"Thou canst surely keep awake and travel one night?" With this question, his father hastily conducted him to the carriage that stood ready for the journey, in order to steal him away while yet in the midst of the glowing dream, with his recollections lulled to slumber, and in order especially to get the start of the pale bride, who this very night, by the same road, was to go home to the last heritage of humanity. "In the carriage thou shalt hear all," replied Gaspard to his son's mild question respecting their destination. Still entranced with the light of the shining land of dreams, Albano willingly and blindly obeyed. He still saw Liana in lofty, divine form, standing on the evening-red ground of the sun, which was bespangled with the dew-drops of joy, and his eye, full of splendor, reached not down into the earth-cellar, and to the narrow cast-off chrysalis-shell of the liberated and soaring Psyche.
Schoppe accompanied him to the torch-lighted carriage, but in perfect silence, in order not to awaken his heart by intimating the destination of the journey. He pressed with warmth the hand of the beautiful and beloved youth, which returned the pressure, and said nothing but "We shall see each other again, brother!" Thereupon, honored by no parting look from the imperious father, he stepped back with emotion from his friend, who continued to wave his warm farewells; and the carriage rolled off, and, leaving a long gleam of torch-light behind it, flew out into the high, starry night.
Freshly and meaningly did the glimmering creation broaden out before the convalescent. Saturn was just rising, and the god of time set himself, as a soft, flashing jewel, in the glittering magic belt of heaven. With sealed eyes was the unconscious youth conducted down from the pastoral cottage of his early years, and out of the shepherd's vale of his first love, away where the great, eternal constellations of art beckoned, into the divine land, where the dark ether of heaven is golden, and the lofty ruins of the earth are clothed with grace, and the nights are days. No eye looked over to the heights of Blumenbühl, from which, at this very moment, a black train of coaches was passing slowly down, with upright-burning funeral torches, like a moving shadow-realm, to convey the still, good heart, wherein Albano and God lived, with its dead wounds, to the soft place of rest. Flaming rolled the torch-carriage up the mountain-road towards Italy.
Tearless and far-gazing, Albano's eye rested on the glimmering, ceaselessly moving fountain-wheel of time, eternally drawing up constellations in the east, and pouring them out in the west; and his childlike hand gently clasped his father's.
barstart
So long as the night lasted, the images of Albano's dream went on gleaming with the constellations, and not until the bright morning rose were they all extinguished. Gaspard told him, smilingly, he was on his way to Italy. He received the intelligence of his going abroad with an unexpected composure. He merely asked where his Schoppe was. When told thathehad not been disposed to join them, then did he seem to see all at once in fancy's eye the Linden-city come following after him over the mountains and valleys, and his last friend standing in the middle of the market-place all alone, engaged in mock-play with himself, by way of quieting his true, strong heart, which would fain worry down its grief and hold fast its love. With this friend, whom he would not let go out of his soul, Albano drew after him, as by a Jupiter's-chain, the whole stage and world of his past, and every sad scene came close up to him. Cities and lands rolled along before him unseen. The waves which sorrow lashes up around us, stand high between us and the world, and make our ship solitary in the midst of a haven full of vessels. He turned away with a shudder from every beautiful virgin; she reminded him, like a dirge, of her who was pale in death; forever did Liana's white face, uncovered,—like a corpse in Italy,[70]—seem to be travelling along on the endless way to the grave, and only indistinguishable forms with masks followed after her alive. So is it with man and his grief; by a process the reverse of ship-drawing, in which the living drag the dead along with them, here the dead takes the living with him, and draws them after him far into his cold realm.
Time gradually unfolded his grief, instead of weakening it. His life had become a night, in which the moon is under the earth, and he could not believe that Luna would gradually return with an increasing bow of light. Not joys, but only actions,—those remote stars of night,—were now his aim. He held it unjust to keep back in the presence of his father the tears which often forced themselves from him in the midst of conversation, merely because his father took no interest in them; still he showed him, nevertheless, by the energy of his discourses and resolves, the vigorous youth. Only the reproach which he had cast upon himself for his guilt in Liana's death had suffered itself to be swallowed up in the peace which Idoine had given him, although he now held her apparition to have been only a feverish waking dream about Liana.
