off everything and leap in, could not but believe the
+man meant to drown himself, and ran in a body to his bathing-place, not
+to let him do it. "Do not drown himself!" cried the mourning-company of
+blacks, while yet afar off. He just let them come on till he could
+discourse the matter to them somewhat nearer, in the following wise:--"I
+am yet open to conviction; I can hear reason, good folk, though I am
+already standing up to my neck in the water; but suffer yourselves to be
+correctly informed in this case, dear _Cherstens_ generally, for so
+Christians were called in the time of Charles. I am a poor
+Sacramentarian, and can hardly recollect what I have hitherto lived on,
+it was so bloody-desperate little. Whatever I have undertaken in this
+world, no blessing went with it, but it was all crab's-track backwards
+and forward. I set up, in Vienna, a neat little magazine of snipes'
+dung, but I made nothing out of it for want of snipes. I took hold on
+the other end, and hawked about in Carlsbad, for the lords and great
+ones, who are accustomed to set a picture upon every old stool and piece
+of trumpery, fine engravings for waste-paper and privy purposes, in
+order that, instead of the mere printed paper, they might have something
+tasty for consumption; but the whole set was left, a dead loss, on my
+hands, because the manner was too hard and not ideal enough. In London I
+prepared ready-made speeches (for I am a _litterateur_) to be used by
+men who are hanged, and yet would fain have something to say for
+themselves: I offered them to the richest parliamentary orators, and
+even knaves of booksellers, but came near having to use the speeches for
+myself. I would gladly have got my living by vomiting,[104] but that
+requires funds. I tried once to get a settlement as note-stand to a
+count's regiment, because it looks stupid enough on drill- and
+parade-days to see every one with a musical flap hanging on his
+shoulder, from which his next neighbor behind plays. I offered for a
+trifle to wear all the musicalia on my own person, and stand before them
+with the notes; but the first-lieutenant (who is at once in the regency
+and in the treasury) thought it would make the fifers laugh when they
+came to blow. Thus has it fared with me from time immemorial, dear
+Cherstens--but don't trample about on my precious cloak there! As ill
+luck would have it, I entered into wedlock with a lady of Vienna, who
+was endowed with melted seals;[105] her name was _Praenumerantia
+Elementaria Philanthropia_;[106] you don't know what this means in
+German,--a real hell-broom, who chased me, all heated, like a hunted
+stag, into the reeds here. Cherstens, I should defame myself in the
+water, were I to come out plainly with the whole story of our woful
+condition;[107] ... in short, my Philanthropia before marriage was soft
+as the spines of a new-born hedge-hog, but in the nuptial state, when
+the foliage was off, I saw, as on trees in winter, one raven's- and
+devil's-nest after another. She was all the time dressing herself and
+dressing herself, till it was time to undress; when a fault in me or the
+children had been removed, she would still continue to scold a little,
+as one continues to vomit, when the emetic and everything is out; she
+indulged me preciously little, and had I had a Fontanel[108] she would
+have reproached me for the fresh pea which I should have been obliged
+every day to put into it; in short, we two pulled opposite ways,--the
+linch-pin of love came out in the struggle, and I came with the
+forward-wheels down into the water here, and my Praenumerantia stays with
+the hind-wheels at home. See, my women, this is why I do violence to
+myself--besides, the gnawing-man[109] would have, at any rate, caught me
+by the throat; but behold yourselves in me as in a mirror! For when a
+man who is a _litterateur_, and therefore, as you yet know by the case
+of Fichte, goes about as instituted overseer, schoolmaster, and mentor
+of the human race, leaps overboard before his wife's face, and lets his
+Ephorie and tutorship go, you may conclude from this of what your own
+husbands, who cannot measure themselves with me at all in learning, are
+capable, in case you are such Praenumerantias, Elementarias, and
+Philanthropias as unfortunately you have the appearance of being. But,"
+he concluded suddenly, as he saw Albano and the Doctor, "clear
+yourselves away; I am going to drown myself!"
+
+"Ah, dear Schoppe!" said Albano. Schoppe blushed at his situation. "It
+must be a clown," said the retiring funeral retinue. "What child's
+foolery is this, then?" asked Sphex, resenting Albano's former passion
+and the anatomical misshot, and derived satisfaction from telling the
+story of the latter's rage. Schoppe knew how heartily the noble youth
+loved him, and he would not say anything, because he was ashamed, but he
+swore to himself (in the grotesque style to which he was accustomed even
+in soliloquy) very shortly to let him into his breast-cavern, and show
+him hanging therein a whole, wild heart full of love.
+
+
+49. CYCLE.
+
+The blue day on which an ascension, a rendering of allegiance, and a
+birthday were to be celebrated already stood over Pestitz, after having
+cast off its morning-red,--two horses were already harbingers of four,
+the lowly coach-box, of the highest,--the country nobility already went
+down, uncomfortably frizzled, into the rooms of the inn, and scolded at
+being cheated out of the fairest weather for heath-cock coupling,
+and the city nobility, yet unpowdered, spoke of the day, but
+without real earnestness,--the court-micrometer,[110] the
+court-marshal, was surrounded by all his quartermasters,--the
+court-transit-instruments,[111] the courtiers, instead of their
+half-holiday, when they work only in the afternoon, had a whole
+working-day, and were already standing at the wash-table,--the
+allegiance-preacher, Schaepe, believed almost every word of his
+discourse, because he had read it too many times over, and the nearness
+of publication infused emotion into him,--there was no longer a domino
+to be had for the evening, except among the Jews,--when a man alighted
+at the door of the Doctor's house, who among all others was the most
+honest and hearty about the allegiance, the Director Wehrfritz. There
+were a son and a father in each other's arms, a fiery youth and a fiery
+man. Albano seemed to him no longer to be the old Albano, but--warmer
+than ever. He brought with him from "his women," as he called them,
+congratulatory letters and birthday presents; he himself made not much
+of the birthday or forgot it, and Albano had only celebrated it a little
+just after waking. These festivals belong more to the other sex, who
+gladly toy with times and seasons in the way of loving and giving.
+
+The Titular Librarian marched out to a village, named Klosterdorf, where
+the Mayor with his family, after an ancient custom, had to imitate the
+Prince with his, and so, as commissioner, drive in the allegiance of the
+neighboring circle; this, Schoppe said, he still was pleased with, but
+the other worked too fatally on his inwards. The Director, dazzled by
+the prospects of the day, and posted in the front with an official
+speech to the chivalry, fell into a quarrel with Schoppe. "The Exchequer
+and the Court," said he, "have been, of course, from time immemorial,
+such as they are; but the Princes, dear sir, are good; they are
+themselves sucked dry, and then they seem to be the suckers."
+"Somewhat," rejoined Schoppe, "as the death-vampyres only give out blood
+from themselves, while they appear to take it; but I make up for that
+again by attributing wholly to the Regents, besides the sins of others,
+the merits, victories, and sacrifices of others also; herein they are
+the pelicans, who shed a blood for their children which really at a
+distance seems to be their own."
+
+All went off: Schoppe, out into the country; Wehrfritz, to church with
+the procession; Albano, into a spectator's-box in the allegiance-hall;
+for he would not in any wise be stuck into the train of the Prince, not
+even as embroidery. Soon the noisy stream of pomp came sounding back
+into the hall. The chivalry, the spirituality, and the cities mounted
+the stage, where the oath was to be taken. In the court-yard of the
+castle one foot stood upon another, and a needle might, to be sure, have
+reached the ground, but no one could do so, to pick it up; everybody
+looked up at the balcony, and cursed before he _swore_. The Prince, too,
+stayed not away; the throne, that graduated and paraphrased princely
+seat, stood open, and Fraischdoerfer had decorated it with beautiful
+mythological and heraldic shoulder-pieces and appendages.
+
+Opposite the Count bloomed the court-dames, and below them a rose and a
+lily, Julienne and Liana. As one lifts his eye from the stiff frosty
+landscape of winter to the blue breathing heavens which looked down upon
+our spring evenings, and wherein the light summer clouds floated and the
+rainbow stood, so did he glance over the shining snow-light of the court
+at the lovely Grace of spring, around whom remembrances hung, like
+flowers, and who now stood so far aloof, so cut off, so imprisoned in
+the heavy finery of the court! Only through her friend, who sits beside
+her, was she gently melted and harmonized with the dazzling present.
+
+Now began fine official speeches, the longest being made by the old
+Minister, the shortest by Wehrfritz: the Prince let the warm eulogies
+glide over his December-visage without thawing it down,--a mistaken
+indifference! For the praise of the Minister, as well as of other
+court-servants, may yet help him with posterity, since, according to
+Bacon, no praise is of more consequence than that which servants give,
+because they surely know their master best.
+
+Then the Upper-Secretary, Heiderscheid, read Luigi's genealogical table,
+and illuminated the hollow family-tree, together with its dryness, and
+the last pale green twig; with sunken eyes Julienne heard this amid the
+_vivat_ of the people, and Albano, never subdued by _one_ thought alone,
+saw her eyes, and could not, however intently the Regent listened,
+avoid the funeral picture, how, one day, and that very soon, this
+extinguished man would bear down after him the name of his whole race
+into the vault; he saw them carving the inverted arms and hanging the
+shield upside down, and heard the shovels strike against the helmet and
+fling the earth after the coffin. Gloomy idea! the tender sister would
+certainly have wept, had she only been alone!
+
+At last the turn came to those, to whom it never comes first, although
+they are the only ones who have a hearty meaning in such ceremonies.
+Heiderscheid stepped out on the balcony, and caused the noisy swarming
+multitude to stretch out the forefinger and thumb, and repeat the oath
+after him. The mass, always fascinated, shouted their _vivat_; in the
+dazzled eyes gleamed the confident expectation of a better regency and
+love for the unknown individual. The Count, whom a multitude generally
+made enthusiastic, as it did Schoppe melancholy, glowed with the
+inspiration of brotherly love and thirst for achievement; he saw
+princes, like omnipotent ones, holding sway on their eminences, and saw
+the blooming provinces and the gay cities of a wisely-ruled land spread
+out before him; he represented to himself how he, were he a prince,
+could, with the electric sparkling of the sceptre-point, dart, with an
+animating shock, into millions of united hearts at once, whereas he
+could now, with so great difficulty, scarcely kindle a few of the
+nearest; he saw his throne, as a mountain in morning light, pouring out,
+instead of lava, navigable streams through the lands, and breaking the
+storms, with a hum of harvests and festivals around its feet; he thought
+to himself how far, from such a high place, he could send light abroad,
+like a moon, which does not hide the sun by day, but, from her
+elevation, flings his distant brightness into the night,--and how he
+would, instead of only defending, _create_ and _educate_ freedom, and be
+a regent for the sake of forming self-regents.[112] "But why am I not
+one?" said he mournfully.
+
+Noble youth! do thy estates, then, furnish thee no subjects? But just so
+does the lesser prince believe he would govern a duchy quite otherwise,
+and the higher one believes the same in regard to a kingdom, and so does
+the highest, in regard to universal monarchy.
+
+Meanwhile, all through this singular uneasy day, wild perspectives of
+youth passed to and fro before him, and the old spirit-voice, which he
+was going to meet to-day, repeated in him the dark exhortation, Take the
+crown! Wehrfritz came back in the evening with a red face from the fiery
+allegiance-banquet, and Albano took an agitated leave of him, as if of
+the ebb and calm of life--his childish youth; for to-day he launched out
+deeper into its waves. Schoppe came back and wanted to have him before
+the sight-hole of his show-box, wherein he slid through the
+vicariate-allegiance-swearing in Klosterdorf, in a series of comic
+pictures; but these contrasted too severely with higher ones, and gave
+little pleasure.
+
+At night Albano put on his beautiful, serious character-mask, that of a
+knight-templar,--for a comic one his form, and almost his mood, was too
+great;--the latter was made still more solemn by this funeral dress of a
+whole murdered knightly order. After he had caused to be described to
+him once more the awful paths of Tartarus, and the burial-place of the
+Prince's heart, to avoid mistaking of the way in the night, he went
+forth, about ten o'clock, with a high-heaving bosom, which the
+night-larvae[113] of fancy, together with friendship and love and the
+whole future, conspired to excite.
+
+
+50. CYCLE.
+
+Albano stepped, for the first time, into the inverted puppet-world of a
+masquerade, as into a dancing realm of the dead. The black forms, the
+slit masks, the strange eyes, gleaming as out of night behind them,
+which, as in that mouldering Sultan in the coffin, alone remained
+alive,--the mingling and mimicking of all ranks, the flying and
+ring-running of the clinking dance, and his own solitude under the
+mask,--all this translated him, with his Shakespearian frame of spirit,
+into an enchanted and ghostly island full of juggleries, chimeras, and
+metamorphoses. Ah, this is the bloody scaffold, was his first thought,
+where the brother of thy Liana rent his young life, like a
+mourning-garment; and he looked fearfully round, as if he feared
+Roquairol might again attempt death.
+
+Among the masks he found no one under which he could suppose him to be;
+this meaningless cousinship of standing parts, footmen, butchers, Moors,
+ancestors, &c.,--these could not conceal any loved one of Albano's.
+Lonesomely and inquisitively he paced up and down behind the rows of the
+Anglaise; and more than ten eyes, which glistened opposite in the
+annular eclipse of the lace mask,--for women, from their
+open-heartedness, do not love masks, but are fond of showing
+themselves,--followed the powerfully and pliantly built form, which,
+with the bold helm and plume, with the crossed white mantle and the
+gleaming mail on his breast, seemed to bring a knight out of the heroic
+age.
+
+At last a masked lady, who was chatting between unmasked ones, came up
+to him with long steps and large feet, and boldly grasped his hand as if
+for a dance. He was extremely embarrassed at the boldness of the
+summons, and about the choice of an answer; it is valor precisely that
+loves to marry itself to gallantry, as the Damascene blade, besides
+hardness, possesses a perpetual fragrance; but the lady only wrote in
+his hand his initials, with the interrogation-mark after them,--"_v.
+C.?_" and after the Yes, the charming one said, softly, "Do you not
+remember me? the master of exercises, Von Falterle?" Albano testified,
+notwithstanding his dislike of the part, a real joy at finding again a
+companion of his youth. He asked which mask was Captain Roquairol;
+Falterle assured him he had not yet arrived.
+
+By this time--as the footmen, the butchers, Falterle, &c., were only the
+snow-drops of this masquerade-spring--better flowers--violets,
+forget-me-nots, and primroses--had sprung up or come in. For one such
+forget-me-not I see a churl entering, puffed out behind and before, and
+convex like a burning-glass, who now opened the back-door and shook out
+confects from his hump-back, and then the front-door and produced
+sausages. Hafenreffer, however, writes me the invention has once before
+appeared at a masquerade in Vienna. Then came a company of German
+play-cards, which shuffled and played out and took each other; a fine
+emblem of atheism, which exhibits it wholly free from the absurdity
+wherewith men have so loved to disfigure it! Mr. Von Augusti appeared
+also, but in simple dress and domino; he became (incomprehensibly to the
+Count) very soon the polar-star of the dancers, and the controlling
+Cartesian vortex of the dancing-school.
+
+With what miserable, black ammunition-biscuit and beggar's-bread of
+enjoyment these people get along! thought Albano, to whom, all day long,
+his dreams, those Jupiter's-doves, had been bringing ambrosia. And how
+pale and stale is their fire, their fancy, and their speech, he thought
+too. Verily, a life down in a gloomy glacier-chasm! for he imagined
+everybody must speak and feel as intensely and ardently as he.
+
+Now came a limping man, with a great glass-chest on his belly; of course
+it was easy to recognize the Librarian; he had on--either because he
+sent too late, or would not pay, for a domino--something black, which he
+had borrowed of a mourning-cloak lender, and was covered from
+shoulder-blade to shin-bone with awful masks, which he, with many
+finger-signs, offered mostly to those people who played their parts
+behind the opposite kind, e. g. short-nosed ones to long noses. He was
+waiting for the beginning of a hop Anglaise, the notes for which stood
+just on the hand-organ of his chest; then he, too, began; he had therein
+an excellent puppet-masquerade which had been planed out by Bestelmaier,
+and now he set the little masks to hopping parallel with the great ones.
+His object was a comparative anatomy of the two masquerades, and the
+parallelism was melancholy. Besides, he had rigged it all out with
+by-work: little dumb persons swung their little bells in the chest; a
+tolerably grown-up child rocked the cradle of an inanimate doll, with
+which the little fool still played; a mechanic was working away at his
+speaking machine, by which he was going to show the world how far mere
+mechanism could go toward giving life to puppets; a live, white
+mouse[114] sprang out by a little chain, and would have upset many of
+the club, if he could have broken it; a starling, buried-alive, a true
+first Greek comedy and school for scandal in miniature, was practising
+upon the dancing-company the death-blow of the tongue with perfect
+freedom and without distinction; a looking-glass-wall mimicked the
+living scenes of the chest so deceptively, that every one took the
+images for true puppets.
+
+The point of this comico-tragic dagger came home directly enough upon
+Albano, as, besides, the hopping wax-figure-cabinet of the great
+masquerade seemed to double the solitude of man, and to separate two
+selves by four faces; but Schoppe went further.
+
+In his glass case stood a faro-bank, and by it a little man, who cut out
+the masked banker in black paper, but into a likeness of the German
+gentleman; this picture he carried into the card-chamber, where a
+bank-keeping mask--most certainly Cephisio--must needs hear and see him.
+The banker looked at him some time inquiringly. Another, dressed wholly
+in black, with a dying expression, which represented the _Hippocratica
+facies_,[115] did the same. Albano looked towards it with a fiery
+glance, because it occurred to him it might be Roquairol, for it had his
+stature and torch-like eye. The pale mask lost much, and kept redoubling
+its loss; at that it drank out of a quill immoderate draughts of
+Champagne wine. The Lector came up; Schoppe kept on playing before the
+eyes that crowded round; the pale mask looked steadily and sternly at
+the Count. Schoppe took off his own before Bouverot; but there was
+another under it; he pulled this off; it disclosed an under-mask of the
+under-mask; he carried on the process to the fifth root;--at last his
+own rough face came forth, but bronzed with gold-beater's skin and
+distorted, as it turned towards Bouverot, with an almost frightful glaze
+and smile.
+
+The pale mask itself seemed to start, and hastened with long strides off
+into the dancing-hall; it threw itself wildly into the wildest of the
+dance. This, too, confirmed Albano's conjecture, as well as its great
+defying hat, which seemed to him a crown, because he prized nothing more
+highly about manly attire than fur, cloak, and hat.
+
+More and more fingers continually drew the letters "_v. C._" in his
+hand, and he nodded composedly. The time surrounded him with manifold
+dramas, and everywhere he stood between theatre-curtains. As with uneasy
+head and heart he stepped to the window, to see whether he should soon
+have moonshine for his night-walk, he saw a heavy hearse, flanked by
+torches, move along across the market, which was conveying a manor-lord
+to his family-vault; and the undisturbed night-watchman called out,
+behind the creeping dead man, the beginning of the spirit-hour and of a
+birth-hour, which is precious to us. Could his smitten heart refrain
+from saying to him how sharply Death, the hard, solid, insoluble, with
+its glacier-air, sweeps through the warm scenes of life, and leaves
+behind it all over which it breathes stiff and snow-white? Could he help
+thinking of the cold young sister, whose voice now awaited him in
+Tartarus? And as Schoppe, with his puppet-parody, came to him, and he
+pointed out to him the street, and the latter said: "Bon! Friend Death
+sits on his game-wagon, and glances quietly up, as if the friend would
+say, 'Bon! only dance on; I make my return trip, and carry you too to
+your place and spot,'"--how close must it have been to him under his
+sultry visor! At this second the pale mask came, with others, to the
+window; he opened his glowing face for coolness; a hasty draught of
+wine, and still more his fancy, showed him the world in burning
+surfaces; the mask surveyed him closely, with a dark, uncertain glow of
+the eye, which he at last could no longer bear, because it might as well
+have been kindled by hatred as by love, just as the spots on the sun
+seem now like abysses and now like mountains.
+
+Eleven o'clock had gone by; he suddenly disappeared from the hot looks
+and the crushing throng, and betook himself on his way to the heart
+without a breast.
+
+
+51. CYCLE.
+
+While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks
+(mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand,
+&c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the
+tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no
+servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy
+catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of
+others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than
+the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be
+murdered than shamed before his father.
+
+How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward
+toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars,
+stood erect before thee!--Beneath the heavens there is no terror, only
+under the earth!--Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on
+Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and butterflies. In the distance
+fiery prongs grew out of the earth and moved along;--it was the hearse
+with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which
+leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward
+the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had
+met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey
+(probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro.
+
+He passed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed
+down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of
+peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward
+Elysium,--a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some
+windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were
+continually seizing and vanishing.
+
+Impetuously Albano ran down a stairway darkened with hangings, and came
+upon an old battle-field,--a gloomy waste with a black wall, of which
+the monotony was broken only by white gypsum heads, which stood in the
+earth as if they were on the point of sinking or of resurrection; a
+tower full of blind gates and blind windows stood in the midst, and the
+solitary clock talked with itself therein, and, with its iron rod
+swaying to and fro, seemed fain to divide the wave of time, which ever
+tended to run together again: it struck three quarters to twelve, and
+deep in the wood the echo murmured as if in sleep, and softly spake once
+more to fleeting man of fleeting time. The road ran in an eternal circle
+round about the churchyard wall, without coming to a gate. Alban must,
+according to his information, seek a spot in the wall where it roared
+and reeled under him.
+
+At last he stepped upon a stone which sank with him; then a section of
+the wall fell down; and a tangled wood, full of clumps of trees, whose
+stems twined together into bush-work, intercepted every beam of the
+moon. As he looked round him under the gate, there hung over the shadowy
+stairway a pale head like a bust of the murder-field, and passed down
+without a body, and the bloodless dead seemed to awake and run after
+it;--the cold hellstone[116] of horror contracted his heart: he stood:
+the death's-head hovered immovable over the last step!
+
+All at once his heart sucked in warm blood again; he turned toward the
+misshapen wood with drawn sword, because he was bearing along his life
+in his hand near armed Death. He followed in the darkness of the
+moss-green towers the roar of the subterranean flood and the rocking of
+the ground. Unfortunately he looked round again, and there stood the
+death's-head behind him still, but high in the air on the trunk of a
+giant. The extreme of horror always drove him with compressed eyes full
+upon a phantom; he called twice through the echoing wood, "Who's there?"
+But when, at this moment, a second head seemed all at once to stand
+beside the first, then his hand clove, frozen, to the ice-cold key of
+the gate of the world of the dead, and he tore it away bleeding.
+
+He fled, and plunged through thicker and thicker twigs, till at last he
+came out into an open garden and into the splendor of the moon; here, ah
+here, when he saw the holy, immortal heavens and the rich stars in the
+north gleaming again, which never rise nor set, the pole-star and
+Friederich's-Ehre,[117] the Bear and the Serpent, and Charles's Wain
+and Cassiopaea, which looked down upon him mildly, as if with the bright
+winking eyes of eternal spirits, then his spirit asked itself, "Who can
+lay hands on me? I am a spirit among spirits"; and the courage of
+immortality beat again in his warm breast.
+
+But what a singular garden! Great and little flowerless beds, full of
+yew, rue, and rosemary, divided it among them; a circle of weeping
+birches drooped like a funeral train around the mute spot; under the
+garden murmured the buried brook, and in the middle stood a white altar,
+near which lay a man.
+
+Albano was strengthened by the appearance of the common dress and the
+mechanic's bundle on which the sleeper rested; he stepped quite close to
+him, and read the golden inscription of the altar: "Take my last
+offering, all-gracious one!" The heart of the Prince must here be
+mouldering in the altar.
+
+Ah, after these rigid scenes, it soothed his soul even to tears to find
+here human words and a human sleep, and the remembrance of God; but as
+he looked with emotion at the sleeper, suddenly that sister's voice
+which he had heard on Isola Bella said softly in his ear, "I give thee
+Linda de Romeiro." "Ah, good God!" he cried, and turned round; and there
+was nothing on either side of him, and he held himself up by the corner
+of the altar. "I give thee Linda de Romeiro," it said again; frightfully
+the thought seized him, that the hovering death's-head might be speaking
+near him, and he shook the sound sleeper, who woke not, and shook and
+called still more violently, when the voice spake for a third time.
+
+"What?" said the drowsy man, "directly! What will he?--you?" and raised
+himself reluctantly and with a yawn; but at the sight of the naked sword
+fell down on his knees, and said: "Mercy! I will, indeed, give up all!"
+
+"Zesara!" a cry came from the wood,--"Zesara, where art thou?" and he
+heard his own voice; but now he boldly called back, "At the altar!" A
+black form rushed out, with a white mask in hand, and hesitated in the
+moonlight before the armed one. Then at length Albano recognized the
+brother of Liana, for whom he had so long panted; he flung his sword
+behind him, and ran to meet him. Roquairol stood before him mute, pale,
+and with a sublime repose on his countenance. Albano continued to stand
+near him, and said with emotion, "Hast thou been seeking me, Charles?"
+Roquairol nodded silently, and had tears in his eyes, and opened his
+arms. Ah, then could the blissful man, with all the flames and tears of
+love fall upon the long-loved soul, and he kept saying incessantly, "Now
+we have each other! now we have each other!" And more and more
+passionately he embraced him, as the pillar of his future, and melted
+into tears, because now, indeed, the buried love of so many years and so
+many choked up fountains of the poor heart could at once gush forth.
+Roquairol, trembling, only clasped him to himself gently with one arm,
+and said, but without passion, "I am a dying man, and that is my face,"
+holding forth the yellow death-mask; "but I have my Albano, and will die
+on his bosom."
+
+Wildly they twined around each other; the sap of life, Love, ran through
+them with a creative power; the ground over the rolling, subterranean
+flood shook more violently; and the starry heaven, with the white, magic
+breath of its trembling stars, floated around the magic glow.
+
+Ah ye happy ones!
+
+
+52. CYCLE.
+
+Some men are born fast friends; their first finding of each other is
+only a second, and they then, like those who have been long parted,
+bring to each other not only a future, but a past also;--this latter our
+happy ones demanded of one another impatiently. Roquairol answered
+Alban's question, How he came hither, in a fiery manner: "He had been
+following him this whole evening,--he had gazed at him at the window
+during the funeral pomp with such a painful longing, and had almost been
+constrained to fly and embrace him,--he had already, but a moment ago,
+stood close by him, and at his question, 'Who's there?' immediately
+taken off his mask." Now did Albano's fallen arm strike again tensely
+through the thin magic-lantern show of ghostly fear, as he now
+learned that the two-headed giant had grown entirely out of an
+optically-magnifying, mistaken notion of the distance of a form which
+was so near, and the death's-head had forfeited its body on the stairway
+only by the dark curtains and its black dress; even the hard
+spirit-scene at the altar seemed to him now less insuperable through the
+rich gain of living love.
+
+Roquairol asked him what woe or joy had driven him hither at midnight to
+a _Moravian_ churchyard, and whither he had sent the man with the sword.
+Albano did not know that Moravians reposed here; and, moreover, he had
+not observed that the sword, probably from fear of its being used, had
+been stolen. He answered, "My dead sister was fain to speak with me at
+the altar; and she has spoken"; but he feared to say more of this. Then
+Roquairol's countenance suddenly changed; he stared at him, and demanded
+confirmation and explanation; during this he looked into the air as if
+he would draw faces from it by his looks, and said monotonously, fixing
+his eyes, however, on Albano the while, "Dead one, dead one, speak
+again!" But only the death-flood went on speaking under them, and
+nothing more. But he threw himself before the altar on his knees, and
+said in measured tone, and yet with trembling lips: "Fly open,
+spirit-gate, and show thy transparent world. I fear not you, the
+transparent ones; I become one of you, when you appear, and walk with
+you, and become an apparition myself." "O my good one, forbear," Albano
+entreated, not only from piety, but from love also; for an accident, a
+night-bird shooting over, might, indeed, kill them by horror: this
+horror stood, too, not far from them; for on the illuminated side of the
+weeping birches stepped out a white, majestic old form. But when
+Roquairol, frantic with wine and fancy, reached out the dying mask into
+the air, and said, turning toward the grave of the heart, "Take this
+face, if thou hast none, old man, and look at me from behind it!" Alban
+seized him; the white form stepped back with bowed head and folded arms
+into the branches; the round tower on the battle-field struck the hour,
+and the dreamy region, murmuring, struck a response.
+
+"Come to my warm heart, thou passionate soul. O that I were permitted to
+receive thee on my very birthday, at my very birth-hour!" This sound
+melted at once the ever-changing man, and he hung upon him with wet eyes
+of joy, and said: "And to keep me even till our dying hours! O look not
+upon me, thou unchangeable, because I appear so wavering and broken; in
+the waves of life man breaks and crinkles as the staff flickers in the
+water, but the essential being stands nevertheless firm as the staff. I
+will follow thee into other parts of Tartarus; but still relate the
+history."
+
+To give this history amounted to opening a _sanctum sanctorum_ of the
+inner man, or even a coffin to the light of day; but do you believe that
+Albano bethought himself a minute? or would you yourselves? We are all
+better, franker, warmer friends than we know and show; only let the
+right spirit meet you,--such a one as thirsting Love ever
+demands,--pure, large, clear, and tender and warm,--and you give him
+everything, and love him without measure, because he is without fault.
+Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his
+whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did
+not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his
+whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the
+rainy season;--hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad
+motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained,
+was a stream with waterfalls.
+
+Charles led him into the so-called catacomb, while he listened to the
+ghost-story of Isola Bella, which, however, from having been exhausted
+by the former, he heard with diminished fear. A dreary, charred vale,
+full of sunken shafts, basked gray in the moonshine; out of the wood
+crept forth the death-flood below their feet, and leaped down a stony
+stairway into the catacombs. The two followed it on another that ran by
+its side. The entrance bore as frontispiece an old dial-plate, of which
+the lightning had once struck away the hour _one_. "One?" said Albano;
+"singular!--just our coming hour!"
+
+How adventurously does the catacomb now wind onward! The long
+death-flood murmurs obscurely far in through the darkness, and glimmers
+at times under the silvery stream which the moonlight sends in through
+the shaft-openings; immovable creatures--horses, dogs, birds--stand
+drinking on the dark bank, that is to say, their stuffed skins; small
+gravestones, worn smooth by time, with a few names and limbs, are the
+pavement; on a brighter niche we read that a nun was immured here; in
+another stands the petrified skeleton of a miner, who was buried alive,
+with gilded ribs and thighs; in scattered spots were black paper hearts
+of men shot by the arquebuse, and heaped-up nosegays of poor sinners;
+the rod which had whipped a forgiven penitent to death, a glass bust
+with a phosphorus point in the water, chrisom-cloths[118] and other
+children's clothes and playthings, and a dwarf skeleton.
+
+As the explanatory words of Roquairol, whose life-path always ran down
+into vaults and out over graves, beat out life more and more thin and
+transparent before him, Zesara, after his manner, at once shaking his
+head, heaving forward his breast, stamping in the sand, and cursing
+(which he easily did in terror and in strong emotion), broke out with
+the words: "By the Devil! thou crushest my breast and thine own. It is
+not so! Are we not together? Have I not thy warm, living hand? Burns not
+within us the fire of immortality? Burnt-out coals are these bones, and
+nothing more; and the heavenly flame which has consumed them has again
+seized upon other fuel, and blazes on. O," he added, as if comforted,
+and stepped into the brook and looked through the opening of the shaft
+up to the rich moon, which streamed down from heaven, and his great eyes
+filled with splendor,--"O, there is a heaven and an immortality; we
+remain not in the dark hole of life; we, too, sweep through the ether
+like thee, thou shining world!"
+
+"Ah, thou glorious one," said Charles, whose soul consisted of souls, "I
+will now bring thee to a more cheerful place." They had hardly gone
+eight steps, when it darkened behind them, and a sword, flung in
+overhead, came perpendicularly down, and struck with its point in the
+sand under the waves. "O thou infernal devil up there!" cried the
+infuriate Roquairol; but Albano was softened at the thought of the iron
+virgin[119] of the death-hour, who had folded her sharp arms together so
+near him. They clasped each other more warmly, and went silent and sad
+towards a low music and a grave-mound. They seated themselves upon it
+opposite an avenue which formed a right angle with the tormenting
+catacomb, lined with green moss, and of which crumbled sparks of rotten
+wood pointed out the extent. It lost itself in an open gate, and a
+prospect of Elysium, of which only the white summits of some
+silver-poplars were distinguishable, and in the distance was seen the
+spring redness of midnight blooming in the heavens, and two stars
+twinkling overhead. The gate, however, was grated, and guarded by a
+skeleton with an AEolian harp in his hand, which seemed to strike upon it
+the thin minor tones which the draught of wind just now wafted into the
+cavern.
+
+"Here," said Charles, at the beautiful spot, and made more curious by
+the deadly fling of Albano's sword, "finish your narrative of to-day!"
+Albano reported to him candidly the word which the sister's voice had
+spoken: "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." In the tumult of his inner being
+he thought not of the anecdote, that she was the very one for whom
+Charles when a boy had proposed to die. "Romeiro?" he started up. "Be
+still! She? O thou mocking executioner, Fate! Why she, and to-day? Ah,
+Albano, for her I early braved death," he continued, weeping, and sank
+upon his breast, "and that is what has made my heart so bad, because I
+have lost her. Do thou only take her, for thou art a pure spirit; the
+glorious shape which appeared to thee on the sea, so she looks, or now
+still fairer. Ah, Albano!" This noble youth trembled at the complicated
+plot, and at the destiny, and said: "No, no, thou dear Charles, thou
+thinkest falsely about everything."
+
+Suddenly it was as if all the constellations rang, and a melodious
+spirit-choir thronged in through the gate. Albano was startled.
+"Nothing; let be," said Charles. "It is not the skeleton; the _pious
+father_ is walking in the _flute-dell_, and is just drawing out his
+flutes, because he prays. But how sayest thou, I think falsely of
+everything?" "How?" repeated Albano, and could not, in the magic circle
+of these echoes, which all-powerfully brought back to him that Sunday
+morning, either think or speak. For did not the silver-poplars wave to
+and fro against the stars, and rosy clouds lie couched about the
+heavens, and did not the whole Elysium pass openly by with the sounds
+which had floated through it, with the tears which had besprinkled it,
+and with the dreams which no heart forgets, and with the holy form which
+eternally abides in his breast? And now he held so fast the hand of her
+brother; so near was he to love and friendship, those two foci in the
+ellipse of life's pathway; impetuously he embraced the brother, with the
+words: "By Heaven, I say to thee, she whom thou hast just named concerns
+me not, and never will."
+
+"But, Albano, thou dost not surely know her yet?" said Charles, pursuing
+his inquiries, perhaps, too hardly; for the noble youth beside him was
+too bashful and too steadfast to unlock the sanctuary of wishes to the
+kinsman of his loved one; to a stranger he could have done it much more
+easily. "O torment me not," he answered sensitively; but he added more
+softly, "Believe me, I pray you believe me, this first time, my good
+brother!" Charles yielded full as seldom as he; and although swallowing
+the inquisitive tone, and speaking in a right loving one, nevertheless
+said this: "By my bliss, I'll do it, and with joy; a heart must have
+been heartily loved and divinely blessed which can renounce such a one."
+Ah, does Albano, then, know that! He only leaned silently, with his
+fiery cheek full of roses, on Liana's brother, shunning scrutiny for
+shame; but when the expiring calls of the flute-dell gathered together
+like sighs in his breast, and reminded him too often how that Sunday
+morning closed, how Liana stole away, and how he looked after her with
+dim, wet eyes from the altar; then, although his heart did not break,
+his eye broke into tears, and he wept violently, but silently, on his
+first friend.
+
+Then, with mute souls, they turned homeward, and looked thoughtfully
+toward the long, vanishing ways of the future; and when they parted,
+they well felt that they loved each other right heartily, that is, right
+bitterly.
+
+On the morrow the pious father lay prostrate under a shock which was
+more blissful than mournful; for he said he had in the night seen his
+friend, the deceased Prince, walking, clad in white, through Tartarus.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[92] [_Fauler Heinz._] Or Athanor, a chemical stove, which works
+on for a long time without poking. [Corresponding to our
+air-tight stove. _Athanor_, from the Greek, _undying_?--TR.]
+
+[93] The translator had to resort to the Scotch to help him get
+this pun into English.
+
+[94] Ezek. xiii. 18: "Woe to the women that sew pillows to all
+arm-holes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature, to
+hunt souls!"--TR.
+
+[95] According to Lempriere.
+
+[96] Sanhedrim, c. 2, Misch. 3.
+
+[97] Cic. ad Quirit. post redit, c. 3.
+
+[98] His sect represented Christ's journey to hell as having
+released all the wicked from that region, but not Abraham, Enoch,
+the prophets, &c.--Tertul. adv. Marcion.
+
+[99] A title given to black colors.
+
+[100] The Corinthian, who was hidden from his enemies in a chest
+of cedar, ivory, and gold, richly adorned with figures in relief,
+and at last expelled the usurpers and mounted the throne.--TR.
+
+[101] The line which is drawn from the aphelion to the
+perihelion, the two apsides, or the nearest and farthest points
+of a planet's distance from the sun.
+
+[102] A child coming into the world face foremost cannot
+afterward bend its head forward.--_The Mother of a Family_, Vol.
+V.
+
+[103] The name of the Invalid Hospital in Copenhagen.
+
+[104] In Darwin's Zooenomy, page 529, the case is adduced of a man
+who did this before spectators. In Paris another did the same by
+swallowing air.
+
+[105] In Vienna there was an Institute which made new sealing-wax
+out of old, and endowed poor persons with the proceeds.
+
+[106] Such was the tasteless name by which Basedow was going to
+baptize a daughter, in memory of the appearing of an elementary
+work by subscription. See Schlichtegroll's Necrology.
+
+[107] _Wehestande_, a parody of _Ehestande_, wedded state.
+
+[108] An issue.
+
+[109] A name given in some places to the consumption.
+
+[110] A micrometer consists of fine threads stretched across in
+the telescope, which serve to measure the smallest distance.
+
+[111] The transit-instrument, or culminatory, observes when a
+star has reached the highest point in its course.
+
+[112] Autarchs; for monarchs or sole-rulers are etymologically
+distinguished from self-rulers.
+
+[113] Ghosts of the dead.--TR.
+
+[114] Does he allude to the frightful white form, in my "vision
+of annihilation"?
+
+[115] A phrase applied to the form of a dying man. [Properly a
+distemper which gives one a deathly look. See Bailey's
+Dictionary.--TR.]
+
+[116] The _lapis infernalis_, or silver cautery.--TR.
+
+[117] Frederick's Honor.
+
+[118] Linen cloths smeared with aromatic ointment, anciently
+placed on the heads of children just born or baptized.--TR.
+
+[119] An allusion to a well-known instrument of the
+Inquisition.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+TENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.[120]--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF
+     FRIENDSHIP.
+
+
+53. CYCLE.[121]
+
+Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth,
+should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter
+as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life,
+when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung
+round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like
+gentle _goddesses_, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years,
+they summon us, like stern _gods_, with commands! And at this period
+Friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as
+later, in a narrow Gothic chapel.
+
+Richly and majestically did life now glitter around Albano, covered with
+islands and ships; he had his whole breast full of friendship and youth,
+and could now let the impetuous energy of love, which on Isola Bella had
+rebounded from a statue, from his father, burst freely and joyously
+upon a man who appeared to him fully as his youthful dream had sketched
+him. He could not let go Charles for a day; he laid bare to him his soul
+and his whole life--(only Liana's name retired deeper and deeper into
+his heart); all models of friendship among the ancients he was fain to
+copy and renew, and do and suffer everything for his loved friend; his
+being was now a double-choir; he drank in every joy with two hearts; a
+double heaven embosomed his life in pure ether.
+
+When, on the following day, he met the form of the new friend,--which
+was all that remained to him of the nightly show-piece of the
+spirit-world, as a pale moon is left by the extinguished stars of
+night,--and when he found him so bald-headed and white, as the fiery
+smoke-column of an AEtna ascends gray in the daytime, he seemed to see
+the whilom suicide standing before him, the more freely, but all the
+more warmly, did he stretch his hand across to the solitary being, who,
+after his leap over life, dwelt now only on his grave, as on a remote
+island. Others, for this very reason, would draw their hand away: the
+baffled self-murderer, who has made a rent in this fair, firm life,
+comes back from his death-hour as a strange, uncomfortable ghost, whom
+we can trust no longer, because in his ungovernableness he may at any
+moment play again the give-away game with the human form.
+
+Therefore Albano saw in the chaotic life of the Captain only the
+disorder of a being who is packing up and marching away. When he stepped
+for the first time into his friend's summer-chamber, he saw, of course,
+a servant's livery wardrobe, a theatrical green-room, and an officer's
+tent before him at once. On the table lay confused tribes of books, as
+on a battle-field, and on Schiller's Tragedies the Hippocratic face of
+the masquerade, and on the Court Almanac a pistol; the book-shelf was
+occupied by the sword-belt, together with its wash-ball of chalk, a
+chocolate-mill, an empty candlestick, a pomatum-box, matches, the wet
+hand-towel and the dried mouth-napkin; the glasshouse of a run-down
+hour-glass, and the washing-and the writing-table stood open, on which
+latter I, to my astonishment, look in vain for any support whatever, or
+writing-sand on it; the comb-cloth, or powder-mantle, leaned back on the
+ottoman, and a long neck-cloth rode on the stove-screen, and the antlers
+on the wall had two hats with feathers shoved over the right and left
+ears; letters and visiting-cards were impaled like butterflies on the
+window-curtains. I should not have been capable of writing a billet
+there, much less a Cycle.
+
+Is there not, however, a sunny-bright, free-fluttering age, when one
+loves to see everything which announces roving unrest, striking of
+tents, and nomadic liberty, and when one would be thankful to keep house
+in a travelling-carriage, and write and sleep therein? And does not one
+in those years look upon precisely such a students' chamber as this as a
+spiritual students' endowment of genius, and every chaos as an
+infusorial one full of life? Forgive my hero this truant time; there was
+still something noble in his nature, that kept him back from becoming an
+imitator of what he eulogized.
+
+As, after the melting away of a late winter, all at once the green
+garment of earth flutters up high in flowers and blossoms, so in the
+warm air of friendship and fancy did Albano's nature start up at once
+into luxuriant verdure and bloom. Charles had and understood all states
+of the heart; he created them dramatically in himself and others; he was
+a second Russia, which harbors all climates, from France even to Nova
+Zembla, and wherein, for that very reason, every one finds his own: he
+was everything to everybody, although for himself nothing. He could
+throw himself into any character, although for that very reason it
+sometimes took his fancy only to carry out the most convenient. The
+girths, belly-bands, cruppers, and saddle-straps of court, town, and
+city life, his Bucephalus had long since cleared; and if the Count was
+vexed every day at the lingual leading-string of the Lector, who
+pronounced everything correctly.--Kanaster instead of Knaster, Juften
+instead of Juchten, Fuenfzig instead of Fuefzig, and Barbieren (the _r_ in
+which I myself take to be a stupid barbarism),--Roquairol was a
+free-thinker, even to the degree of being a hectoring free-speaker; and
+spoke, according to an expression of his own, which was at the same time
+an example of the fact, "right out of his liver and jaw." He was annoyed
+that there should still cleave to the Count a certain epic dignity of
+speech acquired from books. They often thought over and cursed with one
+another the pitiful bald life which one would lead, who, like the
+Lector, should live as a well-bred citizen of extraction, have conduite
+and a nice dress, and a tolerable dapper knowledge of several
+departments, and for refreshment his table-wine, and taste for excellent
+masters in painting and other arts, and should advance to higher posts
+merely as stepping-stones to still higher, and yet, after all this, have
+to stretch himself out, all frizzled and washed, in his coffin, in order
+that the gigantic body-world might, forsooth, hand over its Pestitz
+representative also to the sublime world of spirits. No, said Albano,
+rather throw a dark mountain-chain of sorrows into the dead level of
+life, that one may, at least, have a prospect and something great.
