TITAN:

A ROMANCE.

FROM THE GERMAN OF

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

TRANSLATED BY

CHARLES T. BROOKS.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1864.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
THIRD EDITION.
University Press:
Welch, Bigelow, and Company,
Cambridge.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

The "Titan" is Jean Paul's longest—and the author meant it, and held it, to be his greatest and best—romance; and his public (including Mr. Carlyle) seems, on the whole, to have sustained his opinion. He was ten years about it, and his other works, written in the interval, were preparatory and tributary to this.

As to the general meaning of the title there can hardly, on the whole, be any doubt. It does not refer, as the division into Jubilees and Cycles might, to be sure, suggest to one on first approaching it, to the titanic scale and scope of the work, but to the titanic violence against which it is aimed.

It seems, indeed, from a letter of the author's, that he thought at first of calling it "Anti-Titan." The only question in regard to the application of the title seems to be, whether the champion of truth and justice against the moral Titans in this case was meant to be understood as represented by the hero of the story, with his friends, resisting the iniquity which moved earth and hell to ruin him, or whether the book itself is the Anti-Titan, and an age of extravagance the Titan.

A French critic says of the "Titan":—

"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological résumé, a satire, an elegy, a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization in the eighteenth century.

"How is it to end, this civilization which exaggerates alike intellectual and industrial power at the expense of the life of the soul,—wholly factitious, theatrical,—intoxicating, consuming itself with pleasure, seeking everywhere new enjoyments,—exploring all the secrets of nature, without being able to penetrate the first causes, the secrets of God,—what will be the fate of these generations supersaturated with romances, dramas, journals, with science, ambition, with vehement aspirations after the unknown and impossible?...

"In augmenting the sum of its desires, will it augment the sum of its happiness? Is it not going to increase immensely its capacity of suffering?

"Will it not be the giant that scales heaven—

"And that falls crushed to death?

"Titan!"

In giving his romance the title of "Titan," says the same writer, "it is not Albano de Cesara the author has in view, but his antipode, Captain Roquairol,—that romantic being, that insatiable lover of pleasure, that anticipated Byron, that scaler of heaven,—who, after having piled mountain upon mountain to attain his object, ends in finding himself buried under the ruins....

"Even while at work upon 'Hesperus,' he had formed the resolution of placing a pure man, great and noble, by the side of a reprobate, and of surrounding them both with a multitude of beings corresponding to them. He wished to concentrate in a single work all the ideas of high philosophy which he had disseminated in his other creations, and to show them followed by their natural consequences. So strong a mind could not stop there: he resolved to show the absurdity of exaggeration, whether in good or in evil, in virtue or in vice.

"Hence those reproductions of the same types, those satellites gravitating around their respective planets; in fine, those parodies of the principal personages of the drama.

"By the side of the coldness and the vast plans of Don Gaspard de Cesara, we have the no less dangerous intrigues, though upon a less elevated scale, of the Minister von Froulay; by the side of the ventriloquist Uncle, the lying Roquairol; the Princess Isabelle is opposed to Linda de Romeiro, the aerial Liana to her physical counterpart, the Princess Idoine; the comic vulgarity of Dr. Sphex contrasts with the more elevated buffoonery of Schoppe; and if we have Bouverot, we have also Dion, that Greek so elegant and so noble, happy mixture of the antique and the modern, that artist so sensible and so true....

"The history of Albano, opposed to Roquairol, is the history, taken from his tenderest childhood to the epoch of his greatest development, of a being who, as the strictest consequence of a quite special education, goes through life, wounding himself with all its griefs, drinking at the source of all its lawful pleasures; suffering with nobleness, tasting of happiness, but only the purest kind; exposed every instant to see himself drawn away by fallacious principles, and nevertheless moving on with a steady step towards the end which his reason has marked out for him; sacrificing to the fulfilment of his duties all the delights that a debauched court can offer a young man entering into the world. While all the personages who gravitate around him, and who represent each a different aberration from the fundamental principle of the work, fall successively at his side, victims of the natural consequences of their passions, he, strengthening himself by every fall of which he is witness, ends by attaining the loftiest position which the ambition of man can desire,—a position which he could not have expected, and for which, consequently, he had not been able to make the sacrifices that, in the course of the work, he does not cease to achieve."

The author whom we have thus copiously quoted alludes to Jean Paul's having had the idea of "Titan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us of a Philistine disparagement of the "Titan," that so many of the characters of the other work reappear here under new names. There are some critics who ought to object to the full moon, that she is only the same old moon that we had, in her first quarter or half, several nights ago. However, as we have not yet had "Hesperus" in English, nor are likely to for some time, this kind of objection will not trouble English readers of "Titan."