His father kept a profound silence about Idoine's appearance on the stage of action, as well as all disagreeable recollections. He spoke much, however, of Italy and of the spoils of art which Albano would acquire there, especially through the company of the Princess, the Counsellor of Arts, and the German gentleman, who had gone on before them, and whom one might soon overtake. The son turned to him at last with the bold inquiry whether he really had a sister still, and related the adventure with the Baldhead. "It might well be," said Gaspard, with a disagreeable jocosity, "that thou hadst still more sisters and brothers than I knew of. But what I know is, that thy twin-sister Severina died this year in her cloister. For what, then, dost thou take the night-adventure?" "I should almost think it a dream," he replied. Here, accidentally, his hand found its way to his pocket, and to his astonishment struck upon the half-ring which his sister had presented him. The strangeness of the whole thing sank deep among his sensations, and that night of horror passed swiftly and coldly through his noon. He and his father examined the ends of the divided ring, on each of which a broken-off signature ended abruptly. "There isnothingmiraculous, however," said the Knight. "How do we know, then, that there is anything natural?" said Albano. "Mystery," replied Gaspard, "or the spirit-world, dwells only in the spirit." "We must," the son continued, "even in the case of the commonest optical tricks, derive our pleasure from something else than the resolving of the deception of fancy into a deception of the senses, because otherwise the magic would necessarily please us moreafterthe solution than before. These are the points and poles of human nature, upon which the eternal polar clouds hang. Our maps of the kingdom of truth and spirits are the map-stones, which stand for ruins and villages; these arelies, but still they arelikenesses. The spirit, forever an exile among bodies, desires spirits." "That is just about what I meant, too," said Gaspard.
Albano, however, insisted more distinctly upon his decision respecting the Baldhead and the sister. "Anything else," said the Knight, quite petulantly; "it is to me a very disagreeable conversation. Take the world inthyway and be quiet!" "Dear father," asked Albano, with surprise, "do you mean at some future time to definitely enlighten me on the subject?" "So soon as I can," said the Knight, abruptly, with such sharp and stinging glances at the son, that the latter, flinching from them, as from arrows, hastily bent away his head out of the carriage; when he for the first time observed that his father did not mean him at all; for he still continued to look as sharply in the same direction as if he were close upon the point of falling into his old torpor.
Gaspard's expression about the indwelling of the spiritual world within the spirit, and his look, and the thought of his palsy lent a romantic awfulness to the hour and the silence in Albano's eyes. Down below on the bank of the stream stood a concourse of people, and one came running like a fugitive or a spokesman out of the crowd. A boy at some distance threw himself down on a hill, and laid his ear to the earth, in order to hear somewhat accurately the rolling of their carriage-wheels. In the village where they made their noonday halt there was an incessant tolling. Their host was at the same time a miller; the din of waves and wheels filled the whole house; and canary-birds sent their additional jargoning through the jargon.
There are moments when the two worlds, the earthly and the spiritual, sweep by near to each other, and when earthly day and heavenly night touch each other in twilights. As the shadows of the shining clouds of heaven run along over the blossoms and harvests of earth, so does heaven universally cast upon the common surface of reality its light shadows and reflections. So did Albano find it now. The ring and the mystic word of his cold father had dazzled him like lightning. Below at the house-door he found a maiden, who carried along before her a box of citrons. Suddenly and unpleasantly the tolling stopped; he looked up to the belfry, and a white hawk sat upon the vane. Soon came the bell-ringer himself, to get something to drink, and began upon the chamberlain with strong and yet not ill-meant curses, for having kept him tolling there these three weeks, and said he only wished that such a one as that distinguished personage himself had been the previous year had only been obliged to toll regularly three days after the decease of the blessed daughter. He urged the miller to "buy some of the citrons, because they were good, juicy, and had a thin rind; and he and the 'parson's boy'[71]must recognize them as coming from the burial of the gracious Fräulein; and in fourteen days, at all events, he would need some for the assembled clergy, as bride-father!" "What are the customs here?" asked Albano.
"Why, you see, when any one dies," said the sexton, very respectful and friendly, "then the parson and my littleness get a citron, and so does the corpse too; but if any one is married, then the clergy get the same, and so also the bride. This is the fashion with us, my most gracious master."
Albano went out into the garden back of the house, into which the exposed mill-wheels threw their silver sparks, and which was as if swallowed up in the splendor and uproar of the open water. While he looked into the glimmering, flying whirlpools, the citrons which the corpse as well as the bride got hovered before his excited mind. Emotion is full of similes. Time was, thought he, when Liana should have journeyed to the citron-land, and into the low woods where the snow of blossoms and the gold of fruits play together between green and blue, and there she was to have gained health and refreshment; now she holds the citron in her cold, dead hand, and she is not quickened.
He looked round, and seemed to stand in a strange world. In the blue of heaven an invisible storm without clouds swept along like a spirit; long rows of hills shifted and sparkled with red fruits and red leaves; out of the gay trees glowing apples were flung; and the storm flew from summit to summit, and down upon the earth, and roared along down the whole course of the disturbed stream. One could fancy spirits played around the earth, or would appear upon it, so singularly seemed the bright welkin stirred and illuminated. By this time, Albano had come unconsciously into a dark, wooded wilderness; therein leaped, unseen, unheard, a pure, light fountain out of the earth upon the earth; the storm without was still, only the fountain was heard. "The holy one is near me," said his heart. "Is not the fountain her image? Is it not the very image of her eternal tears? Does she not press upward out of the earth, where she dwells?" All at once he saw in his hand, as if another's hand had laid it therein, the sketch of Linda's head which Liana, with dying hands, had made and presented; but his fancy powerfully impressed upon the picture the resemblance to the artist, so clearly did he see Liana's soft face upon the paper.