+
+But Roquairol was not the man that he seemed to him;--friendship has its
+deceptions as well as love;--and often, when he had long looked upon
+this love-drunken, high-hearted youth, with his chaste maiden-cheeks and
+proud, manly brow, who reposed such a confidence upon _his_ wavering
+soul, and whose heart stood so wide open, and the holiness of whose
+fancy even he envied, then did the delusion of the noble one move him
+even to pain, and his heart struggled to break forth, and longed to say
+to him, with tears: Albano, I am not worthy of thee! But in that case I
+lose him, he always added; for he shunned the moral orthodoxy and
+decision of a man, who was not, like a maiden, to be provoked and
+repelled and won back again, all in sport. And yet the day came--the
+momentous day for both--when he did it. How could he ever have resisted
+_Fancy_, when he only resisted _by and through_ Fancy? I do him half
+injustice: hear the better angel, who opens his mouth.
+
+Roquairol is a child and victim of the age. As the higher youth of our
+times are so early and richly overhung with the roses of joy that, like
+the inhabitants of spice-islands, they lose their smell, and by and by
+put under their heads a Sybarite-pillow of roses, drink rose-sirup and
+bathe themselves in rose-oil,[122] until nothing more is left them
+thereof for a stimulus except the thorns, so are most of them--and often
+the very same ones--stuffed full in the beginning, by their
+philanthropic teachers, with the _fruits_ of knowledge, so that they
+come soon to desire only the honey-thick extracts, then the cider and
+perry thereof, until at last they ruin themselves with the brandy made
+of that. Now if, in addition to this, they have, like Roquairol, a fancy
+that makes their life a naphtha-soil, out of which every step draws
+fire, then does the flame, into which the sciences are thrown, and the
+consumption become still greater. For these burnt-out prodigals of life
+there is then no new pleasure and no new truth left, and they have no
+old one entire and fresh; a dried-up future, full of arrogance, disgust
+with life, unbelief and contradiction, lies round about them. Only the
+wing of fancy still continues to quiver on their corpse.
+
+Poor Charles! Thou didst still more! Not merely truths, but feelings
+also, he anticipated. All grand situations of humanity, all emotions to
+which Love and Friendship and Nature exalt the heart, all these he went
+through in poems earlier than in life, as play-actor and theatre-poet
+earlier than as man, earlier on the sunny side of fancy than on the
+stormy side of reality; hence, when they at last appeared, living, in
+his breast, he could deliberately seize them, govern them, kill them,
+and stuff them well for the refrigeratory of future remembrance. The
+unhappy love for Linda de Romeiro, which, at a later period, would
+perhaps have steeled him, opened thus early all the veins of his heart,
+and bathed it warmly in its own blood; he plunged into good and bad
+dissipations and amours, and afterward represented on paper or on the
+stage everything that he repented or blessed; and every representation
+made him grow more and more hollow, as abysses have been left in the sun
+by ejected worlds. His heart could not do without the holy
+sensibilities; but they were simply a new luxury, a tonic, at best; and
+precisely in proportion to their height did the road run down the more
+abruptly into the slough of the unholiest ones. As in the dramatic poet
+angelically pure and filthy scenes stand in conjunction and close
+succession, so in his life; he foddered, as in Surinam, his hogs with
+pine-apples; like the elder giants, he had soaring wings and creeping
+snakes'-feet.[123]
+
+Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one
+of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when
+she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings.
+But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and
+strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread
+every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first
+threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors,
+which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full
+of these eagles. They love you not, though they think so; because, like
+the blest in Mahomet's paradise, instead of their lost arms of love,
+they have only wings of fancy. They are like great streams, warm only
+along the shore, and in the middle cold.
+
+Now enthusiast, now libertine in love, he ran through the alternation
+between ether and slime more and more rapidly, till he mixed them both.
+His blossoms shot up on the varnished flower-staff of the Ideal, which,
+however, rotted, colorless, in the ground. Start with horror, but
+believe it,--he sometimes plunged on purpose into sins and torments, in
+order, down there, by the pangs of remorse and humiliation, to cut into
+himself more deeply the oath of reformation; somewhat as the physicians,
+Darwin and Sydenham, assert that _strengthening_ remedies (Peruvian
+bark, steel, opium) work more powerfully when _weakening_ ones
+(bleeding, emetics, &c.) have been previously prescribed.
+
+External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow
+of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he
+been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and
+a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason
+the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some
+occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,[124] &c. But the
+lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more
+vain and bold.
+
+So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,--hunting like
+an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart,
+whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable
+of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth
+assimilated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able
+much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the
+true language of passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate
+dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided
+against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and
+indispensable--hearts and joys and truths--melted down and floated
+about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything
+which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking
+round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his
+resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of
+the _tuning-hammer_, and not of the _tuning-fork_, of the finest
+morality; and, in the midst of the roar of passion, standing in the
+bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his
+madness, and gives warning of it.
+
+Only _one_ good angel had not flown with the rest,--Friendship. His so
+often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but
+friendship it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto
+loved as a friend,--so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now
+Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace!
+
+In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with
+himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the
+country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose
+rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men--and he--are like the
+fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the
+morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at
+midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the
+sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a
+great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of
+lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread
+wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to
+Albano, when the whole girandole[125] of his faculties and feelings
+burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of
+flasks.
+
+But do you know the medicine of example, the healing power of
+admiration, and of that soul-strengthener, reverence? "It is shameful of
+me," said Roquairol, "when he is so credulous and open and honest. No, I
+will deceive the whole world, only not his soul!" Such natures would
+fain make good their devastation of humanity by being true to one.
+Humanity is a constellation, in which _one_ star often describes half
+the figure.
+
+From this hour forth, his resolution of the heartiest confession and
+atonement stood fixed; and Alban, before whom life had not yet run down
+into a jelly of corruption, but was capable of being analyzed as a sound
+and well-defined organism, and who did not, like Charles, complain that
+nothing would take right hold of him, but everything played round him
+like air,--_he_ it was who was to bring back youth to his sick wishes,
+and with the help of the pure youth's unwavering perceptions and the
+danger of losing his friendship, Roquairol proposed forcing himself to
+keep with _him_ the word of fruit-bearing repentance, which to himself
+he had too often broken.
+
+Let us follow him into the day, when he tells everything.
+
+
+54. CYCLE.
+
+Once Albano came early in the forenoon to the Captain, when the latter
+was usually, according to his own expression, "a fag-end of a
+yesterday's candle stuck on thorns"; but to-day he stood working away
+blusteringly at the piano-forte and writing-desk by turns; and, like a
+dried-up infusorial animal, was already, even at this early hour, the
+same old, busy creature, because wine enough had been poured upon him,
+that is to say, a good deal. Full of rapture, he ran to meet the welcome
+friend. Albano brought him from Falterle the childish leaves of
+love--for the Master of Exercises had not had the heart to throw them
+into the fire--which he had written from Blumenbuehl to the unknown
+heart. Charles would have been moved on the subject almost to tears,
+had he not already been so before the arrival. The Count had to stay
+there all day, and neglect everything; it was his first day of
+irregularity; it was comic to see how the otherwise unfettered youth,
+subservient, however, to a long habit of daily exertions, struggled
+against the short calm, in which he should sail no ship, as against a
+sin.
+
+Meanwhile, it was heavenly; the low-lying day of childhood, which once
+clothed him with wings, when the house was full of guests, and he,
+wherever he wanted to be, came up again above the horizon; the
+conversation played and made gifts with everything which exalts and
+enriches us; all his faculties were unchained and in ecstatic dance. Men
+of genius have as many festal days as others do working days, and hence
+it is that they can hardly endure a trivial and commonplace[126]
+intercalary-day, and especially on such days of youth! When Charles
+conjured before him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe,
+Klinger, Schiller, and life saw itself colossally represented in the
+poetic magnifying-mirror, then did all the sleeping giants of his inner
+world rise up; his father came and his future, even his friend stood
+forth there as in new relief, out of that shining, fantastic time of
+childhood, when he had dreamed of him beforehand in these characters;
+and in the internal procession of heroes, even the cloud that floated
+through the heavens and the guard-troop marching away across the market
+were incorporated. His friend appeared to him far greater than he was,
+because, like all youths, he still believed of actors and poets, that,
+like miners, they always received into their bodies the metals in which
+they labored. How often they both said, in that favorite metaphor of the
+young man, "Life is a dream," and only became thereby more glad and
+wide-awake! The old man says it differently. And the dark gate of death,
+to which Charles so loved to lead the way, became before the youth's eye
+a glass door, behind which lay the bright, golden age of the belated
+heart in immeasurable meadows.
+
+Maidens, I own,--as their conversations are more fragmentary,
+matter-of-fact, and less intoxicating,--instead of such an Eden-park, go
+for a spruce Dutch garden, well trimmed with crab's-shears and
+lady-scissors, which is furnished them every day in the afternoon by the
+black hour, which serves up to them on the coffee- or tea-table, the
+small black-board[127] of some evil reports, a couple of new shawls
+sitting by, a well-bred man who passes by with a will or marriage
+certificate, and finally the hope of the domestic report. Come back to
+our young men!
+
+Towards evening the Captain received a red billet. "Very well!" said he
+to the woman who brought it, and nodded. "You'll get nothing out of
+that, madam," said he, turning toward Albano. "Brother, guard only
+against married women. Just snap once, for a joke, at one of their red
+beauty-patches; instantly they dart their fish-hooks into your
+nape.[128] Seven of these hooks, such as you see here, have made a
+lodgement in mine alone." The innocent child Albano! He took it for
+something morally great to assert at once the friendship of seven
+married ladies, and would gladly have been in Charles's case; he could
+not see the mischief of it,--that these female friends, like the
+Romans, love to clip the wings of victory (namely, of ourselves), so
+that the Divinity may not fly any farther.
+
+On a fine day, nothing is so fine as its sunset. The Count proposed to
+ride out into the evening twilight, and on the hill to look at the sun.
+They trotted through the streets; Charles pulled off his great cocked-up
+hat, now before a fine nose, now before a great pair of eyes, now
+before transparent forelocks. They flew into the Linden avenue,
+which was festally decked with a motley wain-scoting of female
+street-_sitters_.[129] A tall woman, with piercing, fiery eyes, in a red
+shawl and yellow dress, strode through the female flower-bed, towering
+like the flower-goddess: it was the authoress of the red note; she was,
+however, more attentive to the beautiful Count than to her friend. On
+all walls and trees bloomed the rose-espalier of the evening redness.
+They blustered up the white road toward Blumenbuehl; on both sides the
+gold-green sea of spring heaved its living waves; a feathered world went
+rowing about therein, and the birds dove down deep among the flowers;
+behind the friends blazed the sun, and before them lay the heights of
+Blumenbuehl, all rosy-red. Having reached the eminence, they turned their
+horses toward the sun, which reposed behind the cupolas and
+smoke-columns of the proudly burning city, in distant, bright gardens.
+In wondrous nearness lay the illuminated earth round about them, and
+Albano could see the white statues on Liana's roof blush like life under
+the blooming clouds. He drove his horse close to his companion's, to lay
+his hand on Charles's shoulder; and thus they beheld in silence how the
+lovely sun laid down his golden cloud-crown, and, with the fluttering
+foliage-breath around his hot brow, descended into the sea. And when it
+grew dusky on the earth, and a glow lighted up the heavens, and Albano
+leaned across and drew his friend over to his burning heart, then rose
+the evening-chime in Blumenbuehl. "And down below there," said Charles,
+with soft voice, and turned thither, "lies thy peaceful Blumenbuehl, like
+a still churchyard of thy childhood's days. How happy are children,
+Albano,--ah, how happy are children!" "Are not we so?" answered he, with
+tears of joy. "Charles, how often have I stood on high places, in
+evenings like this, and fervently stretched out my childish hands after
+thee and after the world. Now indeed I have it all. Truly, thou art not
+right." But he, sick with the murmur and ringing-in-his-ears of long
+past times, remained deaf to the word, and said, "Only our cradle-songs,
+only those cradle-songs, sounding back on the memory, soothe the soul to
+slumber, when it has wept itself hot."
+
+More silently and slowly they rode back. Albano bore a new world of love
+and bliss in his bosom; and the youth,--not yet a debtor to the past,
+but a guest of the present,--sweetly unbent by the long Jubilee of the
+day, sank into clear-obscure dreams, like a towering bird of prey
+hanging silent on pinions open with ecstasy.
+
+"We will stay all night at Ratto's," said Charles, when they reached the
+city.
+
+
+55. CYCLE.
+
+They alighted down in Ratto's Italian Cellar. The house seemed to the
+Count at first, after the contemplation of broad nature, like a fragment
+of rock rolled upon it,--although every story, indeed, groans under
+architectural burdens,--but the heavy feeling of subterranean
+confinement[130] soon forgot itself, and singular was the sound that
+came down into the Italian vault of the rattling of carriages overhead.
+The Captain bespoke a _punch royal_. If he goes on so in his
+good fire-regulation, and always has a full cask at home as
+extinguishing-apparatus, and his hose-pipes well proved, then my book
+cannot be touched by the objection, that, as in Grandison, too much tea
+is consumed; more likely is it that too much strong drink will be
+absorbed.
+
+Schoppe was sitting in the Italian souterrain. He loved not the Captain,
+because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were
+heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy
+guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings." Charles paid him back his
+dislike; the hottest waves of his enthusiasm immediately bristled up in
+ice-peaks before the Titular Librarian's face. Only not to-day! He drank
+so amply of king's-punch,--whereof a couple of glasses might have burnt
+through all the heads of Briareus or of the Lernean serpent,--that he
+then said everything, even pious things. "By heavens!" said he, healing
+himself in this Bethesda-pool by--drawing from it, "since it is all
+fiddle-faddle about this growing better, one should obfuscate
+himself[131] with a shot, in order that the baited spirit may once for
+all go free from its wounds and sins." "From sins?" said Schoppe; "lice
+and tape-worms of the better sort will by all means emigrate from my
+territory, when I grow cold; but the worst of them my inner man will
+certainly carry up with it. By the hangman! who tells you, then, that
+this whole churchyard of poor sinners here below shall at once march
+home as an invisible church full of martyrs and Socrateses, and every
+Bedlam come out a high-light lodge? I was thinking to-day of the next
+world, when I saw a woman in the market with five little pigs, every one
+of which she would fain drive before her with a string tied to its leg,
+but which shot off from her and from each other like wisps of electric
+light; now, said I, we, with our few faculties and wishes, which this
+cultivating age sets out _in quintuplo_, fare already as pitifully as
+the woman with her drove; but when we get ten or more new farrows by the
+rope, as the second world, like an America, must surely bring new
+objects and wishes, how will the Ephorus[132] manage his office there? I
+prepare myself to expect there greater indescribable distresses, feudal
+crimes and oppositions." But Roquairol was in his red blaze; he exalted
+himself far above Schoppe and above himself, and denied immortality
+plumply, by way of parodying Schoppe. "An individual man," said he,
+"could hardly, on his own account alone, believe in immortality; but
+when he sees the masses, he has pity, and holds it worth the while, and
+believes the second world is a _monte testaceo_ of human potsherds. Man
+cannot come nearer to God and the Devil hereafter than he does already
+here; like a tavern-sign, his _reverse_ is painted just like his
+_obverse_. But we need the fictitious future for a present; when we
+hover ever so still above our slime, we yet are continually flapping,
+like carps lying still, with poetic fins and wings. Hence we must needs
+dress up the future paradise so gloriously that only gods shall fit into
+it, but, just as in princes' gardens, no dogs. Mere trumpery! We cut
+out for ourselves glorified bodies, which resemble soldiers'-coats;
+_pockets_ and _buttonholes_ are wanting; what pleasure can they hold,
+then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano,
+what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even
+freaks of humor.
+
+At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux.
+He put on his cravat,--he had been sitting there _a la Hamlet_,--and
+said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused,
+still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps.
+
+In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring,
+overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven!
+drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked
+round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as
+slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing
+with them.
+
+Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly
+into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and
+then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his
+friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily
+bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a
+calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting
+through. He was now, after the analogy of the fire-eaters, a
+fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The
+latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer:
+"_Redeem the time_, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life
+all you can: _that_ is time. To this end the best shops of the times,
+the apothecaries', require that a man, after _punch royal_, shall go to
+bed and sweat immoderately."
+
+Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,--when
+the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in
+Derbyshire-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,--when from the
+Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner
+being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the
+proudest (only not the tenderest one),--and when, like Adam in the state
+of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such
+crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but
+from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,--then
+did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the
+unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic,
+credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking
+_naive_ and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon
+that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he
+was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.
+
+"Come out o' doors,--out o' doors!" said Charles; and that had long been
+Albano's wish. It struck one, as they saw, on the narrow cellar-stairs,
+the stars of the spring heaven overhead glistening down through the
+entrance of the shaft. How freshly flowed the inhaled night over the hot
+lips! How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of
+stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How
+was the fiery eye of Albano refreshed and expanded by the giant masses
+of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the
+transparent mantle of night! Zephyrs, the butterflies of day, fluttered
+already about their dear flowers, and sucked from the blossoms, and
+brought in incense for the morning; a sleep-drunken lark soared
+occasionally into the still heavens with a loud day in her throat; over
+the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose
+jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the
+purple pennons of Aurora, as she sailed toward morning. With an exalting
+power the thought seized the youth, that this very minute was measuring
+millions of little and long lives, and the walk of the sap-caterpillar
+and the flight of the sun, and that this very same time was being lived
+through by the worm and God, from worlds to worlds, through the
+universe. "O God!" he exclaimed, "how glorious it is to exist!"
+
+Charles merely clung, with the drooping, heavy feathers of the
+night-bird, to the cheerful constellations around him. "Happy for thee,"
+said he, "that thou canst be thus, and that the sphinx in thy bosom
+still sleeps. Thou knowest not what I am about to do. I knew a wretch
+who could portray her right well. In the cavern of man's breast, said
+he, lies a monster on its four claws, with upturned Madonna's face, and
+looks round smiling, for a time, and so does man too. Suddenly it
+springs up, buries its claws into the breast, rends it with lion's-tail
+and hard wings, and roots and rushes and roars, and everywhere blood
+runs down the torn cavern of the breast. All at once it stretches itself
+out again, bloody, and smiles away again with the fair Madonna's face.
+O, he looked all bloodless, the wretch! because the beast so fed upon
+him and thirstily lapped at his heart."
+
+"Horrible!" said Albano; "and yet I do not quite understand thee." The
+moon at this moment lifted herself up, together with a flock of clouds
+that lay darkly camped along her sides, and she drew a storm-wind after
+her, which drove them among the stars. Charles went on more wildly: "In
+the beginning, the wretch found it as yet good: he had as yet sound
+pains and pleasures, real sins and virtues; but as the monster smiled
+and tore faster and faster, and he continued to alternate more and more
+rapidly between pleasure and pain, good and evil; and when blasphemies
+and obscene images crept into his prayers, and he could neither convert
+nor harden himself; then did he lie there, in a dreary exhaustion of
+bleeding, in the tepid, gray, dry mist-banks of life, and thus was dying
+all the time he lived.--Why weepest thou? Knowest thou that wretch?"
+"No," said Albano, mildly. "I am he!" "Thou? Terrible God, not thou!"
+"O, it is I; and though thou despisest me, thou wilt be what I ... No,
+my innocent one, I say it not. See, even now the sphinx rises again. O
+pray with me, help me, that I may not be obliged to sin,--only not be
+obliged! I must drink, I must debauch, I must be a hypocrite,--I am a
+hypocrite at this moment." Zesara saw the rigid eye, the pale, shattered
+face, and, in a rage of love, shook him with both arms, and stammered,
+with deep emotion, "By the Almighty! this is not true! thou art indeed
+so tender and pale and unhappy and innocent."
+
+"Rosy-cheek," said Charles, "I seem to thee pure and bright as yonder
+orb; but she too, like me, casts a long shadow up toward heaven." Zesara
+let go of him, took a long look toward the sublime, dark Tartarus,
+encompassing Elysium like a funeral train, and pressed away bitter
+tears, which flowed at the remembrance how he had found therein his
+first friend, who was now melting away at his side. Just then the
+night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the
+wood-caterpillar, and Albano pointed silently to the crashing tree.
+Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee
+to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair
+stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.
+
+This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears;
+a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with
+his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild
+self, and every selfish thought. Softly he laid himself on his friend's
+bosom, and with magical, low words, and full of humility, and without
+fiery images, told him his whole heart; and that it was not wicked, but
+only unhappy and weak, and that he ought to have been as heartily
+sincere towards him, who thought too well of him, as towards God; and
+that he swore, by the hour of death, to be such as he,--to confess to
+him everything, always,--to become holy through him. "Ah, I have only
+been loved so very little!" he concluded. And Albano, the
+love-intoxicated, glowing man, the good man, who knew by his own
+experience the sacred excesses and exaggerations of remorse, and took
+these confessions to be such, came back, inspired, to the old covenant
+with unmeasured love. "Thou art an ardent man!" said Charles; "why do
+men, then, always lie frozen together on each other's breasts, as on
+Mount Bernard,[133] with rigid eye, with stiffened arms? O why camest
+thou to me so late? I had been another creature. Why came she[134] so
+early? In the village down below there, at the narrow, lowly
+church-door,--there I first saw her through whom my life became a
+mummy. Verily, I am speaking now with composure. They carried along
+before me, as I went out to walk, a corpse-like white youth on a bier
+into Tartarus: it was only a statue, but it was the emblem of my future.
+An evil genius said to me, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee.' She
+stood at the church-door, surrounded by people of the congregation, who
+wondered at the boldness with which she took up, in her two hands, a
+silver-gray, tongue-darting snake, and dandled it. Like a daring
+goddess, she bent her firm, smooth brow, her dark eye, and the
+rose-blossoms of her countenance upon the adder's head, which Nature had
+trodden flat, and played with it close to her breast. 'Cleopatra!' said
+I, although a boy. She, too, even then, understood it, looked up calmly
+and coldly from the snake, and gave it back, and turned round. O, on my
+young breast she flung the chilling, life-gnawing viper. But, truly, it
+is now all gone by, and I speak calmly. Only in the hours, Albano, when
+my bloody clothes of that night, which my sister has laid up, come
+before my eyes, then I suffer once more, and ask, 'Poor, well-meaning
+boy! wherefore didst thou then grow older?' But, as I said, it is all
+over now. To thee, only to thee, may a better genius say, 'Love the fair
+one whom I show thee!'"
+
+But what a world of thoughts now flew at once into Albano's mind! "He
+continues to torment himself," thought he, "with the old jealousy about
+Romeiro. I will open heart to heart, and tell the good brother that it
+is indeed his sister I love, and that eternally." His cheeks glowed, his
+heart flamed, he stood, priest-like, before the altar of friendship,
+with the fairest offering, sincerity. "O Charles," said he, "now,
+perhaps, she might be otherwise disposed towards thee. My father is
+travelling with her, and thou wilt see her." He took his hand, and went
+with him more quickly up to a dark group of trees, to unfold, in the
+shadow, his tenderly blushing soul. "Take my most precious secret," he
+began, "but speak not of it,--not even with me. Dost thou not guess it,
+my first brother? The soul that I have loved, as long as I have loved
+thee?"--softly, very softly he added,--"thy sister?" and sank on his
+lips to kiss away the first sounds.
+
+But Charles, in the tumult of rapture and of love, like an earth at the
+up-coming of Spring, could not contain himself; he pressed him to
+himself; he let him go; he embraced him again; he wept for bliss; he
+shut to Albano's eyes, and said, as if he had found his sister anew,
+"Brother!" In vain did Albano seek to stifle, with his hand, every other
+syllable on his lips. He began to paint to the excited youth--who, amid
+the secluded and poetic book-world, had acquired a higher tenderness
+than the actual intercourse of society teaches--the portrait of Liana;
+how she did and suffered; how she watched and pleaded for him, and even
+impoverished herself to wipe out his debts; how she never severely
+blamed, but only mildly entreated him, and all that, not from artificial
+patience, but from genuine, ardent love; and how this, after all, made
+up hardly the accessories of her picture. In this purer inspiration than
+the foregoing evening had granted him, what crowned his bliss was, that
+he could love his sister, among all beings, the most intensely and the
+most disinterestedly, and with a love the most free from poetic luxury
+and caprice. Really strengthened by the feeling that he could, for once,
+exult with a pure and holy affection, he lifted once more in freedom his
+disengaged hands, hitherto, like Milo's, jammed and caught in the tree
+of happiness and life, which he would fain have torn open; he breathed
+fresh, living air and courage, and the plan of his inner perfection was
+now gracefully rounded by new good fortune and a consciousness full of
+fair objects.
+
+The moon stood high in heaven, the clouds had been driven away, and
+never did the morning-star rise brighter on two human beings.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[120] At the canonization of a saint, the _Devil_ was heard by
+_attorney_, in the shape of objections to the act. Jean Paul,
+with a slight variation of the sense of the old title, hints a
+converse process in Roquairol's case, making the better angel
+show cause why sentence of _damnation_ should not be absolutely
+pronounced against him.--TR.
+
+[121] Here began Jean Paul's second volume of the Titan.--TR.
+
+[122] Ottar of Roses.--TR.
+
+[123] The above description of Roquairol reminds one of a German
+_Sinn-spruch_ on sensuality, from the Persian:--
+
+    "Make his reason serve his passions,
+      That is what man never should;
+    _To the Devil's kitchen, angels_
+      _Never carry wood_."
+
+[124] Simon's Christian Antiquities. Mursinna, &c., p. 143.
+
+[125] Branch candlestick.--TR.
+
+[126] Schlendrians,--of a slow fellow,--corresponding to our _old
+fogy_.--TR.
+
+[127] Or Black-book.--TR.
+
+[128] Allusion to the mode of angling for frogs with a bit of red
+cloth.
+
+[129] Spazier-sitzerinnen,--not _gaengerinnen_, i. e.
+street-walkers.--TR.
+
+[130] _Zwinger_ means, originally, the narrow space between
+town-walls and town.--TR.
+
+[131] Literally, press something before his brow.--TR.
+
+[132] Overseer, a Lacedaemonian officer.--TR.
+
+[133] Strangers who are frozen are placed by the monks, unburied,
+beside each other, each leaning on the next one's breast.
+
+[134] Linda de Romeiro.
+
+
+
+
+ELEVENTH JUBILEE.
+
+EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES.
+
+
+56. CYCLE.
+
+Joyfully did Roquairol, on the first evening when he knew his father had
+gone a journey, bear to his friend the invitation to go with him to his
+mother. Albano blushed charmingly for the first time, at the thought of
+that fiery night which had wrung from him the oldest mystery; for
+hitherto neither of them, in the common hours of life, had retouched the
+sacred subject. Only the Captain could easily and willingly speak of
+Linda as well as of every other loss.
+
+Liana always beheld her brother--the creator and ruling spirit of her
+softest hours--with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to
+get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book
+in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She
+and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately
+relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the
+Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the
+visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern
+chamber, from which he had seen, for the first time, the dear maiden,
+only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns!
+The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her,
+after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling
+of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire,
+of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent
+consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of
+Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical,
+strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the
+flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten
+years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden;
+afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually
+at once thirteen and seventeen years old.
+
+Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting
+because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be
+avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious
+spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground
+to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and
+warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and
+brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet _proudly_,
+but so _affectionately_, that true pair of eyes!
+
+And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,--whose continuance
+is often, on _men's_ faces, but not on _maidens'_, the title-vignette of
+falsehood,--she received our noble youth, but not him alone.
+
+She seated herself at the embroidery-frame; and the mother soon launched
+the Count out into the cool, high sea of general conversation, into
+which only occasionally the son threw up a green, warm island. Alban
+looked on to see how Liana made her mosaic flower-pieces grow; how the
+little white hand lay on the black satin ground (Froulay's _thorax_ is
+to wear the flowers on his birthday), and how her pure brow, over which
+the curly hair transparently waved, bent forward, and how her face, when
+she spoke, or when she looked after new colors of silk, lifted itself
+up, animated with the higher glow of industry in the eye and on the
+cheek. Charles sometimes hastily stretched out his hand towards her. She
+willingly reached hers across; he laid it between his two, and turned it
+over, looked into the palm, pressed it with both hands, and the brother
+and sister smiled upon each other affectionately. And each time Albano
+turned from his conversation with the mother, and true-heartedly smiled
+with them. But poor hero! It is of itself a Herculean labor to sit idly
+by where fine work is going on, such as embroidery, miniature painting,
+&c.; but above all, with a spirit like thine, which has so many sails,
+together with a couple of storms in behind, to lie inactively at anchor
+beside the embroidery-frame, and not to be, say, a spinning Hercules
+(that were easy), but only one that sees spinning,--and that, too, in
+the presence of a great spring and sunset out of doors,--and, in
+addition to all this, in the company of a mother, so chary of her words
+(in fact, before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to
+introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter),--these are sore
+things.
+
+He looked down sharply at the embroidered Flora. "Nothing pains me so
+much," said he,--for he always philosophized, and everything useless on
+the earth troubled him grievously,--"as that so many thousand artificial
+ornaments should be created in vain in the world, without a single eye
+ever meeting and enjoying them. It will touch me very nearly if this
+green leaflet here is not especially observed." With the same sorrow
+over fruitless, unenjoyed plantings of labor, he often shut his eyes
+upon wall-paper foliage, upon worked flowers, upon architectural
+decorations. Liana might have taken it as a painter's censure of the
+overladen stitch-garden, which, merely out of love for her father, she
+was sowing so full,--for Froulay, born in the days when they still
+trimmed the gold-lace with clothes, rather than the reverse, was fond of
+buttoning a little silk herbary round his body,--but she only smiled,
+and said, "Well, the little leaf has surely escaped that evil destiny:
+it _is_ observed."
+
+"What matters a thing's being forgotten and useless?" said Roquairol,
+taking up the word, full of indifference to the Lector, who was just
+entering, and full of indifference to the opinion of his mother, to
+whom, as well as to his father, only the entreaties of his sister
+sometimes made him submissive. "Enough that a thing _is_. The birds sing
+and the stars move in majesty over the wildernesses, and no man sees the
+splendor. In fact, everywhere, in and out of man, more passes unseen
+than seen. Nature draws out of endless seas, and without exhausting
+them; we, too, are a nature, and should draw and pour out, and not be
+always anxiously reckoning upon the profit, for watering purposes, of
+every transient shower and rainbow. Just keep on embroidering, sister!"
+he concluded, ironically.
+
+"The Princess comes to-day!" said the Lector, and, delighted with the
+prospect, Liana kissed her mother's hand. She looked up often and
+confidentially from her embroidery at the courtier, who seemed to be
+very intimate, but who, as a refined man, was full as much respected
+and as respectful as if he were there for the first time.
+
+The announcement of the Princess set the Captain into a charming state
+of easy good-humor; a female part was to him as necessary for society as
+to the French for an opera, and the presence of a lady helped him as
+much in teaching, as the absence of a button did Kant.[135] By way of
+drawing his sister off from the flowers, he removed the red veil from a
+statue on the card-table, and threw it, like a little red dawn, over the
+lilies on the face of the embroideress; just then the door opened and
+Julienne entered. Liana, trying to remove the veil, in her haste to
+welcome her, entangled herself in the little red dawn. Albano
+mechanically reached out to her his hand to relieve her of the veil, and
+she gave it to him, and a dear, full look besides. O how his enraptured
+eye shone!
+
+Julienne brought with her a train of _jeux d'esprit_. The Captain, who,
+like a pyrotechnist, could give his fire all forms and colors,
+reinforced her with his; and his sister sowed, as it were, the flowers
+with which the zephyrettes of raillery could play. Julienne almost said
+no to yes, and yes to no; only toward the Minister's lady was she
+serious and submissive,--a sign that, on her arena of disputation, among
+the grains of sand particles of golden sand still lay, whereas for
+philosophers the arena is the prize and the ground,--at once the
+battle-field, the _Champ de Mars_, and the _Champs Elysees_. Upon the
+Count she fixed her passionate gaze as boldly as only princesses may
+venture to and love to; and when he returned the glance of her brown
+eye, she cast it down; but she remembered him, from her old visit in
+Blumenbuehl, and inquired after his friends. He now entered with pleasure
+upon something that was as ardent as his own soul,--encomiums. It is
+against the finest politeness to praise or blame persons with
+warmth,--things one may. While he portrayed with grateful remembrance
+his sister Rabette, Julienne became so earnestly and deeply absorbed in
+his eye, that she started, and asked the Lector about the steps of the
+_Anglaise_ which he had led at the masquerade. When he had done his best
+to give an idea of it, she said she had not understood a word of what he
+had been saying; one must, after all, execute it.
+
+And herewith I suddenly introduce my fair readers in a body to a
+domestic ball of two couples. See the two sisters-in-soul, side by side,
+like two wings on _one_ dove, harmoniously flutter up and down. Albano
+had expected Julienne would form a contrast, by nimble and sprightly
+fluttering, to the still, hovering movement of her friend; but both
+undulated lightly, like waves, by and through each other, and there was
+not a motion too much nor too swift.
+
+Hence I have so often wished that maidens might always dance exactly
+like the Graces and the Hours,--that is to say, only with one another,
+not with us gentlemen. The present union of the female wave-line with
+the masculine swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does
+not remarkably beautify the dance.
+
+Liana assumed a new ethereal form, somewhat as an angel while flying
+back into heaven lays aside his graceful earthly one. The dancing-floor
+is to woman's beauty what the horse's back is to ours; on both the
+mutual enchantment unfolds itself, and only a rider can match a dancing
+maiden. Fortunate Albano! thou who hardly dar'st take the finger-points
+of Liana's offered hand in thine! thou gettest enough. And only look at
+this friendly maiden, whose eyes and lips Charis so smilingly brightens
+for the dance, and who yet, on the other hand, appears so touchingly,
+because she is a little pale! How different from those capricious or
+inflexible step-sisters, who, with half a Cato of Utica on the wrinkled
+or tightly stretched face, hop, fall back, and slip round. Julienne
+flies joyfully to and fro; and it is hard to say before whose eyes she
+loves to flutter best, Liana's or Albano's.
+
+When it was done, Julienne wanted to begin over again. Liana looked at
+her mother, and immediately begged her friend rather for a cooling off.
+A mere pretext! A female friend loves to be alone with a female friend;
+the two loved each other before people only with a veil upon their
+hearts, and longed for the dark arbor where it might fall off. Liana had
+a real loving impatience, till she could, with her duplicate-soul, her
+twin-heart, snatch moments free from witnesses in the garden of evening
+and May. They came back changed and full of tender seriousness. The
+lovely beings were perhaps as like each other in their innermost souls
+and in stillness as in the dance, and more so than they seemed.
+
+And thus passed with our youth a fair-starred evening! Pardon him,
+however, that he grasped and pressed this nosegay so close as to feel
+some of the thorns. His heart, whose love grew painfully near another,
+could not help finding this other, where there was no sign of response,
+at once _higher_ and _farther_ off. Her love was love of man,--her smile
+was meant for every kind eye,--she was so cheerful. In Lilar she easily
+passed into emotion and general contemplations; not so here,--of course
+she would look right sympathetically upon her wildly loving brother,
+who, since that confession-night, had twined himself as if with
+oak-roots around the darling; but her half-blind love for the brother
+might indeed be only, in the deceiving light of reflection, shining upon
+_his_ friend. All this the modest one said to himself. But what he had
+enjoyed in full measure of ecstasy was the increasing, clear, tender,
+steadfast love of his soul's-brother.
+
+
+57. CYCLE.
+
+As to Liana's secret inclination and Zesara's prospects I shall never
+once institute any conjectures, although I might erase them again before
+printing. I remember what came of it, when I and others, on a former
+occasion, covered over with our hands Hafenreffer's official reports
+upon matters of consequence, and undertook to unfold at length, by pure
+fancy, how things might have gone on;--it was of no use! And naturally
+enough; for women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, many _doors_
+and few _windows_, and it is easier to _get_ into their hearts than to
+_look_ into them. Particularly maidens', I mean; since women,
+physiognomically and morally, are more strongly marked and boldly
+developed, I would rather undertake to guess at and so portray ten
+mothers than two daughters. The bodily portrait-painters make the same
+complaint.
+
+Whoever observes the influence of night, will find that the doubts and
+anxieties which he had contracted the evening previous about the heroine
+of his life it has, for the most part, completely killed by the time it
+gets to be towards morning. Albano, in the spring morning, opened his
+eyes upon life as in a triumphal car, and the fresh steeds stamped
+before it, and he could only let them have the reins.
+
+He alighted with his friend at Liana's after a few years, that is, days;
+the Minister had not yet come back. Heavens! how new and bloomingly
+young was her form, and yet how unchanged her demeanor! Why is it,
+thought he, that I can get only her motions, not all her features, by
+heart? Why can I not imprint this face, even to the least smile, like a
+holy antique, cleanly and deeply upon my brain, that so it may float
+before me in eternal presence? For this reason, my dear: young and
+beautiful forms are the very ones which are hard for the memory as for
+the pencil; and coarse, old, masculine ones easier for both. Again he
+filled himself with joys and sighs by looking at her,--and these were
+increased by the nearness of the garden, wherein June with his evening
+splendor lay encamped. O, if only _one_ moment could come to him, in
+which his whole soul might speak its inspiration! Out of doors there lay
+the young, fiery spring, basking, like an Antinoues, in the garden, and
+the moon, impatient for the fair June-night, stood already under the
+gate of the east, and found the living day and the lingering sun still
+in the field. But the mother refused to the asking look of Liana the
+sight of sunset,--"on account of the unwholesome _Serein_."[136] Albano,
+with his heart full of manly blood, thought this maternal barrier around
+a child's health very small.
+
+The hour for shutting gates upon to-day's Eden would have struck for him
+the next minute, had it not been for the Captain and the _Cereus
+serpens_.
+
+The Captain came running down from the Italian roof, and announced that
+the Cereus would bloom this evening at ten o'clock, the gardener said,
+and he should stay there. "And thou too," he said to Albano. All that
+the double limitations of forbearing tenderness toward sister and friend
+would allow he lovingly set at stake, for the sake of pleasing the
+latter. Liana herself begged him to wait for the blooming; she was so
+delighted to find it was so near! Her soul hung upon flowers, like bees
+and dew. Already had her friend, the pious Spener, who fixed an
+enraptured eye upon these living arabesques of God's throne, made her a
+friend to these mute, ever-sleeping children of the Infinite; but still
+more had her own maidenly and her suffering heart done it. Have you
+never met tender, female souls, into whose blossoming time fate had
+thrown cold clouds, and who now, like Rousseau, sought other flowers
+than those of joy, and who wearied themselves with stooping, in valleys
+and on rocks, to gather and to forget, and to fly from the dead _Pomona_
+to the young _Flora_? The thorough-bass and Latin, wherewith _Hermes_
+proposes to divert maidens, must yield here to the broad, variegated
+hieroglyphics of Nature, the rich study of Botany.
+
+A nameless tenderness for Liana came into Albano's soul at the little
+four-seated supper-table; it seemed to him as if he were now nearer to
+her, and a relative; and yet he comprehended not his kinswoman, when,
+from every serious mood into which her mother sank, she strove to win
+her back with pleasantries. Out of doors the nightingales were calling
+man into the lovely night; and no one pined more to be abroad than he.
+
+For the soul's eyes, the _blue_ of heaven is what the _green_ of earth
+is to the bodily eyes, namely, an inward strengthening. When Zesara, at
+length, came free and clear out of the fetters of the room,--out of this
+spiritual house-arrest into the free realm of heaven, and beneath all
+the stars and on the magic Olympus of statues, at which he had so often
+longingly looked up,--then did his forcibly contracted breast
+elastically expand: how the constellations of life moved to meet each
+other in brighter forms; how did spring and night sit enthroned!
+
+The old gardener, who, simply from a grateful attachment to "the
+good-souled, condescending Fraeulein," had, with rare pains, forced these
+early blossoms from the _Cereus serpens_, stood up there already,
+apparently as an observer of the flowers, but in fact as an expectant of
+the greatest praise, with a brown, indented, pitted, and serious face,
+which did not challenge praise with a single smile.
+
+Liana thanked the gardener before she came to the blossoms; then she
+praised them and his pains. The old man merely waited for every other
+one of the company to be astonished also; then he went drowsily off to
+bed, with a firm faith that Liana would to-morrow remember him in such a
+way as to make him contented.
+
+The exotic beads of nectar-fragrance which hung in five white calyxes,
+crowned as it were with brown leaf-work, seized the fancy. The odors
+from the spring of a hotter clime drew it away into remote dreams. Liana
+only stroked with a soft finger, as one glides over eyelids, the little
+incense-vases, without touching with predatory hand the full little
+garden of tender stamina which crowded together in the cup. "How lovely,
+how very tender!" said she, with childlike happiness. "What a cluster of
+five little evening stars! Why come they only by night,--the dear, shy
+little flowers?" Charles seemed to be on the point of breaking one. "O
+let it live!" she begged; "to-morrow they will all have died of
+themselves. Charles! thus does so much else fade," she added, in a lower
+tone. "Everything!" said he, sharply. But the mother, against Liana's
+will, had heard it. "Such death-thoughts," said she, "I love not in
+youth; they lame its wings." "And then," replied Liana, with a
+maiden-like turning of the tables, "it just stays with us, that's all,
+like the crane in Kleist's fable, whose wings they broke, so that he
+could not travel with the rest into the warm land."
+
+This gay, motley veil of deep earnestness was not transparent enough for
+our friend. But by and by the good maiden took pains to look just as the
+careful mother wished. The benumbing lily which the earth wears on her
+breast, the moon; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens;
+and the city, with its pierced-work of night-lights; and the high,
+majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white
+lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and
+the nightingales singing out of distant gardens;--did not all this stir
+omnipotently every heart, till it would fain confess with tears its
+longing? And the softest heart of all which beat at this moment below
+the stars, could it have succeeded in wholly veiling itself? Almost! She
+had accustomed herself, before her mother, to dry away with her eye, so
+to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall.
+
+Singular was her appearance, the next minute, to the Count. The mother
+was speaking with her son; Liana stood, far from the latter, with face
+turned half aside, and a little discolored by the moon, near a white
+statue of the holy Virgin, and looking out into the night. All at once
+she looked upon him and smiled, just as if a living being had appeared
+to her in the abyss of ether, and her lip would speak. Earthly form more
+exalted and touching had never before met his eyes; the balustrade by
+which he held swayed to and fro (but it was he himself who shook it),
+and his whole soul cried, "To-day, now, I love the heavenly one with the
+highest, the deepest love I have felt." So he also said lately, and so
+will he say oftener: can man, with the innumerable waves of love,
+institute measurements of altitude, and point to that one which has
+mounted the highest? Thus does man, whereever he may be standing, always
+imagine himself standing in the centre of heaven.
