Chapter C: T. B (14)

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 _Sœur 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.