He went forth again into the shining world. "How poor I am!" he cried. "I see her upon the golden cloud which sails from the evening sun toward morning; I see her in the cool fountain of the vale, and on the moon, and on the flower. I see her everywhere; and she rests only on one spot. O, how poor!" And he looked up to heaven, and a single long cloud was floating therein, swiftly and far away.
Thus did the days, with their cities and landscapes, fly by, and the world mirrored itself in Albano's life as in a poem. One faculty after another, the whole bowed harvest of his inner being, gradually rose up again green and dripping; but, at the same time, the thorn of grief also grew strong. While his eye and spirit were filling themselves with the world and all spoils of knowledge, the evil spectre of pain still kept his abode in the ruins, and came forth when the heart was alone, and seized it.
He touched Vienna, where he must needs be pleased to be introduced to several distinguished friends of Gaspard, who here, for the first time, disclosed to him that he belonged not to theCavalleros del Turone, but was an Austrian Knight of the Fleece. "It is so singularly familiar to me here," said Albano; "whence can this arise?" "From some resemblance to another city," said Gaspard; "whoever travels much comes out of like cities into like." Every day his father grew more dear and intelligible to him, and yet no more confidential or intimate. After a warm day and familiar conversation with Gaspard, one stood, at the next succeeding interview, again in the very antechamber of his acquaintance; as in the case of hard-natured maidens, after every May-month's day the melted May-frost begins to fall anew. Age respects love, but, unlike youth, it respects little the signs of love. However, Albano maintained the pride of letting his father see him wholly and with all his differences, without hiding his summer from the face of winter.
From day to day Gaspard found letters to himself at the post-offices, particularly from Pestitz, as Albano saw externally by the post-marks, for not one was handed over to him. He desired more and more to overtake the Princess, who was now only one day's journey in advance of them. They saw already those giants of winter, the Swiss and Tyrolese Alps, in their encampment; those sons of the gods stood, armed with avalanches and cataracts and winters, sentinels around the divine land where gods and men reciprocally imitated each other. How often did Albano, when the sun at evening glowingly blended with the snow-clad Alpine heights, gaze with a pang of sadness at those thrones, which he had once beheld quite otherwise, much more golden, so hopefully and trustingly, fromIsola Bella! The heights of thy past life, said he to himself, are also white, and no Alpine horns any longer sound up there, among serene, sunny days, and thou art deep in the valley!
They passed, even now, the popular festival of a belated vintage. The Knight informed himself about everything with the curiosity of a wine-dealer, and with the science of a vine-dresser. So did he botanize universally upon the earth after every spear and sprig of knowledge. Albano wondered at this, since he had heretofore believed that Gaspard sought and strove after nothing but the Paris—and Hesperides-apples of art, because, in his station, he could have no occasion for any other fruits, or need their meat and their kernel, either to enjoy or to plant them.
They sank into the depths of the mountains of Tyrol. The heights stood already wrapped in the close, white bier-cloth of winter, and through the valleys the cold storm went to and fro, the only living thing. Albano's longing after the mild land of youth grew, between the storms and the Alps, higher and higher; and Rome's image, the nearer it approached him, assumed more colossal dimensions. Gaspard made the journey go on wings, in order to anticipate the rain-clouds of autumn.
In a dark travelling night they worked their passage, as it were, away through the mountains, like their companion, the river Adige, which tears up a giant rock, and heaves it into the mild plain, and softly speeds on its level way. The sun appeared,—and Italy.
It had rained. A bland air fluttered from the cypress hills through the valley, and through the vine-festoons of the mulberry-trees, and had forced its way along between blossoms and the fruits of the Seville oranges. The Adige seemed to rest, like a curling giant-snake, upon the motley-colored landscape of country-houses and olive-groves, and to set rainbows upon one another. Life played in the ether; only summer birds floated in the light blue; only the Venus-chariot of pleasure rolled over the soft hills.
Albano's full soul gushed out, as it were, into the broad bed which led him from the mild plain to the magnificent Rome! "When we journey back," said Gaspard, "then remember thy approach." They stopped at a village with great stone houses. Albano was looking upon the warm out-o'-door life around him, the uncovered head, the naked breast, and the sparkling eyes of the men, the great sheep with silken wool, the little, black, lively pigs, and the black turkey-cocks, when he suddenly heard his name and a German greeting from a balcony overhead.