+
+Ah, at this moment he was again surprised, but it was with an "Ah!"
+Liana went to her mother, and when _she_ felt in the hand of her darling
+a slight shudder, she importuned her to go out of the night-air, and
+would not give over till she left with her the magic spot.
+
+The friends stayed behind. According to Albano's reckoning, it would
+not, of course, have been too much, if, in this frank time, wherein our
+holier thoughts, hidden by the common light of day, reveal themselves
+like stars, they had all lingered on the roof till toward morning. The
+two walked for a time up and down in silence. At last the incense-altar
+of the five flowers held them fast. Albano clasped accidentally the
+neighboring statue with both hands, and said: "On high places, one wants
+to throw something down,--even himself oftentimes; and I, too, would
+fain throw myself off into the world, into far-distant lands, as often
+as I gaze into the nightly redness yonder, and as often as I come under
+orangery-blossoms, as under these. Brother, how is it with thee? The
+heavens and the earth open out so broadly: why, then, must the spirit
+so creep into itself?" "Just so do I feel," said he; "and in the head,
+generally, has the spirit more room than in the heart." But here, by a
+delicate guess, he arrived, through agreeably circuitous routes, at the
+accidental discovery of the reason why his sister had hurried down so
+soon.
+
+"Even to obstinacy," said he, "she pushes her care for her mother. The
+last time, when she observed that mother saw her grow pale under the
+dance, she immediately ceased. To me alone she shows her whole heart,
+and every drop of blood, and all innocent tears therein; especially does
+she believe something in respect to the future, which she anxiously
+conceals from mother." "She smiled to herself just before she went
+away," said Albano, and drew Charles's hand over his eyes, "as if she
+saw up there a being from the veiled world." "Didst thou too see that?"
+replied Charles. "And then did her lip stir? O friend, God knows what
+infatuates her; but this is certain, she firmly believes she is to die
+next year." Albano would not let him speak further. Too intensely
+excited, he pressed himself to his friend's breast; his heart beat
+wildly, and he said: "O brother, remain always my friend!"
+
+They went down. In the apartment which adjoined Liana's they found her
+piano-forte open. Now that was just what the Count had missed. In
+passion--even in mere fire of the brain--one grasps not so much at the
+pen as at the string; and in that state alone does musical fantasying
+succeed better than poetic. Albano, thanking, meanwhile, the muse of
+sweet sounds that there were forty-four transitions,[137] seated himself
+at the keys, with the intention now to beat a musical fire-drum, and
+roar like a storm into the still ashes, and drive out a clear,
+sparkling swarm of tones. He did it, too, and well enough, and better
+and better; but the instrument struggled, rebelled. It was built for a
+female hand, and would only speak in female tones, with lute-plaints, as
+a woman with a friend of her own sex.
+
+Charles had never heard him play so, and was astonished at such fulness.
+But the reason was, the Lector was not there; before certain
+persons--and he was one of them--the playing hand freezes, so that one
+only labors and lumbers to and fro in a pair of leaden gloves; and,
+secondly, before a multitude it is easier playing than before one,
+because the latter stands definitely before the soul, the former floats
+vaguely. And, besides all that, blessed Albano, thou knowest who hears
+thee. The morning air of hope flutters around thee in tones,--the wild
+life of youth stalks with vigorous limbs and loud strides up and down
+before thee,--the moonlight, undesecrated by any gross earthly light,
+hallows the sounding apartment. Liana's last songs lie open before thee,
+and the advancing moonshine will let thee read them soon,--and the
+nightingale in the mother's neighboring chamber contends with thy tones,
+as if summoned by the Tuba to the field.
+
+Liana came in with her mother, not till late, because the heavy din of
+tones had something in it hard and painful to both. He could see the two
+sitting sidewise at the lower window, and how Liana held her mother's
+hand. Charles, after his manner, walked up and down with long steps, and
+sometimes stood still near him. Albano, in this nearness of the still
+soul, soon came out of the wilderness of harmony into simple moonlit
+passages, where only a few tones moved delicately like graces, and quite
+as lightly linked as they. The artistical hurly-burly of unharmonious
+_ignes fatui_ is only the forerunner of the melodious Charites; and
+these alone insinuate themselves into the softer souls. It seemed to
+him--the illusion was complete--as if he were speaking aloud with Liana;
+and when the tones, like lovers, went on ever repeating the same thing
+from heartiness and zest, did he not mean Liana, and say to her, "How I
+love thee! O how I love thee!" Did he not ask her, "Why mournest thou?
+why weepest thou?" And did he not say to her, "Look into this mute
+heart, and fly not from it, O pure, innocent one, my own!"
+
+How did the good youth blush, when suddenly the caressing friend placed
+his hands over _his_ friend's eyes, which hitherto, unseen in the
+darkness, had been overflowing for love! Charles stepped warmly to his
+sister, and she, of her own accord, took his hand and said words of
+love. Then Albano took refuge in the murmuring wilderness of sounds,
+until his eyes were dried enough for the leave-taking by lamp-light; by
+slow degrees he let the cradle of our heart cease rocking, and closed so
+mildly and faintly, and was silent for a little while, and then slowly
+rose. O, in this mute, young bosom lived every blessed thing which the
+most glorious love can bestow!
+
+They parted seriously. No one spoke of the music. Liana seemed
+transfigured. Albano dared not, in this spirit-hour of the heart, with
+an eye which had so recently calmed itself, rest long upon her mild blue
+ones. Her deeply touched soul expressed itself, as maidens are wont, to
+her brother only, and that by a more ardent embrace. And from the holy
+youth she could not, in parting, conceal the tone and the look, which
+he will never forget.
+
+That night he awoke often, and knew not what it was that so blissfully
+rocked his being. Ah! it was the tone whose echo rang through his
+slumber, and the dear eye which still looked upon him in his dreams.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[135] He is said, in teaching, to have always looked at the spot
+on a student's coat where the button was gone; and was
+embarrassed when it was sewed on again.
+
+[136] The evening hour, which people in southern countries shun
+so much.
+
+[137] From one key to another.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+TWELFTH JUBILEE.
+
+     FROULAY'S BIRTHDAY AND PROJECTS.--EXTRA-LEAF.--BABETTE.--THE
+     HARMONICA.--NIGHT.--THE PIOUS FATHER.--THE WONDROUS
+     STAIRWAY.--THE APPARITION.
+
+
+58. CYCLE.
+
+Happy Albano! thou wouldst not have remained so, hadst thou, on the
+birthday of the Minister, heard what he then proposed!
+
+Already, for a considerable time, had Froulay been full of noticeable,
+stormy signs, and might any moment, one must needs fear, let the
+thunderbolt fly from him; that is to say, he was gay and mild. Thus,
+also, in the case of phlegmatic children, does great liveliness threaten
+an eruption of the chicken-pox. As he was a father and a despot,--(the
+Greeks had for both only the one word, despot,)--so was it expected of
+him, as connubial storm-maker,[138] that he would provide the usual
+storms and foul weather for his family. Connubial storm-material for the
+mere _troubling_ of marriage can never be wanting, when one considers
+how little is required even for its dissolution; for instance, among
+the Jews, merely that the woman scream too loud, burn the dinner, leave
+her shoes in the place for the man's, &c. Beside all this, there was
+much in the present case about which there was a good chance to thunder;
+e. g. Liana, upon whom one might visit the misdemeanor of the brother,
+because he obstinately stayed away and begged for no grace. One always
+loves to let his indignation loose upon wife, daughter, and son at once,
+and would rather be a land-rain than a transient shower; one child can
+more easily imbitter than sweeten a whole family.
+
+But Froulay still continued the smiling John. Nay, did he not--I have
+the proofs--carry it so far, that when, on one occasion, his daughter,
+in taking leave of the Princess, fell upon her neck,--instead of
+representing to her, with flashing eyes, how one must only accept, not
+reciprocate, familiarities with superiors, and must take care not to
+forget one's self precisely then, when _they_ do forget themselves,--and
+instead of sternly asking whether she had ever seen him, in his warmest
+love toward the Prince, offend against _the Dehors_,--instead, I say, of
+doing this, and hailing and storming the while, did he not merely break
+out that once into the fair words: "Child, thou art too affectionate
+toward thy distinguished friend; ask thy mother; she knows, too, what
+friendly _liaisons_ are"?
+
+Only Liana--although so often deceived by these calms--was full of
+unutterable hope and joy at the domestic peace, and believed in its
+permanence, especially as the paternal birthday was so near, that
+Olympiad and normal period upon which and by which the house reckoned so
+largely. During the whole year the Minister had been looking out for
+this day, in order, in the morning, when the congratulations came, not
+to forget to make believe he had forgotten it, but to be astonished on
+the subject,--all owing to business, he said; and at evening, when the
+guests came,--on account of business he never dined, he said, to
+astonish _them_. He was alternately the worshipper and image-breaker of
+etiquette, ministerial and opposition party thereof, as his vanity
+dictated.
+
+Liana importuned her brother, till he promised to do something to please
+his father; he composed, for the purpose, a family-piece, in which he
+introduced the whole confession-night between himself and Albano, only
+he converted Albano into a sister. Liana gladly studied this part also
+for the birthday, although she had to deliver the blooming vest.
+
+The Minister, contrary to expectation, accepted the vest, the Captain
+and his hand-bill for the evening's performance, graciously; for he was
+wont, on former occasions, like some other fathers, to growl the louder
+the more his children stroked him. He danced away like a Polack right
+merrily with his family, and stuck the rod[139] behind the fur. Nothing
+worse at this moment revolved in his head than the question, where it
+would be best to open the amateur theatre, whether in the _Salon de
+Lecture_ or in the _Salon des bains domestiques_; for the two halls were
+entirely distinguished from one another, and from the other chambers, by
+their names.
+
+The day came. Albano, whose invitation Charles had to extort, because
+the Minister, out of pride, hated his pride, brought with him,
+unfortunately, in his soul, the tone which Liana had given him the last
+time to carry home with him. His hope had hitherto lived upon this
+tone. O blame him not for it! The airy nothing of a sigh bears often a
+pastoral world or an orcus on its ephemeron's-wing. Everything weighty
+may, like a rock, be placed on a point, whereupon a child's finger can
+set it in rotation.
+
+But the tone had died away. Liana knew no other way than that, in the
+visiting congregation,--of whose moral pneumatophobia,[140] after all,
+she was not aware in its full extent,--one should hide every religious
+emotion behind the church fan. Boxes, pit, and farthing gallery were,
+almost at the usual play-hour, set off and filled out with Gratulantes,
+all fit to be canons. The German gentleman was made particularly
+prominent by the rich and insolent ostentation of his circumstances. Of
+the visiting-company-lane it can, in passing, only be observed, that in
+it, as in the antiphlogistic system, _oxygen_[141] played the chief
+part, which, however, was given out less by the lungs than by the heart.
+
+When the curtain rose, and Roquairol made that night of forgiveness and
+ecstasy pass by again in a still more glowing form than it had actually
+had; when this dreamy imitation seemed the first appearance of the
+actual reality, how hotly and deeply did he burn himself thereby into
+his friend's soul! (Good Albano! This art of being his own _revenant_,
+his own ghost, his mock- and mimic-self, and of counterfeiting the
+splendid edition of his own life, should have left thee smaller hopes!)
+The Count must needs, in this most grave society that ever sate around
+him, break out into an unseemly weeping. And why did Charles put
+Albano's words, of that memorable night, into the mouth of Liana, so
+bewitchingly interesting in her emotion, and thus make his love,
+wrought upon by so many charms, grow even to anguish?
+
+The German gentleman himself gave to Liana, that white swan, floating,
+tinged with rosy redness, through the evening glow of Phoebus, several
+loud, and to the Count annoying signs of approbation. The Minister was
+chiefly glad that all this happened in his honor, and that the point of
+the last act was still going to throw a very special epigrammatic
+laurel-wreath on his crown.
+
+He got the wreath. The pair of children were very favorably criticised
+by the Erlangen literary gazette[142] of spectators, and by the
+belles-lettres review, and covered over with crowns,--with noble
+martyrs' crowns. The German gentleman had and used the public right of
+ushering in the Coronation, and the Coronation-car. Base man! why should
+thy beetle's-eyes be permitted to creep gnawingly over the holy roses
+which emotion and sisterly love plants on Liana's cheeks? But how much
+gayer still was the old gentleman,--so much so that he flirted with the
+oldest ladies,--when he saw the knight bring out magnificently into full
+daylight his interest in Liana, not fantastically or sentimentally, but
+by still and steady advances and marked attention, by jokes and glances
+and sly addresses, and at last by something decisive! That is to say,
+the German gentleman drew the old man into a cabinet, and both came back
+out of it vehemently animated.
+
+The lovely Liana, withdrawn into her own heart, fled from the upas-tree
+of the laurel away to her comforting mother. Liana had preserved, in the
+midst of the stormy mill-races of daily _assemblees_, a low voice and a
+delicate ear, and the tumult had driven her inward, and left her almost
+shy.
+
+The fair soul seldom guessed anything, except a fair soul: she so easily
+divined her like; with such difficulty her counterpart. Bouverot's
+advances seemed to her the usual forward and side steps of manly
+courtesy; and his knightly celibacy did not allow her entirely to
+understand him. Do not the lilies of innocence bloom earlier than the
+roses of shame, as the purple color, in the beginning, only dyes pale,
+and not till afterward puts on the red glow, when it lies before the
+sun? She kept herself this evening near her mother, because she
+perceived in her an unwonted seriousness. When Froulay had taken off
+from his head the birthday garland, wherein were planted more thorns and
+stalks than flowers,--when he had taken off the crown of thorns, and
+stood in his night-cap amidst his family,--he addressed himself to the
+business whereupon he had been thinking all the evening. "My little
+dove," said he to his daughter, borrowing a good expression from the
+Bastile,[143]--"my little dove, leave me and _Guillemette_ alone." He
+now laid bare his upper teeth by a characteristic grin, and said he had,
+as he hoped, something agreeable to communicate to her. "You know," he
+continued, "what I owe to the German gentleman." He meant not thanks,
+but money and consideration.
+
+We love to dwell upon it as a matter of great praise in the family of
+the Quintii,[144] that they never possessed gold: I adduce--without
+arraying a thousand other families of whom the same is to be sworn--only
+Froulay's. Certain families, like antimony, have no chemical affinity
+whatever with that metal, however much they might wish it; certainly
+Froulay wished it: he looked very much to his interest (to nothing
+else), he willingly (although only in cases of collision) set conscience
+and honor aside; but he got no further than to great outlays and great
+projects, simply because he sought money, not as the end and aim of his
+ambition, but only as the means of ambition and enterprise. Even for
+some pictures which Bouverot had purchased for the Prince in Italy he
+still owed that individual the purchase-shilling which he had taken out
+of the treasury. By his bonds as if by circulars, he stood in
+widely-extended connections. He would gladly have transposed his
+marriage contract into a bond, and had, with his lady, at least that
+most intimate community--of goods; for, under present circumstances,
+divorce and bankruptcy stood in neighborly relations to each other; but,
+as was said, many men, with the best talons,--like the eagle of the
+Romish king,[145]--have nothing in them.
+
+He continued: "Now, perhaps, this _gene_ will cease. Have you hitherto
+made any observations upon him?" She shook her head. "I have," he
+replied, "for a long time, and such as were really consoling to
+me,--_j'avais le nez bon quant a cela_,--he has a real liking for my
+Liana."
+
+The Minister's lady here could draw no inference, and begged him, with
+disguised astonishment, to come to the _agreeable_ matter. Comically on
+his face did the show of friendship wrestle with the expectation that he
+should be under the necessity immediately of being exasperated. He
+replied: "Is not _this_ an agreeable matter? The knight means it in
+earnest. He wished now to be privately espoused to her; after three
+years he retires from the order, and her fortune is made. _Vous etes, je
+l'espere, pour cette fois, un peu sur mes interets, ils sont les
+votres._"
+
+Her maternal heart, so suddenly and deeply wounded, wept, and could
+hardly be concealed. "Herr von Froulay!" said she, when she had composed
+herself a little; "I do not disguise my astonishment. Such a disparity
+in years, in tastes, in religion."[146]
+
+"That is the knight's affair, not ours," he replied, refreshed by her
+angry confusedness, and, like the weather, in his coldness threw only
+fine, sharp snow, no hail. "As to Liana's heart, I beg you just to sound
+that." "O, that innocent heart? You are mocking!" "_Posito!_ so much the
+more gladly will the _innocent_ heart reconcile itself to make her
+father's fortune, if she is not the greatest egotist. I should never
+love to constrain an obedient daughter." "_N'epuisez pas ce chapitre;
+mon coeur est en presse._ It will cost her her life, which already
+hangs by such frail threads." This allusion always struck the fire of
+wrath from his flint. "_Tant mieux_," said he; "then it will never go
+further than an engagement! I had almost said--_Sacre!_ and who is to
+blame for that? So it fares with me at the hands of the Captain too,--in
+the beginning my children promise everything, then they turn out
+nothing. But, madam," he said, swiftly and venomously collecting
+himself; and, instead of compressing his lips and teeth, merely pinching
+moderately the auditory organs of a sleeping lap-dog; "you alone indeed
+know, by your influence upon Liana, how to dress and redress everything.
+Perhaps she belongs to you by a still prior claim than to me. I am not
+then compromitted with the knight. The advantages I detail no further."
+His breast was here already warmed under the vulture-skin of rage.
+
+But the noble lady now indignantly rose, and said: "Herr von Froulay!
+hitherto I have not spoken of myself. Never will I counsel or
+countenance or consent to it,--I will do the opposite. Herr von Bouverot
+is not worthy of my Liana."
+
+The Minister, during this speech, had several times unnecessarily
+snapped-to the snuffers over the wax candles, and only beheaded the
+point of the flame; the fixed air of wrath now colored the roses of his
+lips (as the chemical does botanical ones) blue. "_Bon!_" he replied, "I
+travel; you can reflect on the subject,--but I give my word of honor,
+that I never consent to any other match; and though it were (whereupon
+he looked at the lady ironically) still more considerable[147] than the
+one just projected,--either the maiden obeys or she suffers, _decidez_!
+_Mais je me fie a l'amour que vous portez au pere et a la fille; vous
+nous rendrez tous assez contens._" And then he went forth, not like a
+tempest, but like a rainbow, which he manufactured out of the eighth
+color only, namely, the black, and that with his eyebrows.
+
+After some days of resentment with the mother and the daughter, he rode,
+as Luigi's business-agent, to Haarhaar to see the princely bride. The
+oppressed mother confided to her oldest and only friend, the Lector, the
+sad secret. The two had now a pure relation of friendship toward one
+another, which, in France, in consequence of the higher respect for
+women, is more common. In the first years of the ministerial forced
+marriage, which dawned not with morning dew, but with morning frost,
+perhaps the hawk-moth[148] Cupid fluttered after them; but by and by
+children drove away this sphinx. The wife is often forgotten when she
+becomes the mother. She, therefore, with her characteristic cool and
+clear strength, took all that was ambiguous in her relation to Augusti
+forever out of the way; and he made her firmness more easy by his own,
+because he, with more love of honor than of women, grew not more red at
+any kind of braided-work than at that of a basket,[149] and erroneously
+believed that a man who receives it, has as much to be ashamed of as a
+woman who does.
+
+The Lector could foresee that she would also, after her divorce,--which
+she postponed only for Liana's sake,--remain single, if only for this
+reason, in order not to deprive her daughter of an allodial estate,
+Klosterdorf, for the reservation of which she had now for one and twenty
+years exposed herself to the battering-ram and scythe-chariot and
+blunderbuss of the old Minister. Whether she was not even silently
+intending her dear Liana for a man so firm and tender, who differed from
+her in nothing but in a worldly coolness toward positive religion, is
+another and more delicate question. Such a reciprocal gift were worthy
+such a mother and friend, who must know from her heart, that combined
+feelings of tenderness and honor prepare for a loved soul a surer bliss
+than the love which genius offers, that alternation of flying heat and
+flying cold,--that fire which, like the electric, always twice
+destroys,--in the stroke and in the rebound. The Lector himself started
+not that question; for he never made rash, unsafe plans; and what one
+would have been more so than that of such a connection, in his poverty,
+or with such a father-in-law, in a country where, as in the Electorate
+of Saxony, a statute, so beneficial (for parents), can countermand even
+a marriage of many years' standing, which has been concluded without
+parental consent?
+
+With moist eyes the Minister's lady showed him the new storm-clouds,
+which had again descended upon her and her Liana. She could build upon
+his fine eye for the world, upon his dumb lip and upon his ready hand
+for business. He said, as ever, he had foreseen all this; but proved to
+her that Bouverot, if only from avarice, would never exchange his
+knightly cross for the wedding-ring, whatever designs he might cherish
+with regard to Liana. He gave her to surmise, so far as a tender regard
+to her sore relations would tolerate, to what degree of readiness for
+compliance with Bouverot's wishes the very frailty of Liana's life might
+allure the Minister, in order to harvest it before it had done blooming.
+For Froulay could much more nimbly swallow demands against honor than
+injuries done to his vanity, as the victim of hydrophobia can much more
+easily get down solid morsels than fluids. Yet all this did not sound so
+immorally hard to the Minister's lady as readers of the middling classes
+might imagine; I appeal to the more sensible among the higher.
+
+Augusti and the Minister's lady saw that something must certainly be
+done for Liana during the Minister's absence; and both wonderfully
+coincided in their project. Liana must go into the country this pleasant
+season,--she must muster up health for the wars that were in
+prospect,--she must be put out of the way of the knight's visits, which
+now the birthday would multiply fourfold,--even the Minister must have
+nothing to object to the place. And where can this be? Simply under the
+roof of the Director Wehrfritz, who cannot endure the German gentleman,
+because he knows his poisonous relation to the Prince. But of course
+there are first still other mountains to be climbed than that which lies
+on the way to Blumenbuehl.
+
+The reader himself must now get over a low one; and that is a short
+comico-tragic Extra-leaf upon
+
+
+THE GREEN-MARKET OF DAUGHTERS.
+
+The following is certain: every owner of a very beautiful or very rich
+daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt under his roof, which to himself is
+of no service, and which he must put to its first use after it has long
+lain idle, by selling it to a _Regent_.[150] Strictly and commercially
+speaking, daughters are not an article of trade; for the parental grand
+adventurers no one can confound with those female dealers in second-hand
+frippery, and stall-women, whose transit-business one does not love to
+name; but a stock, with which one gains in a South Sea, or a clod,
+wherewith one transfers symbolically (_scortatione_) real estate. "_Je
+ne vends que mes paysages et donne les figures par dessus le
+marche_,"[151] said Claude Lorraine, like a father,--and could easily
+say it, because he had the figures painted in his landscapes by
+_others_;--even so in the purchase or marriage-contract only the
+knightly seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them is
+thrown into the bargain. Even so, higher up, is a princess merely a
+blooming twig, which a princely sponsor plucks off and carries home, not
+for the sake of the _fruits_, but because a _bee-swarm_ of lands and
+people has attached itself thereto.
+
+If a father, like our Minister, has not much, then he can pawn his
+children, as the Egyptians did their parents (namely, the mummies of
+them), as mortgages and hand-pledges or imperial pawns, which are not
+redeemed.
+
+At present the mercantile order, which formerly dealt only in foreign
+products, has got possession of this branch of commerce also; methinks,
+however, they might find room enough in their lower vaults to be selfish
+and damned, without going up stairs to the daughter. In Guinea only the
+nobility can trade; with us they are cut off and debarred from almost
+all trade, except the small trade in daughters, and the few other things
+which grow on their own estates; hence is it that they hold so fast to
+this liberty of trade, and that the noblesse seem here to be a Hanse
+alliance for this delicate branch of business; so that one may, in some
+manner, compare the high standing[152] of this class with the _higher_
+one (in a literal sense) which marketable people in Rome were obliged to
+mount[153] in order to be seen.
+
+It is a common objection of young and (so-called) sensitive hearts, that
+this sort of transaction very much constrains, or in fact crushes love;
+whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation for it as this very
+thing. For when the bargain is once concluded and entered by the
+bookkeeper (the parson) in the ledger, then does the time truly come on
+when the daughter can consider and provide for her heart, namely, the
+fair season after marriage, which is universally assumed in France and
+Italy, and is gradually coming to be in Germany also, as the more
+suitable time for a female heart to choose freely among the host of
+men; her state then, like the Venetian, grows out of a commercial into a
+conquering one. The husband himself, too, is quite as little interrupted
+afterward as beforehand in his love by this short business transaction;
+all is, that now--as in Nuremberg every Jew is followed by an old
+woman--close upon the heels of our bridegroom a young one is seen. Nay,
+often, the nuptial tradesman conceives an inclination even for the
+article which he has carried home with him,--which is an uncommon piece
+of good fortune; and as Moses Mendelssohn, with his bundle of silken
+wares under his arm, thought out his _letters_ upon the _affections_, so
+do better men, amidst their business, meditate love-letters on this
+branch of trade, and deal with the virgin--as merchants in Messina[154]
+do with the holy virgin--in Co.; but of course such profitable
+connections of love with business must always be rare birds, and are
+little to be counted upon.
+
+The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with
+children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make
+something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to
+prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show
+of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous
+leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of
+apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal
+liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your
+daughters _friendship_ for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage,
+exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in
+the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or
+do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for
+training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself?
+You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves
+educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy
+inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to _them_;
+and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and
+but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under
+the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale
+as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier
+period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the
+gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being?
+
+If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they
+afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what
+is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole
+heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly _your own_; _your_ glory and
+aggrandizement, _your_ feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy
+with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your
+silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage;
+for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a
+death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial
+merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them
+sinners,[155] in order not to be yourselves robbers?
+
+Tell me not that marriages of inclination often turn out ill, and forced
+marriages often well enough, as may be seen in the instance of the
+Moravians, the old Germans, and Orientals. Name me rather all barbaric
+times and nations, in which--for both indeed only reckon the man, never
+the wife--a happy marriage means nothing more than a happy husband. No
+one stands by near enough to hear and to count a woman's sighs; the
+unheard pang becomes at last speechless; new wounds weaken the bleeding
+of the oldest. Further: the ill-luck of fancy-marriages is chargeable
+upon your very opposition to them, and your war against the married
+couple. Still further: every forced marriage is, in fact, for the most
+part, half a marriage of fancy. Finally: the best marriages are in the
+middling class, where the bond is more apt to be love; and the worst in
+the higher, where it is more a mercenary motive; and as often as in
+these classes a prince should choose merely with his heart, he would get
+a heart, and never lose nor betray it.
+
+Now, then, what sort of a hand is that into which you so often force the
+fairest, finest, richest, but rebellious one? Commonly, a black, old,
+withered, greedy fist. For decrepit, rich, or aspiring libertines have
+too much of the connoisseur, too much satiety and freedom, to steal any
+other than the most splendid creatures; the less perfect fall into the
+hands and homes of mere lovers and amateurs. But how base is a man, who,
+abandoned of his own character, backed merely by the despotic edict of a
+stranger, paying for his fortune with a stolen one, can now drag away
+the unprotected soul from the yearning eyes of a weeping love into a
+long, cold life, and clasp her to his arms as against the edges of
+frosty swords, and therein so near to his eye see her bleed and grow
+pale and quiver! The man of honor even gives with a blush, but he takes
+not with a blush; and the better lion, the beast, spares woman;[156]
+but these soul-buyers extort from constrained beings at last even the
+testimony of free-will.
+
+Mother of the poor heart, which thou wilt bless by misfortune, hear me!
+Suppose thy daughter should harden herself against the misery which is
+forced upon her, hast thou not reduced her rich dream of life to empty
+sleep, and taken out of it love's islands of the blest, and all that
+bloomed thereon; the fair days when one roamed over them, and the
+perpetual happy retrospect of them when they already lie with their
+blooming peaks low in the horizon? Mother, if this happy time was ever
+in thy breast, then snatch it not from thy daughter; and if it was
+barbarously torn from thee, then think of thy bitter pang, and bequeath
+it not!
+
+Suppose, further, she makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now
+what she might have been to its darling; and whether she does not then
+deserve anything better than to gratify a jailer, locked in with her
+forever by one shutting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well
+as this; thou wilt heap a double disaster upon thy soul,--the long agony
+of thy daughter, and the growing coldness of her husband, who by and by
+comes to feel and resent refusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time
+when man first needs the morning-sun,--namely, youth. O, sooner make all
+other seasons of the day of life cloudy; they are all alike, the third
+and the fourth and fifth decades; only at sunrise let it not rain into
+life; only this one never returning, irredeemable time darken not!
+
+But how, if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely joys, relations, a
+happy marriage, hopes, a whole posterity, to thy plans and commands,
+but the very being herself[157] whom thou constrainest? Who can justify
+thee, or dry thy tears, when thy best daughter,--for she is the very one
+who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, as the monks of La
+Trappe see their cloister burn down, without one of them breaking the
+vow of silence,[158]--when she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and
+half in the shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and pale;
+when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last can no longer conceal
+anything from thee, but for years bears round the paleness and the pangs
+of decline in the very orient of life; and when thou canst not console
+her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience cannot suppress
+the name of infanticide; and when at last the worn-out victim lies there
+under thy tears, and the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young,
+so faint, and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complaining, with
+languishing and longing looks, with painfully confused and conflicting
+emotions, sinks with her blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of
+death,--O guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed her in, who
+will comfort thee? But I would call every guiltless one, and show her
+the bitter dying, and ask her, Shall thy child also perish thus?
+
+
+59. CYCLE.
+
+It was a romantic day for Zesara, even outwardly; sun-sparks and
+rain-drops played dazzlingly through the heavens. He had received a
+letter from his father, dated at Madrid, which stamped at last the black
+seal of certainty on the threatened death of his sister, and in which
+there was nothing agreeable but the intelligence that Don Gaspard, with
+the Countess of Romeiro, whose guardianship he was now concluding, would
+travel in autumn (the Italian spring) to Italy. Two tones had been, in
+his life, stolen away from the musical scale of love; he had never known
+by experience what it was to love a brother or a sister. The coincidence
+of her death-night with that night in Tartarus, this whole clawing into
+the holy images and wishes of his heart, stirred up his spirit, and he
+felt with indignation how impotently a whole assailing world might seek
+to remove Liana's image from his soul; and again he painfully felt, that
+this very Liana herself believed in her near decline.
+
+In this situation was he found by an unexpected invitation from the
+Minister's lady herself,--sun-sparks and rain-drops played in his heaven
+also. He flew; in the antechamber stood the angel who broke the six
+apocalyptic seals,--Rabette. She had run to meet him from a bashfulness
+before company, and had embraced him sooner than he her. How gladly did
+he look into the familiar, honest face! with tears he heard the name of
+brother, when he had lost a sister to-day!
+
+The reason of her appearance was this: when the Director was at the
+Minister's lady's the last time, the latter had, with easy, disguised
+hand, opened her house to his daughter, "for the sake of a knowledge of
+empty city life, and for change,"--in order that she might hereafter
+venture to knock at _his_ door on her own daughter's behalf. He said he
+would "forward the female wild deer to her with pleasure, and all
+possible despatch." And as in Blumenbuehl Rabette had answered him No,
+then Yes, then No, then Yes, and had held with her mother, even before
+midnight, an imperial-exchequer-revision, a mint-probation-day about
+everything which a human being from the country can wear in the city,
+she packed up there and unpacked here.
+
+"Ah, I am afraid in there," said she to Albano; "they are all too
+clever, and I am now so stupid!" He found beside the domestic trio the
+Princess also, and the little Helena from Lilar, that lovely medallion
+of a fine day to his stirred heart. Indescribably was he smitten with
+Liana's womanly advances to Rabette, as if he shared her with her. With
+courtesy and tenderness, a mildness also, which was without falsehood or
+pride, came to the help of the embarrassed playmate, on whose face the
+inborn gayety and eloquence of nature now singularly contrasted with her
+artificial dumb gravity. Charles, with his ready familiarity, was more
+in a condition to entangle than to extricate her; only Liana gave to her
+soul and tongue, if only by the embroidery-frame, a free field; Rabette
+could write with the embroidering needle, no illuminated and initial
+letters, indeed, but still a good running-hand.
+
+She gave--turning her face toward her brother's, in order to pluck
+courage therefrom--a clear report of the dangerous road and upsets,
+laughing all the while, after the manner of the people when they are
+telling their mishaps. Her brother was to her, at the company's expense,
+both company and world; upon him alone streamed forth her warmth and
+speech. She said she could from her chamber see him "play on the
+harpsichord." Liana immediately led both thither. How richly and
+sublimely, beyond Rabette's demands upon city-life, was the maidenly
+_hospitium_ set out, from the tulip (not a blooming one, but a
+work-basket of Liana's,--although every tulip is such a basket for the
+finger of spring) even to the piano-forte, of which she, of course, for
+the present can use no more than seven treble-keys for half a waltz?
+Five moderate trunks of clothes--for therewith she thought to come out,
+and show the city that the country too could wear clothes--represented
+to him in their well-known flower-pieces and tin bands the old
+impressions (_incunabula_) of his earliest days of life; and to-day
+every trace of the old season of love refreshed him. She made him look
+for his windows, from one of which the Librarian was fixing a hard gaze
+on a paving-stone in the street to see how often he could hit it by
+spitting.
+
+Here alone, in the presence only of the brother, Liana spoke more loudly
+to the sister the word of friendship, and assured her how happy she
+meant to make her, and how sincere she was in all that she promised. O
+look not into the flame of the pure, religious, sisterly love with any
+yellow eye of jealousy! Can you not comprehend that this fair soul even
+now distributes its rich flames among all sisterly hearts, until love
+concentrates them into _one_ sun; as, according to the ancients, the
+scattered lightnings of night gather themselves in the morning into one
+solid solar orb? She was, everywhere, an eye for every heart; like a
+mother, she never once forgot the little in the great; and she poured
+out (let no one deny me the privilege of printing this minute example)
+for little Helena the cup of coffee, which the Doctor forbade, half
+full of cream, in order that it might be without strength or harm.
+
+The impatient Princess had already looked ten times toward the heavens,
+through which now beams of light, now rain-columns flew, till at length
+out of the consumed cloud-snow the broad fields of blue grew up, and
+Julienne could lead out the delighted young people into the garden, to
+the annoyance of the Minister's lady, who did not like to expose Liana
+to the _Serein_,--five or six blasts of the evening-wind, and the wading
+through rain-water that stood a nineteenth of a line[159] deep. She
+herself stayed behind. How new-born, glistening, and inviting was all
+down below! The larks soared out of the distant fields like tones, and
+warbled near over the garden,--in all the leaves hung stars, and the
+evening air threw the liquid jewelry, the trembling earrings, from the
+blossoms down upon the flowers, and bore sweet incense to meet the bees.
+The Idyl of the year, Spring, parcelled its sweet pastoral land among
+the young souls. Albano took his sister's hand, but he listened vacantly
+to her intelligence from home. Liana went far in advance with the
+Princess, and bathed herself in the open heavens of confidential
+communion.
+
+Suddenly Julienne stood still, chatting playfully with her, in order to
+let the Count come up, and to inquire after letters from Don Gaspard,
+and after tidings of the Countess Romeiro. He communicated, with glowing
+countenance, the contents of to-day's letter. In Julienne's physiognomy
+there was a smile almost of raillery. To the intelligence of Linda's
+intended journey she replied: "That is just herself; she will fain learn
+everything,--travel over everything. I wager she climbs up _on_ Mont
+Blanc and _into_ Vesuvius. Liana and I call her, for this reason, the
+Titaness." How graciously did Liana listen, with her eyes wholly on her
+female friend! "You are not acquainted with her?" she inquired of the
+tortured one. He answered, emphatically, in the negative. Roquairol came
+up; "_Passez, Monsieur_," said she, making room, and giving him a sign
+to move on. Liana looked very earnestly after. "_La voici!_" said
+Julienne, letting the cover of a likeness spring up, by a pressure, on a
+ring of her little hand. Good youth! it was exactly the form which
+arose, that magic night, out of Lago Maggiore, sent to thee by the
+spirits! "She is hit there, exactly," said she to the agitated man.
+"Very," said he, confusedly. She did not investigate this
+contradictory[160] "very"; but Liana looked at him; "very--beautifully
+and boldly!" he continued; "but I do not love boldness in women." "O,
+one can readily believe that of men!" replied Julienne; "no hostile
+power loves it in the other party."
+
+They passed along now through the chestnut avenue by the holy spot where
+Albano had seen, for the first time, the bride of his hopes shining and
+suffering behind the water-jets. O it was here that he would gladly,
+with that soul of his painfully excited by the mutual reaction of
+wonderful circumstances, have knelt down before the still angel so near
+him! The tender Julienne perceived that she had to spare an agitated
+heart; after a tolerably loud silence, she said, in a serious tone: "A
+lovely evening,--we'll go to the water-house. There is where Liana was
+cured, Count! The fountains must leap, too." "O the fountains!" said
+Albano, and looked with indescribable emotion upon Liana. She thought,
+however, he meant those in the flute-dell. Helena cried out behind for
+them to wait, and came tripping along after with two little hands full
+of dewy auriculas, which she had plucked, and gave them all to Liana,
+expecting from her, as collatress of benefices, the flower-distribution.
+"The little one, too, still thinks of the beautiful Sunday at Lilar,"
+said Liana. She gave the Princess one or two, and Helena nodded; and
+when Liana looked at her, she nodded again, as a sign the Count should
+have something too: "More yet!" she cried, when he had got some; and the
+more Liana gave, the more did the child cry, "More,"--as children are
+wont to do, in the hyperboles of their tendency to the infinite.
+
+They went over a green bridge, and came into a neat room. Instead of the
+piano-forte formerly there, stood a glass chapel of the goddess of
+music, a harmonica. The Captain screwed in behind a tapestry-door, and
+immediately all the confined spring-waters shot up outside with silvery
+wings toward heaven. O how the sprinkled world burned as they stepped
+out on the top!
+
+Why wast thou, my Albano, just at this hour not entirely happy? Why,
+then, do pains pierce through all our unions,--and why does the heart,
+like its veins, bleed most richly when it is heated? Above them lay the
+still, wounded heavens in the bandage of a long, white mass of cloud;
+the evening sun stood as yet behind the palace, but on both sides of it
+his purple mantle of clouds floated in broad folds away across the sky;
+and if one turned round toward the east to the mountains of Blumenbuehl,
+green living flames streamed upward, and, like golden birds, the _ignes
+fatui_ danced through the moist twigs and on the eastern windows, but
+the fountains still threw their white silver into the gold.
+
+Then the sun swam forth, with red hot breast, drawing golden circles in
+the clouds, and the arching water-shoots burned bright. Julienne bent
+upon Albano--near whom she had constantly remained, as if by way of
+atonement--a hearty look, as if he were her brother, and Charles said to
+Liana, "Sister, thy evening song!" "With all my heart," said she; for
+she was right glad of the opportunity to withdraw herself, with the
+melancholy seriousness of her enjoyment, and down below in the solitary
+room to utter aloud, on the harmonica-bells, all that which rapture and
+the eyes bury in silence.
+
+She went down; the melodious requiem of the day went up,--the zephyr of
+sound, the harmonica, flew, waving, over the garden-blossoms,--and the
+tones cradled themselves on the thin lilies of the up-growing water, and
+the silver lilies burst aloft for pleasure, and from the brightness of
+the sun, into flamy blossoms, and over yonder reposed mother sun in a
+blue pasture, and looked greatly and tenderly upon her human children.
+Canst thou, then, hold thy heart, Albano, so that it shall remain
+concealed with its joys and sorrows, when thou hearest the peaceful
+virgin walking in the moonlight of tones? O when the tone which trickles
+down in the ether announces to her the early wasting away of her life,
+and when the soft, long-drawn melodies flow away from her like the
+rose-oil of many crushed days; dost thou not think of that, Albano? How
+the human creature plays! The little Helena flings up auriculas at the
+flashing water-veins, in order that she may dash one of them with the
+spray of the intercepted jet, and the youth Zesara bends far over the
+balustrade, and lets the stream of water leap off from his sloping hand
+upon his hot face and eye, in order to cool and conceal himself. The
+fiery veil was snatched from him by his sister; Rabette was one of
+those persons whom this musical tremor gnaws upon even physically, just
+as, on the other hand, the Captain was little affected by the harmonica,
+and indeed was always least moved when others were most so; there were
+no pains with which the innocent girl was less familiar than with sweet
+ones; the bitter-sweet melancholy into which she sank away in the idle
+solitude of Sundays, she and others had scolded at as mere sullenness.
+At this moment she felt all at once, with a blush, her stout heart
+seized, whirled round, and scalded through as by hot whirlpools. Besides
+it had to-day already been swayed to and fro by the meeting with her
+brother again, the leaving of her mother, and her confused bashfulness
+before strangers, and even by the sight of the sunny-red mountain of
+Blumenbuehl. In vain did the fresh brown eyes and the overripe full lip
+battle against the uprending pain; the hot springs tore their way
+through, and the blooming face with the strong chin grew red and full of
+tears. Painfully ashamed, and dreading to be taken for a child,
+especially as all her companions' emotions had remained invisible, she
+pressed her handkerchief over her burning face, and said to her brother,
+"I must go away, I am not well, I shall choke,"--and ran down to the
+gentle Liana.
+
+Yes, thou needest only carry thither thy shy pangs! Liana turned, and
+saw her hastily and violently drying her eyes. Ah, hers too were indeed
+full. When Rabette saw it, she said, courageously, "I absolutely cannot
+hear it,--I must scream,--I am really ashamed of myself." "O thou dear
+heart," cried Liana, joyfully falling upon her neck, "be not ashamed,
+and look into my eye! Sister, come to me, as often as thou art troubled;
+I will gladly weep with thy soul, and dry thy eye even sooner than my
+own." There was an overmastering enchantment in these tones,--in these
+looks of love, because Liana fancied she was mourning over some eclipsed
+star or other of her life. And never did trembling gratitude embrace
+more freshly and youthfully a venerated heart than did Rabette Liana.
+
+And now came Albano. Awakened by the dying away of the cradle-song, he
+had hurried after her, leaving all the cold and other drops unwiped from
+his fiery cheeks. "What ails thee, sister?" he asked, hastily. Liana,
+still lingering in the embrace and the inspiration, answered quickly,
+"You have a good sister; I will love her as her brother does." The sweet
+words of the so deeply affected souls and the fiery storm of his being
+carried him away, and he clasped the embracing ones and pressed the
+sisterly hearts to each other and kissed his sister; when, at the sight
+of Liana's confused bending aside of her head, he was terrified and
+flamed up crimson.
+
+He must needs fly. With these wild agitations he could not stay in the
+presence of Liana, and before the cold, mirroring glances of the
+company. But the night was to be as wonderful as the day; he hastened
+with live looks, that appeared like angry ones, out of the city to the
+Titaness, Nature, who at once calms and exalts us. He went along by
+exposed mill-wheels, about which the stream wound itself in foam. The
+evening clouds stretched themselves out like giants at rest, and basked
+in the ruddy dawn of America, and the storm swept among them, and the
+fiery Briareuses started up; night built the triumphal-arch of the
+milky-way, and the giants marched gloomily under. And in every element
+Nature, like a storm-bird, beat her rustling wings.