Jean Paul has been justly praised for his success in drawing and shading female characters. Our French critic says: "Richter has the rare merit of placing on the stage in the same work six female personages, who have not a shadow of resemblance to each other, and who, from the moment of their appearance on the scene to that of their quitting it, never deviate a single minute from the character the author has given them."

The fate of his Titanide, Linda, created a loud remonstrance in Germany; and one can hardly, indeed, help feeling as if poetic justice had been a little caricatured, at least, in Richter's disposal of that half strong-headed and half headstrong woman. Painful, however, as her end is, the Translator could not listen an instant to the suggestion of omitting a line of the scenes in which that terrible tragedy is brought to a close.

When the "Titan" first appeared, complaint was made by some that there was too much of drollery, by others that there was not enough; some found too much sentimentality, others too much philosophy; the Translator has found it full, if not of that brevity which is the soul of wit (not, however, of humor), yet of that variety which is the spice of life.

The Translator (or Transplanter, for he aspires to the title) of this huge production, in his solicitude to preserve the true German aroma of its native earth, may have brought away some part of the soil, and even stones, clinging to the roots (stones of offence they may prove to many, stones of stumbling to many more). He can only say, that if he had made Jean Paul always talk in ordinary, conventional, straightforward, instantly intelligible prose, the reader would not have had Jean Paul the Only.

And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose heart (to use the homely phrase) is ever in the right place.

It has seemed necessary to give a few notes, and only a few. Properly to furnish such a work with annotations would require Jean Paul's own voluminous un-commonplace-books of all out-of-the-way knowledge, and that Dictionary to Jean Paul which one of his countrymen began, but unfortunately carried only through one of his works, the work on Education, Levana.

The Translator desires emphatically to express his obligations to his friend, Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and to his friend, the accomplished scholar, Mr. Knorr, to whose kind and patient care whatever of accuracy or felicity there may be in his version of the first Jubilee is largely due; also, to Rev. Dr. Hedge, and all the friends who have helped him with suggestion and encouragement in this large and difficult undertaking, he makes his warmest acknowledgments;—and he closes by commending the Titan to all lovers of the humanities, confident (in the words of Mrs. Lee, in her Life of Jean Paul) that "the more it is read, the more it will be acknowledged a work of exalted genius, pure morality, and perennial beauty."

C. T. B.
Newport, R. I.

TO

THE FOUR LOVELY AND NOBLE SISTERS ON THE THRONE.[1]

THE DREAM OF TRUTH.

Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia once looked down into the clear-obscure of earth, and, weary of the ever-bright but cold Olympus, yearned to enter in beneath the clouds of our world, where the Soul loves more because it suffers more, and where it is sadder but more warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, with which Polyhymnia passes invisibly up and down the low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our hearts; and they mourned that their throne stood so far from the sighs of the helpless.

Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and to clothe themselves in our mortal form. They came down from Olympus; Love and little loves and genii flew playfully after them, and our nightingales fluttered to meet them out of the bosom of May.

But, as they touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of light, and cast no shadows, then the earnest Queen of gods and men, Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and said: "The immortal becomes mortal upon the earth, and every spirit becomes a human being!"

So they became human beings and sisters, and were called Louisa, Charlotte, Theresa, Frederica; the little loves and genii transformed themselves into their children, and flew into their maternal arms, and the motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love in a great embrace. And when the white banner of the blooming spring fluttered abroad, and more human thrones stood before them,—and when, blissfully softened by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon each other and their happy children, and were speechless for love and bliss,—then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by over them, and recognize them, and gave them the tones wherewith the heart expresses and awakens love and joy.

And the dream was ended and fulfilled; it had, as is always the case, shaped itself after waking reality. Therefore, be it consecrated to the four fair and noble sisters, and let all which is like it in Titan be so consecrated too!

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Titan was published during the years 1800-1803. The four sisters were the four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, viz. the Duchess of Hildburghausen, the Princess von Solms, the Princess of Thun and Taxis, and the Louisa who afterward became Queen of Prussia, and was so in the Liberation War.—Tr.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

FIRST JUBILEE.

PAGE

Passage To Isola Bella.—First Day of Joy in the Titan.—The Pasquin-Idolater.—Integrity of the Empire eulogized.—Effervescence of Youth.—Luxury of Bleeding.—Recognition of a Father.—Grotesque Testament.—German Predilection for Poems and the Arts.—The Father of Death.—Ghost-Scene.—The Bloody Dream.—The Swing of Fancy [1]

SECOND JUBILEE.