It was the Princess; her carriages stood just aside; Bouverot and Fraischdöfer were with her. How like balsam it steals through the heart, in a strange land, and though it were the loveliest, to meet again a brother or a sister inhabitant of a rougher land, as if one were meeting in the second world a kindred son of earth! The Adige, too, that had previously in the wild mountains accompanied him under the name of the Etsch, followed him with its fairer designation into the plain. The Princess seemed to him, he knew not why, to have become milder, more maidenly in form and look, and he reproached himself with his earlier error. But he only committed a later one. Beyond Vienna her strongly drawn physiognomy was surpassed by sharper southern ones, and the striking[72]colors in which she loved to array herself were outshone by the Italian. A strange soil is a masquerade ball-room or a watering-place hall, where only human relations, and no political ones, prevail, and in a strange land men are least strangers. All touched each other in friendliness, as strange hands feel after and grasp each other during the ascent of mountains. With what veneration did Albano look upon the Princess! For he thought, "She would fain have taken the departed one with her into the healing Eden. O, the saint would indeed be happy this morning, and her blue eye would weep for bliss." Then his did so, but not for bliss; and thus are the fire-works of life, like others, built always by and upon water. Then was the oath solemnly sworn within him before the beautiful face of the dead Liana: "I will be truly the friend of this her friend!" Man plays a new part in the drama of life most warmly and best; over our introductory sermons the Holy Spirit floats, brooding with the wings of a dove; only by and by do the eggs lie cold. Albano, never yet initiated into any friendship but a man's, worshipped that of woman as a rising star, and for this, as for the former, he found far more capacities of sacrifice treasured up in his warm soul than for love. Man is in friendship what woman is in love, and the reverse; namely, more covetous of the object than of the feeling for it.
With new swelling sails and flying streamers, in gayly decorated singing-vessels, with propitious side winds, did the gay passage fly through cities and pastures.
Nothing hangs out over thecorsoof a long journey a finer festoon of fruits and flowers, for a carriage which goes before, than a couple of carriages coming after. What fellowship of joy and danger in night quarters! What bespeaking of lines of march! What joy over the adventures past and to come, namely, over the reports of the same! And how each loves the others!
Only toward Bouverot Albano showed a steady coldness; but the Knight was friendly. Albano, brought up more among books than among men, often wondered within himself, that in the former the same difference of sentiments passed by him so lightly, which among the latter assailed him so sharply. At last his father asked him upon one occasion, "Why dost thou demean thyself so strangely toward Herr von Bouverot? Nothing exasperates more than a considerate, quiet hatred; a passionate hatred does so far less." "Because it is my law," he answered, "to flee and to hate the everlasting untruthfulness of men in their connections with each other. Out of mere humanity to place one's self on a par with unlike persons, designedly to make a friendly face to any one, to have such a feeling towards a man, that one is not at liberty to speak it out to him on the spot, that may well be deemed complete slavery, and confounds the purest." "Whoso will love nothing but his likeness," replied Gaspard, "has nothing but himself to love. Von Bouverot," he added, laughing, "is, after all, a brave host and travellingcompagnon." Albano, who could withstand even people whom he respected, made no inquisition upon his father, but thought the German gentleman only the more despicable.
That gentleman, born a pettifogger and pedler, had, it must be observed, cleared a pathway of deep footprints for himself in the snow of the Knight and the Princess,—both of whom, like all long travellers,[73]were uncommonly avaricious,—by overseeing and overreaching all hosts and Italians in settling up thePatto,[74]and even by his understanding the art of being profoundly coarse just at the right time, whereas upon turning from the host to the Princess he would become as much a man of the world again as Fontenelle or any Frenchman, who in such cases always counts up and curses longer than he eats. The Knight of the Fleece, who, as he confessed, had never travelled so cheaply, covered him, therefore, with the laurel which grew all about here, and looked as gay as he had never looked before. Only to his son was the cold, wrathful, coarse man a volcano, ejecting slime and water. Ride a mile ahead of a crowned head or a classic author, who is also one, and in general before people who have money, but not to spare, and only save them a few gold pieces a day,—never shall you have seen the said heads more glad or grateful than in such a case!
Everywhere Albano would fain have alighted, and stepped in among great ruins and into the splendor of the scattered insignia, which had been lost by the conquerors of the world out of their triumphal chariots on the way to Rome. But the Knight advised him to spare and save his eyes and inspiration for Rome itself. How his heart beat, when at last in the wasteCampagna, which lay full of lava-eruptions around the nest of the Roman eagles, those world-driven storm-birds, they rolled along over the Flaminian road! But he and Gaspard felt themselves wonderfully oppressed. One seemed to be wading through the stagnant lake of a sultry sulphurous atmosphere, which his father ascribed to the brimstone huts at Baccano,—he thirsted for the snow on the distant mountains,—the heavens were dark-blue and still,—single lofty clouds flew arrow-swift through the silent wilderness. A man in the distance set down again an urn which he had dug up, and prayed, anxiously looking to heaven, and telling his beads. Albano turned toward the mountains, to which the evening sun was sinking, as if dissolved in piercing splendor. All at once the Knight ordered the postilion to stop, who passionately threw up his arms toward heaven, while it went on rumbling under the carriage, and exclaimed, "Holy mother of God, an earthquake!" But Gaspard touched his son, who seemed intoxicated with the splendors of sunset, and said, pointing, "Ecco Roma!" Albano looked, and saw in the depths of the distance the dome of St. Peter's gleaming in the sun. The sun went down, the earth quaked once more, but in his spirit nothing was save Rome.