+
+Albano lay, without knowing it, on the woodland bridge of Lilar, under
+which the wind-streams went roaring through. He glowed like the clouds
+with the lingering tinges of _his_ sun; his inner wings were, like those
+of the ostrich, full of spines, and wounded while they lifted him; the
+romantic spiritual day, the letter of his father, Liana's tearful eyes,
+his boldness, and then his bliss and remorse about it, and now the
+sublime night-world on all sides round about him, passed to and fro
+within him and shook his young heart; he touched with his fiery cheek
+the moistened tree-tops, and did not cool himself, and he was near to
+that sounding, flying heart, the nightingale, and yet hardly heard her.
+Like a sun, his heart goes through his pale thoughts, and quenches on
+its path one constellation after another. On the earth and in the
+heavens, in the past and in the future, stood before Albano only one
+form; "Liana," said his heart, "Liana," said all nature.
+
+He went down the bridge and up the western triumphal-arch, and the
+glimmering Lilar lay before him in repose. Lo! there he saw the old
+"pious father" on the balustrade of the arch, fast asleep. But how
+different was the revered form from the picture of it which he had
+shaped to himself according to that of the deceased Prince. The white
+locks, flowing richly down under the Quaker hat, the femininely and
+poetically rounded brow, the arched nose and the youthful lip, which
+even in late life had not yet withered, and the childlikeness of the
+soft face, announced a heart which, in the evening-twilight of age,
+takes its rest and looks toward the stars. How lonely is the holy sleep!
+The Death-angel has conducted man out of the light world into the dark
+hermitage built over it; his friends stand without near the cell;
+within, the hermit talks with himself, and his darkness grows brighter
+and brighter, and jewels and pastures and whole spring-days gleam out at
+last,--and all is clear and broad! Albano stood before the sleep with an
+earnest soul, which contemplates life and its riddles;--not only the
+incoming and the outgoing of life are hidden with a manifold veil, but
+even the short path itself; as around Egyptian temples, so around the
+greatest of all temples sphinxes lie, and, reversing the case as it was
+with the sphinx, he only solves the riddle who dies.
+
+The old man spoke, behind the speech-grating of sleep, with dead ones
+who had journeyed with him over the morning meadows of youth, and
+addressed with heavy lip the dead Prince and his spouse. How sublimely
+did the curtain of the venerable countenance, pictured over with a long
+life, hang down before the pastoral world of youth dancing behind it,
+and how touchingly did the gray form roam round with its youthful crown
+in the cold evening dew of life, taking it for morning-dew, and looking
+toward the east, and toward the sun! The youth ventured only to touch
+lovingly a lock of the old man; he meant to leave him, in order not to
+alarm him with a strange form, before the rising moon should have
+touched his eyelids and awakened him. Only he would first crown the
+teacher of his loved one with the twigs of a neighboring laurel. When he
+came back from it, the moon had already penetrated with her radiance
+through the great eyelids, and the old man opened them before the
+exalted youth, who, with the glowing rosy moon of his countenance,
+glorified by the moon overhead, stood before him like a genius with the
+crown. "Justus!" cried the old man, "is it thou?" He took him for the
+old Prince, who, with just such blooming cheeks and open eyes, had
+passed before him in the under-world of dreams.
+
+But he soon came back out of the dreamy Elysium into the botanical, and
+knew even Albano's name. The Count, with open mien, grasped his hands,
+and said to him how long and profoundly he had respected him. Spener
+answered in few and quiet words, as old men do who have seen everything
+on the earth so often. The glory of the moonlight flowed down now on the
+tall form, and the quietly open eye was illumined,--an eye which not so
+much penetrates as lets everything penetrate it. The almost cold
+stillness of the features, the youthful gait of the tall form, which
+bore its years upright as a crown upon the head, not as a burden upon
+the back, more as flowers than as fruit, the singular mixture of former
+manly ardor and of womanly tenderness,--all this called up before Albano
+the image of a prophet of the Eastern land. That broad stream which came
+roaring down through the alps of youth, glides now calmly and smoothly
+through its pastures; but throw rocks before it, and again it starts up
+roaring.
+
+The old man looked upon the youthful youth, the oftener the more warmly.
+In our days youth is, in young men, a bodily and spiritual beauty at
+once. He invited him to accompany him this beautiful night to his quiet
+cottage, which stands overhead there near the church-spire, that looks
+down from above into flute-dell. On the singular, mazy paths which they
+now took, Lilar was transformed to Albano's eyes into a new world; like
+flying silver clouds of night, the glimmering beauties were continually
+shifting and arranging themselves together into new groups, and
+occasionally the two companions penetrated through exotic shrubbery with
+lively-colored blossoms and wondrous odors. The pious father asked him
+with interest about his former and present life.
+
+They came to the opening of a dark passage into the earth. Spener, in a
+friendly manner, took Albano's right hand, and said this way led _up_ to
+his mountain-abode. But soon it seemed to go downward. The stream of the
+vale, the Rosana, sounded even in here, but only single drops of
+moonlight trickled through scattered mountain openings overspun with
+twigs. The excavation extended farther downward; still more remotely
+murmured the water in the vale. And yet a nightingale sang a lay that
+grew nearer and nearer. Albano was composed and silent. Everywhere they
+went along before narrow gates of splendor which only a star of heaven
+seemed to fling in. They descended now to a distant, illuminated magic
+bower of bright red and poisonous dark flowers, arched over at once with
+little peaked leaves and great broad foliage; and a confusing white
+light, partly sprinkled about by the living rays that gushed in, and
+partly flying off from the lilies only as white dust, drew the eye into
+an intoxicating whirl. Zesara entered with a dazzled eye, and as he
+looked to the right, in the direction of the fire that rained in, he
+found Spener's eye sharply fixed upon something to the left; he looked
+thither, and saw an old man, entirely like the deceased Prince, dart by
+and stalk into a side cavern; his hand quivered with affright, so did
+Spener's,--the latter pressed hastily on downward; and at last there
+glistened a blue, starry opening: they stepped out....
+
+Heavens! a new starry arch; a pale sun moves through the stars, and they
+swim, as in play, after him,--below reposes an enraptured earth full of
+glitter and flowers; its mountains run gleaming away up toward the arch
+of heaven, and bend over toward Sirius; and through the unknown land
+delights glide, like dreams over which man weeps for joy.
+
+"What is that? Am I on or under the earth?" said Albano, astounded; and
+his wandering eye fled for refuge to the face of a living man,--"I saw a
+dead man." Much more affectionately than before, the old man answered,
+"This is Lilar; behind us is my little house!" He explained the
+mechanical illusion[161] of the descent. "Here, now, have I stood so
+many thousand times, and feasted myself with so fervent a heart on the
+works of God. How looked the form, my son?" "Like the dead Prince," said
+Alban. In a startled, but almost commanding tone, Spener said, with a
+low voice, "Be silent, like me, until his time,--it was not he. Thy
+salvation and the salvation of many hangs thereon. Go no more to-day
+through the passage."
+
+Albano, half-angered by all the experience of this singular day, said,
+"Well, then, I go back through Tartarus. But what means the ghostly
+creation that everywhere pursues me?" "Thou hast," said the old man,
+lovingly and refreshingly, laying a finger on the youth's brow, "nothing
+but invisible friends about thee,--and cast thyself everywhere upon God.
+There are a great many Christians who say, God is near or far off, that
+his wisdom and his goodness appear quite specially in one age or
+another,--truly that is idle deception; is he not the unchangeable,
+eternal Love, and does he not love and bless us at one hour just as much
+as at another?" As we ought, properly, to call the eclipse of the sun an
+eclipse of the earth, so it is man who is obscured, never the Infinite;
+but we are like the people who look at the obscuration of the sun in the
+water, and then, when the water trembles, cry out, "See how the
+glorious sun struggles!"
+
+Albano stepped into the solitude of the old man's neatly ordered
+dwelling, only with heaviness, because, in the hot ashes of his volcano,
+every feeling put forth and throve the more luxuriantly. Spener
+pointed over from his mountain-ridge to the little so-called
+"Thunderhouse,"[162] and advised him to occupy it this summer. Albano
+took his leave at length, but his agitated heart was a sea, in which the
+morning sun is glowingly still half reflected, and into which, at
+evening, a lead-colored storm dips, and which swells glistening under
+the storm. He looked up from below at the old man, who was looking after
+him; but he would hardly have wondered to-day if _he_ had either sunk or
+ascended. With indignant and spirited resolutions, to stake and
+sacrifice his life for his love, at which cold hands were grasping, he
+strode without any fear through Tartarus, which, by the magnifying
+mirror of night, was distorted into a black giant armament: thus is the
+spirit-world only a region of our inner world, and _I_ fear only
+_myself_. When he stood before the altar of the heart in the dumb night,
+where nothing was audible but the thoughts, then did the bold spirit
+advise him repeatedly to call upon the dead old man, and swear aloud by
+his heart, full of dust; but when he looked up to the fair heavens, his
+heart was consecrated, and only prayed, "O good God, give me Liana!"
+
+It grew dark; the clouds, which he had taken for the shining mountains
+of a new earth, stretching away into the heavens, had reached the moon,
+and overshadowed it with darkness.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[138] _Tempestiarii_, or Storm-makers, was a name given, in the
+Middle Ages, to the master-wizards who could conjure up foul
+weather. Weather-prayers were used in the churches against them,
+and other wizard-masters called in to counteract the former.
+
+[139] The Polish dancer always carries a rod under the fur-dress,
+wherewith his partner is excused by a blow or two, when she makes
+a misstep.--_Upper Siles. Monthly Mag._, July, 1788.
+
+[140] Dread of spirits.
+
+[141] The German for this is _sauer-stoff_ (sour-stuff).--TR.
+
+[142] A noted review in Richter's day, published at Erlangen near
+Nuremberg.--TR.
+
+[143] Thus did the turnkeys name their prisoners.
+
+[144] Alexand. ab Al., v. 4.
+
+[145] To distinguish himself from the eagle of the Emperor, who
+holds something in both claws.
+
+[146] Bouverot was a Catholic.
+
+[147] He meant one with the poor Lector.
+
+[148] Literally, "twilight-bird."--TR.
+
+[149] To _get the basket_ means a refusal.--TR.
+
+[150] I do not mean (as perhaps may appear from the _selling_)
+Pitt the Minister, but Pitt the Diamond, which the father of the
+present Pitt traded away to the Duke Regent of France, and for
+whose splinters he got twelve thousand ducats into the bargain.
+
+[151] I sell only my landscapes, and throw in the figures.
+
+[152] _Stand_, in German, has the double meaning of an _estate_
+and a _stand_.--TR.
+
+[153] Plaut. Bacch., Act 4, Scen. 7, 4, 16, 17.
+
+[154] Seventh Part of the new Collection of Travels.
+
+[155] I speak more particularly of the daughters, because they
+are the most frequent and greatest victims; the sons are
+bloodless mass-offerings.
+
+[156] Pliny, Nat. Hist., VIII. 16.
+
+[157] And this is quite probable. Dr. Edward Hill reckoned that
+in England eight thousand die annually of unhappy love,--of
+broken hearts, as the Englishwomen touchingly express it. Beddoes
+shows that vegetable food--and of this such victims are
+particularly fond--fosters consumption, and that females incline
+to this. Besides, the times of longing, which of itself, even
+without disappointment, as homesickness shows, is a poisonous
+revolving leaden ball, occur in youth, when the seed of pectoral
+maladies most easily springs up. O many married ones fall, under
+misconstructions, victims to the death-angel, into whose hand
+they had, previously to marriage, put the sword they themselves
+had sharpened!
+
+[158] Forster's Views, Vol. I.
+
+[159] A line (French) is one twelfth of an inch.--TR.
+
+[160] Because he had just said he did not know her.--TR.
+
+[161] Weigel. in Jena, invented the inverted bridge (_pons
+heteroclitus_), a stairway on which a person seems to descend, by
+going up.--_Bush's Handbook of Inventions_, Vol. VII.
+
+[162] It had the name from its height and its being so often
+struck with lightning.
+
+
+
+
+THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+     ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE
+     PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TETE-A-TETE.--THE
+     RIDE TO BLUMENBUeHL.
+
+
+60. CYCLE.
+
+Out of the drops which the harmonica had wrung from Rabette's heart the
+old enchanter, Fate, is perhaps preparing, as other enchanters do out of
+blood, dark forms; for Roquairol had seen it, and wondered at the
+sensibility of a heart which hitherto had been set in motion more by
+occupations than by romances. Now he drew nearer to her with a new
+interest. Since the night of the oath, he had drawn his heart out of all
+unworthy fetters. In this freedom of victory, he went forward proudly,
+and stretched out his arms more lightly and longingly after noble love.
+He now visited his sister incessantly; but he still kept to himself.
+Rabette was not fair enough for him, beside his tender sister. She was
+an artificial ribbon-rose beside one by Van der Ruysch; she said
+herself, naively, that she looked, with her village-complexion in white
+lawn, like black-tea in white cups. But in her healthy eyes, not yet
+corroded into dimness by tragical drops, and on her fresh lips, life
+glowed; her powerful chin and her arched nose threatened and promised
+spirit and strength; and her upright and downright heart grasped and
+repelled decidedly and intensely. He determined to prove her. The
+Talmud[163] forbids to inquire after the price of a thing, when one does
+not mean to buy it; but the Roquairols always cheapen and look further.
+They tear a soul in two, as children do a bee, in order to eat out of it
+the honey which it would gather. They borrow from the eel, not only his
+dexterity in slipping away, but also the power to twine around the arm
+and crush it.
+
+And now he let all the dazzling powers of his multi-form nature play
+before her,--the sense of his ascendency permitted him to move freely
+and gracefully, and the careless heart seemed open on all sides,--he
+linked so freely earnestness and jest, glow and glitter, the greatest
+and the least, and energy with mildness. Unhappy girl! now art thou his;
+and he snatches thee from thy _terra firma_ with rapacious wings up into
+the air, and then hurls thee down. Like a vine running on a
+lightning-rod, thou wilt richly unfold thy powers and bloom up on him;
+but he will draw down the lightning upon himself and thy blossoms, and
+strip thee of thy leaves and rend thee utterly.
+
+Rabette had never conceived of such a man, much less seen one; he made
+his way by main force into her sound heart, and a new world went in
+after him. Through Liana's love for the Captain, hers mounted still
+higher; and the two could speak of their brothers in friendly
+reciprocation. The good Liana sought to bring to the help of her friend
+many a thing which would hardly take hold, particularly mythology,
+which, by reason of the French pronunciation of the names of the gods,
+was still more unserviceable to her. Even with books Liana sought to
+bring them together; so that reading was to her a sort of week-day
+Divine service, which she attended with true devotion, and was always
+delighted when it was over. Through all these water-wheels of knowledge
+streamed Roquairol's love, and helped drive and draw. How many blushes
+now flitted without any occasion over her whole face! The laugh which
+once expressed her gayety, came now too often, and betokened only a
+helpless heart, which longed to sigh.
+
+So stood matters with her when Charles once playfully stole behind her
+and covered her eyes with his hand, in order, under the mask of her
+brother's voice, to give her soft, sisterly names. She confounded the
+similar voices; she pressed the hand heartily, but her eye was hot and
+moist. Then she discovered the mistake, and flew with the concealed
+evening and morning redness of her countenance out of the room. Now he
+looked closer into the eyes of Liana, who blamed him for it, and hers
+too had wept. She would fain at first conceal from him the object of the
+sisterly emotion; but another's No was to him, of old, an auxiliary
+verb,--a fair wind blowing him into port. Liana grew more and more
+agitated; at last she related how Rabette's account of Albano's youthful
+history had drawn from her in turn the history of his early relations,
+and that she had portrayed to her the bloody night of the masquerade,
+and even shown his bloody dress. "And then," said Liana, "she wept with
+me as heartily as if she had been thy sister. O, it is a dear heart!"
+Charles saw the two linked together like two pastures, namely, by the
+rainbow which stands over both with its drops; he drew her with thankful
+love to his breast. "Art thou then happy?" asked Liana, in a tone
+ominous of something sad.
+
+She must needs disclose to him her full heart, and tell him all. He
+heard with astonishment, how that whole Tartarus-night, on which the
+unknown voice had promised Linda de Romeiro to his friend, had been made
+known to her. By whom? She held an inexorable silence; he contented
+himself, because, to be sure, it could only have been Augusti, who was
+the only one that knew of it. "And now believest thou, thou heart from
+heaven," said he, "that I and the brother of my soul could ever separate
+by robbing each other? O, it is all otherwise, all otherwise! He curses
+the mock-spirits and the object of the mimicry. O he loves me; and my
+heart will rejoice in the day when it is his!" The touching ambiguity of
+these last words dissolved him in a sacred melancholy.
+
+But she, in the midst of the heartiest overflow of feeling, took part,
+as if out of piety, with the spirits, and said: "Speak not thus of
+spiritual apparitions! They exist, that I know,--only one needs not fear
+them." Here, however, with firm hand she held fast the veil over her
+experiences; he too had known long since, that, notwithstanding her most
+tremblingly delicate feelings, which shrunk even from the sight of the
+blue veins on the lily hand, as from a wound, she had appeared
+unexpectedly courageous before the dead and in the ghostly hours of
+fantasy.
+
+Behind the waves of so different an emotion which now drove his heart up
+and down, Rabette was eclipsed. He burned now only for the hour when he
+could tell his Albano the singular treachery of the Lector.
+
+
+61. CYCLE.
+
+Even before the Captain disclosed to his friend Augusti's probable
+treachery, Albano was almost entirely at variance with his two tutors.
+In a circle full of young hearts which beat for one another, and still
+more fondly fight for one another, two always take an indissoluble hold
+of each other, and become one at others' expense.
+
+Albano boldly broke with every one whom Charles displeased. Besides,
+Schoppe had long been loved by few, because few can endure a perfectly
+free man; the flower-chains hold better, they think, when galley-chains
+run through them. He, therefore, could not bear it, when one "with too
+close a love clambered up round him so tightly that he had the freedom
+of his arms no more than if he wore them in bandages of eighty
+heads."[164] The sarcastic liveliness of his pantomime chilled the
+Captain, by having the appearance of a somewhat stricter observation,
+more than did the composed face of the Lector, who from that very
+circumstance took everything more sharply into his still eye.
+
+The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his
+intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isinglass," as he
+expressed it,--toward the tender errors of the heart, the sacred
+excesses by which man weaves into this short life a still shorter
+pleasure. On one occasion Charles walked up and down with arms akimbo
+and drooping head, as on a stage, and said, accidentally, so that the
+Titular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the
+world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody shake, in
+jest, a baker's dozen[165] of hornets, a basket of crabs, a mug of
+wood-pismires, all at once over the Librarian's skin, and take a flying
+observation of the effect of the stinging, nipping, biting; then can
+one, in a measure at least, conceive what a quivering, swelling, and
+irritation there was in him, so soon as he heard the above-mentioned
+phraseology. "Mr. Captain!" he began, drawing in a long breath, "I can
+stand through a good deal on this rusty, stupid earth,--famine,
+pestilence, courts, the stone, and fools from pole to pole; but your
+phraseology surpasses the strength of my shoulders. Sir Captain, you
+may, most certainly, use this rhetoric with perfect justice, because
+you, as you say, are not understood. But, O heavens! O devils! I hear,
+in fact, thirty thousand young men and maidens, from one
+circulating-library to another, all with inflated breast, saying and
+groaning round and round, that nobody understands them, neither their
+grandfather nor their god-parents, nor the conrector, when, in fact, the
+wrapping-paper,[166] commonplace pack does not itself understand. But
+the young man means by this merely a maiden, and the maiden a young man;
+these can appreciate each other. Out of love will I undertake, as out of
+potatoes, to serve up fourteen different dishes; let one just shear off,
+as they do off of the bears in Goettingen, its beastly hair, and no
+Blumenbach would any longer recognize it.
+
+"Mr. Von Froulay, I have somewhat often compared this cursed exaltation
+of souls, merely from low motives, with the English horsetails, which
+also always stand pointing to heaven, only because their sinews have
+been cut. Must not one be mad, when one hears every day, and reads every
+day, how the commonest souls, the very doggerels and trumpeters' pieces
+of Nature, think themselves exalted by love above all people, like cats
+that fly with hogs' bladders buckled on to them; how they rendezvous in
+the hare's form and emporium of love, the other world, as on a
+Blocksberg, and how, on this finch-ground, in this theatrical green-room
+(or dressing-room, which then becomes the opposite), they drive their
+business until they are coupled. Then it's all over; fancy and poesy,
+which now should be to them for the first time serviceable, are caught!
+They run away from them like lice from the dead, although on these the
+hair continues to sprout out. They shudder at the next world; and when
+they become widowers and widows, they do their courting very well
+without the hogs' bladders, and without the decoy-feathers, and the
+folding screen of the next world. Such a thing as this now, Sir Captain,
+provokes one, and then, in the heat, the just must suffer with the
+unjust, as your ears unfortunately attest!"
+
+Alban, who never light-mindedly forgave, silently separated himself from
+a heart, which, as he unjustly said, quenched the flames of love with
+satiric gall.
+
+In the chain of friendship with Augusti, one ring after another
+absolutely broke in twain. The Count found in the Lector a spirit of
+littleness which was more revolting to him than any bad spirit. The
+elegance of a good courtier, his propensity to keep the smallest secrets
+as faithfully as the greatest, his passion for starting up behind every
+action a long plan, his thirsty curiosity for genuine historical
+sources, at court and in the city, and his coldness toward philosophy,
+so dried up the overstrained image which Albano had formed of him, that
+it wrinkled up and grew full of rents. Such dissimilarities never rise
+among cultivated men to open feuds; but they secretly put upon the inner
+man one piece of armor after another, till he stands there in solid
+mail, and strikes out.
+
+Now, in addition to all this, the Lector bore the Captain a hearty
+grudge, because he cost the Minister's lady many anxious hours, and
+Liana, and even the Count, much money, and because he seemed to him to
+pervert the youth. The otherwise directly ascending flame of Albano was
+now, by the obstacles thrown in the way of his love, bent on all sides,
+and, like soldering fire, burned more sharply; but this sharpness
+Augusti ascribed to the friend. Albano appeared to those whom he loved
+warmer, to those whom he endured colder, than he was, and his
+earnestness was easily confounded with defiance and pride; but the
+Lector imagined that Albano's love was stolen from him by Charles.
+
+He undertook, with equal refinement and frankness, to play off on the
+Count a good map-card of the spots which were thickly sown in the
+heavenly body of this Jupiter. But he tore every map. Charles's painful
+confessions on that night extinguished all additions by other hands. And
+Albano's grand faith, that one must shield a friend entirely, and trust
+him entirely, warded off every influence. O it is a holy time, in which
+man desires offerings and priests, _without fail_, for the altar of
+friendship and love, and--beholds them; and it is a too cruel time, in
+which the so often cheated, belied bosom prophesies to itself, on
+another's bosom, in the midst of the love-draught of the moment, the
+cold neighborhood of bankruptcy!
+
+As the Lector saw perfectly that Alban, at many of his charges against
+Charles,--for instance, of his wildness and disorder,--remained cold,
+for the reason that he might deem himself to be reproached over
+another's shoulders, as the French (according to Thickness) give
+strangers praise over their own; he now, instead of the point of
+similarity, took hold of an entire dissimilarity of the Captain, his
+light-mindedness toward the sex. But this only made the matter worse.
+For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-worshipper,
+and the Lector only the one whom the coal of this fire blackens. Augusti
+cherished, in regard to love, pretty nearly the principles of the great
+world, which, merely for honor's sake, he never coined into action, and
+he assigned only the cloud-heaven near the earth to love. The Captain,
+however, spoke of a third heaven, or heaven of joy, as belonging
+thereto, wherein only saints are the blest. Augusti, after the manner of
+the great world, spoke much more freely than he acted, and sometimes as
+openly as if he were dining in the hall of a watering-place. Charles
+spoke like a maiden. The virgin ear of Albano, which was mostly closed
+in good visiting-parlors, and which in study-chambers remained open,
+united to his want of the experience that a cynical tongue is often
+found in the most continent men, for instance, in our buffoonery-loving
+forefathers, and an ascetic one in modest libertines,--these two things
+must naturally have involved the pure young man in a double error.
+
+Thus did Augusti start up within him more and more storm-birds. Both
+came often to the verge of a complete feud and challenge; for the Lector
+had too much honor to fear any one thing, and dared in cold blood as
+much as another in hot.
+
+Now, at length, did Charles disclose fully to his friend, though with
+all the tenderness of friendship, Liana's acquaintance with that
+Tartarus-night. "The otherwise reserved Lector must be after nearer
+advantages with his tattling," Albano concluded, and now the toad of
+jealousy, which lives and grows in the living tree without any visible
+way in or out, nursed itself to full size in his warm heart. Unanswered
+love is besides the most jealous. God knows whether he is not
+scenery-master of these ghost scenes working in and through each other
+with so many wheels. All these are Albano's private conclusions; open
+accusations were forbidden by his sense of honor. But his warm heart,
+always expressing itself, demanded a warmer society, and this he found
+when he followed the pious father, and went to Lilar into the
+Thunderhouse, into the midst of the flowers and summits, in order, lying
+nearer to the heart of Nature, to dream and enjoy more sweetly.
+
+There was only one warm, sun-bright spot for him in Charles's historical
+picture; namely, the hope that perhaps only the mistakes about his
+relation to the Countess, out of which Liana had been helped by her
+brother, had dictated to her the evenly cold deportment which she had
+hitherto maintained towards him. On this sunny side Rabette threw a
+billet, in which she wrote him that she was going back to her parents on
+Saturday, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence,
+the prospect of less favorable circumstances, his going to Lilar,--all
+this decided him in the purpose of snatching to himself a solitary
+moment, and therein casting off before Liana the veil from his soul and
+hers.
+
+
+62. CYCLE.
+
+Singularly did events cut across each other on the day when Albano came
+into the Ministerial house to take leave of Rabette, and (a trembling
+voice said within him) of Liana, too. Rabette beckoned to him, from the
+window, to come to her chamber. She had folded together the Icarus's
+wings of her apparel into the trunks. Over her inner being a prostrating
+storm swept to and fro. Charles had disturbed the equilibrium of her
+heart by his warmth, and had not restored it again by a word of
+recompense. Like the doves, she flutters around the high conflagration.
+O may she not, like them, escape with singed feathers, and come back
+again, and at last fall into it! She said she had longed for her
+friends, ever since she saw yesterday a flock of sheep driven through
+the city. She should accompany, on Saturday, Liana and her mother to
+attend the consecration of the church, and the interment of the princely
+couple. He begged her, so abruptly and eagerly, to contrive for him
+to-day a solitary moment with her friend in the garden, that he
+absolutely did not hear her sweet news of Liana's intention to stay
+there and make her a visit.
+
+Alas! he found with the Minister's lady that showman of magnificent
+pictures, who, like Nature, made not only a beginning of his spring, but
+an end of his autumn, with poisonous flowers,[167] Mr. Von Bouverot.
+Dian had sent him four heavenly copies from Rome; these he opened with
+dry, artistic palate. Liana received the Count again as ever. Was,
+perhaps, Raphael's _Madonna della Sedia_, in whose heaven-descended
+palladium her tender soul was absorbed, the seal-keeper of her holiest
+mystery? The all-forgetting artistic passion became her so gracefully!
+Her optic nerves had become, by her long painting, like delicate
+feelers, which closed fast around lovely forms. Certain female forms,
+like this one, stirred up her whole soul. For she had, in childhood,
+sketched in her inner heaven shining constellations of the heroines of
+romances, and in general of unseen women; great ideas of their spirit,
+their heavenly walk, their exaltation above all that she had ever seen;
+and she had felt equal shyness and longing to meet one such. Hence she
+went forth out of this colossal nympheum[168] of her fancy, so easily
+dazzled, and with such warm, heartfelt reverence, to meet pure female
+friends and the Countess Romeiro. Now certain pictures brought back
+these altar-pieces like copies. The good girl thought not of _this_, but
+her friend may well have done so, that one needed only to quicken into
+life the eyes of this loving, down-gazing Mary, and merely to warm these
+lips with tones, and then one had Liana.
+
+The German gentleman went on, and now placed beside each other Raphael's
+Joseph, telling his brothers a dream, and the older Joseph, interpreting
+one to a king, and began to translate the three Raphaels into words, and
+that with so much felicity, and not only with so much insight into
+mechanics and genius, but also with such a precise setting forth of
+every human and moral lineament, that Albano took him for a hypocrite,
+and Liana for a very good man. She seized every word with a wide-open
+heart. When Bouverot painted the prophesying Joseph, as at once
+childlike, natural, still, and firm as a rock, and glowing and
+threatening, there stood the original at her side.
+
+There also dropped from the German gentleman much thought about Da
+Vinci's boy Christ in the Temple, about the magnificently executed
+fraternization and adoption of the boy and the youth in one face. Liana
+had also copied the copy, but she and her mother were modestly silent on
+the subject.
+
+But at last Franciscus Albani disturbed the calm that had hitherto
+prevailed, by his "Repose during the Flight." While he acted the
+dream-interpreter to these picturesque dreams, and Rabette had her eyes
+fastened sharply on the Saint Joseph of this picture, sitting beside
+Mary, with an open book, Liana said, unluckily, "A fine Albani!" "I
+should think not," Rabette whispered; "brother is much more beautiful
+than this praying Joseph!" She had confounded Albani with Albano; her
+whole picture-gallery lay in the hymn-book, whose hymns she separated
+from each other with golden-red saints. The others did not comprehend;
+they knew him only as Count of Zesara,--but Liana, sweetly blushing,
+flung at Rabette a tenderly reproving glance, and looked, with mute
+endurance, more closely at another picture. Never before in Albano,--in
+whom the strongest and the tenderest feelings coupled, as the echo makes
+thunder louder and music lower,--had the bitter-sweet mingling of love
+and pity and shame wrought more warmly, and he could have at once knelt
+down before the maiden, and yet have kept silent.
+
+The German gentleman had finished, and said to the men, with a look full
+of victory, "He had, however, something more in his case, which bore
+away the palm from the Raphaels; and he would beg them to follow him
+into the adjoining apartment." On the way, he observed, that few works
+were executed with such magnificent freedom and bold abandon. In the
+room he unpacked a little bronze Satyr, against whom an overtaken nymph
+is defending herself. "Divine!" said Bouverot, and held the group by a
+thread, in order not to rub off the rust. "Divine! I set the Satyr
+against the Christ!" Few have even a moderate idea of the amazement of
+my hero, when he saw the critic set virtue and vice at once at a round
+table, without any quarrel for precedency.
+
+With a fiery glance of contempt, he turned away, and wondered that the
+Lector remained. It seems to be unknown to him that painting, like
+poetry, only in its childhood related to gods and divine service, but
+that by and by, when they grew up to a higher stature, they must needs
+stride out from this narrow churchyard,--as a chapel[169] was originally
+a church with church-music, until both were left out, and the pure music
+retained. Bouverot had the regard for pure form in so high a degree,
+that not only the smuttiest, most immoral subject, but even the most
+pure and devout, could not contaminate his enjoyment; like slate, he
+stood the two proofs of heating and freezing, without undergoing any
+change.
+
+Albano had seen the maidens through the window in the alley, and
+hastened down to take leave of his sister, and to something more
+weighty. He came, with fuller roses on his cheeks than those which
+glowed around him, to a grassy bank, where Liana, with his sister, was
+sitting behind the red parasol, with half-drooping eyelids, and head
+bent aside, softly absorbed in the harvest of evening, suffused with a
+sunny redness by the parasol, in white dress, with a little slender
+black cross on her tender bosom, and with a full rose; she looked upon
+our lover so simply, her voice was so sisterly, and all was such pure,
+careless love! She told him how delighted she was with the scenes of his
+youth, and with country life, and how Rabette would conduct her
+everywhere; and particularly to the consecration discourse, which her
+father-confessor, Spener, was to deliver on Sunday. She talked herself
+into a glow, with picturing how greatly the great breast of the old man
+would be moved by the dirge and paean over the ashes of his princely
+friend.
+
+Rabette had nothing in her mind but the solitary minute, which she would
+fain leave her brother to enjoy with her. She begged her, in a lively
+manner, to play for her yet once more on the harmonica. Albano, at this
+proposal, plucked for himself a moderate nosegay from the--foliage of
+the tree that hung over his head. Liana looked at her warningly, as much
+as to say: "I shall spoil thy cheerfulness for thee again." But she
+insisted. At the entrance into the water-house, a light blush flitted
+across Albano, at the thought of the latest past and the nearest future.
+
+Liana speedily opened the harmonica, but the water, the colophonium[170]
+of the bells, was wanting. Rabette was just going to fill a glass down
+at the fountains, for the sake of leaving them alone; but the Count,
+from manly awkwardness about entering at once into a ruse, stepped
+courteously before her and fetched it himself. Hardly, at length, had
+the lovely, pleasing creature laid, with a sigh, her delicate hands on
+the brown bells, when Rabette said to her, she would go down into the
+alley to hear how it sounded at a distance. As if at the painful
+sunstroke of a too sudden and great pleasure, his heart started up, he
+heard the triumphal car of love rolling afar off, and he was fain to
+leap into it and rattle away into life. The credulous Liana took the
+withdrawal for a veil which Rabette wished to throw over her eye,
+sweetly breaking into tears at music, and immediately removed her hands
+from the bells; but Rabette kissed her entreatingly, pressed back her
+hands upon them, and ran down. "The true heart!" said Liana; but this
+pure, guileless confidence in her friend touched him, and he could not
+say, Yes.
+
+When, in the meadows of Persia, a happy one, who, on the luxuriant
+enamel has been sleeping down among the pinks and lilies and tulips,
+blissfully opens his eyes at the first evening call of the nightingale
+upon the still, tepid world, and the motley twilight, through which some
+gold threads of the evening sun float glowingly: that blissful one is
+like the youth Albano in the enchanted chamber,--the Venetian blinds
+scattered round broken lights, trembling green shadows; and there was a
+holy twilight as in groves around temples; only murmuring bees flew, out
+of the loud, distant world, through the silent cell, into the noise
+again. Some sharp streaks of sunshine, like lightnings before sleepers,
+were wafted romantically to and fro with the rose; and in this dreamy
+grotto, amid the rustling wood of the world, the solitude was not
+disturbed by so much as the shadowy existence of a mirror.
+
+Into this enchantment she let the tones fly out of her hands like
+nightingales,--the tones were propelled towards Albano, as by a storm,
+now more clearly, and now more faintly; he stood before her, with folded
+hands, as if in prayer, and hung with thousand looks of love on the
+downward gazing form; all at once she lifted upon him that holy eye,
+full of sympathy, but she suddenly cast it down before the sun-glance of
+his.
+
+Now the great eyelids immovably closed upon the sweet looks, and gave
+her, like a sleep, the appearance of absence; she seemed a white
+May-flower on wintry soil, hanging down its blossom-bells. She was a
+dying saint in the devotion of harmony, which she heard rather than
+made; only the red lip she took with her as a warm reflection of life,
+as a last rose, that was to deck the fleeting angel; O could he disturb
+this prayer of music with a word of his?
+
+With narrower and narrower circles did the magnetic vortex of tones and
+of love clasp him round,--and now, when the drawing of the harmonica,
+like the water-drawing of the scorching sun, licked up his heart; and
+when the lightnings of passion darted over his whole life, and illumined
+the mountain-ridges of the future and the valleys of the past, and when
+he felt his whole being concentrated into one moment, he saw some drops
+trickle out from Liana's drooping eyes, and she looked up cheerfully to
+let them fall; then Albano snatched her hand away from the keys, and
+cried, with the heart-rending tone of his longing, "O God, Liana!"
+
+She trembled, she blushed, she looked at him, and knew not that she
+still wept and looked on, and continued to play no more. "No, Albano,
+no!" she said, softly, and drew her hand out of his, and covered her
+face, started at the pause of the musical tones, and collected herself
+and again made them flow out slowly, and said, with trembling voice:
+"You are a noble being. You are like my Charles, but quite as
+passionate. Only one request! I am about to leave the city for a
+while."
+
+His alarm at this became ecstasy, when she named the place, his
+Blumenbuehl. She went on with difficulty before the delighted lover; her
+hand often lay for a long time on the dissonance in forgetfulness of the
+analysis; her eyes glimmered more moistly, although she said nothing
+more than this: "Be to my brother, who loves you inexpressibly, as he
+has loved no other yet,--O be to him everything! My mother recognizes
+your influence. Draw him,--I will speak it out!--especially draw him off
+from playing deeply!"
+
+He could hardly, for his confusion, asseverate the "Yes," when Rabette
+came running in with the almost unsuitably accented tidings, that the
+mother was coming. Probably she had seen that Rabette was alone. Albano
+parted from the pair with abrupt wishes of a pleasant journey, and
+forgot, in the flurry, to answer in the affirmative Rabette's request
+for a visit. The mother, meeting him, ascribed his ardor to a brother's
+emotion at taking leave.
+
+While he hastened through the wealth of the season, he thought of the
+rich future,--of Liana's stammering and veiling: do not fair female
+souls, like those angels before the prophet, need only two wings to lift
+them, but four to veil themselves? The sea of life ran in high waves,
+but everywhere it flashed on its broad surface, and sparks dropped from
+the oar.
+
+
+63. CYCLE.
+
+Ah, on the morning following this, the evening redness of a whole heaven
+had grown, to be sure, into a sad cloudiness. For Liana walked before
+the youth in such long, thick veils. Any mystery of trouble throws up
+cold cloister-walls between hearts drawn near together; that is
+manifest. Hitherto accidents of various kinds had bent aside some
+flowers which Liana had drawn as a veil over her heart (as the ground
+stories in cities prevent looking in at the windows by flowers and
+grape-vines), and had disclosed the darkest corner of the background, in
+which something like the reverse side of a bust hung, which, turned
+round, would perhaps resemble the Count. But as yet the image hangs with
+its face toward the wall. However, a female heart is often like marble;
+the cunning stone-cutter strikes a thousand blows, without the Parian
+block showing the line of a crack; but all at once it breaks asunder
+into the very form which the cunning stone-cutter has so long been
+hammering after.
+
+On Saturday, when the Minister's lady and the pair of friends were about
+to start for Blumenbuehl, in order to behold the burial and the
+consecration, the Captain came to the Count, not only full of joy,--for
+he had gladly, out of love to Rabette, helped make for Liana, not
+_wings_ indeed, but still _wing-shells_, and out of a threefold interest
+for his friend, helped tighten the fly-work,--but also full of anxiety.
+But, ye muses! why in the poetical world are there rarely any
+occurrences which have such manifold motives as often in the actual?
+
+His anxiety was simply this, lest his father should arrive earlier than
+his mother went off,--for he knew the Minister. The latter intended,
+according to his letters, to arrive on Monday or Tuesday (Saturday at
+the latest); but this might--as Froulay loved to let his friends swim in
+the broad play-room of expectation--still more certainly threaten that
+he--because, like the Basle clocks,[171] he always struck an hour too
+early, and came in the hope of catching his people at some right odious
+thing--might at any minute come driving in at the court-yard gate. If he
+came driving furiously up this forenoon, or at the moment when the
+servant was lifting the daughter into the carriage, and the mother
+already sat therein, then was this much certain, by a thousand
+conclusions from observance, that both would have to go up into the
+house again; that he would order all trunks and boxes unpacked, and, as
+to the daughter of the Provincial Director, after her ten thousand
+entreaties,--although her very second would freeze upon her lips,--he
+would, in a friendly manner, with quite jocose equanimity, let her be
+carried home, as a solitary member of a conclave, in a close carriage.
+Certain men--and he is their generalissimo--know no sweeter cordial for
+themselves, than to put under lock and key, before the very nose of
+their friends, the garden-gates of some Arcadia or other, for which they
+have not drawn up for them a map of the route and region, and judicially
+to seal them up. Besides, just before a pleasure party, most parents
+secrete gall; if Froulay, in fact, could absolutely prevent one, that
+was as much for him as if he were himself returning home from one red
+and gay.
+
+At three o'clock in the afternoon, our friends went to walk beneath the
+loveliest sky. Everything had been already arranged; Charles proposed to
+follow to-morrow; Albano not till Monday, after the general return (his
+tender motives, and the hard ones of others, decided it); and there
+floated through the whole vaulted blue no cloud but Charles's concern
+lest the second depositing of the princely corpse might draw his father
+along as early as to-day,... when he suddenly cried out, with a curse:
+"There he comes!" He knew him by the tiger-spotted post-team, and still
+more by the long line of horses tackled on tandem. A purgatorial moment
+of life! The carriage rattled swiftly down the street; the head horses
+streamed forth in a longer and quite disorderly train; the people
+stared. At last the pulling distance became an acre long,--that seemed
+quite impossible,--when Albano's eagle eye discovered that there was no
+leather connection between the post-train, and at last, that in fact
+there was merely a strange churl, with two horses, accidentally riding
+along before the carriage, and at this moment they saw the open
+triumphal car, with the female trinity slowly moving up the Blumenbuehl
+heights, and the blended tulip-bed of the three parasols glimmered long
+after them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[163] Basa Metzia, c. 4, m 10.
+
+[164] The _head_ of a bandage is a technical term in
+surgery.--TR.
+
+[165] The German word _mandel_ (literally _almond_) means a
+collection of _fifteen_. There being no one word expressing it
+collectively in English, _baker's dozen_ (which means thirteen)
+seems to come near enough.--TR.
+
+[166] See Dr. Franklin's verses, comparing different classes of
+people to different kinds of paper. Sparks's edition of
+Franklin's Works, Vol. II. p. 161.--TR.
+
+[167] It is well known that spring flowers, on account of
+dampness and shade, are for the most part suspicious; as also the
+autumnal ones.
+
+[168] Museum of Nymphae or Chrysalides.--TR.
+
+[169] In the artistic technical sense.--TR.
+
+[170] A black resin, used for violin-strings.--TR.
+
+[171] Alluding to the case where by this change of the town-clock
+the Basle people outwitted an enemy--TR.
+
+
+
+
+FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+ALBANO AND LIANA.
+
+
+64. CYCLE.
+
+So many tender and holy sensibilities flutter round in our inner world,
+which, like angels, can never assume the bodily form of outward action,
+so many rich, full flowers stand therein which bear no seed, that it is
+lucky poetry has been invented, which easily treasures up all these
+inborn spirits and the flower-fragrance in its limbo. With this I catch,
+dear Albano, thy glorious perfume-breathing Sunday, and hold fast the
+invisible incense for the Schneider's-skin of the world!
+
+On Sunday he moved to the thunder-house in Lilar. The Lector kept
+himself up with the hope that the Count would very soon tread down the
+flower-parterre of the new enjoyment as flat and dead as a cross-way. It
+was a fine morning, all sprinkled with dew; a fresh wind blew from Lilar
+over the blooming grain; and the sun burned alone in a cool heaven. Over
+the Blumenbuehl road a swarm of people were plodding onward, and no one
+went long alone; on the Eastern heights he saw his friend Charles, with
+bowed crest, dashing to meet the sun.
+
+The breezes of Lilar came flying to welcome him with a breath of
+orange-fragrance, and blew away the ashes which rested on the glowing
+altar-coals of that first magnificent Sunday. He went down the bridge,
+and Pollux, early in his finery, came driving a ruffled turkey-cock to
+meet him. A _Soeur Servante_ of old Spener had been already for an
+hour cooking at Chariton's, merely to see him go by. The latter ran,
+festally decked, out of the house, which opened itself gayly with all
+its windows to the whole heavens, to meet him, and, in the confusion of
+her joy, broke out with the main matter first, namely, that everything
+was ready and beautiful up there in the little house, and whether he
+would have his dinner up there. She would fain, in the midst of the
+conversation, pull Pollux out of the Count's fingers, but he let him
+swing up for a kiss, and won thereby every heart, even the old one
+behind the kitchen fire.
