FOOTNOTES:

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 uponMontBlanc andintoVesuvius. 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, theignes fatuidanced 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 wassnatched 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 gladlyweep 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 ofhissun; 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 growsbrighter 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 ledupto 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 thewater 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 ifhehad 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, andIfear onlymyself. 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 issauer-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]Toget the basketmeans a refusal.—Tr.[150]I do not mean (as perhaps may appear from theselling) 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 anestateand astand.—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.

[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 issauer-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]Toget the basketmeans a refusal.—Tr.

[150]I do not mean (as perhaps may appear from theselling) 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 anestateand astand.—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.

Roquairol's Love.—Philippic against Lovers.—The Pictures.—Albano Albani.—The Harmonic Tête-à-tête.—The Ride to Blumenbühl.

OOut 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 promisedspirit 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.

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 promisedspirit 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 thyterra firmawith 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, wasstill 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 thenhappy?" 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.

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 anybodyshake, 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 comparedthis 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 forgenuine historical sources, at court and in the city, and his coldness toward philosophy, so dried up the overstrained image which Albano had formed of him, that it wrinkled up and grew full of rents. Such dissimilarities never rise among cultivated men to open feuds; but they secretly put upon the inner man one piece of armor after another, till he stands there in solid mail, and strikes out.

Now, in addition to all this, the Lector bore the Captain a hearty grudge, because he cost the Minister's lady many anxious hours, and Liana, and even the Count, much money, and because he seemed to him to pervert the youth. The otherwise directly ascending flame of Albano was now, by the obstacles thrown in the way of his love, bent on all sides, and, like soldering fire, burned more sharply; but this sharpness Augusti ascribed to the friend. Albano appeared to those whom he loved warmer, to those whom he endured colder, than he was, and his earnestness was easily confounded with defiance and pride; but the Lector imagined that Albano's love was stolen from him by Charles.

He undertook, with equal refinement and frankness, to play off on the Count a good map-card of the spots which were thickly sown in the heavenly body of this Jupiter. But he tore every map. Charles's painful confessions on that night extinguished all additions by other hands. And Albano's grand faith, that one must shield a friend entirely, and trust him entirely, warded off every influence. O it is a holy time, in which man desires offerings and priests,without fail, for the altar of friendship and love, and—beholds them; and it is a too cruel time, in which the so often cheated, belied bosom prophesies to itself, on another's bosom, in the midst of the love-draught of the moment, the cold neighborhood of bankruptcy!

As the Lector saw perfectly that Alban, at many of his charges against Charles,—for instance, of his wildness and disorder,—remained cold, for the reason that he might deem himself to be reproached over another's shoulders, as the French (according to Thickness) give strangers praise over their own; he now, instead of the point of similarity, took hold of an entire dissimilarity of the Captain, his light-mindedness toward the sex. But this only made the matter worse. For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-worshipper, and the Lector only the one whom the coal of this fire blackens. Augusti cherished, in regard to love, pretty nearly the principles of the great world, which, merely for honor's sake, he never coined into action, and he assigned only the cloud-heaven near the earth to love. The Captain, however, spoke of a third heaven, or heaven of joy, as belonging thereto, wherein only saints are the blest. Augusti, after the manner of the great world, spoke much more freely than he acted, and sometimes as openly as if he were dining in the hall of a watering-place. Charles spoke like a maiden. The virgin ear of Albano, which was mostly closed in good visiting-parlors, and which in study-chambers remained open, united to his want of the experience that a cynical tongue is often found in the most continent men, for instance, in our buffoonery-loving forefathers, and an ascetic one in modest libertines,—these two things must naturally have involved the pure young man in a double error.

Thus did Augusti start up within him more and more storm-birds. Both came often to the verge of a complete feud and challenge; for the Lector had too much honor to fear any one thing, and dared in cold blood as much as another in hot.

Now, at length, did Charles disclose fully to his friend, though with all the tenderness of friendship, Liana's acquaintance with that Tartarus-night. "The otherwise reserved Lector must be after nearer advantages with his tattling," Albano concluded, and now the toad of jealousy, which lives and grows in the living tree without any visible way in or out, nursed itself to full size in his warm heart. Unanswered love is besides the most jealous. God knows whether he is not scenery-master of these ghost scenes working in and through each other with so many wheels. All these are Albano's private conclusions; open accusations were forbidden by his sense of honor. But his warm heart, always expressing itself, demanded a warmer society, and this he found when he followed the pious father, and went to Lilar into the Thunderhouse, into the midst of the flowers and summits, in order, lying nearer to the heart of Nature, to dream and enjoy more sweetly.

There was only one warm, sun-bright spot for him in Charles's historical picture; namely, the hope that perhaps only the mistakes about his relation to the Countess, out of which Liana had been helped by her brother, had dictated to her the evenly cold deportment which she had hitherto maintained towards him. On this sunny side Rabette threw a billet, in which she wrote him that she was going back to her parents on Saturday, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence, the prospect of less favorable circumstances, his going to Lilar,—all this decided him in the purpose of snatching to himself a solitary moment, and therein casting off before Liana the veil from his soul and hers.

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'sMadonna 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 ofthis, 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 followhim 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 hertender 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 painfulsunstroke 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 onthe 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.

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, notwingsindeed, but stillwing-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, andcame 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-spottedpost-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.

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