Chapter C: T. B (13)

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.