Half an hour after the earthquake, the heavens swathed themselves in seas and dashed them down in masses and in torrents. The nakedCampagnaand heath were covered with the mantle of rain. Gaspard was silent,—the heavens black,—the great thought stood alone in Albano, that he was hastening on towards the bloody scaffold and the throne scaffolding of humanity, the heart of a cold, dead, heathen-world, the eternal Rome; and when he heard, on thePonte Molle, that he was now going across the Tiber, he felt as if the past had risen from the dead,—as if the stream of time ran backward, and he were sailing on it; under the streams of heaven he heard the seven old mountain-streams rushing and roaring, which once came down from Rome's hills, and with seven arms uphove the world from its foundations.
At length the constellation of the mountain city of God, that stood so broad before him, opened out into nights; cities with scattered lights lay up and down, and the bells (which to his ear were alarm-bells) sounded out the fourth[75]hour, when the carriage rolled through the triumphal gate of the city, thePorta del Popolo; then the moon rent her black heavens, and poured down out of the cleft clouds the splendor of a whole sky. There stood the Egyptian obelisk of the gateway, high as the clouds in the night, and three streets ran gleaming apart. "So," said Albano to himself, as they passed through the longcorsoto the Tenth Ward, "thou art veritably in the camp of the god of war; here, where he grasped the hilt of the monstrous war-sword, and with the point made the three wounds in three quarters of the world." Rain and splendor gushed through the vast, broad streets,—occasionally he passed suddenly along by gardens and into broad city-deserts and market-places of the past. The rolling of the chariot amidst the rush and roar of the rain resembled the thunder, whose days were once holy to this heroic city, like the thundering heaven to the thundering earth; muffled-up forms, with little lights, stole through the dark streets; often there stood a long palace with colonnades in the fire of the moon, often a solitary gray column, often a single high fir-tree, or a statue behind cypresses. Once, when there was neither rain nor moonshine, the carriage went round the corner of a large house, on whose roof a tall, blooming virgin, with an uplooking child on her arm, herself directed a little hand-light, now toward a white statue, now toward the child, and so alternately illuminated the whole group. The friendly company made its way to the very centre of his exalted soul and brought with it to him many a recollection; particularly was a Roman child to him a wholly new and mighty idea.
They alighted at last at the Prince di Lauria's, Gaspard's father-in-law, and old friend. Near his palace lay theCampo Vaccino(the ancient Forum), and the radiant moon shone on the broad steps and the three wondrous edifices of the Capitol; in the distance stood the Colosseum. Albano ascended hesitatingly into the lighted house, before which the carriage of the Princess stood, reluctantly turning his eye from those heights of the world, from which once a light word like a snow-flake rolled far and wide, and grew and grew, till at last in a strange land it crushed a city with the weight of an avalanche.
The Princess, with her company, saw with pleasure the new-comers. The old Prince Lauria welcomed his grandson courteously and with reserve. His innumerable servants spoke among them almost all the languages of Europe. Albano immediately asked the Knight after his teacher Dian, that graft of a Greek upon a Roman; but the most human thing was precisely that which Gaspard, as is always the case with great men, had not thought of. They sent to his residence, which was near; he was not at home.
They sat down to dine. The Prince immediately entertained them with his favorite show-dish, the political progress of the world, and gave the latest news of the French Revolution. Gazettes of the times were to him Eternities, news was his antiques; he took all the newspapers of Europe, and therefore kept for each a German, Russian, English, Polish servant, to translate it for him. By the side of his satirical coldness toward all men and things, the political and Italian zeal appeared the stronger, with which he defended the French against the Knight, who composedly despised them; and, indulging himself after his manner, even in bad puns, conceded to the old Romans theForumand to the modern theCampo Vaccino, and even to the ancient Gauls the field of Mars, and to the modern French a field of March.
Albano could not conceive of there being any joking so near theForum, and thought every word must be great in this city. The cold Lauria spoke warmly for France, like a minister, regarding only nations, not individuals, and his sentiment pleased the youth.