+
+While he marched off toward his little house through the western
+triumphal arch, he felt, with indescribable strength and sweetness, that
+the lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of gods, temples,
+and bliss,--and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals stalk through
+and strip with their talons.
+
+His blooming path ran at length into the descending and ascending
+stairway, which he had passed with Spener; single streaks of day burned
+themselves into the moist ground and painted the scattered twigs fiery
+and golden. In the mystic bower, where the dead Prince had stalked along
+before him in the by-cavern, he found no such cavern, but only an empty
+niche. He stepped out above, as out of the haunch of the earth. His
+little house lay on the crooked back of the mountain ridge. Down below
+reposed around him those elephants of the earth, the hills, and Lilar
+gloriously swelling in blossoms, and he looked from his windows into
+the camp of the giants of Nature.
+
+Meanwhile he could not now stay on the window-sill, nor near the
+inspiring AEolian harp, nor in the eye-prison of books; through streams
+and woods and over mountains fresh nature longed to sweep. That he did.
+
+There are sometimes between the every-day days of life--when the rainbow
+of Nature appears to us only broken up, and as a misshapen, motley mass
+on the horizon--certain creation-days, when she rounds and contracts
+herself into a fair form, nay, when she becomes alive, and speaks to us
+like a soul. To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years
+often pass away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along
+on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow
+fuller and fuller to meet him;--without wind, a landscape was to him a
+stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;--and now the wind rolled the solid
+land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves
+like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods
+stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances.
+Majestically swam through the blue the silvery islands, the clouds, and
+on the earth shadows stalked like giants over streams and mountains; in
+the valley sparkled the Rosana, and rolled into the oak grove. He went
+down into the warm vale; the flowery pastures foamed and their seed
+played in its cloud-fleece ere the earth caught it; the swan spread
+voluptuously his long wing; pairs of doves were pecking each other for
+love; and everywhere lay beds and twigs full of hot maternal bosoms and
+eggs. Like a glorious blue bouquet, the neck of the reposing peacock
+played off its dissolving colors in the high grasses. He stepped under
+the oaks, which with knotty arms seized hold upon heaven, and with
+knotty roots the earth. The Rosana talked alone with the murmuring wood,
+and ate away, foaming, at the rocky crags and at the decaying
+shore;--night and evening and day chased each other in the mystic grove.
+He stepped into the stream, and went out with it before a warm, busy
+plain full of villages, and out from them came the Sabbath sounds, and
+out of the grain-fields larks arose, and on the mountains human
+foot-paths crept upward,--the trees lifted themselves up as living
+things, and the distant men seemed to be fast-rooted, and became only
+little shoots on the low bark of the enormous tree of life.
+
+The soul of the youth was cast into the holy fire; like asbestos-paper,
+he drew it out quenched and blank; it was to him as if he knew nothing,
+as if he were _one_ thought; and here the feeling came upon him in a
+wonderfully new manner, that is the world, thou art on the world;--he
+was _one_ being with it,--all was _one_ life, clouds and men and trees.
+He felt himself grasped by innumerable polypus-arms, and swallowed up at
+the same time with them, and yet running on in the infinite heart.
+
+In a blissful bewilderment he arrived at his dwelling, from which little
+Pollux came rolling down the mountain to meet him, and call him to
+dinner. In the little house the very thought of his heart was expressed
+by the AEolian harp at the open window. While the child was thundering
+away with his little fist on the harpsichord, and the birds joyfully
+screamed in out of the trees, the soul of the world swept exulting and
+sighing through the AEolian strings, now lawlessly and now regularly,
+playing with the storms and they with it; and Albano seemed to hear the
+streams of life rushing between their shores, the countries of the
+earth,--and through flower-veins and oak-veins, and through
+hearts,--around the earth, bearing clouds on their bosom,--and the
+stream, which thunders through eternity, a Divine hand was pouring out
+under the veil.
+
+Albano came, with the innocent boy dancing before him, to the still
+smiling mother. Even here, between the four walls, the sails continued
+to propel him which the great morning had swelled. Nothing surprised
+him, nothing seemed to him common, nothing remote; the wave and the drop
+in the endless sea of life flowed away in indivisible union with the
+streams and whirlpools which it bore onward. Before Chariton he stood
+like a shining god, and she would gladly have veiled either him or
+herself. Never was humanity individualized in purer forms, crippled by
+no alloy of provincialism or nationality, than in this circle of joy,
+wherein childhood, womanhood, and manhood, twined with flowers, met and
+softly clasped each other.
+
+Chariton spoke constantly of Liana, out of love, not merely for the
+absent one, but also for the one who stood near; for, although she
+looked with those open eyes, which seem more to image quietly than to
+behold, more to let in than to draw in, still she was, like children,
+virgins, country people, and savages, at once open-heartedly true and
+keen. She had easily detected Albano's love, because everything is
+easier to disguise from women,--even hatred, than its opposite. She
+praised Liana infinitely, particularly her incomparable kindness; and
+"her lord had said, few men had so much heart as she, for she had often
+been, without any fear, whole nights with her in Tartarus." Certainly,
+neither was this explicable to the Count. The marvellous is the aureole
+of a beloved head; a sun, softened down to a human countenance, takes
+less powerful hold than a beloved countenance glorified into a
+sun-image.
+
+More and more heartily delighted at his delight, she offered to lead him
+into Liana's chamber. A simple little chamber,--under a green twilight
+of glimmering vine foliage, some books of Fenelon and Herder, old
+flowers still in their water-glasses, little Chinese dishes, Julienne's
+portrait, and another of a deceased youthful friend, whose name was
+Caroline, an unstained writing-stand, with English-pressed paper,--was
+what he found. The holy spring hours of the virgin passed by before him,
+dropping dew like sunny clouds.
+
+He happened to touch a penknife, when Chariton brought quills to be cut,
+"because," she said, "they had so much trouble on this score since her
+master had gone away." For a woman can more easily drive any pen--even
+the epic and Kantian--than make one; and here, as in several other
+cases, the stronger sex must lend the weaker a hand.
+
+Albano wished to see, also, the working-chamber of his teacher; but this
+she decidedly--although an hour's eating together had not given her any
+new courage--refused, because her master had forbidden it. He begged
+once more; but she smiled more and more painfully, and adhered to her
+gentle no.
+
+He now dreamed away the murmur of the morning in the magic garden, on
+whose waters and paths the moonshine and reflection of memory played.
+Out of the nine million square miles of common earth, how do certain
+poetical lands stand out to a poetical heart! On the mountain with the
+altar, where he once saw her disappear down below, the afternoon chime
+of Blumenbuehl came wafted to him with the fanning of a freer ether; and
+his childhood's life, and the present scenes yonder, and Liana, gave him
+a tender heart, and he surveyed, with dimmer eyes, the transfigured
+land.
+
+At evening came happy church-goers from Blumenbuehl, and praised the
+consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still
+standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he
+should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all,
+overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in
+splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song
+of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,--the constellations over Blumenbuehl
+shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his
+closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened
+him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of
+slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.
+
+
+65. CYCLE.
+
+Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day
+clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same
+old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in
+order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path
+was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully
+pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the
+broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and
+shepherd-boys had not, like the grass, shot up taller during his
+absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and
+the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much
+prolonged to his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear
+alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his
+breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the
+Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even
+the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up
+both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the
+earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high
+to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that
+the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.
+
+In the castle how profusely was his heart covered with hearts, and the
+youngest love drowned by the old, from the easily weeping mother,
+Albina, even to the hand-extending old servants, who, on his account,
+stirred more briskly their petrified limbs! He found all his
+loves--Liana excepted--in Wehrfritz's study,[172] because he loved
+"young folk" and discourse, and always insisted that they should set out
+the breakfast on his table of papers, which, he said, was as good as a
+breakfast-table with varnished scrap-pictures that nobody saw. Albano
+tormented himself with the fear that the Minister's lady had been the
+church-robber of a very goddess, and carried Liana back yesterday,--till
+the Captain hastily explained the non-appearance. The good soul had had
+yesterday to atone for the commotion of her sympathizing heart with
+sick-headache. Her loved teacher, Spener, with his sublime
+soul-stillness,--those eyes, which wept no more over the earth, buried
+with the princely pair,--standing with his head under the cold polar
+star of eternity, so that now, like the pole, it no longer saw any stars
+rise or set,--calmly, and with hands apostolically folded in one
+another, speaking so all-persuasively upon the sorrow and the great end
+of this pale life, pressing, with his inspired speech, men's hearts to
+the verge of tearful emotion, and yet with exalted tenderness drawing
+them back from extreme grief, that so only the heart may weep without
+the eye,--and then the consecration of the coupled coffins and of the
+church,--O, in the delicate Liana these emotions could not surely fail
+to grow into sorrows, and all that her teacher buried in silence was in
+her spoken aloud. In addition to this, she had not taken the usual
+medicine of keeping still, but had disguised all her pangs behind active
+joy, so as to give her departing mother no pains, although herself far
+too great ones.
+
+Into the midst of this explanation she herself entered pleasantly, in a
+white morning-dress, with a nosegay of Chinese roses,--a little pale and
+tired,--looking up with a dreamy softness,--her voice somewhat low,--the
+roses on her cheeks closed into buds,--and, like a child, smiling upon
+every heart;--thou angel of heaven! who may dare to love and reward
+thee? She beheld the lofty youth;--all the lilies of her still face
+were, contrary to her wont, baptized into a heavenly morning-red of joy,
+and a tender purple lingered upon them.
+
+She asked him, with an open manner, why he had not come yesterday to the
+festivities, and disclosed, as a matter of moment, that they would all
+to-day visit the pious father, for whom she had been tying her
+dwarf-roses. He took gladly the fourth voice in the concert of the
+pleasure-party. What a magnificent hanging garden, with its loveliest
+flowers and prospects, is built out into the evening-hours! How many
+happy ones a single roof covers!
+
+The ingenuous Rabette, more brisk and busy for her still gladness, was,
+unweariedly, Liana's sick-nurse and Roquairol's lion-keeper and
+_maitresse de plaisirs_, who made every one of the mother's ground-plans
+of pleasure broader by a half, and her whole being was so happy! Ah, her
+poor innocent heart had not yet, indeed, been loved by any one, and
+therefore it glows, with the fresh energies of the first love, so
+brightly and truly before a mighty one which seems to come down to it
+with a blessing, like a loving god, drawing after it a whole heaven!
+Roquairol saw how bewitchingly a busy activity shook aside in the
+play-room of her character and her occupations the heavily hanging
+foliage, which in the visiting parlor darkly overspread her real worth;
+she was even made more lovely by the darker, neat house-dress, since he
+by his preaching had sent back every white drapery of her brunette
+person into the wardrobe. She would not obey her mother in this matter,
+till he had demanded it. Nay, he had yesterday brought her to the point
+of really wearing about with her the watch which the proud Minister's
+lady had presented her, though she blushed like fire at the unwonted
+ornament. Meanwhile he proposed to take with her, as it were, a true
+serpentine flowery way to the altar of his love's _loud_ Yes,--the
+_silent_ one he was saying all the time;--he knew she would get in at
+once so soon as he rode forth with the conch-chariot of Venus, to which
+he had tackled a dove and a hawk.
+
+How gloriously the forenoon flew away on golden wing-shells and on
+transparent wings! The beloved Albano was introduced into all the
+changes of the house; the finest was in his study-chamber, which Rabette
+had transformed into her toilet-chamber, sewing-room, and study, and
+which again, since yesterday, had become guest-chamber and library to
+Liana. How gladly did he step to the western window, where he had so
+often caused his invisible father and the beloved one to appear, in an
+unearthly manner, in the crystal mirror of his fancy! On the panes were
+many L's and R's drawn by his boyish hand. Liana asked what the R's
+meant; "Roquairol," said he, for she did not inquire after the L. With
+infinite sweetness did the thought flow around his heart, that his
+beloved was indeed to live through some blooming days in the dreamy cell
+of his first fresh life. Liana showed him with childlike joy how she
+shared everything, that is, the chamber, fairly with Rabette, in her
+double housekeeping and chum-ship, and how she made her very hostess her
+guest.
+
+I have often admired with envy the fine, light, nomadic life of maidens
+in their Arcadian life-segments; easily do these _doves of passage_
+flutter into a strange family, and sew and laugh and visit there, with
+the daughter of the house, one or two months, and one takes the
+ingrafted shoot for a family twig; on the other hand, we _house-pigeons_
+are inhabitive and hard to transplant, and generally, after a few days,
+journey back again. Since we, as more brittle material, less easily melt
+in with the family ore; since we do not weave our work into that of
+others so easily as maidens do theirs,--because carriages full of
+working-tools must follow after us,--and since we need much and contrive
+much;--from all this our claim to a passport is very well deduced,
+without the least detriment to our characters.
+
+After a half-eternity of dressing,--since, in the neighborhood of the
+loved one, an hour of absence lasts longer than a month when she is far
+off,--the maidens entered, equipped for travelling, in the black dress
+of brides. How charmingly the roses become Rabette, in her dark hair,
+and the lace edging on the white neck, and the timid flames of her pure
+eye, and the flitting blushes! And Liana--I speak not of this saint.
+Even the good old Director, when the innocent face looked upon him so
+childlike from beneath the white veil of India muslin, sprinkled with
+gold wire, which was simply thrown over her head after the manner of the
+nuns, could not but give his satisfaction words: "Like a nun, like an
+angel!" She answered: "I wanted once really to be one with a friend; but
+now I take the veil later than she," she added, with a wondrous tone.
+
+She hung to-day with tender enthusiasm upon Rabette, perhaps from the
+weakness of ill health, perhaps from love for Albano and the parents,
+and perhaps because Rabette, in her love, was so good and beautiful, and
+because she herself was nothing but heart. She had, besides, the sacred
+fault of forming too enthusiastic conceptions of her female
+friends,--into which the nobler maidens easily fall, and which belongs
+less to married women,--carried to an unusual height; thus, for
+instance, her friend Caroline, who had met her like a heroine of romance
+only on the romantic playground of friendship and beautiful nature, she
+could not, in the beginning, without a rending away of the saintly halo,
+at all conceive of as having hands, which drove the needle and
+flat-iron, and other implements of the female field of labor.
+
+Whoso will feel the tenderest participation in joy, let him look not at
+happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never
+did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina--across whose face time had
+struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no
+step-motherly discord appeared--look oftener to and fro, and more
+benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they
+were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and
+perturbations of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the
+"hypocrisy and spiritlessness[173] of the young people now-a-days,"
+compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was
+chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day
+assigned himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the
+pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for
+as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had
+he--(others have the devil, the deuse)--the journeyman's greeting of
+genius, _Rascal_, together with the derivatives, _rascality_, &c. But
+how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the
+stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits.
+The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not
+been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of
+man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the
+higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds
+itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly
+characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not
+in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly.
+
+The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his
+glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a
+glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a
+youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing
+whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art,
+by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom!
+
+
+66. CYCLE.
+
+The carriage flew through the village with the four young people. How
+grateful to our youth was the expanse of heaven and of earth! The portal
+of life--youth--was hung with flowers and lights. They rolled along at
+the foot of the mountain by the bird-pole, the sign-post of a boyish
+Arcadia, by the cradle where, in the enraptured sleep of childhood, he
+had stretched out his boyish arm after the high heaven; and through the
+birch thicket, now dwindled in his eyes to a bush, which, on that golden
+morning, he had found so broad and long; and by the open triumphal arch
+of the east, behind which the sea of the many-shaped Lilar poured the
+tide of its charms; and when they arrived behind the mountain-wall of
+the flute-dell, they sent back the carriage.
+
+They walked on a glorious earth, under a glorious heaven. Pure and white
+swam the sun like a swan through the blue flood,--meadows and villages
+crowded up close around the distant, low mountain-ridges; a soft wind
+swayed the green waves of the crop to and fro all over the plain; on the
+hills shadows lay fast asleep under the wings of white clouds; and
+behind the summits of the heights the mast-trees of the Rhine ships
+majestically sailed away.
+
+As Albano went along so close by the side of his beloved, the purgatory
+burning under his Eden fell back deeper and deeper into the earth's
+core; full of uneasiness and hope, he cast his fiery eye now on the
+summer, now on the mild vesper-star, which glimmered so near to him out
+of the spring ether. The good maiden seemed to-day more still, serious,
+and restless than usual. As they went through a little wood, open on all
+sides, along the ridge of a hill that ran round the flute-dell, Liana
+suddenly said to the Count, she heard flutes. Scarcely could he say, he
+heard only far-off turtle-doves, when she at once collected herself as
+for something wonderful, fixed her eyes on heaven, smiled, and suddenly
+looked round toward Albano, and grew red. Then turning to him, she said:
+"I will be frank; I hear at this moment music within me.[174] Forgive me
+to-day my weakness and tenderness; it comes from yesterday." "I--you?"
+said he, passionately; for he, about whom in sicknesses only burning
+images stormed, was inspired with veneration for a being to whom, as if
+from her higher world, low tones like golden sunbeams reach down in her
+pains, and pass veiled through the rough deep.
+
+But Liana, as if for the sake of turning aside his enthusiasm, came upon
+the subject of her friend Caroline, and told how she always hovered
+before her on such days, and especially on this walk. "In the beginning
+I sought her out," said Liana, "because she resembled my Linda. She was
+my instructress, although she was only a few weeks older than I. Her
+pure, severe, unflinching character, and her readiness to sacrifice
+herself cheerfully and in silence, made her even, if I may say so,
+worthy of veneration in the eyes of her mother. She was never seen to
+weep, tender as she was, for she wished to keep her mother always
+cheerful. We were going to take the veil in company, for the sake of
+being always together; I should not live to become old, she said, and I
+must spend my short life happily and without anxiety; but also in
+preparation for the next. Ah, she herself went up before me!
+Night-watching by the sick-bed of her mother, and sorrow for her death,
+took her away. She received the holy supper, for which we were preparing
+ourselves together, only on her death-bed. Then did the angel give me
+this veil, in which I am some time to follow her. O good, good
+Caroline!" She wept unconcealedly, and pressed, with emotion, Albano's
+hand. "O, I should not have begun about this! There comes already our
+friend; we will be right cheerful!"
+
+They had now passed through a high wood of under-brush, which teasingly
+disclosed and hid by turns the landscapes that glided around them, and
+had come near to the spire which looks in upon the flute-dell, and near
+which lay a solitary church and Spener's dwelling, and in the plain
+below the open village. Spener came to meet his pupil--after the manner
+of old men--unconcerned about the others; and a young roe ran after him.
+A beautiful spot! Little white peacocks; turtle-doves at large; a city
+of bees in the midst of their bee-flora,--all bespoke the tranquil old
+man, whom the earth serves and honors, and who, indifferent towards it,
+lives only in God. He came--disappointing one's expectation of an
+ecclesiastical gravity--with a light playfulness upon the gay train, and
+laid his finger in benediction on the forehead of Liana, who seemed to
+be his granddaughter, as it were, a second tree-blossom in the late
+autumn of life. In a daughterly way, she placed the bunch of dwarf-roses
+in his bosom, and took very careful notice whether it pleased him. She
+smiled quite serenely, and all her tears seemed fanned away; but she
+resembled the rain-sprinkled tree, when the sun laughs out again,--the
+least agitation flings the old rain from the still leaves.
+
+The old man was delighted with the sympathy of the young people, and
+remained with them upon the blooming and resounding eminence, which sat
+enthroned between a wide landscape and the richly laden mountain-ridge,
+running away into Elysium. Since, as with one who ascends in a balloon,
+the tones of earth did not reach him from so great a distance as its
+forms, they let him talk more than listen, as one spares old people.
+
+He spoke soon of that in which his heart lived and breathed, but in a
+singular, half-theological, half-French, Wolfian, and poetic speech. One
+ought, of many a mystic's poetry and philosophy to give, instead of
+verbal, real translations, in order that it may be seen how the pure
+gold of truth glows under all wrappages. Spener says, in my translation:
+"He had formerly, before he found the right way, tormented himself in
+every human friendship and love. He had, when he was fervently loved,
+said to himself, that he could surely never so regard or love himself;
+and even so the beloved being could not truly so think of itself, as the
+loving one did, and though it were ever so perfect or so full of
+self-love. If every one looked upon others as upon himself, there could
+be no ardent love. But all love demands an object of infinite worth, and
+dies of every inexplicable and clearly recognized failure; it projects
+its objects out of all and above all, and requires a reciprocal love
+without limits, without any selfishness, without division, without
+pause, without end. Such an object is verily the divine being, but not
+fleeting, sinful, changeable man. Therefore must the lovesick heart sink
+into the Giver himself of this and of all love, into the fulness of all
+that is good and beautiful, into the disinterested, unlimited,
+universal Love, and dissolve and revive therein, blest in the
+alternation of contraction and expansion. Then it looks back upon the
+world and finds everywhere God and his reflection: the worlds are his
+deeds; every pious man is a word, a look, of the All-loving; for love to
+God is the Divine thing, and the heart yearns for him in every heart."
+
+"But," said Albano, whose fresh, energetic life rebelled against all
+mystical annihilation, "how, then, does God love us?" "As a father loves
+his child, not because it is the best child, but because it needs
+him."[175] "And whence," he further inquired, "comes, then, the evil in
+man, and whence sorrow?" "From the Devil," said the old man, and
+pictured out uninterruptedly, with transfigured joy, the heaven of his
+heart,--how it was always surrounded with the all-beloved, all-loving
+One, how it never desired any good fortune or any gifts from him at all
+(which one did not wish even in earthly love), but only a higher and
+higher love towards himself, and how, while the evening mists of old age
+were gathering thicker and thicker around his senses, his heart felt
+itself, in the darkness of life, embraced more and more closely by the
+invisible arms. "I shall soon be with God!" said he, with a radiance of
+love on that countenance of his, chilled with life, and breaking in
+under the weight of years. One could have borne to see him die. So
+stands Mont Blanc before the rising moon; night veils his feet and his
+breast, but the light summit hangs high in the dark heaven as a star
+among the stars.
+
+Liana, like a daughter, had not let her eye nor her hand go from him,
+and had languishingly drunk in every sound; her brother had heard him
+with more pleasure than Albano, but merely for the sake of remodelling
+more clearly and fully the mystic Hero into the mimic Mount Athos of his
+representation, and Rabette had contemplated him as in a church among
+believing by-thoughts.
+
+He withdrew now without ceremony to take care of his animals, which he
+loved, as he did everything involuntary, for instance, children, as
+coming at first hand from God. "Everything is divine," he said, "and
+nothing earthly but what is immoral." He could not bear to smoke bees
+with brimstone, let flowers dry up with thirst in the pot-cage, or see
+an overdriven wounded horse, and he passed by a butcher's stall not
+without shuddering limbs.
+
+"Shall we," said friend Charles, "take in the glorious evening on the
+magnificent mountain road, and see thy thunder-house, and cast down
+every cup of sorrow into the vales below?" Through what a magic
+neighborhood did they now pass along the sloping ridge of the
+thunder-house! On the right, as it were, the occident of nature; on the
+left, the orient; before them Lilar, glittering in the _faerie_ of
+evening,--lying in the arms of the glancing Rosana,--golden grain behind
+silver-poplars, and overhead a heaven filled with a life-intoxicated,
+tumultuous creation,--and the sun-god stalking away over his
+evening-world, and stooping a little under the midnight to raise his
+golden head in the east. Albano went forth, holding Liana's holy hand.
+"O how beautiful is all!" said he. "How the fluttering world-map rustles
+and murmurs with long streams and woods,--how the eastern mountains bask
+in steadfast repose,--how the groves climb the hills, with glowing
+stems! One could plunge down into the smoking vales and into the cold,
+glistening waves. Ah, Liana, how beautiful is all!" "And God is on the
+earth," said she. "And in thee!" said he, and thought of the word of the
+old man, that love seeks God, and that he dwells in the heart which we
+esteem.
+
+Now came rolling toward him the great waves which the AEolian-harp dashed
+out in the thunder-house; and his genius flew by before him with the
+words, "Tell her there thy whole heart!"
+
+Before the little tabernacle of yesterday's dreams his stormy heart was
+dissolved; and the sun and the earth reeled before his passionate tears.
+As he entered with her into the rosy splendor of the evening sun that
+filled the apartment, and into the spirit-like din of tones discoursing
+with one another alone, he seized Liana's hands and pressed them wildly
+to his breast, and sank down before her speechless and dazzled; flames
+and tears suffused his eyes and his cheeks,--the whirlwind of tones blew
+into his blazing soul,--the mild angel of innocence bowed herself,
+weeping and trembling, toward the burning sun-god, and a sharp pain
+twined itself like a pale serpent through the roses of the mild
+countenance,--and Albano stammered: "Liana, I love thee!"
+
+Then the serpent turned round and clasped and covered the sweet rosy
+form. "O good Albano! thou art unhappy, but I am innocent!" She stepped
+back with dignity, and quickly drew down the white veil over her face,
+and said, beside herself, "Wouldst thou love the dead? This is my
+corpse-veil; the coming year it will lie upon this face." "That is not
+true," said Albano. "Caroline, answer him!" said she, and stared at the
+burning sun as if looking for a higher apparition. Frightful moment! as
+during an earthquake the sea heaves and the air rests in fearful
+stillness, so was his lip dumb beside the veiled one, and his whole
+heart was a storm. On the strings swept by a sighing world of spirits,
+and the last ended with a sharp scream. The beauty of the earth was
+distorted before him, and in the evening clouds broad fiery banners were
+planted; and the sun's eye shut-to in blood.
+
+All at once Liana folded her hands as if in prayer, and smiled and
+blushed; then she raised the veil from her divine eyes, and the
+transfigured one, tinged with the rosy reflection, looked on him
+tenderly,--and cast her eye down,--and raised it again,--and again let
+it sink,--and the veil fell again before her, and she said, in a low
+tone, "I will love thee, good Albano, if I do not make thee miserable."
+"I will die with thee!" said he. "What then?"--And now let a holy cloud
+veil the sun-god, who moves flaming through the midst of his stars!
+
+His solitude and Liana's solution of so many wonders were suspended by
+the entrance of Rabette and Charles, who both seemed more touched than
+blessed,--she by the comforting nearness of the loved one, he by the
+singular situation and the subduing evening; for after certain beings a
+storm follows, and they must, against their will, make the steps that
+they take more rapid.
+
+When Albano, with the peace-angel of his life, with the beloved one,
+who, in the midst of the rush of her feelings, heard, nevertheless, the
+voice of her female friend, walked forth again once more alone upon the
+rocky causeway between fragrant vales of Tempe in the glimmering world,
+he felt as if he had struggled through his life like an eagle through a
+storm-cloud, and as if the black tempest were running far away below his
+wings, and the whole starry heaven burned bright above his head. Liana,
+with maidenly nobleness and firmness, gave him, before he had put a
+question, the answer: "I must now tell you a mystery, which I have
+hidden from every one, and even from my mother, because it would have
+disquieted her. I spoke just now of my never-to-be-forgotten Caroline.
+On the day of my sacrament, which I had wished to take with her, I went
+back by night from my teacher to my mother, and in fact through the
+singular, long cavern, wherein one seems to descend, when one is in
+reality going upward. My maid went before with the lantern. In the
+romantic arbor, where a concave mirror stands, I turn round toward the
+full moon which was streaming in, from a dread of the wild mirror, which
+distorts people too horribly. Suddenly I hear a heavenly concert, such
+as I often heard again afterward in sicknesses,--I think of my blessed
+friend,--and gaze, full of longing, into the moon. Then I saw her
+opposite to me, beaming with innumerable rays: in her fair eyes was a
+tender look, but yet something dissolving; the tender mouth, almost the
+only living feature, resembled a red, but transparent fruit, and all her
+hues seemed to be nothing but light. Yet only in the blue eye and red
+mouth did the angel seem like Caroline. I could sketch her, if one could
+paint with light. I became dangerously sick; then she appeared to me
+oftener, and refreshed me with inexpressibly sweet tones,--they were not
+properly words,--whereupon I always sank into a soft sleep, as into a
+sweet death. Once I asked her--more with inner words--whether I should,
+then, soon come to her into the realm of light. She answered, I should
+not die just now, but somewhat later; and she named very clearly the
+coming year, and the very day, which I have, however, forgotten.... O
+dear Albano! forgive me only a few words! I soon recovered, and mourned
+over the slow, lingering passage of time...."
+
+"No," Albano interrupted her, for his feelings were striking against
+each other like swords, "I revere, but I hate her dangerous phantom.
+Fancy and sickness are the parents of the air-born, destroying angel,
+who flies scorching, like a dumb heat-lightning, over all the blossoms
+of youth!"
+
+She answered, with emotion, "O thou good, pure spirit! thou hast never
+distressed me, thou hast ever comforted, guided, made me happy and
+holy,--a phantom is it, Albano? It even preserves me against all
+phantoms of terror, against all ghostly fear, because it is always about
+me. Why, if it is only a phantom, does it never appear to me in my
+dreams?[176] Why comes it not when I will? But it comes only in weighty
+cases; then I consult and obey it very willingly. It has already to-day,
+Albano," she added, in a lower and fainter tone, "twice appeared to me
+on the way, when I heard the inner music, and previously in the
+thunder-house, when the sun went down, and has affectionately answered
+me."
+
+"And what says it, heavenly one?" asked Albano, innocently. "I saw it
+only on the way, and asked no question," replied the childlike one,
+blushing; and here, all at once, her holy soul stood unconsciously
+without a veil before him; for she had, in the thunder-house, received
+from the invisible Caroline the yes to her love; because that being was
+her own creation, and this a suggestion of her own. Yes indeed, heavenly
+one! thou standest before the mirror with the virgin's veil over thy
+form, and when thy image softly raises its own, thou fanciest thyself
+still covered!
+
+No word can express Albano's veneration for such a sanctified heart,
+which dreamed into such distinctness glorified beings; whose golden
+flowers only grew the higher over the thought of death, as earthly ones
+do in churchyards over the reality; which, simultaneously with his own,
+invisible hands had drawn into two similar dreams;[177] to which one was
+ashamed to give common truths for its holy errors. "Thou art from
+heaven," he said, inspired, and his joy became the pearl melted in the
+eye which quenches the thirst of the human heart; "therefore thou
+wouldst go back thither!" "O, I consecrate to thee, my friend," said
+she, smilingly weeping, and pressed his hand to her pure heart, "the
+whole little life which I have, every hour to the last, and I will,
+meanwhile, prepare thee for everything which God sends."
+
+Before they entered the cottage of the pious father, Albano seized his
+friend's hand, and the sisters joined each other. The friends went
+forward for a time in silence; Charles looked upon Albano, and found the
+peace of blessedness upon his face. When the latter saw how Liana
+pressed her overfraught heart to her sister's, then were sincerity and
+joy too strong in him, and he fell without a word upon the heart of the
+dear brother of the eternal bride, and let him silently guess all from
+his tears of bliss. O, he might have guessed it, to be sure, from the
+bridal look of love which his sister more seldom removed from his
+friend, and from the heartiness wherewith she drew Rabette to her heart;
+just as if they two would soon be related to each other, as if her
+brother himself would soon speak more sweetly, since he for some time
+had no longer called her the little Linda; and consecrated her thereon
+for the heart of her brother. Not before the pious father did the
+enraptured look hold itself much in abeyance, which Albano, standing as
+if under the gate of eternity, cast into the heavens, gleaming like
+worlds one behind another; he was still and tender, and in his heart
+dwelt all hearts. O love _one_ heart purely and warmly, then thou lovest
+all hearts after it, and the heart in its heaven sees like the
+journeying sun, from the dew-drop even to the ocean, nothing but mirrors
+which it warms and fills.
+
+But in Roquairol started up immediately, when he saw the heavenly bliss
+so near, the mutinous spirit of his past, and struck with a bloody
+epilepsy the limbs of the inner man: those immortal sighings after an
+ever-flying peace again tormented him; his transgressions and errors,
+and even the hours when he innocently suffered, were painfully reckoned
+up before him; and then he spoke, (and stirred every heart, but most of
+all poor Rabette's, which he pressed against his own to warm himself,
+as, according to the tradition, the eagle does with the dove, after
+which he does not tear her to pieces,)--nobly he spoke then of life's
+wilderness, and of fate, which burns out man, like Vesuvius, into a
+crater, and then again sows cool meadows therein, and fills it again
+with fire; and of the only blessedness of this hollow life, love, and of
+the injury inflicted, when fate with its winds sways and rubs a
+flower[178] to and fro, and thereby cuts through the green skin against
+the earth.
+
+But while he thus spoke, he looked on the glowing Rabette, and would
+fain by these warmings burst open, as it were by force, the fast-closed
+flower-bud of his love, and spread its leaves out under the sun. O the
+bewildered and yearning one was surely not yet quite happy even to-day,
+and he wished not so much to affect others as himself.
+
+With what blissful presentiments did they step out again before the
+sphinx of night, who lay smiling before them with soft, starry glances!
+Did they not go through a still, glimmering, subterranean world, light
+and free, without the heavy clogging earth on their feet, while in the
+wide Elysium the warm ether only flutters because invisible Psyches fan
+it with their wings? And out of the flute-dell the old man sends after
+them his tones as sweet arrows of love, in order that the swelling heart
+may blissfully bleed of their woundings. Albano and Liana came out upon
+a prospect where the broad eastern landscape, with its light-streaks of
+blooming poppy-fields, and its dark villages, ascended the soft
+mountains, where the moon awoke, and the splendor of her garment already
+swept like that of a spirit through heaven: here they remained standing
+and waiting for Luna. Albano held her hand. All the mountain-ridges of
+his life stood in a glowing dawn. "Liana," said he, "what innumerable
+springs are there at this moment up yonder on the worlds which hang in
+the heavens; but this is the fairest!" "Ah, life is lovely, and to-day
+it is too dear to me! Albano," she added, in a low voice, and her whole
+face became an exalted, tearless love, and the stars wove and
+embroidered its bridal dress, "if God calls me, then may he let me
+always appear to thee as Caroline does to me. O, if I could only attend
+thee thus through thy whole dear life, and console and warn thee, I
+would willingly wish for no other heaven."
+
+But as he was about to express the fulness of his love, and the anger
+of his pain about the death-delusion, just then came his wild friend,
+who, like a Vesuvius, pouring out at once lava- and rain-streams over
+the credulous Rabette, had made both her heart and his own only fuller,
+not lighter; then Charles beheld the glorified beings and the blue
+horizon, where already the moon was flinging forth her glimmering light
+between the bristling mast-peaks and summits, and looked again into the
+splendor of holy love. Then could he no longer contain himself; his
+heart, full of agony, mounted to an eternal purpose, as if to God, and
+he embraced Albano and Rabette, and said: "Beloved man! beloved maiden!
+keep my unhappy heart!"
+
+Rabette clung around him compassionately, as a mother around her child,
+and gave up to him, in hot, gushing tears, her whole soul. Albano,
+astonished, enfolded in his arms the love-bond; Liana was drawn to the
+beloved hearts by the whirlpool of bliss. Unheard the flutes sounded on,
+unseen waved the white banners of the stars overhead. Charles spoke
+frantic words of love, and wild wishes of dying for joy. Albano touched
+trembling Liana's flower-lip, as John kissed Christ, and the heavy
+milky-way bent down like a magic wand toward his golden bliss. Liana
+sighed: O mother, how happy are thy children! The moon had already flown
+up into the blue, like a white angel of peace, and glorified the great
+embrace; but the blest ones marked it not. Like a sounding waterfall,
+their rich life covered them, and they knew not that the flutes had
+ceased, and all the hills were shining.[179]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[172] Museum (home of the muses) is the beautiful German name for
+it.--TR.
+
+[173] _Kopf-und Ohr-haengerei._ Hanging down of head (hypocrisy)
+and ears.--TR.
+
+[174] This self-resounding--as the AEolian-harp [_riesen-harfe_,
+giant-harp, in German.--TR.], when the weather changes, sounds
+without a touch--is common in sick-headache and other maladies of
+weakness; hence in dying; for instance, in Jacob Boehme, life,
+like a concert-clock, rung out its hours amidst surrounding
+harmonies.
+
+[175] Some disinterested love or other must from eternity have
+existed. As there are eternal truths, so must there also be an
+eternal love.
+
+[176] For the same reason, perhaps, that the poet does not see
+his, so often and distinctly beheld, creations pass in his dreams
+among the images of the day.
+
+[177] For on his and her sacrament-day he had imagined her death
+by lightning.
+
+[178] The winter stock-jelliflower.
+
+[179] Jean Paul's second volume ends here.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+MAN AND WOMAN.
+
+
+67. CYCLE.
+
+I have often in the theatre made the pleasant experience, that when
+painful scenes immediately followed the rising of the curtain, I took
+but a slight interest in them, while in joyful ones which, immediately
+after the music, came on with their own music, I took the greatest; man
+demands more that sorrow than that rapture should show its motive and
+its apology. Without hesitation, therefore, I begin a third volume[180]
+with blisses of which, to be sure, the foregoing couple have been
+preparing more than enough.
+
+At the moment where our story has arrived, among all the descendants of
+Adam who lifted a glad face to heaven, and imaged in that face a still
+fairer heaven, there must have been some one who had the highest
+heaven,--a happiest of all men. Ah yes! And to be sure, among all
+suffering creatures upon this _globe_, which our short race makes a
+_plain_, there must also have been one most unhappy; and may the poor
+man soon lie down to sleep under, not _on_, his rocky road! Although I
+could wish that Albano might not be the happiest of all,--in order that
+there might yet be a higher heaven above his,--still it is probable
+that, on the morning after that holiest night, in his present dream of
+the richest dream, deep in the threefold bloom of youth, of nature, and
+of anticipation, he bore the broadest heaven in himself which the narrow
+bosom of man can span.
+
+He looked from his thunder-house,--that little temple on whose walls
+still lingered the radiance of the goddess who had therein become
+visible to him,--out over the new-created mountains and gardens of
+Lilar; and it was to him as if he looked into his white and red blooming
+future, adorned with mountain-peaks and fruit-tree-tops, a full Paradise
+built out into the naked earth. He looked round in his future after any
+robbers of joy who might attack his triumphal chariot; he found them all
+visibly too weak to cope with his arms and weapons. He called up Liana's
+parents, and his own father, and the host of spirits which had hitherto
+been working in the air, and set them out on the road which lay between
+him and his beloved; in his muscles glowed more than sufficient power
+easily to dash through them to her, and take her with him into his life
+by main force. "Yes," said he, "I am completely happy, and need nothing
+more,--no fortune, only my heart and hers!" Albano, may thy evil genius
+not have heard this dangerous thought, so as to carry it to Nemesis! O,
+in this wildly entangled wood of thy life, no step, even in the blooming
+avenues of pleasure, is wholly safe; and amidst the very fulness of this
+artistic garden there awaits thee a strange, gloomy upas-tree, and
+breathes cold poisons into thy life! Therefore it was better as it was
+once, when men were still lowly and prayed to God even in their great
+raptures; for in the neighborhood of the Infinite One the fiery eye
+sinks and weeps, but only out of gratitude.
+
+Let no mean almanac measurement be applied to the fair eternity which he
+now lived, when he saw the beloved every evening, every morning, in her
+little village. As evening star she went forth before his dreams; as
+morning star, before his day. The interval both filled out with letters,
+which they themselves carried to each other. When they parted at
+evening, not long before they were to see each other again, and while in
+the north already the rose-bud twigs shot along low down in the heavens,
+which during men's sleep speedily grew out toward the east, in order to
+hang down from heaven with thousands of full-blown roses ere the sun and
+love came back again,--and when his friend Charles stayed with him by
+night, and he asked, in the course of an hour, whence the light came,
+whether from the morning or from the moon,--and when he sallied forth,
+while moon and morning still appeared together in the dew-dripping
+pleasure-woods,--and when the road, left only a few hours before,
+appeared wholly new and the absence too long, (because Cupid's wing is
+half a second-hand, which shows the day of the month, and half a
+month-hand, which points to the second, and because, in the neighborhood
+of the loved one, the shortest absence lasts longer than the longest
+when she is far away,)--and when at last he saw her again,--then was the
+earth a sun, from which rays proceeded: his heart stood all in light;
+and as a man, who on a spring morning dreams of a spring-morning, finds
+it still brighter around him when he awakes, so, after the blessed
+youthful dream of the beloved, did he open his eyes before her, and
+desire the fairest dream no more.
+
+Sometimes they saw each other, when the long summer day was too long,
+on distant mountains, where by appointment they looked upon the
+harvests; sometimes Rabette came alone to Lilar to her brother, that he
+might hear something from Liana. When Liana had read a book, he read it
+after her; often he read it first and she last. Whatever of divine the
+fairest, purest souls can manifest to each other when they unfold
+themselves,--a holy heart which makes one still holier, a glowing heart
+which makes one still more glowing,--that they manifested to each other.
+Albano was mild toward all, and the radiance of a higher beauty and
+youth filled his countenance. The fair realms of nature and of his
+childhood were both adorned by love, not it by either of them; he had
+mounted from the pale, light moon-car of hope upon the sounding, shining
+sun-car of living ecstasy. Even on the galleys of wooden sciences, as if
+animated by the wonder-working hand of Bacchus, masts and shrouds
+fluttered out into vine-stalks and clusters. If he went to the Froulay
+house, he always, because he went in full of tolerance, came back
+without any sacrifice of the same: the Minister, who had returned from
+Haarhaar with a veil of gay, blooming ideas on his face, imparted to him
+charming prospects of the exultation wherewith city and country would
+celebrate the approaching marriage-feast of the Prince and the gain of
+the most beautiful bride.
+
+And had he not, in addition to all, his friend too? When one stands so
+close before the flame of joy, one does indeed shun men,--because they
+easily step between us and the pleasant warmth,--but one seeks them too;
+a hearty friend is our wish and joy, who shall gently lead on, without
+chasing away, the happy dream in which we sleep and speak. Charles
+played softly into his friend's dream; he would, however, have also done
+it from sincere love for the sister.
+
+In fact, with so much youth, summer weather, innocence, freedom,
+beautiful scenery, and deep love and friendship, there may well be
+constructed, even on this low earth, something like that which up in
+heaven is called a heaven; and a celestial chart, an Elysium-atlas,
+which one should map out thereof, would perhaps look not far otherwise
+than this: in front, a long pastoral land, with scattered
+pleasure-castles and summer-houses; a philanthropist's grove in the
+middle, the Tabor mountains overhead, with herdsmen upon them, long
+Campanian vales; then the broad archipelago, with St. Peter's islands;
+over on the other side the shores of a new pastoral continent, all
+covered with Daphnean groves and gardens of Alcinoues; behind that again,
+stretching far inward, an Arcadia; and so on.