Then the Princess led the stream of conversation to Rome's high art. Fraischdörfer dissected the Colossus into limbs, and weighed them in the narrowest scales. Bouverot engraved the giant in historical copperplate. The Princess spoke with much warmth, but without point. Gaspard melted all up together, as it were, into a Corinthian brass, and comprehended all without being comprehended. On his coldly but strongly up-shooting life-fountain he let the world play and dance like a ball.
Albano, dissatisfied with all, kept his inspiration, sacrificing to the unearthly gods of the past round about him, after the old fashion, namely, with silence. Well might and couldhehave discoursed also, but quite otherwise, in odes, with the whole man, with streams which mount and grow upwards. He looked more and more longingly out of the window at the moon in the pure rain-blue and at single columns of the Forum; out of doors there gleamed for him the greatest world. At last he rose up, indignant and impatient, and stole down into the glimmering glory and stepped before the Forum; but the moonlit night, that decorative painter, which works with irregular strokes, made almost the very stage of the scene irrecognizable to him.
What a broad, dreary plain, loftily encompassed with ruins, gardens and temples, covered with prostrate capitals of columns, and with single upright pillars, and with trees and a dumb wilderness! The heaped-up ashes out of the emptied urn of time, and the potshards of a great world flung around! He passed by three temple columns,[76]which the earth had drawn down into itself even to the breast, and along through the broad triumphal arch of Septimius Severus; on the right stood a chain of columns without their temple; on the left, attached to a Christian church, the colonnade of an ancient heathen temple deep sunk into the sediment of time; at last the triumphal arch of Titus, and before it, in the middle of the woody wilderness, a fountain gushing into a granite basin.
He went up to this fountain, in order to survey the plain out of which the thunder-months of the earth once arose; but he went along as over a burnt-out sun, hung round with dark, dead earths. "O man, O the dreams of man!" something within him unceasingly cried. He stood on the granite margin turning toward the Colosseum, whose mountain-ridges of wall stood high in the moonlight, with the deep gaps which had been hewn in them by the scythe of Time. Sharply stood the rent and jagged arches of Nero's golden house hard by, like murderous cutlasses. The palatine hill lay full of green gardens, and on crumbling temple-roofs the blooming death-garland of ivy was gnawing, and living Ranunculæ still glowed around sunken capitals. The fountain murmured babblingly and eternally, and the stars gazed steadfastly down with imperishable rays upon the still battle-field, over which the winter of time had passed without bringing after it a spring,—the fiery soul of the world had flown up, and the cold, crumbling giant lay around;—torn asunder were the gigantic spokes of the fly-wheel which once the very stream of ages drove. And in addition to all this, the moon shed down her light like eating silver-water upon the naked columns, and would fain dissolve the Colosseum and the temples and all into their own shadows!
Then Albano stretched out his arms into the air, as if he could therewith embrace and flow away, as with the arms of a stream, and exclaimed: "O ye mighty shades, you who once strove and lived here, ye are looking down from heaven, but scornfully, not sadly, for your great fatherland has died and gone after you! Ah, had I on the insignificant earth (full of old eternity), which you have made great, only done one action worthy of you! Then were it to me a sweet privilege to open my heart by a wound, and to mix earthly blood with the hallowed soil, and to hasten away out of the world of graves to you, eternal and immortal ones! But I am not worthy of it!"
At this moment there came suddenly along up theVia Sacraa tall man, deeply enveloped in his mantle, who drew near to the fountain; without looking round threw down his hat, and held a coal-black, curly, almost perpendicular hindhead under the stream of water. But hardly had he, turning upward, caught a glimpse of the profile of Albano absorbed in his fancies, when he started up all dripping, stared at the Count, fell into amazement, threw his arms high into the air, and said, "Amico?" Albano looked at him. The stranger said, "Albano!" "My Dian!" cried Albano. They clasped each other passionately, and wept for love.
Dian could not comprehend it at all. He said, in Italian, "But it surely cannot be you; you look old." He thought he was speaking German all the time, till he heard Albano answer in Italian. Both gave and got only questions. Albano found the Architect merely browner, but there was the lightning of the eyes and every faculty in its old glory. With three words he described to him the journey and the company. "How does Rome strike you?" asked Dian, pleasantly. "As life does," replied Albano, very seriously; "it makes one too tender and too hard. I recognize here absolutely nothing at all," he continued; "do those columns belong to the magnificent Temple of Peace?" "No," said Dian, "to the Temple of Concord; of the other there stands yonder nothing but the vault." "Where is Saturn's Temple?" asked Albano. "Buried in St. Adrian's Church," said Dian, and added, hastily, "close by stand the ten columns of Antonine's Temple; over beyond there, the Baths of Titus; behind us, the Palatine Hill, and so on. Now tell me—"
They walked up and down the Forum, between the arches of Titus and Severus. Albano—especially beside the teacher who in the days of childhood had so often conducted him hitherward—was yet full of the stream which had swept over the world, and the all-covering water sank but slowly. He went on to say, "To-day, when he beheld the obelisk, the soft, tender brightness of the moon had seemed to him eminently unbecoming the giant city; he would rather have seen a sun blazing on its broad banner; but now the moon was the proper funeral torch beside the dead Alexander, who at a touch collapses into a handful of dust." "The artist does not get far with feelings of this kind," said Dian; "he must look upon everlasting beauties on the right hand and on the left." "Where," Albano went on asking, "is the old Lake of Curtius, the Rostrum, thepila Horatia, the Temple of Vesta, of Venus, and of all those solitary columns?" "And where is the marble Forum itself?" said Dian; "it lies thirty span deep under our feet." "Where is the great, free people, the senate of kings, the voice of the orators, the procession to the Capitol? Buried under the mountain of potshards. O Dian, how can a man, who loses a father, a beloved in Rome, shed a single tear, or look round him with consternation, when he comes out here before this battle-field of time, and looks into the charnel-house of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for fate has an iron hand!"
Dian, who nowhere stayed more reluctantly than upon such tragic cliffs, hanging over, as it were, into the sea of eternity, always leaped off from them with a jest. Like the Greeks, he blended dances with tragedy. "Many a thing is conserved here, friend," said he; "in Adrian's church yonder they will still show you the bones of the three men that walked in the fire." "That is just the frightful play of destiny," replied Albano, "to occupy the heights of the mighty ancients with monks shorn down into slaves."
"The stream of time drives new wheels," said Dian; "yonder lies Raphael twice buried.[77]How are Chariton and the children doing?" "They are blooming on," said Albano, but in a sombre tone. "Heavens!" cried Dian, with all a father's terror, "is it really so?"[78]"Verily, Dian!" said Albano, softly. "Does Liana," said Dian, "still come often to Chariton's? And how fares the sweet one?" Albano answered, in a low tone, "She is dead." "What! dead? Impossible! Froulay's daughter, Albano? The gold-rose? O speak!" he cried. Albano nodded affirmatively. "Ah! thou good maiden!" said he, piteously, with tears in his black eyes, "so friendly, so enchantingly lovely, so fine an artist! But how did it come to pass? Have you, then, not been acquainted at all with the lovely child?" "One spring only," said Albano, hurriedly. "My good Dian, I will now go back to my father, and I can answer no more questions." "O certainly! But I must learn more," Dian concluded. And so they climbed silently and speedily over rubbish and torsos of columns, and neither gave heed to the mighty emotion of the other.
barstart
Rome, like the creation, is an entire wonder, which gradually dismembers itself into new wonders, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, St. Peter's Church, Raphael, &c.
With the passage through the Church of St. Peter the knight began the fair race through immortality. The Princess let herself be bound by the tie of art to the circle of the men. As Albano was more smitten with edifices than with any other work of art, so did he see from afar with holy awe the long mountain-chain of art, which again bore upon itself hills; so did he stand before the plain, around which two enormous colonnades run like Corsos, bearing a people of statues; in the centre shoots up the obelisk, and on its right and left an eternal fountain, and from the lofty steps the proud church of the world, inwardly filled with churches, rearing upon itself a temple toward heaven, looks down upon the earth. But how enormously, as they drew near, had its columns and its rocky wall mounted up and flown away from the vision!
He entered the magic church, which gave the world blessings, curses, kings, and popes, with the consciousness that, like the world-edifice, it was continually enlarging and receding more and more, the longer one remained in it. They went up to two children of white marble, who held an incense-muscle-shell of yellow marble; the children grew by nearness till they were giants. At length they stood before the main altar and its hundred perpetual lamps;—what a stillness! Above them the heaven's arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them an overarched city, of four streets, in which stood churches. The temple became greatest by walking in it; and when they passed round one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed earnestly down. Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time, filled. "In no art," he said to his father, "is the soul so mightily possessed with the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands in it and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of it and close before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract ideas, said: "He is perfectly right." Fraischdörfer replied: "The sublimity here also lies only in the brain: for the whole church stands, after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the heavens, in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel anything." He also complained, "That the place for the sublime in his head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself." Gaspard said, taking everything in a large sense: "When the sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and annihilates all little circumstantial ornaments." He adduced as evidence the tower of the minster,[79]and nature itself, which is not made smaller by its grasses and villages.
The Princess, among so many connoisseurs of art, enjoyed in silence.