+
+All the philosophy and stoicism that he now had in him--for he held that
+which the arm out of the clouds gave him as booty gained by his
+own--Albano applied to the purpose of taking _from_ his ecstasy the
+moderation which they impart. Moderation, he said, was only for patients
+and pigmies; and all those anxious, evenly balanced sticklers for
+temperament[181] and time-keepers had, whether in the cultivation of a
+pleasure or of a talent, profited themselves more than the world; on the
+contrary, their antipodes had benefited the world more than
+themselves.[182]
+
+He kept in view very good fundamental principles. Man, said he, is free
+and without limits,--not in respect to what he will do or enjoy, but in
+respect to what he will do without; he can, if he _will_, will to
+dispense with _everything_. In fact, he continued, one has simply the
+choice, either _always_ or _never_ to fear; for thy life-tent stands
+over a loaded mine, and, round about, the hours aim at thee naked
+weapons. Only one in a thousand[183] hits; and, in any case, I am sure I
+would sooner fall standing than bending like a coward. But, he
+concluded, in order to justify himself on the subject, is then
+steadfastness made for nothing better than for a surgeon and
+serving-maid, and not much rather for our muse and goddess? for it is
+not surely a good, merely because it helps do without something which we
+have lost, but it is intrinsically one, and a greater than the one whose
+place it supplies; even the happiest must acquire it, even without
+outward occasion or bestowal; yes, it is so much the better, if it is
+possessed earlier than applied.
+
+These deceptions or justifications were partly weapons of self-defence
+against the tragic Roquairol, who would fain heighten every pleasure,
+and even those of his friend, by sombre contrasts; and partly they were
+such as a noble man, who hitherto has plunged into sorrow without
+measuring its depth, and who would always feel his power of swimming
+through life, must necessarily fall upon, when he is inwardly aware that
+the centre of gravity of his bliss and of his hell has shifted and
+fallen out of himself into another being. "O, what if she should die?"
+he asked himself. He had not been wont to shudder so at the thought of
+any death as of this. Therefore he squeezed these thorns of fancy right
+sharply in his hand in order to crush them. At last, when the pure
+country air of love and the shepherd-dance in this Arcadia had brought
+more and more roses to Liana's cheek, then his thorns ceased to grow.
+
+To all other vipers of life, so long as they could find no entrance
+through Liana's heart, he was inaccessible. At whatever price,--and
+though he should have to forsake, give up, provoke, undertake all,--he
+would buy Liana. The phantoms of terror which came threateningly to meet
+him out of two houses,--Froulay's and Gaspard's,--he let come on, and
+dispelled them: let the foe once show himself, thought he, so am I his
+foe too. Often he stood in Tartarus, and found, in this still life of
+death _in rilievo_, peace of soul. The actual world takes more quickly
+our image than we its; even here he gained soft, broad, life-illumining
+hopes and sweet tears, which flowed from him at the thought of Liana's
+faith in her death, not because he believed in the probability, but in
+the improbability thereof, which, through love and joy and recovery,
+would daily grow greater.
+
+Only one misfortune was there for him, against which every weapon
+snapped in pieces, whose possibility, however, he held to be a sinful
+thought,--namely, that he and Liana, by some fault or time or the
+world's influence, might cease to love each other. Here, relying on two
+hearts, he boldly defied the future. O, who has not said, when, in
+reliance upon a warm eternity, he has expressed his rapture, The Fatal
+Sister may clip the thread of our life, but shall she come and open the
+scissors against the bond of our love? The very next day the Fatal
+Sister has stood before him, and snapped the scissors to.
+
+
+68. CYCLE.
+
+Once Roquairol came quite late to take Albano with him to the
+"Evening-Star Party" at the herdsman's hut, which he had arranged with
+Rabette. The Captain loved to build around the warm springs of his love
+and joy the well-curb of wholly select days and circumstances; if he
+could contrive it, for instance, he made his declarations of love, say
+on a birthday, during a total eclipse of the sun, on a valentine's day,
+in a blooming hot-house in winter, in a skating chair on the ice, or in
+a charnel-house; so, too, he loved to quarrel with others in significant
+days and places, in the church-pew, in the beginning of spring or
+winter, in the green-room of the amateur theatre, at a great fire, or
+not far from Tartarus or in the flute-dell. Albano, however, was too
+young, as others are too old, to have to season his fresh feeling with
+artificial hours and situations; he preferred to beautify the latter
+through the former.
+
+With impetuous joy Albano flew along the road to the unexpected
+pleasure. Last evening had been so rich,--the four rivers of Paradise
+had, in one cataract, poured down from heaven into his heart,--and this
+evening he would leap into its sprayey whirlpool. The evening heaven
+itself was so fair and pure, and Hesperus went with growing splendor
+down his brightly glimmering path.
+
+Rabette waited at the foot of the mountain on which stood the herdsman's
+hut (the little shooting-house), in order to lead him unsuspecting to
+the unprepared female friend, who at the window, with her gleaming eye
+on Hesperus, lay musing, and thought of the full, glowing autumn
+flowers, which, at this late time of her life, and so shortly before the
+longest night, were springing up. She was troubled to-day about many
+things. She had, in fact, sought hitherto more to deserve and to justify
+than to enjoy and increase her love, and more to bless with it another's
+heart than her own. How indescribably she longed to do deeds for
+him,--only sacrifices were to her deeds,--and she really envied her
+friend who had, every time, at least to prepare Charles a beverage. As
+she knew no other way, she expressed her devoted zeal by greater
+daughterly love and attention to Albano's parents and sister; and
+learned even to cook a little, which other ministers' daughters, who
+make nothing but salad and tea, must pardon her, especially when they
+reflect that, in Liana's case, they themselves would not have done
+otherwise, but rather have made one dish more. Yes, she accounted
+Rabette as more virtuous, because she could be more broadly and
+extensively active; Rabette, on the other hand, held Liana to be the
+better of the two, because she prayed so much the more. A similar error
+they repeated twofold in respect to the brothers; Rabette thought
+Charles the gentler, and Liana, Albano; both, according to inferences
+from their mutual reports.
+
+So long as a woman loves, she loves right on, steadily. A man has to do
+something between whiles. Liana transformed everything into his image
+and his name: this mountain, this little chamber, this, to him once
+dangerous, bird-pole, became the crayon pencils for his stereotype
+image. She always came back upon this, that he deserved something better
+than her; for love is lowliness, on the wedding-ring sparkles no jewel.
+It touched her that her early death affected him. There she saw still
+the maiden blinded by the small-pox, whom he had once unconsciously
+pressed to his heart;[184] and, with the quick apprehension of sadness,
+she felt herself to resemble the blind one also, in that incident, and
+not merely in the similar, although shorter night, which pain had once
+thrown over her eyes.
+
+As gentle as her emblem, Hesperus, dipping into the western horizon of
+life, did she seem to her lover. She never could pass immediately out of
+her own heart into the startling present; her turnings were always like
+those of the sunflower, very slow, and every sensation lived long in her
+faithful breast. Seldom, indeed, does a lover find the welcome of his
+loved one like the last image, which the farewell had imparted to him; a
+female soul must--so man desires--with all the wings, storms, heavens,
+of the last minute, sound over into the next. But Liana had ever
+received her friend shyly and softly, and otherwise than she had parted
+with him; and sometimes, to his fiery spirit, this tender waiting, this
+slow lifting of the eyelid, appeared almost as a return to the old
+coldness.
+
+To-day it seized the more ardent Count more strongly than usual. Like a
+pair of strange children who are to become acquainted with each other,
+and smile upon and touch each other, the two stood beside each other
+friendly and embarrassed. She told how she had made his sister tell her
+of his childish break-neck adventure on this mountain. A loved maiden
+knows no more beautiful, no richer history than that of her friend. "O
+even then," he said with emotion, "I looked toward thy mountains! Thy
+name, like a golden inscription, was written on my whole youth. Ah,
+Liana! didst thou haply love me as I thee, when thou hadst not yet seen
+me?"
+
+"Certainly not, Albano," answered she, "not till long after!" She meant,
+however, her blindness; and said he appeared to her in this twilight of
+the eyes, on that evening when he ate with her father, like an old
+northern king's son, somewhat like Olo,[185] and she had had a certain
+awe before him, as for her father and brother. Her high respect for men
+the fewest were hardly worthy to guess, not to say, occasion. "And how
+when thou hadst regained thy sight?" said Albano. "I just told thee
+that," she replied naively. "But when thou didst so love my brother,"
+she continued, "and wast so good to thy sister, then to be sure I quite
+took heart, and am now and henceforth thy second sister. Besides, thou
+hast lost one--Albano, believe me, I know I am surely unworthy,
+especially of thee; but I have _one_ consolation."
+
+Perplexed by this mixture of sanctity and coldness, he could only
+passionately kiss her, and was constrained, without contradicting her,
+to ask forthwith, "What consolation?" "That thou wilt one day be
+entirely happy," said she softly. "Liana, speak more plainly!" said he.
+For he understood not that she meant her death and the announcement of
+Linda by the spirits. "I mean after one year," she replied, "from the
+date of the predictions." He looked at her speechless, wild, guessing
+and trembling. She fell weeping upon his heart, and suddenly gave vent
+to the swell of inward sighs: "Shall I not then be dead at that time,"
+said she with deep emotion, "and look down from eternity to see that
+thou art rewarded for thy love to Liana? And that, too, certainly in a
+high degree!"
+
+Weep, be angry, suffer, exult, and wonder more and more, passionate
+youth! But, to be sure, thou comprehendest not this lowly soul!--Holy
+humility! thou only virtue which God, not man, created! Thou art higher
+than all which thou concealest or knowest not! Thou heavenly beam of
+light! like the earthly light,[186] thou showest all other colors and
+floatest thyself invisible, colorless, in heaven! Let no one profane
+thy unconsciousness by instruction! When thy little white blossoms have
+once fallen, they come not again, and around thy fruits only modesty
+then spreads her foliage.
+
+Painfully did the heart in Albano split into contradictions, as if into
+two, his own heart and Liana's. She was nothing but pure love and
+lowliness, and the splendor of her talents was only a foreign
+border-work, as white marble images of the gods have the variegated
+border only as decoration: one could not do anything but adore her, even
+in her errors. On the other hand, she had, in conjunction with tender,
+susceptible feelings, such firm opinions and errors; his modesty fought
+so vainly against her humility, and his clear-sightedness against her
+visionary tendency. The hostile train which this propensity drew after
+it he saw too clearly sweeping along over all the joys of her life. His
+ever-besetting suspicion, that she loved him merely because she hated
+nothing, and that she was always a sister instead of a lover, again
+charged home upon him like an armed man. Thus did all things fight
+together in this case,--duty and desire, fortune and place. Both were
+new and unknown to each other, because of love; but Liana divined as
+little as he. O how strange to each other and unlike each other two
+human beings, kindred souls, become, merely because a Divinity hovers
+between the two and shines upon both!
+
+Something remained in him unharmonious and unsolved. He felt it so
+sadly, now that the summer night glimmered for higher raptures than he
+possessed; now that, deep in the ether, the trembling evening star
+pressed on after the sun through the rose-clouds under which he was
+buried; now that the meadows of grain breathed perfume and murmured not,
+and the closed pastures grew green and did not glow, and the world and
+every nightingale slept, and life below was a still cloister-garden,
+and, only overhead, the constellations, like silver, ethereal harps,
+seemed to tremble and sound before the spring winds of distant Edens.
+
+He must needs see Liana again to-morrow, by way of tuning his heart.
+Rabette came up from the mountain with her friend, infinitely animated.
+Both seemed almost exhausted with laughing and joking; for Roquairol
+carried everything, even mirth, to the degree of pain. He had converted
+the evening star, for which he had given the invitation, into a hothouse
+and homestead of pleasant conceits and allusions. At first he would not
+come home with her, even to-morrow; but at last he consented, when
+Rabette assured him "she understood the fine gentleman well enough, but
+he must nevertheless just let her take care of things."
+
+When the ruddy dawn arose, Albano, accompanied by him, came again; but
+the garden-gate of the "manor-garden" was already open, and Liana
+already in the arbor. A stitched book of public documents (seemingly)
+lay in her lap, and her folded hands beside it; she looked rather
+straightforward, as in thought, than upwards, as in prayer; yet she
+received her Albano with so mild and distant a smile, as a man, greeting
+a guest who comes right into the midst of his prayers, smiles upon him,
+and then continues his devotion. The Count had hitherto been obliged
+always to prepare himself for a certain reserve in her reception of him.
+A misunderstanding, which returns quickly, however often it is removed,
+acts again and again as deludingly and freshly as at the first time. He
+felt very strongly that something more fixed than that first virgin
+bashfulness, wherewith a maiden will always invent for the dazzling sun
+of love, besides the dawn, a twilight too, and again another for that,
+hindered the fiery melting together of their souls.
+
+He asked what she was reading; she hesitated, covering it up. A thought,
+suddenly darting upon her, seemed to open her heart; she gave him the
+book, and said it was a French manuscript,--namely, written prayers,
+drawn up by her mother several years before, which touched her more than
+her own thoughts; but still there was ever-more looking through her
+tenderly woven face a cloistral thought, which sought to leave her
+heart. What could Albano object to this Psalmist of the heart? Who can
+answer a songstress? A praying female stands, as does also an unhappy
+one, on a high, holy place, which our arms cannot reach. But how
+miserable must most prayers be, since, although in earlier life
+possessing the attraction of charms, like the rosary, which is made out
+of sweet-smelling woods, yet afterward in advanced age they act only as
+blemishes, and like the relic or the death's-head with which the rosary
+itself ends!
+
+Without waiting for his question, she told him at once what had
+disturbed her during her prayer; namely, this passage in it: _O mon
+Dieu, fais que je sois toujours vraie et sincere_, &c., whereas she had
+hitherto concealed her love from her dear mother. She added, she would
+come now very soon, and then the closed heart should be opened to her.
+"No," said he, almost angrily, "thou mayest not; thy secret is also
+mine!" Men are often hardened by that in prose which in poetry softens
+them; for example, woman's piety and open-heartedness.
+
+Now no one hated more than he the clutching of the parental
+writing-finger, forefinger, and little finger into a pair of clasped
+hands; not that he feared, on the part of the Minister, wars or
+rivals,--he rather presupposed open arms and feasts of joy,--but
+because, to his magnanimous spirit, at once claiming and granting
+liberty, nothing was more revolting than the reflection, what smutty
+turf now for the kindling of the fire the parents might lay on the altar
+of love, or what pots they might set on to boil; how easily, then, even
+poetic parents often transform themselves with the children into prosaic
+or juristical ones, the father into an administrative, the mother into a
+financial board; how, then, to say the least, the court atmosphere makes
+one a bondsman, just as only the poetic heaven's ether makes free; and
+what perturbations his Hesperus might expect from the attracting world,
+the old Minister, who found nothing more unprofitable about love than
+love itself, and to whom the holiest sensibilities seemed about as
+useful for marriages of rank as the Hebrew is for preachers, namely,
+more in examination than in actual service. So ill did he think of his
+father-in-law, for he knew not something still worse.
+
+But the good daughter thought far higher of her mother than did a
+stranger, and her heart struggled painfully against concealing from her
+her love. She appealed to her brother, who was just entering. But he was
+wholly of Albano's mind. "Women," he added, not in the best humor, "are
+more fond of speaking _about_ love than _in_ love; men, the reverse."
+"No," said Liana, decidedly; "_if_ my mother ask me, I cannot be
+untrue." "God!" cried Albano, with a shudder, "and who could wish that?"
+For to him, also, free truth was the open helmet of the soul's nobility;
+only he spoke it merely from self-respect, and Liana out of human
+affection.
+
+Rabette came with the tea-things and a flask, wherein was tea-juice and
+elementary fire, or nerve-ether for the Captain,--arrack. He never liked
+to visit people in the morning, with whom he could not drink it till
+evening; Rabette had yesterday guessed this naughtiness, and to-day
+gratified it. "How can the soul," said the sound Albano to him often,
+"make itself a slave to the belly and the senses? Are we not already
+bound closely enough by the fetters of the body, and thou wilt still
+draw chains through the chains?" To this Roquairol had always the same
+answer: "Just the reverse! Through the corporeal itself, I free myself
+from the corporeal; for instance, by wine from blood. As long as thou
+canst never escape servitude to the bodily senses, and all thy
+consciousness and thy thinking can only, through a bodily servitude,
+attaching itself to the glebe of the earth, abide in their nobility; I
+cannot perceive why thou dost not properly use these rebels and despots
+as thy servants? Why must I let the body only work ill upon me, and not
+advantageously as well?" Albano stood to it, that the still light of
+health was more dignified than the poppy-oil flame of a slave of opium;
+and the fate of being prisoner of war to the body, which one spirit has
+to bear in common with the whole human army, more honorable than the
+cramping confinement of a personal arrest.
+
+To-day, however, not even the spirituous brimstone-smoked tea-water
+could wash away a certain discontent from Roquairol, whom night-watching
+had colored more pale, as it had the Count more red. He could not be
+reconciled to it, that the manor-garden was all shut in with a
+board-fence as high as a man, which was less intended as a
+billiard-table border, not to let the eye-ball go out, than as a
+mountebank's booth, to let nothing in, and which of course insured no
+other _prospect_ than the prospect proper; quite as little did the
+pleasure-garden commend itself to his favor by the fact that the
+turf-benches on which they sat in the arbor had not yet been mowed, that
+in all the beds only vegetables for the trimming of cooked meat flapped
+about, that nothing ripe yet hung there but one or two moles in their
+hanging death-beds, that on a bowling-green, whereupon one rolls into a
+tinkling middle-hole, the crooked return-alley let the balls run home
+again, much more easily than they could--unless one threw them--be made
+to pass over the earth-bottom of the main alley, and that no orangery
+was anywhere to be seen, excepting once, when fortunately the
+garden-gate stood open, just as a blooming orangery box passed by in a
+wheelbarrow on its way to Lilar.
+
+The Captain needed only to bring forward these particulars satirically,
+and thereby inwardly to wound the outwardly laughing Rabette,--because
+no woman can bear to hear fault found with her bodily property, whether
+it be children, clothes, cakes, or furniture;[187] and then his
+mountain-heights could gradually disencumber themselves of their clouds
+again, and Rabette become still more uncommonly gay.
+
+Albano, in this morning hour of the day, and, as it were, of childhood,
+and in this little paradise-garden of his childish years, was inwardly
+glad,--for in the first love, as in Shakespeare's pieces, nothing
+depends on the wooden stage of the performance; but to-day's afterwinter
+of yesterday's chill would nevertheless not melt. The morning-blue began
+to be filled with brighter and brighter golden fleeces; as the garden,
+like small cities, had only two gates, the upper and the lower, he
+opened like an aurora that of the morning sun; the splendor gushed in
+over the smoking green; the Rosana gliding below caught lightnings, and
+flung them over hitherward; Albano departed finally full of love and
+bliss.
+
+But the love was greater than the bliss.
+
+
+69. CYCLE.
+
+Flying Spring! (I mean love, just as one calls the after summer a
+_flying summer_) thou hurriest away of thyself over our heads with
+arrowy speed; why do authors again hurry over thee? Thou art the German
+blossoming season; which is never a blossoming month long. We read all
+winter in almanacs and similes much about its magnificence, and we pine
+for it; at last it hangs thick on the dark boughs six days long, and
+beside that, under cold May showers, sweeping bliss-month[188] storms,
+and with a dumb-session of half-frozen nightingales,--and then, when one
+comes out at length into the garden, the footpath is already white with
+blossoms, and the tree at most full of green; then it is over, till in
+winter we again hear with exaltation of heart the beginning of a tale:
+"It was just in the lovely season of the blossoming." Even so do I see
+few authors, at the long session-and-scribbling-table of romance,
+working right and left for the benefit of the reading-desk, who, after
+the long preface to love, do not so soon as, like a war, it is declared,
+forthwith conclude it; and really, there are more steps _to_ love than
+_in_ it; all that is _coming to be_,--for instance, spring, youth,
+morning, learning,--opens out more widely and in a richer variety of
+hues than fixed _being_; but is not this latter in turn a progress, only
+a higher; and this, again, a state of being, only a quicker?
+
+Albano would fain lead along more beautifully the fleeting, divine
+season, when the heart is our god; he would have it rather fly _upward_
+than fly _away_. He was angry the next day with nobody but himself. He
+tore his way through such petty and yet closely entangling troubles,
+through a condition like that of men during an earthquake, when an
+invisible vapor holds the heavy foot as a snare. "I would rather let
+myself be rained on upon mountains," said he, "than in valleys." Men of
+quick fancy more easily reconcile themselves to the loved one when she
+is absent, than when she is present.
+
+After some days, he went again to Blumenbuehl just before sundown. A
+burning red cut through the night-like gloom of the foliage. His
+darkening, woody road was made, by the flames which danced about
+therein, an enchanted one. He transferred his illuminated present deep
+into a future, shady past. O, after years, thought he, when thou
+returnest, when all is gone by and changed, the trees grown up, human
+beings passed away, and only the mountains and the brook left, then wilt
+thou congratulate thyself that thou couldst once in these walks so often
+journey to thy sweetest heart, and on either hand the music and the
+glory of Nature went along with thy joyful soul, as the moon seems to
+the child to run after him through all streets. An unwonted rapture
+flung through his whole being the long, broad streak of sunshine; the
+farthest flowers of his fancy opened; all tones came through a brighter
+ether, and sounded nearer. The flowers around him, too, exhaled a keener
+fragrance, and the peal of the bell sounded nearer; and both are signs
+of foul weather.
+
+Thus inwardly happy, he made his appearance,--and, indeed, without
+Roquairol, who in fact came more and more seldom,--and found his beloved
+up in his childhood's study, her guest-chamber, which was now the usual
+scene of his visits. In a white dress, with dark trimming, as in a
+beautiful half-mourning, she sat at the drawing-table with her eyes
+sharper than usual, buried in a picture. She flew to his heart, but only
+to lead him back presently to the dear form upon which her heart hung as
+in a mother's arms. She related that her mother had been here to-day
+with the Princess, and had showed so much pleasure in her improving
+color, such infinite kindness toward her happy daughter. "She was
+obliged," continued she, "to let me take a slight sketch of her, in
+order that I might only look upon her so much the longer, and have
+something of her to keep by me. I am just finishing the outline of the
+face, but it is absolutely too poor a likeness." She could not tear her
+fancy away from the image, and still less from the original. To be sure,
+no more beautiful medallion can hang _on_ a daughter's heart, or in fact
+_in_ it, than that of a mother; but, nevertheless, Albano thought to-day
+the hanging-ring took up too broad a space.
+
+She talked only of her mother. "I certainly sin," said she; "she asked
+me in such a friendly way whether thou camest often, but I said only
+yes, and nothing further. O good Albano, how gladly would I have given
+up to her frankly my whole soul!"
+
+He answered, that the mother seemed not to be so frank; she perhaps knew
+already the whole through the Lector, and the pure draught of love would
+now be continually disturbed by foreign substances. Against Augusti he
+declared himself very strongly, but Liana quite as strongly upheld him.
+Through both that counterfeiter of the coin of truth, namely,
+suspicion,--the suspicion that she perhaps loved him as she loved
+everything, since she grew as by a living tie to everything
+good,--gained, under Albano's sensibilities, which besides had been
+to-day so warm and glad, more and more mint-stamps and currency.
+
+She suspected nothing, but she came back to the subject of her secrecy.
+"But why, then, does it make me unhappy," said she, "if it is right?
+Beloved one, my Caroline too appears to me no longer, and truly that is
+no good sign." This spectral-machinery always came on as oppressively
+and gloomily to him as a thunder-cloud in the outer world. His old
+exasperation against the teasings practised in his own case by apes of
+the air, whom he could not lay hold of, passed over into a similar
+feeling against Liana's optical self-deception. That veil presented her
+by Caroline, wherewith, in the beginning, she had so sublimely arrayed
+herself for the cloister of the tomb,--that travelling veil for the next
+world,--had long been to this Hercules a burning garment, drenched in
+the poisonous blood of a Nessus; therefore she no longer dared to wear
+it before him. The conclusion that the fancy of being destined to death
+laid the seed of the reality, and that in the deep overhanging cloud an
+accident might easily attract the striking-spark of death, fell like a
+mourning into his love festival. So are all strange sea-wonders of fancy
+(like this death-delusion) desired only _in_ fancy (in romance), but not
+in life, except once on fantastic heights; but then must such comets,
+like others, soon recede again from our heaven.
+
+He spoke now very seriously,--of suicidal fancies, of life's duties, of
+wilful blindness to the fairest signs of her recovery, among which he
+reckoned as well the disappearance of the optical Caroline as the
+blooming of her color. She heard him patiently; but through the
+Princess, who, notwithstanding her love, seldom left behind with him
+pleasant impressions, her fancy had to-day taken quite another road, far
+beyond herself and her grave. She stood only before Linda's image, of
+which Julienne had this afternoon communicated to her sharper outlines
+than maidens are wont to give of maidens. "She is a very good girl,"
+they say of each other. Linda's manly spirit, her warm attachment to
+Gaspard in connection with her contempt of the mass of men, her
+inflexibility, her bold strides in manly knowledge, her masterly and
+often severe letters, more pithy than flowery, and, most of all, her
+probably approaching arrival, took a powerful hold of Liana's tender
+heart. "My Albano must have her," was the constant thought of this
+disinterested soul; and if the Princess had had the intention of
+humiliating comparisons, she remarked it not, but fulfilled it. The good
+creature found, too, so much of a higher providence here,--for example,
+that her brother need now no longer be the rival of her lover and of his
+friend,--that she herself could portray beforehand her vigorous Albano
+to the proud Romeiro, and that certainly, despite all opposition, all
+the ghostly prophecies strikingly connected and coincided with each
+other. All this she now said (because she concealed only her sorrows,
+not her hopes) right to the Count's face.
+
+What a gnashing bite did an evil genius at this moment make into his
+tenderest life! That glowing love which neither divides nor is divided
+possessed _his_ heart, he thought, not hers. He came very near to
+showing up his inner being just as it was, all kindled at once, as if by
+a lightning stroke, into a lofty blaze. Only the innocent white brow,
+with festive roses in its little ringlets; the childishly bright
+looking-up of the pure blue pair of eyes, and the soft face, which even
+at a musical fortissimo, and at every vehemence in movement or laughter
+on the part of another, caught a sickly redness from the beating heart;
+and his indignant shame at the levity with which a man can abuse his
+omnipotence and his sex, to the terror of the tenderer, restrained him,
+like guardian spirits; and he said merely, in that noble anger which
+sounded like a tender emotion, "O Liana, thou art hard to-day!"
+
+"And yet I am indeed so tender!" said the innocent one. The two had
+hitherto been standing at the window, before the dark tempest which came
+rolling on out of Lilar. She turned suddenly round; for since the day of
+her blindness, when a dark cloud had seemed to fly towards her, she had
+never been able to look at one long; and Albano's tall form, with his
+whole live-glowing face and his soul-speaking eyes, stood illumined by
+the evening light before her. With the hand which he left free she
+softly and playfully swept aside the dark hair from his defiant
+forehead, smoothed the contracted eyebrow, and said, as his look stung
+like a sun, and his mouth shut with determination, "O, joyfully,
+joyfully, shall this fair face one day smile!" He smiled, but sadly.
+"And then shall I be still more blest than to-day!" said she, and
+started, for a lightning-flash darted across his earnest face, as over a
+jagged mountain, and showed it, like that of the god of war, illuminated
+with war-flames.
+
+He hurried away; would not be held back; spoke of a weather-cooling;
+went out into the storm; and left Liana behind in the joy that she had
+spoken to-day merely out of pure love. From the last house in the
+village Rabette flew to meet him; the torrents of the restrained tears
+rolled down his cheeks. "What dost thou want? why weepest thou?" she
+cried. "Thou art dreaming!" cried he, and hurried, without further
+answer, out into the tempest, which had suddenly, like a mantle-fish,
+flung itself stiflingly over the whole heaven. There, under the
+rain-drops and lightning-flashes, he began, first of all, to reckon up
+for himself the best proofs that Liana had saintly charms, divine sense,
+all virtues, especially universal philanthropy, daughterly, sisterly,
+friendly affection, only not, however, the glowing love for one
+person,--at least, not for him. She is so entirely and exclusively--such
+is always his conclusion--possessed and absorbed with the present
+object, whether it be myself or a broken arm of the little Pollux, that
+it hides from her heaven and earth. Hence the setting of her life's day,
+with all the attendant partings, is no more to her than the setting of a
+star. Hence it was that I stood beside her so long, with a heart full of
+the pangs of love, and she saw not into my love, because she found none
+in her own bosom. And this is what makes it so bitter, when man, pining
+in poverty among the common hearts of earth, is rendered by the noblest
+only unhappy at last.
+
+The rain pattered and trickled through the leaves, the fire darted
+through the woods, and the Wild Huntsman of the storm drove his crazy
+chase. This refreshed and rejoiced him like the cooling hand of a friend
+taking his to guide him. As he ascended, not through the cavern, but
+outside over the back of the mountain to his high thunder-house, he saw
+a thick, gray night of rain settle down heavily upon the green Lilar,
+and on the winding Tartarus rested under the flashes the illuminated
+storm. He shuddered, on entering his little house, at a cry which his
+AEolian-harp emitted under the snatches of the wind; for it had once,
+gilded by the evening sun, ethereally clothed his young love like
+starlight, and had followed it with ever-varying tones, as it went out
+over this suffering life.
+
+
+70. CYCLE.
+
+On the morning after both storms were dissolved into a still
+cloudiness.--And out of the great griefs came only errors. Weaklings
+that we are! when at our sham execution fate touches us with the rod,
+not with the sword, we sink impotently from the block, and feel the
+process of dying reach far into our life! All fevers, including
+spiritual ones, are cooled by the freshness of a new morning, just as
+sad evening stirs all their embers into a glow. Who of us has not at
+evening,--that proper witching hour of tormenting spectres,
+house-haunting ghosts and hobgoblins,--caught in the threads which he
+himself had spun, but which he took for a web spread by other hands,
+entangled himself more and more deeply the more he turned about and
+tried to extricate himself, till in the morning he saw his turnkey
+before him, namely, himself?
+
+Albano saw on the whole theatre of yesterday's war nothing left standing
+but a pale, kindly figure in half-mourning, who looked round after him
+with innocent maidenly eyes, and toward which he could not help looking
+over, albeit she was now more a bride of God than of a mortal. He felt
+now, to be sure, more strongly how high his demands upon real friends
+rose, than he once did, when he could heighten at pleasure the highest
+which he made upon the beings of his dreams, whom he always cast exactly
+into the temporary mould of his heart; and how he was possessed by a
+spirit that spared no one, that would stretch the wings of every other
+according to its own, because it could bear no individuality except that
+which was copied.
+
+He had hitherto experienced from all his loved ones too little
+opposition, as Liana had too much; both extremes injure one. The
+spiritual as well as the physical man, without the resistance of the
+outer atmosphere, is blown up and burst by the inner, and without the
+resistance of the inner is crushed by the outer; only the equilibrium
+between inner resistance and outer pressure keeps a fair play-room open
+for life and its culture. Besides, men--since only the best of them
+appreciate in the best of their own sex strong conviction--can hardly
+tolerate it in women, and would have them not merely the reflection, but
+even the echo, of themselves. They want, I mean, not merely the look,
+but also the word, that says yes.
+
+Albano punished himself with several days of voluntary absence, till the
+unclean clouds should have cleared away from within him which had
+overshadowed the gnomon of the sundial of his inner man. "When I am
+quite cheerful and good-natured," said he, "I will go back to her, and
+err no more." He errs at this moment. Whenever a strange, uncomfortable
+semitone has repeatedly intruded itself between all the harmonies of two
+natures, it swells more and more fatally till it drowns the key-note,
+and ends all. The dividing tone was, in this case, the strength of the
+man's pitch in connection with the strength of the woman's. But the
+highest love is most easily wounded by the slightest difference. O,
+little avails it then for man to say to himself, I will be another man!
+Only in the finest, only in unimpaired enthusiasm, does he propose to
+himself such a thing; but it is just when the feeling is impaired, when
+he were hardly capable of the purpose, that he has to rise to the
+fulfilment of it, and then he can hardly make the achievement.
+
+The Count went in the morning, as usual, to his lecture-rooms and
+parlors in the city. In the former it was hard for him to fix his
+instruments and his eyes upon the stars of the sciences, and to take
+sight, sailing as he was on such a sea of emotion. In the latter he
+found the Lector colder than ever, the Bibliothecary warmer, the
+household more inflated. He went to Roquairol, whom he to-day loved and
+treated still more cordially, as if by way of atonement to his offended
+sister. Charles said at once, with his sudden and tragical flinging up
+of the curtain of futurity, "All was discovered,--in the highest degree
+of probability!" As often as lovers see that their Calypso's
+island--which, to be sure, lies free on the open ocean--has at length
+come to the eyes of the seafaring world, and that they are making sail
+for it, they are astonished to an astonishing degree; for is there any
+one Paradise which has such a loose and low palisado, allowing every
+passer-by to see in, as theirs?
+
+For a long time, he related, had the Doctor's children always had
+something to fetch from the Architect's wife at Lilar,--flowers,
+medicine-phials, &c.; certainly as spy-glasses and ear-tubes of Augusti,
+who again was the opera-glass of his mother. In short, his father had,
+at least, been at the Greek woman's yesterday, but had luckily found
+only an empty package[189] from Rabette to him (Charles), which,
+according to the liberties of the ministerial Church, he had opened and
+closed.
+
+"Why _luckily_?" said Albano. "I will justify and honor my love before
+the world." "I referred to myself," he replied; "for never was my father
+more friendly to me than since he broke open my last letters. He is this
+afternoon in Blumenbuehl, and it may well be more on my own account than
+my sister's."
+
+Albano had no fear that the city could drill mining-galleries under his
+childhood's land, so as to blow up in one conflagration the blessed
+isle,--could he not trust his character and courage and Liana's
+own?--but it pained him now that he had so needlessly robbed the
+childlike Liana of the joy and merit of a childlike open-heartedness.
+How he longed now for the atoning and recompensing moment of the first
+meeting again, after the next morning!
+
+He stayed by his friend as by a consolation, and did not go back till
+the evening redness floated about in the rain-clouds. When he came, he
+found already awaiting him a letter from Liana, written to-day.
+
+     "O good Albano, why camest thou not? How much I had to say
+     to thee! How I trembled for thy sake on Friday, when the
+     frowning cloud pursued thee with its thunder! Thou hast
+     weaned me too much from sorrow, so strange and heavy has it
+     become to me now. I was inconsolable the whole evening; at
+     last, when night fell, the thought sank into my mind that
+     thou hadst been oppressed as with presentiments, and that
+     the lightning loved to strike the thunder-house. Why,
+     indeed, art thou there? I hurried up, and knelt by my bed,
+     and prayed to God, although the storm had long been
+     dispersed, that he would have preserved thee. Smile at my
+     tardy prayer; but I said to him, 'Thou knewest indeed,
+     all-gracious One, that I would pray.' I was consoled, too,
+     when I looked up to the stars, and the broken ray of joy
+     trembled within me.
+
+     "But in the morning Rabette made me sad again. She had seen
+     thee weeping on the road. A thousand times have I asked
+     myself, whether I am to blame for that. Can it have come
+     from this,--for she says so,--that I afflict thee too much
+     with my death thoughts? Never more shalt thou hear them; the
+     veil, too, is laid away; but I calculated upon thee
+     according to my brother, to whom, as he himself says, the
+     dusk of death is an evening-twilight, in which forms seem to
+     him more lovely. Truly, I am quite blest; for thou art even
+     so, and yet hast so little in having me,--only a small
+     flower for thy heart, but I have thyself. Leave me my
+     grave-mound; therefrom, as from a mountain, comes better,
+     more fruitful soil into my valley. O how one loves, Albano,
+     when all around us crumbles and sinks and melts away in
+     smoke, and when, still, the bond and splendor of love stand
+     firm and inviolate on the fleeting ground of life, as I have
+     often seen with emotion, when standing by waterfalls, a
+     rainbow hover, undisturbed and unchanged, over the bursting,
+     impetuous floods! O, would that the nightingales were yet
+     singing; now I could sing with them! Thy AEolian-harp, my
+     harmonica, how gladly would I have it in my hand! My father
+     was with us, and more cheerful and friendly toward all than
+     ever. Lo, even he is kindly disposed! My parents surely send
+     no tempest into our feast of roses. I readily did him the
+     pleasure, therefore,--forgive it!--of promising him, that I
+     would receive no visits from strangers in a strange
+     house--because, he said, it was improper. I must go home for
+     some days on account of the Prince's marriage; but I shall
+     see thee soon. O forgive! When my father speaks softly, my
+     soul cannot possibly say, No. Farewell, my noble one!
+
+                                                         L.
+
+     "P. S. Soon a little leaf will come fluttering again over to
+     thy mountain. Only continue in perpetual joy! O God! why am
+     I not stronger? What beings shouldst thou then take to thy
+     heart!--Thou dear one!"
+
+How was he shamed by this full-blooming love, which never rightly knows
+when it is misunderstood, and which presupposes no other fault than its
+own! How sadly did the thought of the commanded separation affect him
+now, after the voluntary one! He could now love her as a guarding angel
+_before_ Paradise, how much more as a giving angel _in_ it! But it is
+hard for a man, as the youth felt, clearly to distinguish in the female
+heart, especially in this one, intention from instinct, ideas from
+feelings, and in this dark, full heaven to count and arrange all the
+stars. Everything like hardness, every unpromising bud, arose at last as
+a flower; and her worth unfolded itself piece-wise like spring; whereas,
+generally, from other maidens, a traveller who visits them carries away
+with him directly at his first evening's departure a little complete
+flower-catalogue of all their charms and arts, as a Brocken-passenger
+gets at the tavern a neat nosegay of the various kinds of mosses which
+are found on the mountain.
+
+He supposed she was now with her parents; and he followed, not as a
+pouting schoolboy, but as a harmonious man, the giant of destiny. In the
+garden rainy weather held sway, the crop of every heavy tempest, which,
+like a war, always devastates the scene of conflict.
+
+The promised leaflet appeared: "Only be happy. We shall see each other
+very, very soon, and then most blissfully. Forgive me! Ah, I long
+exceedingly!"
+
+Now he experienced what days they were which had _once_--that is, only a
+few days ago--passed before him as divine apparitions, and which now
+again were to come up in the East as returning stars! Why does a
+blessing, not till it is lost, cut its way like a sharp diamond so
+deeply into the heart? Why must we first have lamented a thing, before
+we ardently and painfully love it? Albano threw both past and future
+away from him, that he might dwell wholly and purely in that present
+which Liana had promised him.
+
+
+71. CYCLE.
+
+On Sunday morning, when all the blue heavens stood open, and the earth
+was festally decked with pearls and twigs, a gentle finger tapped at
+Albano's door, which could belong to none but a female hand. It was
+Liana who entered at so early an hour; Rabette and Charles without
+uttered a loud greeting. On his exulting breast fell the beautiful
+maiden, blooming from, her walk, with blessed, bright eyes, a freshly
+bedewed rose-bud. It was his finest morning; he had a clear feeling of
+Liana's love. As the AEolian-harp sounded in, she looked towards it,
+remembered with a blush that fairest evening of the covenant, and
+listened in silence, and dried her eyes when she turned them again
+towards Albano. But he could not enter into this temple of joy without
+having cleansed and healed himself by a frank confession of his late
+errors. What a sweet rivalry ensued between them of confessing and
+forgiving, when Liana lovingly exclaimed and owned that she had not
+understood him lately, that only she was the blamable one, and that she
+would begin this very moment to speak better. She could not give herself
+any comfort about the secret pangs which she had caused her friend. As
+mahogany furniture cracks in no temperature, and contracts no spots, and
+needs no polishing, so was it with this heart, Albano's felt, as he now
+swore to himself always, even when he did not understand her, to say to
+himself, She is right.
+
+She solved for him the riddle of her appearing to-day with those
+friendly looks which a good nature redoubles, when it has anything to
+sweeten,--namely, she was going back to Pestitz to-day; but the carriage
+would not come till late, till evening, in fact, about tea-time, and so
+there remained a whole day before them; and she hoped her father would
+not take this circuitous route through Lilar as a breach of her promise.
+A loving maiden grows unconsciously more bold. Thereupon she sought to
+make him quite calm about the peaceful intentions of her father, and
+represented his strictness, in subjecting himself and others to
+convenience, as the reason of his prohibition, as well as of her being
+summoned back to the wedding-festival. Albano, so soon after the oath
+which he had just sworn to himself, kept it, and said, She is right.
+
+The Captain came in with the red-cheeked Rabette, whose eyes glistened
+with joy. The small apartment did not, by narrowness and confusion, make
+the pleasure less. Charles, generally so much like Vesuvius, which in
+the first hours of morning is still covered with snow, presented already
+a warm summit; he seated himself at the instrument and thundered into
+the noisy presence with a prestissimo (which lay open) of Haydn's,--that
+true hour-caller of rejoicing hours,--and played, to the astonishment of
+the females, the hardest part so easily, at sight, that he rather played
+into it, than from it, and kept composing much (for instance, the bass)
+himself; whereas Albano, with almost comic fidelity, gave you the exact
+truth in music quite as much as in history, which, again, always became
+in Charles's mouth a piece of his own personal biography. The morning
+added wings to all their souls, whereas noon always binds men's wings
+down,--hence Aurora goes with winged steeds, and the god of day with
+wingless ones. "But how now are our seven pleasure-stations to be made
+out?" inquired Charles, "for the day lies like a garden-hall, with
+nothing but pleasure-avenues on all sides open before us." "Charles, is
+it not, then, a matter of indifference _where_ a man loves?" said
+Albano. Blessed one, whose heart needs nothing but one heart more, no
+park into the bargain, no _opera seria_, no Mozart, no Raphael, no
+eclipse of the moon, not so much as moonlight, and no read or acted
+romance!
+
+"First, I must see my Chariton," said Liana. "Yes," added her brother,
+immediately, "she can bring our dinner after us into the gothic temple."
+He proposed, namely, on this lovely day, to dine in the twelfth century,
+and to sit by a sombre, motley window-light, and on sharp-cornered,
+heavy, thick furniture, and, as it were, darkly under the earth of a
+green present, glistening overhead, to sit with blooming faces; for
+thus did he overload the fullest enjoyments with external contrasts, and
+enjoyed every happy present most in the near gleam and reflection of the
+sharpened sickle which was to mow them away.[190] "God forbid and avert
+it, friend!" said Rabette. Albano, too, deemed the friendly Greek, her
+laughing children, and the neighboring rose-fields far preferable, and,
+with the aid of Liana, prevailed. Before the embowered cottage the
+children came running to meet them, Helena, with her little apron full
+of orange-blossoms, which she had picked up, for the breaking of them
+off had been forbidden her, and Pollux, in the last, light bandage of
+his broken arm, the hand of which had now been obliged to work with its
+companion, the right hand, at puckering up and cracking the rose-leaves.
+Both gave notice: "Mother was not ready yet, and had dressed them
+first." But presently, neat and simple as a priestess destined to dance
+around the altar of gods of joy, sprang Chariton to meet her Liana, and,
+as she came, continued adjusting her hastily donned clothes by a light
+hitching and twitching. "This," said Roquairol, after he had easily
+obtained from Rabette a nodding assent thereto, because she had not
+understood his French request for the same, "is my spouse since
+yesterday,"--and he enjoyed without further circumstance the right of
+thouing her, which she, since the friendly encouragement of the
+Minister, accepted the more fondly with maidenly presentiments.