The ascent of the dome Gaspard recommended to defer to a dry and cloudless day, in order that they might behold the queen of the world, Rome, upon and from the proper throne; he therefore proposed very earnestly the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let this follow immediately after the impression of St. Peter's Church. They went thither. How simply and grandly the Hall opens upon one! Eight yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically, as the head of the Homeric Jupiter, its temple arches itself! It is the Rotunda or Pantheon. "O the pygmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you have built enough."[80]They stepped in; there reared itself around them a holy, simple, free world-structure with its heavenly arches soaring and striving upward, an odeum of the tones of the sphere-music, a world in the world! And overhead[81]the eye-socket of the light and of the sky gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch the lofty arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood nothing but the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple ofallgods endured and concealed the diminutive altars of the later ones.
Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. He said he preferred the larger church of St. Peter. The Knight approved, and said that "youth, like nations, always more easily found and better appreciated the sublime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young man ripened from strength to beauty, as his body ripens from beauty to strength; however, he himself preferred the Pantheon." "How could the moderns," said the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, "build anything, except some little Bernini's towers?" "That is why," said the offended Provincial Architect, Dian, who despised the Counsellor of Arts, because he never made a good figure, except in the æsthetic hall of judgment as critic, never in the exhibition-hall as painter, "we moderns are, beyond contradiction, stronger in criticism, though in practice we are collectively and individually blockheads." Bouverot remarked, "The Corinthian columns might be higher." The Counsellor of Arts said, "After all, he knew nothing more like this fine hemisphere than a much smaller one, which he had found in Herculaneum, moulded in ashes—of the bosom of a fair fugitive." The Knight laughed, and Albano turned away in disgust, and went to the Princess.
He asked her for her opinion about the two temples. "Here Sophocles, there Shakespeare; but I comprehend and appreciate Sophocles more easily," she replied, and looked with new eyes into his new countenance. For the supernatural illumination through the zenith of Heaven—not through a hazy horizon—transfigured in her eyes the beautiful and excited countenance of the youth, and she took for granted that the saintly halo of the dome must also exalt her form. When he answered her: "Very good! But in Shakespeare Sophocles also is contained; not, however, Shakespeare in Sophocles; and on Peter's Church stands Angelo's rotunda!" Just then the lofty cloud all at once, as by the blow of a hand out of the ether, broke in two, and the ravished sun, like the eye of a Venus, floating through her ancient heavens,—for she once stood even here,—looked mildly in from the upper deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy of wonder and delight, and said, with low voice: "How transfigured at this moment is everything in this sacred place! Raphael's spirit comes forth from his grave in this noontide hour, and everything which its reflection touches brightens into godlike splendor!" The Princess looked upon him tenderly, and he lightly laid his hand upon hers, and said, as one vanquished, "Sophocles!"
On the next moonlit evening Gaspard bespoke torches, in order that the Colosseum with its giant-circle might, the first time, stand in fire before them. The Knight would fain have gone around alone with his son dimly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden time, but the Princess forced herself upon him, from a too lively wish to share with the noble youth his moments,—and perhaps, in fact, to have her heart and his own common property. Women do not sufficiently comprehend that an idea, when it fills and elevates man's mind, shuts it up against love, and crowds out persons, whereas with woman all ideas easily become human beings.
They passed over the Forum by theVia Sacrato the Colosseum, whose lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight. They stood before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four colonnades, one above another, and the flames shot up into the arches of the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead; and deep in the earth had the noble monster already buried his feet. They stepped in, and ascended the mountain full of fragments of rock, from one seat of the spectators to another; Gaspard did not venture to the sixth, or highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the Princess did. Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the round, green crater of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed nine thousand beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human blood; the lurid glare of the flames penetrated into the clefts and caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the great shadows of the moon, which, like recluses, kept themselves in cells; toward the south, where the streams of centuries and barbarians had stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades,—temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined with his limbs, and still, with all his wounds, he looked out livingly into the world.
"What a world!" said Albano. "Here coiled the giant snake five times about Christianity! Like a smile of scorn lies the moonlight down below there upon the green arena, where once stood the colossus of the sun-god. The star of the north[82]glimmers low through the windows, and the serpent and the bear crouch. What a world has gone by!" The Princess answered, that twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre, and that a great many more had bled in it. "O, we too have building prisoners," said he, "but for fortifications; and blood, too, still flows, but with sweat! No, we have no present; the past without it must bring forth a future."
The Princess went off to break a laurel-twig and pluck a blooming wall-flower. Albano sank away into musing,—the autumnal wind of the past swept over the stubble,—on this holy eminence he saw the constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid of Cestius; but all became past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as upon graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age as if they were still its kings and judges.
"This in remembrance of the place and the time!" said the Princess, returning and handing him the laurel and the flower. "Thou mighty one, a colosseum is thy flower-pot; for thee nothing is too great, and nothing too small!" said he, and threw the Princess into considerable confusion, till she observed that he meant not her, but Nature. His whole being seemed newly and painfully moved, and as it were removed to a distance,—he looked down after his father and went to find him,—he looked at him sharply, and spoke of nothing more this evening.