+
+When Liana kindly announced four noonday guests for Chariton, there
+stood in the dark eyes of the Greek gleams of joy, and the little face,
+with great arched Italian eyebrows, became a stereotype smile, which was
+not culinary embarrassment, but merely tongueless joy; which only made
+her white semicircle of teeth shine more broadly, when Charles spoke
+right out: "Surely thou canst help her, wife!" "Of course!" said
+Rabette, quite delighted; because her heart had no longer any other lips
+than her two hands, for which, if they could only lay hold of hard work,
+it was full as much as if they were pressed by the hand of a lover. Did
+she not again and again curse her awkward, hesitating throat, when
+Roquairol, in her presence, poured out his sounding and fiery torrents
+of speech? On this occasion, when he had again set off the surroundings
+with artificial, shadowy refinements, he insisted upon it, of course,
+that Chariton should be executive secretary, and Rabette only
+corresponding secretary. Liana, too, out of a like womanliness, would
+fain do something for her darling; but since she, as a maiden of rank,
+could not cook anything, but only bake a little, accordingly it was
+assigned her,--but reluctantly on the part of her friend, who never
+loved to see the sweet form anywhere else than, like other butterflies,
+by his side among the flowers,--at a quite late moment, and for a space
+of ten minutes, with her eyes and in extraordinary cases with her three
+writing-fingers, to co-operate in making the snow-balls, which were to
+close and crown the dessert.
+
+Never had kitchen ball-queen a broader canopy, or a more beautifully
+carved sceptre and apple, or fairer _dames d'atour_[191] than Chariton,
+and vessels and fire were quite thrown into the shade thereby.
+
+Now the happy couples--and the children too--went out into the joyful
+day, into the youthful garden, in order, like planets, with their moons,
+to stand now near each other, now far off, now in opposition, and now in
+conjunction, on their heavenly orbit around the same sun. "We will
+launch out at a venture," said Charles, in port, "and see whether we do
+not meet." Albano went with Liana after the children, who were already
+skipping along on the little houses through the rose-walks, on the
+bridge over the singing wood. He whose heart beats in such calm
+blissfulness, seeks in the invisible church no visible one: the whole
+temple of nature is the temple of love, and everywhere stand altars and
+pulpits. On the smoothly descending life-stream man stands without
+rudder, happy in his skiff, and leaves it to its own will.
+
+Then the children, mindful of the maternal prohibition against
+excursions, led the way up along the right, over the bridged eminence,
+to the western triumphal arch; and Helena, merely as guide of the little
+convalescent, ran forward quite unexpectedly and wildly with his hand.
+How gladly did Albano follow the little pilots and pointers! Heavens!
+when they looked round them on the magnificent height, and into the rich
+outspread day, and then into each other's eyes, how freely and broadly
+did the arches of their life-bridge rear themselves, and ships, with
+swollen sails and proudly towering masts, sail away beneath! Rose-trees
+clambered up the triumphal arches, the children reached up, snatched
+roses from their summits, and trudged away (working out and proving the
+unusual obedience) over four gates, in order, from the fifth, to look
+down into the smooth, shining lake, and to descend into the "enchanted
+wood," where art, like the children, played her pranks.
+
+Out of the entrance of the wood came forth Charles and Rabette, on their
+way back to Chariton over the arches, the former bound to the
+wine-cellar (he had something empty therefrom in his hand), and she
+intending to run a moment into the kitchen. He went blissfully, as if on
+wings, and said: "Life travels to-day in the constellation of the wain,
+far away through the blue." He turned round, however, to let the
+_Pleiades_ rise before them, that is, the so-called "inverted rain,"
+which ascends only for the space of five minutes, and properly only in
+an illumination. He led them all into the wondrous wood, through a light
+that lay in noonday slumber, glowing under free trees, whose stems,
+standing far asunder, only tendered each other their long twigs. At the
+focus of the picturesque paths, he let them await the play of the rain.
+The children sprang after him with their hopes, and, backed by the
+courage of the grown ones, sat down by them, on designated seats of the
+gods, or children's seats, between two little round lakes.
+
+While Charles ran swiftly up and down in zigzag, attending to the
+hydraulic and other mechanism,--nearly according to the points of the
+labyrinth-garden in Versailles,--they could fly about through the magic
+wood that rose everywhere. An all-powerful arm of the Rosana, which
+swept by without, struck in among the flowers, and bore a heavy, rich
+world; now the water was a fixed mirror, now a winding, beating vein,
+now a gushing spring, now a flash of lightning behind flowers, or a dark
+eye behind leafy veils; tapering shores, short beds, children's gardens,
+round islands, little hills, and tongues of land lay between: they held
+their motley, blooming children on arm and bosom, and the blue eyes of
+the forget-me-not, and the full tulip-cheeks, and the white-cheeked
+lilies played together like brothers and sisters apart from strangers,
+but roses ran through all. Now they heard a murmuring and purling; the
+lakes beside them bubbled up; on a peeled May-tree, fenced in on an
+island, the yellow fir-needles began to drop from above; from the
+hanging birches on the tongue of land, an inner rain dripped and glided
+down; out of the two lakes beside them water-jets flew like
+flying-fishes toward heaven. Now it gushed everywhere, and rows of
+fountains, those water-children, played with the flower-children. Like
+birds, streams fluttered with broad wings out of the laurel-hedges, and
+fell into the groups of roses. On a hill full of oaks, a water-snake
+crawled up; victoriously shot out from all the mouths of the shores
+besieging arches to the summits; suddenly the cheated spectators found
+themselves overhung with rainbows, for the lakes flung their waters high
+across over them, so that the wavering sun blazed through the
+lattice-work of drops, as through a shivered jewel-world. The children
+screamed with a terror of joy. The scared birds cruised through the
+shower; night butterflies were cast down; the turtle-doves shook
+themselves on the ground, beaten down in the torrents; the banks and the
+beds held their blooming little ones beneath the heavens.
+
+After five minutes the whole was over, and nothing remained, save that
+in all flowers and eyes the moist radiance trembled, and on the waves
+the stars continued to glisten. The children ran after the
+wonder-worker, Charles. "All is over outwardly," said Albano, "but not
+within us. I am to-day perfectly and peacefully happy; for thou lovest
+me, and the whole world, too, is friendly. Art thou, too, happy, Liana?"
+She answered, "Still more happy, and I must needs weep for joy if I told
+how happy I am." But she was weeping already. "See! drops!" said she,
+naively, as he looked upon her, and wiped _his_, which were the
+sprinklings of the rainbow, softly from his cheeks. His lips touched her
+holy, tender eye, but the other remained open, and her love looked out
+from it at him, and never did her holy soul hover nearer to him.
+
+After a few minutes this inverted heavenward shower was also over. They
+went across the middle of the free gardens to the eastern parts and
+gates. How brightly lay the coasts of the future before them, with
+thick, high green, and nightingales flying around the shores! Rapture
+makes the manly heart more womanly. The voice of his full bosom spoke
+but softly to Liana, on whose countenance, turned sidewise and
+heavenward, lay a still, pious gratitude; his fiery glance moved but
+slowly, and rested on the beautiful world; and he went without hasty
+strides around the smallest points of land. The young nightingale whet
+her well-fed bill against the twig, and shook herself merrily; the old
+one sang a short lullaby, and skipped chanting after fresh food; and
+everywhere flew and screamed across each other's paths the children of
+spring and their parents. Little white peacocks ran, without their
+pride, like little children in the grass. Blissfully floated the swan
+between her waves, with the white arch over the eyes that dipped under,
+and blissfully hovered the glistening music-fly, like a fixed star,
+undisturbed in the air, over a distant, flowery bell. The butterflies,
+flying flowers, and the flowers, fettered butterflies, sought and
+sheltered each other, and laid their variegated wings to wings; and the
+bees exchanged flowers only for blossoms, and the rose which has no
+thorns for them they exchanged only for the linden.
+
+"Liana," said Albano, "how I love the whole world to-day, on thy
+account! I could give the flowers a kiss, and press myself into the very
+heart of the full trees; I could not tread in the way of the long chafer
+down there." "Should one," she replied, "ever feel otherwise? How can a
+human being, I have often thought, who has a mother, and knows her love,
+so afflict and rend the heart of a brute mother? But Spener says, we do
+not forgive beasts even their virtues." "Let us go to him," said he.
+
+They came out through the eastern gate on the mountain-way behind the
+flute-dell, up to the house of old Spener, which lay in noonday
+brightness; but, as they heard loud reading and praying, they chose
+rather to walk by at a great distance, in order not to throw so much as
+their shadow into his holy heaven.
+
+They gazed into the fair, still flute-dell, and would fain go directly
+in; at length it spoke up to them with one flute. Their friends seemed
+to be down below there. The flute continued long to complain, as if
+lonely and forsaken; no sisters and no fountains murmured in with it. At
+last there rose, panting, in company with the flute, a timid, trembling
+singer's voice, struggling forth. It was Rabette, behind the tall
+bushes. She stirred both to the depths of the soul, because the poor
+creature, with the labor of her helpless voice, was rendering her loved
+one the meek sacrifice of obedience. "O my Albano," said Liana, twining
+around him with ecstasy, "what sweetness to think that my brother is
+happy, and has found peace of soul, and _that_ through thy sister!" "He
+deserves all my peace," said he, with emotion; "but we will not disturb
+the two, but go back the old way." For Rabette's tones were often cut
+short, but it was uncertain whether by fear, or by kisses, or by
+emotion.
+
+When they came in again through the eastern gate, the songstress and
+Charles came out of the green portal to meet them, both with wet eyes.
+Charles, stepping impetuously over living beds, and with wandering eyes,
+grasped a hand of both with his, and said, "This is, for once in this
+rainy world, a day which does not look like a night. Brother, but when
+one is so deeply blest, and catches the music of the spheres, the tones
+are such as were once heard in token that from Mark Antony his patron
+deity, Hercules, was departing." Thus are joys, like other jewels,
+mechanical poisons, which only in the distance shine, but, when touched
+and swallowed, eat into us. But Albano replied, smiling, "Since thou now
+fearest, dear friend, thou hast nothing to fear; for thou art not
+perfectly happy. I, however, alas! fear nothing." "Bravo!" said Charles;
+"now go into your kitchen, maiden!" He went into the so-called "Temple
+of Dreams," but soon hastened after her into the forbidden kitchen.
+
+Albano visited Liana's spring chamber. Here he painted to himself from
+memory that bright Sunday when Liana led him through Lilar, and he let
+the past soothingly glimmer into the present; but the latter overpowered
+the former with its beams. Out in the garden stood and shone, so it
+seemed to him, the pure pillars of his heaven, the supporters of his
+temple, the trees; and all that he here saw near him belonged again to
+his happiness, Liana's books and pictures and flowers, and every little
+mark of her tender hand.
+
+At last the saint of the Rotunda herself--suffused with a virgin blush
+at this nearness and at his blushing--stepped in, to take him away into
+the cool dining-room. It was small and dusky, but the heart needs not
+for its heaven much space nor many stars therein, if only the star of
+love has arisen. To the table-talk,--whereby alone an eating becomes a
+human one,--and to the jokes,--the finest _entremets_, the powdered
+sugar of conversation,--the children contributed their share, especially
+as they, unqualified to ascend from the forbidden _thou_ to _you_,
+always used thou-you at once. The deeply-red Chariton made extracts from
+Dian's letters and from the history of her life, and from the surgeon's
+bulletins in relation to Pollux's broken arm; she sought to extol the
+snow-balls, listened with a half-credulous, half-cunning look to the
+Captain, who spun out the sportive marriage-thou toward Rabette into
+five acts, and smiled with pleasure just where it was required.
+Especially did that music-barrel of all souls, Charles, spin joyously
+round; that Jupiter, around whom the eclipses of so many satellites were
+always flying, could show a great, serene splendor, when he and others
+wished. As often as Albano, according to the old way, would not come to
+his tragedy, he drew up the curtain of a comedy. To the good Rabette a
+word was as good as a look from him, although she only returned the
+latter, so as neither to fall into the _Thou_ nor into the _You_.
+Albano, knit with ears and eyes to one soul, could not produce with his
+lips much more than a smile of bliss; he could more easily have made a
+hymn than a _bon-mot_, a grace at meat than a dinner speech. For his
+Liana was to-day too affectionate, so contentedly and exhilaratingly did
+the sweet maiden look round with such hearty play, acting the chatty,
+bantering hostess, that a man who saw it and thought of her firm
+death-belief, would only have been so much the more deeply affected by
+this dance around the grave with flowers on the head, though he should
+remark--or rather for the very reason of his remarking--that she was
+here merely carrying on a joke with jocoseness itself for the
+sake--according to her new moral funeral arrangement--of sweetening for
+her beloved every parting-hour, as well the next as the last of all. But
+this was hard to perceive, because in female souls every show easily
+becomes reality, whether it be a sad or a gay one.
+
+How happy was her friend and every good being to think that the saint
+pronounced herself blest! And then she became, in turn, still more so.
+Thus does the radiance of joy dart to and fro between sympathizing
+hearts, as between two mirrors, in growing multiplication, and grows
+without end.
+
+
+72. CYCLE.
+
+The hour of departure came rolling on with swifter and swifter wheels;
+more constellations of joy went down than came up. Thus do the blooming
+vineyards of life always grow green on the ups and downs of a
+mountainous way, never on a smooth plain. The two lovers needed quiet
+now, not walks. They took the nearest, the path to the thunder-house.
+They stepped into the glimmering vesper-grounds as into a new land; at
+mid-day man is awakened from one dream after another, and has always
+forgotten and sees things always new. In Albano the golden splendor of
+the strings of joy still lingered under the declining sun; he told her
+gladly, how often he would visit her at her parents', and how he
+certainly hoped to find them friendly. Liana, as a daughter and a lover,
+retouched all his hopes with her own. But now she let her hitherto light
+heart, which had been rocking itself on the flowers of sport, sink back
+upon the solid ground of earnest.
+
+When there is peace and fulness in a man, he wishes not to enjoy
+anything else but himself; every motion, even of the body, jostles the
+full nectar-cup. They hastened out of the loud, lively garden into the
+still, dark thunder-house. But when, as if parted from the world, which
+lay out around the windows, brightly glistening and far receding, they
+stood alone together in the little twilight, and looked upon each
+other,--and when Albano's soul became like a sun-drunken mountain at
+evening, light, warm, firm, and fair, and Liana's soul like an
+up-gushing spring on the mountain, which glides away purely bright and
+cool and hidden, and only under the touch of the evening-beam glows in
+rosy redness,--and now that these souls had just found each other in the
+wide, unharmonious world,--then did a mighty joy thrill through them
+like a prayer, and they cast themselves upon each other's hearts, and
+glowed and wept and looked upon each other exaltedly in the
+embrace;--and, on the AEolian-harp, suddenly the folding doors of an
+inspired concert-hall flew open, and outswelling harmonies floated by,
+and suddenly again the gates shut to.
+
+They seated themselves at the breezy eastern window, before which the
+mountains of Blumenbuehl and Lilar's hills and paths lay in the sunlight.
+Around them was evening shade, and all was still, and the AEolian-harp
+breathed low. They only looked at each other, and felt joy to their
+innermost being that they loved and possessed each other. How
+ecstatically did they look, from the protection of this citadel, down
+into the sounding, stirring world! Down below the wind blew the blaze of
+poppies and tulips far and wide, and in among the heavy, yellow harvest.
+The silver-poplars, wearing eternal May-snow, fluttered with uptossing
+splendor; a flock of pigeons went rustling away, and dipped into the
+blue; and overhead, amid flying clouds, stood those round temples of
+God, the mountains, in rows, beside each other, bearing alternate nights
+and days; and the pious father stood alone on his hill, and handed his
+roe tender branches.
+
+"Thus may we ever remain!" said Albano, and pressed her dear hand with
+both of his to his heart. "Here and hereafter!" said she. "Albano, how
+often have I wished thou wert at the same time my female friend, that I
+might speak with thee of thyself! Who on the earth knows how I esteem
+thee, except myself alone?" "Here and hereafter? Liana, I am happier
+than thou, for I alone believe in our _long_ life here," said he, all at
+once changed.
+
+Whatever, now, may have been the reason,--whether that man is not at all
+accustomed to be happy in a pure present, severed from all future and
+past, because his inner heaven, like the natural one, directly over his
+head and close to him, always looks dark-blue, and only round about the
+distant horizon radiant; or that there is a bliss so tender and
+unearthly as, like the moonshine, to be made too dark by every passing
+cloud, whereas a sturdy one, like daylight, can bear the broadest; or
+that Albano was too much like men who always in joy feel their powers so
+strongly that they would rather kick over the table of the gods than see
+a dish or a loaf of the heavenly bread less thereupon, rather be
+perfectly miserable than not perfectly happy;--suffice it, he could not
+and would not be guilty of longer fear and concealment.
+
+So, when Liana, instead of answering, only embraced him, and was silent,
+because she meant to remain the whole day true to her promise not to
+dash the festal tapestry of fair days with a shade of mourning-cloth,
+then, as if urged on by a strange spirit, he spoke out: "Thou answerest
+nothing? Only joys, not sorrows, shall I share? Thou hast not thy veil?
+Wilt thou spare _me_ as a weakling? and thee alone shall thy
+death-belief continue to oppress? Liana, I will have pangs, too, and all
+thine,--tell all!"
+
+"Truly, I only meant to keep my promise," said she, "and no more. But
+what then shall I say to thee, dear?"
+
+"Dost thou believe, then, that thou art certainly to die after a year,
+superstitious one?--heavenly one!" said he.
+
+"In so far as it is God's will, certainly," said she. "O my good Albano,
+how can I help my belief, much as it pains thee too?" And here she could
+no longer restrain her tears, and all the crucifixes of memory started
+up alive in the fair soul, and bled intensely.
+
+"God's will?" asked he. "Quite as well might he at this moment
+precipitate a winter as an iceberg, into this happy summer. God?" he
+repeated, looked up, knelt down, and prayed, "O thou all-loving God--But
+thou shalt not die to me!" He turned, as if in anger, towards her,
+incapable of continuing his prayer, for the cry of his heart, and wiping
+hastily with both hands over his moist face. Now he prayed on, with a
+soft, trembling voice: "No, thou all-loving One! kill not this fair,
+young life! Leave us together long in purity and in peace."
+
+She knelt involuntarily at his side;--to-day more exhausted with
+pleasures and unknown inner victories, even with long walking, so much
+the more intensely struck by a moving reality that she had been spoiled
+and softened by moving fancies, and inexpressibly afflicted at Albano's
+sorrow;--she could not speak; her head and neck bowed, as under a
+burden suddenly laid upon them; and thus, as one heavily overclouded by
+a whole life, she looked down upon the floor. The embracing death-flood
+sounded with one arm around her; then did she see, without looking up,
+her Caroline pass by somewhere in bridal dress, and with the white,
+gold-spangled veil trailing along far over life; and she saw clearly how
+the celestial shape, when Albano begged for her life, shook its head
+slowly to and fro. "Cease to pray!" she cried, inconsolably. "But listen
+to me, thou cold apparition, and only make _him_ happy!" she prayed, but
+she saw nothing more; and, with inexpressible love, she hid her face,
+marked all over with the lines of agony, upon his breast.
+
+Here her brother called up, that the carriage was ready. She threw down
+a quick, thin-voiced "Yes." "Must we part?" asked Albano; the fiery rain
+of ecstasy had now fallen back into his open soul, in the shape of a
+darker rain of ashes; and so he went on without any bounds to his
+anguish. "Then have we seen each other for the last time?" and under the
+closed eyelid his noble eye wept.
+
+"No! in the name of the All-gracious, no!" said she, and rose to go.
+"Stay!" said he, and she staid, and embraced him again. "But do not
+accompany me!" she entreated. "Not!" said he, and held her for some time
+as she withdrew, by the tips of the fingers; it pained him so much, when
+he saw the sufferings which had been brought upon this still form, that
+these white wings of innocence had beaten themselves bloody against his
+cliffs and mountain-horns. He drew her again to himself, ere he let her
+and his salvation go from him. He looked after her as she slowly stole
+down along the sunny mountain, drying her eyes under the twigs, and
+went with bowed head along all the gay, blooming paths of the forenoon's
+walk. But he gazed not after, when her carriage rolled away across the
+joyous wood; he stood at the eastern window, and saw his childhood's
+mountains tremble, because he had forgotten to dry his eyes.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[180] The Titan was originally divided into four volumes.--TR.
+
+[181] A musical term, meaning the compensation made by
+transferring to imperfect concords part of the beauty of the
+perfect ones.--TR.
+
+[182] Every partial development of course works well for the
+whole; but only for this reason, because its opposite partial one
+balances it in a higher equation and sum total, so that all
+individual men are only the limbs of a single giant, such as the
+Swedenborgian _man_ is. But in so far as, in one individual, a
+want arises which helps out an opposite one in another,--so that
+the road of humanity plagues and trips equally much by hills and
+by hollows,--it will be seen that every one-sided fulness is,
+only a cure of the times, not their health; and that the higher
+law is, after all, a culture slower in the individual, but still
+harmonious; less in amount, indeed, but impartial, and thereby,
+in the long run, even more rapid. We always forget that--as in
+mechanics power and time are mutual supplements--eternity is the
+infinite power.
+
+[183] According to Borreux, the engineer, literally only every
+thousandth shot from small-arms hits. So is it in all cases; fear
+death, and then there stand flower-pots ready to fall from
+chamber-windows, lightnings from the blue sky, air-guns going
+off, polypuses in the heart, mad dogs, robbers, every gash in the
+finger, _aqua toffana_, proud flesh, &c., in short, all
+nature--that ever-going, crushing cochineal-mill--stands with
+innumerable open scissors of fate round about thee, and thou hast
+no consolation, save this, that--nevertheless people grow eighty
+years old. Fear impoverishment: then fire, flood, famine, and
+war, banditti and revolutions, set upon thee with greedy claws
+and fangs; and yet, thou rich man! the poor man--creeping along
+under the same birds of prey--becomes at last as rich as thou.
+March, therefore, boldly through the slumbering lion-herd of
+dangers, lying on the right and left, and go up to the fountain,
+only do not wantonly wake them up; of course a hell-god drags
+down individuals who feared nothing; but so, too, does a higher
+God draw up individuals who expected nothing; and fear and hope
+are swallowed in one common night.
+
+[184] Titan, 13. Cycle.
+
+[185] At the court of King Olaus, the royal youth Olo, dressed as
+a peasant, offered himself as a champion of the daughter against
+robbers. Then did the fire of the eyes and nobleness of form tell
+as proof of a high descent; thus did Suanhita, for example,
+recognize King Regner in a herdsman's guise by the beauty of his
+eye and face. The king's daughter looked searchingly into Olo's
+flaming eye, and came near swooning; she essayed a second look,
+and was senseless; and at the third, swooned. The divine youth
+therefore cast his eyelids down but uncovered his brow and his
+golden hair and the signs of his rank. See "The German and his
+Native Land," by Rosenthal and Karg, Vol. I. pp. 166, 167.
+
+[186] For what we call light is only an intenser white. No one
+sees, by night, the luminous stream which rushes upward along by
+the earth, pouring from the sun upon the full moon.
+
+[187] This warmer, tenderer, more timid, ever-praised sex, living
+more in the opinion of others than in its own, is poisonously
+pierced by a reproach which only pricks _us_ so as to draw a
+little blood, as noxious beasts, in warm countries and months,
+poison, and in cold ones only wound. Therefore let the girls'
+schoolmaster consider that a dose which is satire upon the
+boy--who, besides, must withstand opinion--becomes a lampoon,
+when it lights upon his sister.
+
+[188] Poetic name for May.--TR.
+
+[189] In which were always enclosed letters from Liana to Albano.
+Let every one see here, by two examples, how on the harmonica of
+love a brother must stand in front as key-bank for the sister,
+who would reach the bells. There should, therefore, always be a
+couple of couples, diametrically connected in sisterhood and
+affection.
+
+[190] "Such a character," writes Hafenreffer in this connection,
+"were desirable for romancing Kotzebues, for they, as he always
+will, according to his nature, create and raise the dignity of
+the situation by the accidental place thereof, might, under the
+cloak of his personality, humor entirely their own and disguise
+the weakness of the poet under the weakness of the hero."
+Methinks this is, so far as a biographer of romancers can decide,
+very striking.
+
+[191] Tiring-women.--TR.
+
+
+
+
+SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.
+
+THE SORROWS OF A DAUGHTER.
+
+
+73. CYCLE.
+
+Clouds like these last consisted with Albano less of falling drops than
+of settling dust. His life was yet a hothouse, and stood therefore
+toward the sunny side. Every day brought a new apology for the absent
+sweetheart, till at last she needed one no longer. But still he gave to
+every day its letter of indulgence for her silence; by and by they grew
+into letters of respite (moratories); finally, when she never let
+anything at all be heard or read from her; then he began to re-examine
+the afore-said apologies, and strike out many things therein.
+
+Quite as little could he find for himself, or for a note, a way of
+access to her. Even the Captain had been gone for some days on a journey
+to Haarhaar. With faint hands he held the heavy, drained cup of joy,
+which, when empty, weighs the heaviest. The wild hypotheses which man in
+such a case trots[192] through him--as in this, for instance, that of
+Liana's being sick, having caught cold, her imprisonment, absence on a
+journey--are, in their alternation and value, to be compared with
+nothing, except with the quite as great wildness and number of the
+plans which he enlists and dismisses,--that of abduction, of hate, of a
+duel, of despair.
+
+The terrible motionless time had no gnomon on its dial-plate. He stood
+as near his fate as man does to his dreams, without being able to
+recognize or prepare for its form, any more than one can for that which
+dreams will take. He went often into the city, through all whose streets
+there was riding, running, and driving, because they were about bringing
+and nailing together the beams for the grandest throne-scaffolding, on
+which the princely bride at her introductory compliment in the land,
+might look round the farthest; but he heard nothing there of his own
+bride, except that she quite often visited the picture-gallery with the
+Minister.
+
+Hereby two distressing hypotheses, that of her sickness, and that of her
+being at war with her family, seemed to lose their stings. The best,
+though the hardest thing was, to go straight to the Minister, as to
+Vesuvius, in order there to have the fairest prospect. He visited the
+Vesuvius. In fact this volcano was never more still and green. He asked
+after everything, and expressed himself upon much which immediately
+concerned the marriage festival; nor did he seek to conceal his hopes
+and wishes that the Count would help welcome the admirable bride.
+
+At last the latter, too, must venture to unfold _his_ hopes and wishes
+about the ladies. The Minister replied, with uncommon pleasantness, that
+the two had just carried back the "charming Mademoiselle von Wehrfritz"
+to Blumenbuehl; and indulged himself forthwith in a eulogium of that
+"unsophisticated nature." Albano soon took his leave, but much happier
+than when he came. A few street-lamps[193] certainly were now burning on
+his path.
+
+But in the morning he fell into a little obscure alley, where there was
+not a single one; in other words, Rabette, the little reindeer, came
+running to Lilar, as she yesterday had to Pestitz,--for what is a race
+of a mile to a country-girl, else than a simple _Allemande_?[194]--and
+shook and shook her heart before him, even to its very ears, but nothing
+fell out of it except pleasant images, a few heavens, a complete
+wedding-day, a couple of parents-in-law, and a Captain's wife. "The
+Minister had been so courteous toward me, but--the mother afterward
+still more so toward my parents; and they have mentioned and praised the
+Captain so much,--in short, they of course know all, my glorious,
+heartily-loved brother!" said she,--but of Liana she had nothing to
+bring to her glorious brother, except a bill of her health; her joyous
+eye had not turned toward any dark region whatever. "We were not alone a
+minute, that is the reason of it," she added, and came again upon the
+subject of her Captain, whom the Minister had sent out on the Haarhaar
+road, as chief marshal of the escort of the Princess; yet she referred
+him to the illumination night in Lilar, when she and Liana, and the
+parents on both sides, had arranged to be there. Thou good creature! who
+is so cruel as to begrudge thee the glittering ring of joy, which thou
+contemplatest on thy brown and hard-boiled hand, and who does not fondly
+wish that its stones may never fall out?
+
+Soon after, the brother of the past festivals flew to the heart of the
+deserted one,--Charles. He repeated almost exactly Rabette's deposition,
+although not her rapture; he said,--but without special emotion,--that
+his father actually threw him the brotherly hand kiss through several
+rooms, distinguished and designated him quite particularly, and kindly
+made use of him for business purposes; and all this merely since he had
+become acquainted with his love for Rabette, and the silent assent of
+the parents; for with his father, though the heart was of no account,
+yet Rabette's fief was, especially as one could not trust, with all the
+romantic stock-jobbing of his heart, that he would not himself one day
+realize the poorest result.
+
+With a sighing breast, which would gladly have imparted more to an
+expecting one, Charles merely related that he had found Liana well and
+quiet, but not alone for one minute. The association of another's want
+with his own open, rich fortune was, so Albano believed, the fair,
+tender reason why Charles glided with such cool, fleeting pleasure over
+the parental benediction of his soul's bond. O, how he loved him at this
+moment! Could he have loved him ever so much more, he would have done
+it, though Liana had been actually lost to the sum of his happiness,
+merely to show himself and him that holy friendship wants no third heart
+in order to love a second.
+
+This cloud of silence lay fixed for weeks, and grew more and more dark
+around his fairest heights; and the guiltless one went round and round
+through the darkness in a circle of contradictions. How must this youth
+have harassed himself when he thought, as he soon did, that the parents
+would, in all probability, reject an alliance with him, as he, indeed,
+thought himself obliged rather to forget than to reciprocate their
+advances, and that they might sacrifice two hearts to political
+heartlessness; or when he let fall upon the innocent Liana the suspicion
+of giving way before parental assaults, which suspicion received
+reinforcement from the past through the conjecture that she had
+embraced him rather in poetical enthusiasm and from goodness, and more
+with wings than with arms, and that, in fact, accustomed to such long
+submissions, she could hardly distinguish sacrifices and inclinations,
+and might take one for the other; or when, as he soon and oftenest did,
+he turned the point of all these weapons against his own breast, and
+asked himself why he had such a firm confidence in friendship, and such
+a wavering one in love. Then this reproach led him to a second, upon
+every previous one, which he had cast upon the good soul merely for the
+sake, according to the proselyting system and reforming mania which men
+exercise more upon their wives than upon their friends, of melting her
+down for his own mould. This last he might rue; as Holberg[195] observes
+that men do not keep estates so well as women, because the former are
+always wanting to improve them more than the latter; on the same ground,
+also, lovers spoil women more than these do them.
+
+For the sake merely of getting more expeditiously from the tedious
+tribunal of the future his sentence of death, or a more agreeable
+document, he went again to the ministerial house. He was again smilingly
+received by the Minister, and seriously by the mother; and, in reply to
+his question, Liana was not quite well. He laid before old Schoppe (who
+now pressed his friendship upon him more warmly, and who, for some time
+near the dissecting-knife of the Doctor, had not studied any other heart
+than that which was to be spattered to pieces and prepared) a short
+question about the Doctor's visits at the Minister's. How was he
+astonished when he heard that no one out of the house any longer made
+any visits to it, (while Liana, quite blooming, went into all circles,)
+except merely the Lector, who made very frequent ones!
+
+He well comprehended that only the Medusa's-heads of the parents could
+turn the softest heart into stone against him; but even this he found
+not right. He boldly demanded that she should love him more than her
+parents, "not from egotism," said he to himself, "not on my account, but
+on her own." A lover wishes a great, indescribable love, of which he
+thinks himself always only the accidental and unworthy object, merely
+for the sake of tendering the highest himself.
+
+Even the silent Lector, who generally placed all newly rising lights
+behind light-shades and fire-screens, communicated unbidden to the Count
+the novel tidings that Liana would be, under the administration of the
+coming Princess, something--[196]maid of honor. His old jealous
+suspicion of Augusti's wishes or relations allowed him no answer to
+that.
+
+Now his spirit manned itself, and he wrote straight to the soul that
+belonged to him, and sent the letter to her brother for delivery. The
+latter came the next day, but seemed to him not to have any answer yet,
+because he would otherwise have given it with the first greeting.
+Charles introduced him to the Haarhaar court, where he had lately been;
+said every nerve there had on jack-boots, and every heart a
+hoop-petticoat; then went on to eulogize the youngest, but most
+unpopular Princess, _Idoine_; declared she possessed, in addition to all
+her other advantages,--for instance, purity, kindness, decision of
+character, which even on the throne selects for itself its own lot and
+life,--the further grace of amiableness, since even the princely bride,
+who loved no one else, hung upon her heart, and--last, not least--the
+advantage of a very deceptive similarity to Liana.
+
+"Has Liana received my letter yet?" asked Albano. Charles handed it back
+to him. "By Heaven!" said he, ardently, and yet ambiguously, "I could
+not get it to her just now. But, brother, canst thou believe, only for
+one minute, that she does not remain forever most thine?" "I do not
+believe anything at all!" said Albano, offended, and tore his leaf on
+the spot into little bits no bigger than the letters. "Only _we_ will,"
+he continued, with a tone of emotion, "remain, as we are, firm as iron,
+and flexible as iron when it comes out of the furnace." The deeply
+touched friend sought to console him with the following: "Only wait, I
+pray, the illumination evening;[197] then she will speak with thee. She
+must certainly appear, and thou wilt wonder in what character, and for
+whom." He nodded silently; he easily gathered her part from her
+resemblance to Idoine, and from her expected office at court. But what
+help was it to his fortune?
+
+With the return of his note, which he despatched against his pride, that
+same pride came back in renewed strength. Now was a hot seal stamped on
+Albano's bleeding lip; he had now nothing for and before him, except
+time, which was now his poison, and would by and by, as he hoped, be his
+antidote. Nothing was ever master over his sense of honor, when it was
+once roused. He could look forward to a scaffold on which blood spurted
+out, but he could not look upon a pillory where, under the heavy,
+poisonous, murderous pain of scorn and self-contempt, a downcast,
+distracted face hung on the sinful breast.
+
+Charles sometimes approached with a few lights the long night-like
+riddle; but Albano, however much he wished them, staggered him by
+opposition, and sought not even to hear him, much less to ask him
+questions. So he lay on hard, youthful, thorny rose-buds, which a single
+hour can open into tender roses. Victories beget victories, as defeats
+do defeats; he found now, if not a complete relief from the emotions
+which besieged him, nevertheless a mountain-fortification against them,
+provisioned for a little eternity, in the shape of an astronomical
+observatory. With an entire and firmly collected soul he threw himself
+upon theoretical astronomy, in order not to see daylight, and upon
+practical astronomy in order not to see night. The watch-tower stood
+indeed upon a mountain intermediate between the city and Blumenbuehl, and
+commanded a view of both; but he cast his eyes only upon the
+constellations, not upon those rosy-red spots of the earth, where they
+now could have sucked out of the cold flower-cups only water instead of
+honey. Thus amid the festive preparations in Lilar did he go armed to
+meet the long delaying evening when the presence of the fairest soul
+should either bless or destroy him, vainly looking from time to time at
+the distant telegraph of his destiny, which was constantly moving,
+uncertain whether with peaceful or hostile significance.
+
+
+74. CYCLE.
+
+To remove the seals from the enrolled acts of the foregoing history for
+the purpose of looking into it,--or to push back the blinds and shove up
+the windows of the same,--or to uncover so many covered ways and
+vehicles,--or, in fine, the whole matter,--all that is mere
+metaphors,--and the most inappropriate ones, too,--which cannot serve
+any other purpose than only to hold off still longer and more tediously
+the long-expected solution, which they would fain describe; much rather
+and better, methinks, will the whole war and peace position in the
+ministerial palace be at once freely laid bare as follows:--
+
+Herr Von Froulay had, as has been already mentioned, come home from
+Haarhaar with a _Belle-vue_ in his face, and with a _mon-plaisir_ in his
+heart (provided these tropes do not seem more elaborate than exquisite).
+He told his lady openly, what had hitherto detained and enchanted him so
+long,--the future Princess, who had conceived for him a more than
+ordinary fancy. He threw a full, glorifying light on her enriched
+understanding,--he never praised anything beyond this in
+ladies,[198]--as well as a faint streak of shade upon his own _her's_;
+and pronounced himself fortunate in the possession of a person whose
+fine, persistent coquetry (he said) he for his part could recommend as a
+model, and whose attachment he, in fact, (that he pretended not to
+conceal,) reciprocated half-way, but only half-way, for it was perfectly
+true, what the Duke of Lauzun[199] asserted: in order to keep the love
+of Princesses, one must just hold them in right hard and short. In the
+old man accordingly there shoots up, as we see, quite late,--not unlike
+the case of fresh teeth,--which oftentimes old men do not cut till they
+are nonagenarians,--a lover's heart beneath the star; only it is more to
+be wished than hoped, he will especially play the ridiculous in the
+matter. For as he all the week long holds the helm of state, either on
+the rower's bench, to keep it in motion, or on the cabinet-maker's
+bench, to trim it down into a fine and light shape for the Prince; the
+consequence is, he is so tired when Saturday comes, that no Virgil and
+no tempest could persuade him--and though his feet had not more steps to
+take for the purpose than the number of feet in Virgil's hexameter, or
+of commandments in the Decalogue of Moses--to accompany a Dido out of
+the storm into the nearest cave. He does no such thing. He remains quite
+as free from sentimental and pathetic love as from sensual, especially
+as he apprehends that the former would in the end entangle him in the
+latter, because like a minor-tone it has quite a different returning
+scale from its ascending one. The ironical and stinging element in the
+man made every marriage--even that of souls--to him as well as to other
+world's people as disagreeable in the end as the spines of the hedgehogs
+make theirs. He lays up, therefore, in the future for the Princess only
+a cold, politic, coquettish, courtly love, such as she herself haply
+has, and such as he has occasion for, in order less to gain her than to
+gain from her, and to gain first of all the entire Prince. I promise
+myself cosmopolitan readers, who, I hope, find no offence to this
+personage in Froulay's partiality for his lady; for so soon as the
+court-preacher has but once laid his joining hand on the Princess, then
+has this house-steward made, as it were, the cut in the pea-hen,[200]
+and she can then be taken off untouched, and be feasted on in other
+places.
+
+I have already (in the second volume) intimated the anxiety of the
+Minister's lady lest the Minister, if he should (in this volume) come
+back and not find Liana at home, should chafe; but, contrary to
+expectation, he approved; her use of the country air-bath fell in
+exactly with his design of sending her into the vapor-bath of the court
+atmosphere. He told her mother that it by no means displeased him that
+she should now be entirely well, since the new Princess would select her
+for her maid of honor, whenever he should say the word. He could not for
+three minutes see a sceptre or a sceptrelet lying by him without proving
+its polarity for himself, and either attracting or repelling something
+with it. As the famous theologian, Spener,--a predecessor of our
+Spener,--prayed to God so beautifully thrice a day for his friends, one
+finds with similar pleasure that the courtier daily prays a little for
+his friends before his god, the Prince, and seeks to obtain something.
+
+The Minister's lady, never opposing his changeable plans in the sketch,
+but only in the execution, easily became reconciled with his latest one,
+because it at least seemed rather to stand in no auxiliary relation to
+the old one of the bethrothal to Bouverot.
+
+One evening, unfortunately, the fatal, anxious Lector--who pasted the
+smallest visiting-card to a Fulda's historic chart--arrived in her
+presence with his packet-ship, and came ashore having under his two arms
+the state and imperial advertisements of her two children; he had one of
+them under each; and yet why do I fly out upon the man? Could a
+double-romance, especially when played in the open air, remain better
+concealed than a single one?
+
+Her astonishment can be compared with the greater astonishment of her
+husband, who happened to have just been screwing on in the third chamber
+his tin ear,--made by Schropp of Magdeburg,--in order to listen to the
+servants, and who now caught a number of things. Nevertheless, the
+double-ear, with the broad meshes of its nocturnal lark-net, had only
+fished up from Augusti's low, whispering, courtly lips single, long,
+proper names,--such as Roquairol and Zesara. Hardly had the soft-spoken
+Lector gone out, when he stepped gayly into the chamber, with his ear in
+his hand, and demanded of her a report of the reports. He held
+it beneath his dignity either to patch up or disguise his
+suspicion,--which, even in the friendliest and gayest mood, would never
+shut its Argus ears and eyes,--or to dissemble his eavesdropping, with
+so much as a syllable or a blush of shame; the fair lilies of the most
+colorless impudence were not painted, but branded on him. The Minister's
+lady immediately seized upon the female expedient, of telling the
+truth--half-way; namely, the agreeable truth of Roquairol's
+well-received advances at the house of Wehrfritz, whose estate and
+provincial directorship had been cast into a very fitting shape for a
+father-in-law. Meanwhile the Minister had seen in his lady's face the
+mourning-border around this pleasant notification-document, far too
+clearly and broadly not to inquire about that prominent word "Zesara,"
+which his delicate tin searcher had also caught up, but he inquired in
+vain; for the mother held her good daughter too dear to set this wolf on
+the scent for her into her Eden; she hoped to get her out of it in a
+gentler way, by a divine voice and angels; and so evaded his question.
+
+But the wolf now ran farther on in his track; he got the gout in his
+stomach,--so it was reported to Dr. Sphex,--demanded of him speedy aid,
+and also some intelligence of his tenant, the Count. Doctor and Madam
+Sphex had already a grudge against the inflated youth; through their
+four juvenile envoys, as _enfans perdus_ in every sense, as four
+hearing-organs of every city rumor, much might be brought in on
+advice-yachts from Blumenbuehl and Lilar. In short, the auricular organs
+fitted in so well to those of others, that Froulay, in a few days, was
+in a situation to ask, with his lily brow, the Greek woman for a letter
+to his son, which he offered to take along with him.
+
+He found one, which he broke open with great joy, without, however,
+finding anything therein from Albano's or Liana's hand, but only some
+stupid allusion of Rabette to that couple, which, to the Minister, were
+as much as if, with his sharp exciseman's-probes, he had bored into
+Liana's heart and lighted upon contraband there. Without any long,
+slavish copying of the former seal, he set a second upon the letter, and
+went away enlightened by it.
+
+We can all follow him, when we have detained ourselves only a few
+minutes for his justification, with my
+
+
+_Apology and Defence[201] in the Matter of the Second Seal upon Letters
+in State Affairs._
+
+Whether the examination of other people's letters pertains to old
+Froulay as minister or father,--(although the latter presupposes the
+former, the father of the country implying every other father and his
+own too,)--I will not decide, except by the parenthesis just inserted.
+The state which tackles on the post-horses before letters has, it
+should seem, the right to examine more narrowly, under the closed visor
+of the seal, these not so much _blind_ as blinding _passengers_,[202] in
+order to know whether it is not using its horses in the service of its
+enemies. The state, an ever-drawing light-magnet, means certainly only
+to have light in the case, and particularly light upon all light in
+general; it requires only the naked truth, without cover or covering.
+All that rides and fares through its gates must, though it were dressed
+in a surtout, just open its _red_ mouth, and say what name and business.
+
+As the common soldier must first show his letters to his officer, the
+garrison-soldier of the Bastile to the governor, the monk his to the
+prior, the American colonist his to the Dutchman,[203]--in order that he
+may burn them up, if they find fault with him,--so, surely, can no
+statesman, whether he regards the state as a barrack, or as an
+Engelsburg, or as a _monasterium duplex_, or as a _European possession
+in Europe_, deny it the right to keep all its letters as open as bills
+of lading, patents of nobility, bills of sale, and apostolic epistles
+are. The only mistake is, that it does not get hold of the letters
+before they are enveloped and sealed. That is immoral enough; for it
+necessitates the government to open and shut,--to draw the letter out of
+the case, and put it back again, as the cook with pains turns the snail
+out of his shell, and then, when he is once taken off from the fire,
+shoves him back again into it, to serve him up therein.
+
+This last is the point of the compass and cardinal wind which is to
+guide us onward; for universally acknowledged as it is, just as custom
+and observance are, that the government, on the same ground on which it
+opens the _last_ will, must have the power to unseal also the last but
+one, and the one before that, and finally the very first, before its
+heir can do it, and that a prince must be able still more readily to
+bring servants' letters into the same deciphering chancery (and into
+their antechamber, the unsealing chamber), wherein the letters of
+princes and legates fly open before the caper-spurge,[204] nevertheless
+the cork-drawing of letters,--the joint seal, the vicariate seal, the
+laborious imitation of the L. S., or _loco sigilli_,--all this is
+something very annoying and almost detestable; out of the wrong a right
+must therefore be made by constitutional repetition.
+
+Something of the kind might be brought about, I flatter myself, if it
+were commanded to write letters only on stamp-paper. An inspecting and
+stamping office appointed for that purpose would then read everything
+over beforehand.
+
+Or one might prohibit in future all private seals, just as they do
+mint-stamps for private coin. A seal-department would then interfere,
+with full rights, and seal up, as they now do the legacies of the
+deceased, so in that case those of the living.
+
+Or--which is perhaps preferable--an epistolary _censorship_ must
+commence. Unprinted newspapers, _nouvelles a la main_,[205]--that is,
+letters,--can never, inasmuch as they divulge still greater mysteries,
+demand a greater freedom of censorship than printed newspapers;
+especially as every letter, now-a-days, so easily becomes a circular,
+going everywhere. A catalogue of prohibited letters (_index
+expurgandarum_) would always be, in that case, a _word to
+correspondents_.
+
+Or let the postmasters be put under oath that they will be faithful
+referendaries of whatever they find weighty or considerable in the
+letters, which, before despatching, they have laid in the mental
+letter-balance, and closed again, with the hope, according to the
+Leibnitzian principle of the non-distinguishable seal, of speeding them
+far and wide.
+
+If the State finds all these ways of reading and closing letters new and
+difficult, then it may go on in its own way--of opening them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Froulay flew, laughing, to his lady, and assured her her falsehood
+towards him was no news to him at all. Her present plan, merely to work
+against Herr von Bouverot and himself, he understood full well. Hence it
+was that Rabette had had to come in, and the daughter to go out.
+Meanwhile he would show the hypocrite and bigot, or whoever it might be,
+that she had not merely a mother, but a father too. "She must
+immediately come home; _je la ferai damer,[206] mais sans vous et sans
+M. le Compte_," he concluded, with an allusion to the office of
+court-dame.
+
+But the Minister's lady began, in accordance with her vehement contempt
+of his projects and powers, with that coldness which would have more
+exasperated every ardent one than this cold one, to say to him that she
+must needs disapprove and oppose Liana's and the Count's love still more
+than he did; that she had merely, in an excessive and otherwise never
+disappointed confidence in Liana's openness of soul, believed her rather
+than herself, and, notwithstanding so many signs of Albano's partiality,
+let her go to Blumenbuehl; that she would, however, give him her word on
+the spot to act with as much energy and spirit against the Count as
+against the German gentleman, and that she was, as surely as she knew
+Liana, almost certain of the easiest and happiest result.
+
+Of course this was unexpected to him and--incredible, especially after
+the previous concealment; only the finest man's soul distinguishes in
+the female the blending boundaries of self-deception and wilful
+delusion, weakness and deceit, accident and intent; besides, the
+Minister's lady was one of those women whom one must first love in order
+to know them, a case which is generally reversed. He readily accepted on
+the one hand the confession of her agreement and co-operation,--merely
+for the sake, hereafter, of turning it as a weapon against her;--but he
+could not conceal, on the other hand, that _there again_ (that was
+always his phrase) she had, according to her own confession, neglected
+to watch over her children from a want of jealousy. He retained the
+habit, when an open-hearted soul showed him its breaches, of marching in
+upon it through those breaches, as if he himself had made them. The
+penitent who knelt before him for forgiveness he would crush still
+lower, and instead of the key of absolution draw forth the hammer of the
+law.
+
+I owe it here to the Spaniards, who will one day become acquainted with
+me through miserable translations,[207] and to the Austrian knighthood
+of the Golden Fleece, who perhaps read the original in a counterfeit
+edition, to assign the reasons why the house of Froulay did not bespeak
+feasts of joy--instead of court-mourning--on the occasion of these
+advances by a son of their order, a Spanish Grandee, who often lays upon
+himself a German princely sceptre as a yardstick to measure himself
+withal. For every Spaniard must have hitherto wondered about this.
+
+I answer every nation. The Froulays had, in the first place, nothing
+against the union except the--certainty of separation; since on the same
+ground, which the Knights of the Fleece and the Spaniards have opposed
+to me, old Gaspard de Zesara can in no wise suffer a bridge to be thrown
+over from his Gothard to the Jungfrau [virgin]. Secondly, on this very
+ground the Minister could oppose to this romantic love a much older,
+wiser, which he bore toward the German gentleman and his moneys and
+_liaisons_, as well as the old grudge of the Knight of the Fleece.
+Thirdly, the Minister's lady had, beside these same grounds,--and
+besides several in favor of the Lector, perhaps,--one quite decisive
+one, and that was, she could not endure the Count; not merely and solely
+for the reason that she discovered a painful similarity between him and
+her son, and even husband, in pride, in excitability, in the
+characteristic fierceness of genius against poor married women, in want
+of religious humility and devoutness; but the principal reason why she
+could not well endure him was this: that she could not bear him. As the
+system of Predestination sentences some men to hell, whether they
+afterward deserve heaven or not, so a woman never takes back an enmity
+to which she has once doomed any one, all that country and city, God,
+time, and the individual's virtues may say to the contrary,
+notwithstanding.
+
+In the treaty of peace, concluding the usual chamber-war, the following
+private articles were adjusted between the married couple: The Count
+must be, on the Father's and Director's account, treated with the most
+courtly consideration, and shoved aside,--and Liana gently and gradually
+drawn away from Wehrfritz's house,--the whole dissolution of the
+engagement must seem to happen of itself without parental interference,
+merely through the breaking off of the daughter,--and the whole affair
+remain a mystery. Froulay hoped to keep the whole interlude or episode
+concealed from Liana's earlier-intended, the German gentleman,
+particularly as he, just now, in August, was more at the card-tables of
+the baths than at home.
+
+So it stood; and into this cold, awful pass the friendly Liana moved on,
+when on that warm living Sunday she left the blessed, open Lilar.
+Refined and sanctified by joy,--for every Paradise was to her a
+purifying Purgatory,--she came nobly to her mother's bosom, without
+remarking the strange seriousness of the reception by reason of the
+earnest warmth of her own. Her easy confession of the garden-company
+opened the trying scene,--almost in the _coulisse_. For the mother, who
+would fain have begun otherwise, had to mount the thunder-car at once,
+in order to thunder and lighten against such incomprehensible
+forgetfulness of female propriety; and yet she held in the
+thunder-steeds in mid-career, in order to enjoin upon Liana immediately,
+as the Minister might come any moment, a perfect silence on the subject
+of to-day's garden-party. Now she cast the deepest strengthening shade
+upon her previous mute falsehood towards a mother; for she arbitrarily
+transposed in her story the sowing and blossoming time of this love,
+even into the days preceding the journey to the country. How did the
+warm soul shudder at the possibility of such an unkindness! She led her
+mother as far as she could up along the pure, light pearl-brook of her
+history and love, and told all that we know, but without giving much
+satisfaction, because she left out precisely the main point; for, out of
+forbearance toward her mother, she felt obliged to let the apparition of
+Caroline, who in the beginning had been the image-stormer of her love
+and then its inspiring muse and bride's-maid, together with the
+death-certificate of the future, remain out of sight in the narration.
+
+She held, with fervent pressure, her mother's hand amidst more and more
+cheerful assurances, how she had always been disposed to tell her
+everything; she thought hopingly, she needed to save nothing but her
+_open_ heart. O thou hast more to save, thy warm, thy whole and living
+heart! Her mother now, from old habit, half believing her, found fault
+with nothing more than the whole affair, its impropriety, impossibility,
+folly. "O good mother," said Liana, simply remaining tender under the
+harsh picturing of the future Albano; "O he is not such, assuredly not!"
+Quite as tenderly did she far overlook the darkly-sketched future
+refusal of Don Gaspard, because to her faith the earth was only a
+blooming grave-mound hanging in the ether. "Ah!" said she, meaning how
+little time she was for this world, "our love is not so important!" Her
+mother took this word and the whole gentleness of her resistance, as
+preludes of an easy victory.
+
+At this moment Albano's father-in-law came in with a kettle-drum,
+alarm-bell, fire-drum, and rattlesnake, in his girdle, in order
+therewith to make himself audible. First he inquired,--for he had been
+listening in vain,--in a very exasperated manner, of the Minister's
+lady, where she had stowed away his ear (it was the tin duplicate ear,
+wherein, as in a Venetian lion's-head, all mysteries and accusations of
+the whole service and family met); he said, he had a little occasion for
+it just now, particularly since the newest "adventures of his worthy
+daughter there." The Siamese physicians begin the healing of a patient
+with treading upon him, which they call softening. In a similar manner
+Froulay loved to soften, by way of moral pre-cure; and accordingly
+began, with the above-mentioned speaking-machines in his girdle, to
+declare his sentiments explicitly on the subject of degenerate children;
+upon their arts and artifices; and upon intrigues behind fathers' backs
+(so that no father can accompany a volume of love-poems with a prose
+preface); backed up many points with the strongest political grounds,
+which all had reference to himself and his interest, and wound up with a
+little cursing.
+
+Liana heard him calmly, as one already accustomed to such daily
+returning equinoctial storm-bursts, without any other emotion, except
+that she often raised her downcast eye pityingly upon him, out of tender
+sympathy for the paternal dissatisfaction. In a calm he became loudest.
+"You will see to it, madam," said he, "that to-morrow forenoon she sends
+the Count what she has of his, together with a farewell, and notifies
+him of her new office, as an easy excuse; thou art to be court-dame to
+the reigning Princess, although thou didst not deserve that I should
+labor for thee!"
+
+"That is hard!" cried Liana, with breaking heart, falling upon her
+mother. He supposed she meant the separation from Albano, not from her
+mother, and asked, angrily: "Why?" "Father, I would so gladly," said
+she, and turned only her face away from the embrace, "die near my
+mother!" He laughed; but the Minister's lady herself shut to the
+hell-gates upon the flames which he still would fain have vomited forth,
+and assured him it was enough, Liana would certainly obey her parents,
+and she herself would be surety for it. The preacher of the law came
+down his pulpit-stairs with an audible ejaculation about a better
+security, calling back, as he went, that his ear must be produced
+to-morrow, and though he should have to search for it in all chests and
+cupboards.
+
+The mother kept silence now, and let her daughter softly weep on her
+neck; to both, after this drought of the soul, the draught of love was
+refreshment and medicine. They came out of each other's arms with
+cheered spirits, but both with entirely delusive hopes.
+
+
+75. CYCLE.
+
+A hard, black morning; only the outward atmospheric morning was
+dark-blue; there was nothing loud and stormy, except perchance the
+swarms of bees in the linden-thicket; the heaven's ether seemed to
+flutter away high over the stony streets, so as to settle down low in
+the bright open Lilar upon all hill-tops and tree-tops, and, blue as
+peacock's plumage, to play its hues over the twigs.
+
+Liana found on her writing-table a billet, folded in large quarto,
+wherein the Minister, ever-working, like a heart, sought even at this
+early hour of the morning, before raising out of the public documents
+for the several administration and exchequer counsellors the transient
+tempests which were necessary to fruitfulness, to descend upon his
+shuddering daughter with a cold morning rain-gust. In the decretal
+letter referred to, he developed more in detail, upon a sheet and a half
+what he had meant yesterday,--separation on the spot; and offered six
+grounds of separation,--first, his uncongenial relation with the Knight
+of the Fleece; secondly, her own and the Count's youth; thirdly, the
+approaching place of court-dame; fourthly, that she was his daughter,
+and this the first sacrifice to which he, her father, for all his
+previous ones, had ever laid claim; fifthly, she might perceive, by his
+indulgent "Yes," to the love of her brother, whose apparent improvement
+he held out to her as a model, that he lived and cared only for the
+welfare of his children; sixthly, he would send her to Fort * * * to his
+brother, the commandant, in case she were refractory, by way of exiling,
+punishing, and bringing her round; and neither weeping, nor falling at
+feet, nor mother, nor hell should bend him; and he gave her three days'
+time for reflection.
+
+Mutely, and with wet eyes, she handed to her who had been hitherto her
+comforter the heavy sheet. But the comforter had become a judge: "What
+wilt thou do?" said the Minister's lady. "I will suffer," said Liana,
+"in order that _he_ may not suffer; how could I so sorely sin against
+him?" The mother, whether actually under the old notion of her easy
+conversion, or from dissimulation, took that "He" for the father, and
+asked: "Say'st thou nothing of me?" Liana blushed at the substitution,
+and said: "Ah! poor me, I will not indeed be happy,--only true!" How had
+she during this night prayingly lived and wept amidst the fearful wars
+of all her inner angels! A love so guiltless, consecrated by her holy
+friend in heaven,--a fidelity so exceedingly abridged by early death;
+so sound-hearted a youth, shooting up with high, fruit-bearing summit
+heavenward, whom not even ghostly voices could scare or allure out of
+his faithful childhood's love toward her, insignificant one; the
+everlasting discomfort and grief which he would experience at the first,
+greatest lie against his heart; her short, straight path through life,
+and the nearness of that cross-way, at which she should wish to throw
+back,--not stones, but flowers upon the other pilgrims;--all these forms
+took her by _one_ hand to draw her away from her mother, who called
+after her with the words: "See how ungratefully thou art going from me,
+and I have so long suffered and toiled for thee!" Then came Liana back
+again out of the dusky, warm rose-vale of love into the dry, flat
+earth-surface of a life, wherein nothing breaks the monotony save her
+last mound. O how imploringly did she look up to the stars, to see
+whether they did not move as the eyes of her Caroline, and tell her
+_how_ she must sacrifice herself, whether for her lover or for her
+parents; but the stars stood friendly, cold, and still in the steadfast
+heavens.
+
+But, when the morning sun again beamed upon her heart, it beat
+hopefully, newly strengthened with the resolution to endure this day for
+Albano full many sorrows,--ah yes, even the first. Could Caroline,
+thought she, approve a love to which I must be untrue?
+
+Hardly had she left the lips of her mother with the morning greeting,
+when the latter sought, but more earnestly than yesterday, to draw up
+the roots of this steadfast heart out of its strange soil by a longer
+use of yesterday's flower-extractor. In her comparative anatomy of
+Albano and Roquairol, from the similarity of voice even to that of
+stature, she grew more and more cutting, till Liana, with a maiden's
+wit, at once asked, "But why may my brother, then, love Rabette?"
+"_Quelle comparaison!_" said the mother. "Art thou nothing better than
+she?" "She _does_, strictly speaking, much more than I," said she, quite
+candidly. "Didst thou never quarrel with the wild Zesara?" asked the
+mother. "Never, except when I was in the wrong," said she, innocently.
+
+The mother was alarmed to perceive more and more clearly that she had to
+pull up deeper and stronger roots than light flowers strike into the
+soil. She concentrated all her maternal powers of attraction and
+lifting-machines upon one point, for the upturning of the still green
+myrtle. She disclosed to her the Minister's dark plan of an alliance
+with the German gentleman, her hitherto concealed strifes and sighs on
+the subject, her thus far effectual resistance, and the latest paternal
+stratagem, to make her a garrison-prisoner with his brother, and thereby
+probably Herr von Bouverot a besieger of the citadel.
+
+For some readers and relicts of the heavy, old-fashioned, golden age of
+morality, the remark is here introduced and printed, that a peculiar,
+cold, unsparing, often shocking and provoking, candor of remark upon the
+nearest relatives and the tenderest relations is so very much at home in
+the higher ranks, that even the fairer souls, among whom, surely, this
+mother belongs, cannot, absolutely, understand or do otherwise.
+
+"O thou best mother!" cried Liana, agitated, but not by the thought of
+the rattle and the snaky breath of Bouverot, or of his murderous spring
+at her heart,--she thought with as much indifference of being betrothed
+to him as any innocent one does of his dying on a scaffold,--but by the
+thought of the long building over and crowding out of sight of the
+motherly tears, the streams of motherly love, which had hitherto flowed
+nourishingly deep down under her flowers. She threw herself gratefully
+between those helpful arms. They closed not around her, because the
+Minister's lady was not to be made weak and soft by any washing wave and
+surge of sudden emotion.
+
+Into this embrace the Minister struck or stepped in. "So!" said he,
+hastily. "My ear, madam," he continued, "cannot be found again at all
+among the domestics; I have that to tell you." For he had to-day posted
+himself upon a law-giving Sinai, and thundered into the ears of the
+service assembled at its foot the inquiry after his own ear, "because I
+must believe," he had said to them, "that you, for very good reasons,
+have stolen it from me." Then he had swept like a hail-storm, or a
+kitchen-smoke in windy weather, through the servants' apartments and
+corners, one by one, in quest of his ear. "And thou?" said he, in a
+half-friendly tone to Liana. She kissed his hand, which he, as the Pope
+does his foot, always despatched for kisses, as proxy and lip-bearer,
+agent, and _de latere nuncio_ of his mouth.
+
+"She continues disobedient," said the severe lady. "Then she is a little
+like you," said he, because the mistrustful one looked upon the embrace
+as a conspiracy against him and his Bouverot. Upon this, his ice-Hecla
+burst out, and flamed and flowed, now upon daughter, now upon wife. The
+former was absolutely a miserable creature, he said; and only the
+Captain was worth anything, whom he luckily had educated by himself
+alone. He saw through all, heard all, though they had hid away his
+ear-trumpet. There was, accordingly, as he saw, (he pointed to his
+unsealed morning-psalm,[208]) a communication between the two colleges;
+but he invoked God to punish him if he did not--"my dear daughter, pray
+answer at last!" he begged.
+
+"My father," said Liana, who, since the fraternization of Bouverot and
+the ill treatment from her mother, had begun to feel her heart wake up,
+which, however, could only despise and never hate, "my mother has to-day
+and yesterday told me all; but I have surely duties towards the Count!"
+A bolder liveliness than her parents had ever missed or found in her
+beamed under her upraised eye. "Ah, I will truly remain faithful to him
+just as long as I live," said she. "_C'est bien peu_," replied the
+Minister, astounded at such pertness.
+
+Liana listened now, for the first time, after the word which had escaped
+her; then, in order to justify the past and her mother, she conceived
+the pleasant and ridiculous purpose, of moving and converting the old
+gentleman by her ghost-visions or dream-seeings. She begged of him a
+solitary interview, and afterward--when it was reluctantly
+granted--intreated him therein for his sacred promise to be silent
+towards her mother, because she feared to show to that loving one the
+clock-wheels of her death-bell rattling so near to the fatal stroke. The
+old gentleman could only, with a comic expression,--which made him look
+like one who with a bad cold wants to laugh,--vow that he would keep his
+word so far as was necessary, because never, so far as he could
+recollect, had his word been kept by him, only he had been often kept by
+his word. In such men, word and deed are like theatrical thunder and
+lightning, which, though generally occurring in close connection, and
+simultaneously in heaven, on the stage break forth out of separate
+corners, and by means of different operators. But Liana would not rest
+till he had put on a word-keeping, sincere face,--a painted window.
+Thereupon she began, after a kissing of the hand,[209] her ghostly
+history.
+
+With unbroken seriousness, and firmly contracted muscles, he heard the
+extraordinary narration through; then, without saying a word, he took
+her by the hand and led her back into the presence of her mother, to
+whom he handed her over with a long psalm of praise and thanksgiving
+about her successful daughter's-school. "His boy's-school with Charles
+had not been blessed to him, at least in this degree," he added. As a
+proof, he frankly communicated to her--cold-bloodedly working up all
+Liana's pangs, as the coopers do cypress-branches into cask-hoops--the
+little which he had promised to bury in silence, because he always
+prostituted either himself or the other party, generally both. Liana sat
+there, deeply red, and growing hotter and hotter, with downcast eyes,
+and begged God to preserve her filial love towards her father.
+
+No sympathizing eye shall be further pained with the opening of a new
+scene, when the ice of his irony broke, and became a raging stream, into
+which flowed tears of maternal indignation, also, at the thought of a
+precious being, and her feverish, fatal, dreaming of herself away into
+the last sleep. The object and the danger almost united the married
+couple for the second time; when there is a glazed frost, people go very
+much arm in arm. "Thou hast sent nothing to Lilar?" asked the father.
+"Without your permission I certainly should not do it," said she; but
+she meant her letters, not Albano's. He took advantage of the
+misunderstanding, and said, "Thou hast, however, surely." "I will gladly
+do, and let be done everything," said she, "but only on condition the
+Count consents, in order that I may not appear to him disingenuous; he
+has my sacred word for my truth!" At this mild firmness, at this Peter's
+rock overgrown with tender flowers, the father stumbled the hardest. In
+addition to this, the transition of a haughty lover from his own wishes
+to those of his enemies, supposing they had allowed Liana the question
+to the Count, was so impossible on the one hand, and the solicitation of
+this change, whether it were granted or refused, absolutely so degrading
+on the other, that the astounded Minister's lady felt her pride rise,
+and asked again, "Is this thy last word to us, Liana?" And when Liana,
+weeping, answered, "I cannot help it; God be gracious to me!" she turned
+away indignantly toward the Minister, and said: "Do now what you take to
+be _convenable_; I wash my hands in innocence!" "Not so entirely, _ma
+chere_; but very well!" said he, "thou wilt stay after to-morrow in thy
+chamber, till thou hast corrected thyself, and art more worthy of our
+presence!" he announced, as he went out, to Liana; firing at her
+meanwhile two eye-volleys, wherein, according to my estimate, far more
+reverberating fires, tormenting ghosts, eating, devouring medicaments,
+brain and heart-borers, were promised, than a man can generally hold to
+give or bear to receive.
+
+Poor maiden! Thy last August is very hard, and no harvest-month day!
+Thou lookest out into the time, where thy little coffin stands, on which
+a cruel angel wipes away the still fresh flower-pieces of love running
+round it, in order that it may, all white, as rosy-white as thy soul or
+thy last form, be consigned to the grave!
+
+This banishment by her mother into the desert of her cloister-chamber
+was quite as frightful to her, only not more frightful than her anger,
+which she had to-day, only for the third time, experienced, though not
+deserved. It was to her as if now, after the warm sun had gone down, the
+bright evening glow had also sunk below the horizon, and it grew dark
+and cold in the world. She remained this whole day, which was yet
+allowed her, with her mother; gave, however, only answers, looked
+friendly, did everything cheerfully and readily, and--as she quickly
+dashed away, with her tiny finger, every gathering dew-drop out of the
+corner of her eyes, as if it were dust, because she thought, at night I
+can weep enough,--she had very dry eyes; and all that, in order not to
+be an additional burden to her oppressed mother. But she, as mothers so
+easily do, confounded a timid, loving stillness with the dawning of
+obduracy; and when Liana, with the innocent design of consolation,
+wished to have Caroline's picture brought for her from Lilar, this
+innocence also passed for hardness, and was punished and reciprocated
+with a corresponding on the part of the parent, namely, with the
+permission to send. Only the Minister's lady demanded the French prayers
+of her again, as if she were not worthy to lay them under her present
+heart. Never are human beings smaller than when they want to plague and
+punish without knowing _how_.
+
+As every one who rules, whether he sits on a chair of instruction or a
+princely one, or, like parents, on both, when the occupant of its
+footstool once leaves off his former obedience, imputes that obedience
+to him, not as a mitigation, but as an aggravation of his offence, so
+did the Minister's lady also toward her hitherto so uniformly docile
+child. She hated her pure love, which burned like ether, without ashes,
+smoke, or coal, so much the more, and held it to be either the author
+or the victim of an incendiary fire, particularly as her own married
+love hitherto had seldom been anything more than a showy chimney-piece.
+
+Liana at last, too heavily constrained, since on the other side of the
+wall-tapestry the serene day, the loveliest sky was blooming, ascended
+to the Italian roof. She saw how people were travelling and riding back
+contentedly from their little places of pleasure, because the earth was
+one; on Lilar's bushy path the walkers were sauntering with a blissful
+slowness home,--in the streets there was a loud carpentering at the
+festive scaffoldings and Charles's-wains for the princely bride, and the
+finished wheels were rolled along for trial,--and everywhere were heard
+the drillings of the young music, which when grown up was to go before
+her. But when Liana looked upon herself, and saw her life alone standing
+here in dark raiment,--over yonder the empty house of her loved one,
+here her own, which to her had also become empty,--this very spot, which
+still reminded her of a lovelier, rarer blossoming than that of the
+_Cereus serpens_,--and oh! this cold solitude, in which her heart
+to-day, for the first time, lived without a heart; for her brother, the
+chorister of her short song of gladness, had been sent off, and Julienne
+had for some time been incomprehensibly invisible to her,--no, she could
+not see the fair sun go down, who, so serene and white, was sinking to
+slumber with his high evening star,--or listen to the happy evening
+chorus of the long day, but left the shining eminence. O how does joy
+die a stranger in the untenanted, dark bosom, when she finds no sister
+and becomes a spectre there! Thus does the beautiful green, that spring
+color, when a cloud paints it, betoken nothing but long moisture.
+
+When she entered, soon, the asylum of day, the bedchamber, the heavens
+without flashed heat-lightning; O why just now, cruel fate?--But here,
+before the still-life of night, when life, covered with her veil, sounds
+more faintly,--here may all her tears, which a heavy day has been
+pressing,[210] gush forth freely. On the pillow, as if it bore the last,
+long sleep, rests this exhausted head more softly than on the bosom
+which reproachfully reckons up against it its tears; and it weeps
+softly, not _upon_, only _for_ loved ones.
+
+According to her custom, she was on the point of opening her mother's
+prayers, when she recollected, with a startled feeling, that they had
+been taken from her. Then she looked up with burning tears to God, and
+prepared alone out of her broken heart a prayer to him, and only angels
+counted the words and the tears.
+
+
+76. CYCLE.
+
+The father had made this chamber-imprisonment a punitory mark of her
+refusal. With deep anguish she uttered this mute no, in the very fact
+that she voluntarily stayed in the chamber, and denied her mother the
+morning kiss. She had, in the course of the night, cast many an ardent
+look at the dead image of her counsellor Caroline, but no original, no
+fever-created form had appeared to her. Can I longer doubt, she inferred
+from this, that the divine apparition, which has spoken the assenting
+word to my love, was something higher than my own creation, since I must
+otherwise have been able to form it again over against her picture?
+
+She had Albano's blooming letters in her desk, and opened it, in order
+to look over from her island into the remote orient land of warmer
+times; but she shut it to again; she was ashamed to be secretly happy,
+while her mother was sorrowful, who into these melancholy days had not
+even come, like her, out of pleasant ones.
+
+Froulay did not long leave her alone, but soon sent for her; not,
+however, to sound her or pronounce her free, but for the purpose--which,
+as may well be conceived, required an unvarnished brow and cheek, whose
+fibrous network was as hard to be colored as his with the Turkish red of
+shame--of appointing her his mistress in artistic language, and taking
+her with him to the Prince's gallery, in order to learn from her the
+explanation of these frontispieces (for such they were to him) in this
+private deaf-and-dumb institution so well that he might be in a
+condition, so soon as the Princess should come to inspect it, to
+represent something better than a mute before the beauties of the
+pictures and the image-worshipping Regentess. Liana had to transfer an
+impression of every pictured limb, with the praise or blame appertaining
+thereunto, over into his serious brain, together with the name of the
+master. How delightedly and completely did she give this kallipaedeia to
+her growling old cornute,[211] and would-be _connoisseur_ in painting,
+who paid her not a single thankful look as instruction-money!
+
+At noon, for the first time, did the daughter find her longed-for
+mother, among the kitchen-servants, very serious and sad. She ventured
+not to kiss her mouth, but only her hand, and opened upon her her
+love-streaming eyes only timidly and a little. Dinner seemed a
+funeral-feast. Only the old gentleman, who on a battle-field would have
+danced his marriage-minuet, and celebrated his birthday, was in good
+spirits and appetite, and full of salt. In case of a family jar, he
+usually ate _en famille_, and found in biting table-speeches, as common
+people do in winter and in famine, a sharper zest for food. Quarrelling,
+of itself, strengthens and animates, as physicians can electrify
+themselves merely by whipping something.[212]
+
+Laughable, and yet lamentable, was it that poor Liana, who was all day
+long to keep a prison, was always called out of it just for
+to-day,--this time into the carriage again, which was to set down the
+sad heart and the smiling face before nothing but bright palaces. She
+had to go with her parents to the Princess, and look as happy as they,
+who, on the melancholy road, regarded her as if she were to be envied.
+So does the heart which has been born not far from the throne never
+bleed, except behind the curtain, and never laugh but when it rises;
+just as these same distinguished ones were formerly executed only in
+secret. The Prince, who was ridiculously loud on the subject of his
+marriage; Bouverot, just returned from card-tables or privateering
+planks, whom Liana now, since the latest intelligences, could only
+endure with a shudder; and the Princess herself; who excused her
+previous absence from her on account of the distraction of preparing for
+the festival, and who very strangely jested at once about love and
+men,--only to a Liana who guessed so little, suffered so much, and
+endured so willingly, could all these beings and incidents seem anything
+but the most intolerable.
+
+Ah, what was intolerable, but the iron unchangeableness of these
+connections, the fixedness of such an eternal mountain-snow? Not the
+greatness, but the indefiniteness, of pain; not the minotaur of the
+labyrinth, its cellar-frost, sharp-cornered rocks, and vaults, make the
+breast contract and the blood curdle therein, but the long night and
+winding of its egress. Even under bodily maladies, therefore, unwonted
+new ones, whose last moment stretches away beyond our power of
+prediction, appear to us more ominous and oppressive than recurring
+ones, which, as neighboring frontier-enemies, are ever attacking us, and
+find us in arms.
+
+Thus stood the dumb Liana in a cloud, when the exulting Rabette, with a
+bosom full of old joys and new hope, came running into the house,--that
+sister of the holy youth who had been torn away from her, that
+confederate of such glorious days. She was honorably received, and
+constantly attended by a guard of honor,--the Minister's lady,--because
+she might, indeed, as likely be an ambassadress of the Count as an
+electress of her son. The cunning girl sought to snatch some solitary
+moments with Liana by boldly begging for her company to Blumenbuehl. The
+company was granted, and even that of the mother freely offered, into
+the bargain. Liana led the way to Blumenbuehl over the still-blooming
+churchyard of buried days. What a torrent of tears struggled upward in
+her breast when she parted from the still happy Rabette! _She_ had
+innocently left to the house one of the greatest apples of discord for
+the evening meal which the Minister had ever plucked for his fruit-dish
+with his apple-gatherer. Therefore he supped again _en famille_. That is
+to say, a silly word had escaped Rabette about the Sunday's meeting at
+Lilar. "Of that," said Froulay, in a very friendly manner, "thou hast
+not made one word of remark, daughter." "I did to my mother
+immediately," she replied, too fast. "I should be glad, too, to take an
+interest in thy amusements," said he, saving up his fury. In the
+pleasantest mood imaginable did this raftsman of so many tears and
+hewn-down blossoming branches, which he let float down thereupon, take
+his seat at the supper-table. He first asked servants and family for his
+auxiliary ear. Thereupon he passed over to the French, although the
+plate-exchangers found a rough translation thereof for themselves, a
+_versio interlinearis_, on his face, by way of giving notice that the
+distinguished Count had been there, and had inquired after mother and
+daughter. "With good right he asked for you both," continued the moral
+glacier, who loved to cool his warm food. "You are conspired, as I heard
+again to-day, to keep silence towards me; but why, then, shall I still
+trust you?" He hated from his heart every lie which he did not utter
+himself; so he seriously regarded himself as moral, disinterested, and
+gentle, merely for this reason, that he inexorably insisted upon all
+this in the case of others. With an abundant supply of the stinging
+nettles of persiflage,--the botanical ones also come forward best in
+cold and stony soil,--he covered over all his opening and closing
+lobster-claws, as we keep brook-crabs in nettles, and took first his
+tender child between the claws. Her soft, submissive smile he took for
+contempt and wickedness. How comes this soft one intelligibly by his
+paternal name, unless one assumes the old hypothesis, that children are
+usually most like that for which the pregnant mother vainly longed,
+which in this case was a soft spouse? Then he assailed, but more
+vehemently, the mother, in order by his mistrust to set her at variance
+with his daughter; yes, in order, perhaps, to torment the latter, by
+means of her mother's sufferings, into childlike sacrifices and
+resolutions. He very freely declared himself--for the egotist finds the
+most egotists, as love and Liana find only love, and no
+self-love--against the egotism around and beside him, and concealed not
+how very cordially he cursed them both for female egotists (as the old
+heathen did the Christians for atheists). The Minister's lady,
+accustomed to live with the Minister in no wedlock so little as in that
+of souls,--as Voltaire defines friendship,--said merely to Liana, "For
+whom do I suffer so?" "Ah, I know," she answered, meekly. And so he
+dismissed both full of the deepest sorrows, and thought afterward of his
+business matters.
+
+This general distress was increased by something which should have
+lessened it. The Minister was vexed that he had daily, in the midst of
+his wrath, to consult the taste of the women upon his--exterior. He
+wanted, at the marriage festival,--for the sake of his beloved,--to be a
+true bird of paradise, a Paradeur, a _Venus a belles fesses_.[213] Of
+old he had loved to act the double part of statesman and courtier, and
+would fain, by way of monopolizing pride and vanity, grow into a
+Diogenes-Aristippus. Something of this, however, was not vanity; but
+that tormenting spirit of the male sex, the spirit of order and
+orthodoxy, would not go out of him. He was a man who would flourish
+against his very livery the clothes-switch wherewith the servant had let
+a few particles of dust settle on the state coat; still more dangerous
+was it--because he sat between two looking-glasses, the frizzling-glass
+and the large mirror in the stove-screen--to lay the dust rightly on his
+own wool; and hardest of all was it for him to be satisfied with the
+_fixing_ of his children. Liana, as artist, had now to suggest the
+proper color of a new surtout. _Sachets_, or smelling-bags, he directed
+to be filled, and with them his pockets; and a musk-plant pot placed in
+his window, not because he wished to use the leaves for perfume (that he
+expected of his fingers), but because he wished to anoint his fingers by
+rubbing the leaves together. Patent pomatum for the hands, and English
+pressed ornamental paper also for the same (when they wished to use a
+_billet-doux_ pen), and other knickknacks, excited less attention than
+the snuff which he procured for himself; not, however, for his nose, but
+for his lips, in order to rub them red. In fact, he would have rendered
+himself quite ridiculous in the eyes of many a merry blade, if such a
+one had seen him draw privately out of his souvenir the hair-tweezers,
+and with them the hair out of his eyebrows, just where the saddle of
+life, as upon a horse's back, had worn it white; and only the Minister
+himself could look serious during the process, when he sat before the
+looking-glass, smiling through all the finest ways of smiling,--the best
+one he caught and kept,--or when he tried the most graceful modes of
+throwing one's self on the sofa,--how often he had to practise
+this!--and finally, in short, through all his operations upon himself.
+
+Fortunately for the mother, the good Lector came; from the hand of this
+old friend she had so often taken, if not a Jacob's ladder, yet a
+mining-ladder, upon which to climb out of the abyss; hopefully she now
+laid before him all her trouble. He promised some help, upon the
+condition of speaking with Liana alone in her chamber. He went to her
+and declared tenderly his knowledge and her situation.
+
+How did the childlike maiden blush at the sharp day-beams which smote
+the scented night-violet of her love! But the friend of her childhood
+spoke softly to this smitten heart, and of his equal love for her and
+her friend; of the temperament of her father, and of the necessity of
+considerate measures; and said the best was to make him a sacred vow
+that she would yield to her parent's wish of her strictly avoiding the
+Count, only until he had received from his father, to whom he himself,
+as attendant of the son, had long been obliged to communicate
+intelligence and inquiries about the new connection, the yes or no in
+respect to it; if it were "no,"--which he would not answer for,--then
+Albano must solve the riddle; if it were "yes," he himself would stand
+security for a second on the part of her parents; at the same time,
+however, he must lay claim to her profoundest silence toward them in
+relation to his inquiries, whereby they might perhaps find themselves
+compromitted. Thereby he rooted himself only the more deeply in her
+confidence.
+
+She asked, trembling, how long the answer would tarry? "Six, eight,
+eleven days after the nuptials at most!" said he, reckoning. Yes, good
+Augusti! "Ah! we are all suffering, indeed," said she, and added,
+confidentially, and out of a weeping breast: "But is he well?" "He is
+diligent," was the reply.
+
+So he brought her, burdened with two secrets, and for the present
+consenting to an interim-separation, back to her mother; but she
+bestowed only upon the Lector the reward of a friendly look. He desired,
+meantime,--after his Carthusian manner,--no other reward than the most
+good-natured silence toward the Minister on the subject of his
+interference, since the latter might hold his deserts in this connection
+much greater than they were.
+
+The eight days' improvement and abstinence was announced to the
+Minister. He believed, however,--keeping in reserve a mistrust towards
+his lady,--that he could carry the war farther into the enemy's country
+with his own weapons; nevertheless, he contented himself, at the same
+time, with the new respite and Liana's disincarceration, for the sake of
+driving his daughter before him to his beloved at the nuptial festival,
+blooming and healthy as a sparkling pea-hen.
+
+Roquairol at this moment came back, and ushered into the house a cloud
+or two full of beautiful, bright morning redness. He delivered to his
+father tidings and greetings from the Princess. To Liana he brought the
+echo of that beloved voice, which had once said to her heaven: "Let it
+be!"--ah! the last melody among the discords of the unharmonious time!
+He guessed easily--for he learned little from his mother, who neglected
+him, and nothing from her daughter--how all stood. When he was actually
+on the point of slipping Albano's letter to her, in the twilight of
+evening, into her work-bag, and she said, with an ah! of love, "No, it
+is against my word,--but at some future time, Charles!"--then he saw, as
+he expressed it, "with crying indignation, his sister, in Charon's open
+boat, sailing into the Tartarus of all sorrows." About his friend he
+thought less than of his sister. The friendly, flattering Minister--he
+presented, as a proof of it, a valuable saddle to the Captain--informed
+him of Rabette's visit, and gave hints about betrothment and the like.
+Charles said, boldly: "He postponed every thought of his own happiness,
+so long as his dear sister saw none before her." By way of drawing the
+old gentleman again into more interest for Liana, he suggested to him a
+romantic invention for the marriage festival, which Froulay did not
+dream of, when he already stood quite close to it; namely, Idoine (the
+sister of the bride) was strikingly like Liana. The Princess loved her
+inexpressibly, but saw her only seldom, because on account of her strong
+character, which once refused a royal marriage, she lived in a village
+built and governed by herself, in a courtly exile from court. He now
+proposed to his father the poetic question, whether, on the illumination
+night, Liana might not for a few minutes, in the dream-temple, which was
+entirely suited to this beautiful illusion, delight the Princess with
+the image of her beloved sister.
+
+Whether it was that love toward the Princess made the Minister bolder,
+or he was intoxicated by the desire of brilliantly introducing Liana to
+her office of court-lady; suffice it, he found in the idea good sense.
+If anything supplied tobacco for the calumet of the _ex parte_ peace
+which he had made with his son, it was this theatrical part. He hastened
+immediately to the Prince and the Princess with the prayer for his
+permission and her sympathy; and then, when he had secured both, he
+hastened on to his Orestes, Bouverot, and said: "_Il m'est venu une idee
+tres singuliere qui peut-etre l'est trop; cependant le prince l'a
+approuvee_," etc.,--and finally--for he must not forget her either--to
+Liana.
+
+The Captain had already sought to persuade her beforehand. The mother
+opposed the dramatic imitation from self-respect, and Liana from
+humility; such a representation seemed to her a piece of presumption.
+But at last she gave in, simply because the sisterly love of the
+Princess had seemed to her so great and unattainable, just as if she did
+not cherish a similar sentiment in her own heart; thus she always
+regarded only the image in the mirror, not herself, as beautiful; just
+as the astronomer thinks the same evening, with its red splendors and
+night shadows, more sublime and enchanting, when he finds it in the
+moon, than when he stands in the midst of it on the earth. Perhaps, too,
+there entered another element of secret sweetness into Liana's love for
+the Prince's bride, namely, a step-daughter's affection; because she
+should once have been the bride of the Knight Gaspard. Women regard
+relationship more than we; hence, too, their ancestral pride is always
+several ancestors older than ours.
+
+Thus, then, did she make ready her oppressed heart for the light plays
+of the shining festival, which the coming Cycles are to present on the
+New-Year's holiday, as it were, of a new Jubilee.
+
+
+END OF VOL. I.
+
+Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[192] This is Jean Paul's own image.--TR.
+
+[193] That is, of course, some lights of hope.--TR.
+
+[194] A German or Suabian dance.--TR.
+
+[195] His Moral Treatises, Vol. II. p. 96.
+
+[196] The Germans call the dash the _stroke of thought_. Here it
+implies an emphatic pause, as much as to say, "What do you think
+is coming?"--TR.
+
+[197] At the Prince's marriage.
+
+[198] With the Egyptians the enchanters were only learned men;
+with him the learned women were enchantresses.
+
+[199] _Memoires secrets sur les Regnes de Louis XIV._, etc. Par
+Duclos. Tom. I.
+
+[200] It is well known that a cut is made in a fowl left whole as
+a sign that it has been upon the Prince's table, so that it may
+not be set on again, but otherwise enjoyed.
+
+[201] In German, _Schutz- und Stich-blatt_,--literally, a plate
+to defend the hand in parrying and thrusting,--_Blatt_, meaning
+_leaf_ (of paper) also, conveys a _pun_ not easily
+translated.--TR.
+
+[202] The blind-passenger in the German stage-coach corresponds
+to our _dead-head_ in stage or steamboat.--TR.
+
+[203] See Klockenbring's collected Essays.
+
+[204] (In German, _Spring-wurzel_.) The juice of some plant
+(perhaps Devil's-milk) highly and quickly corrosive.--TR.
+
+[205] News by hand.--TR.
+
+[206] The King had to _damer_, or make a dame of an unmarried
+maiden of rank, before she could go to Versailles to court.
+
+[207] Not so miserable perhaps as a French mangling the
+translator remembers to have seen.--TR.
+
+[208] He refers to the letter he had left on Liana's table, and
+which she had shown to her mother.--TR.
+
+[209] _Fist_ in the original.--TR.
+
+[210] I.e. as in a wine-press.--TR.
+
+[211] Alluding to the horned hat once worn by graduated printers'
+apprentices.--TR.
+
+[212] Beseke discovered it. See "On the Elemental Fire," by him,
+1786.
+
+[213] Venus with beautiful thighs.--TR.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+RICHTER'S WRITINGS.
+
+
+TITAN. A ROMANCE. 2 vols. 16mo. $3.00.
+
+FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 2 vols. 16mo. $2.75.
+
+LEVANA; OR, THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
+
+HESPERUS. 2 vols. 16mo. _Preparing._
+
+_The above volumes are printed in uniform size and style._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+IN PRESS.
+
+LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. By ELIZA BUCKMINSTER LEE. New Edition, Revised. 1
+volume.
+
+TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Titan: A Romance v. 1 (of 2), by
+Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
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