The two Biographical Courts.—The Herdsman's Hut.—The Flying.—The Sale of Hair.—The Dangerous Bird-pole.—A Storm locked up in a Coach.—Low Mountain-Music.—The loving Child.—Mr. Von Falterle from Vienna.—The Torture Soupé.—The Shattered Heart.—Werther without Beard, but with a Shot.—The Reconciliation [70]

THIRD JUBILEE.

Methods of the two Professional Gardeners in their Pedagogical Grafting-School.—Vindication of Vanity.—Dawn of Friendship.—Morning Star of Love. [110]

FOURTH JUBILEE.

High Style of Love.—The Gotha Pocket-Almanac.—Dreams on the Tower.—The Sacrament
and the Thunder-Storm.—The Night-Journey into Elysium.—New Actors and Stages, and the Ultimatum of the School-Years [128]

FIFTH JUBILEE.

Grand-Entry.—Dr. Sphex.—The drumming Corpse.—The Letter of the Knight.—Retrogradation of the Dying-Day.—Julienne.—The still Good-Friday of Old Age.—The healthy and bashful hereditary Prince.—Roquairol.—The Blindness.—Sphex's Predilection for Tears.—The fatal Banquet.—The Doloroso of Love [161]

SIXTH JUBILEE.

The Ten Persecutions of the Reader.—Liana's Eastern Room.—Disputation upon Patience.—The picturesque Cure [197]

SEVENTH JUBILEE.

Albano's Peculiarity.—The intricate Interlacings of Politics.—The Herostratus of Gaming-Tables.—Paternal "Mandatum sine Clausula."—Good Society.—Mr. Von Bouverot.—Liana's Spiritual and Bodily Presence [215]

EIGHTH JUBILEE.

Le petit Lever of Dr. Sphex.—Path to Lilar.—Woodland-Bridge.—The Morning in Arcadia.—Chariton.—Liana's Letter and Psalm of Gratitude.—Sentimental Journey through a Garden.—The Flute-Dell.—Concerning the Reality of the Ideal [238]

NINTH JUBILEE.

Pleasure of Court-Mourning.—The Burial.—Roquairol.—Letter to him.—The Seven last Words in the Water.—The Swearing of Allegiance.—Masquerade.—Puppet Masquerade.—The Head in the Air, Tartarus, the Spirit-Voice, the Friend, the Catacomb, and the two united Men [268]

TENTH JUBILEE.

Roquairol's Advocatus Diaboli.—The Festival Day of Friendship [310]

ELEVENTH JUBILEE.

Embroidery.—Anglaise.—Cereus Serpens.—Musical Fantasies [334]

TWELFTH JUBILEE.

Froulay's Birthday and Projects.—Extra-Leaf.—Rabette.—The Harmonica.—Night.—The Pious Father.—The Wondrous Stairway.—The Apparition [351]

THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.

Roquairol's Love.—Philippic Against Lovers.—The Pictures.—Albano Albani.—The Harmonic Tête-à-tête.—The Ride to Blumenbühl [384]

FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.

Albano and Liana [405]

FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.

Man and Woman [432]

SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.

The Sorrows of a Daughter [481]

TITAN.

FIRST JUBILEE.

Passage to Isola Bella.—First Day of Joy in the Titan.—The Pasquin-Idolater.—Integrity of the Empire Eulogized.—Effervescence of Youth.—Luxury of Bleeding.—Recognition of a Father.—Grotesque Testament.—German Predilection For Poems and the Arts.—The Father of Death.—Ghost-scene.—the Bloody Dream.—The Swing of Fancy.

1. CYCLE.

On a fine spring evening, the young Spanish Count Cesara came, with his companions, Schoppe and Dian, to Sesto, in order the next morning to cross over to the Borromæan island, Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore. The proudly blooming youth glowed with the excitement of travelling, and with thoughts of the coming morrow, when he should see the isle, that gayly decorated throne of Spring, and on it a man who had been promised him for twenty years. This twofold glow exalted my picturesque hero to the form of an angry god of the Muses. His beauty made a more triumphal entry into Italian eyes than into the narrow Northern ones from the midst of which he had come; in Milan many had wished he were of marble, and stood with elder gods of stone, either in the Farnese Palace or in the Clementine Museum, or in the Villa of Albani; nay, had not the Bishop of Novara, with his sword at his side, a few hours before, asked Schoppe (riding behind) who he was? And had not the latter, with a droll squaring of the wrinkle-circle round his lips, made this copious answer (by way of enlightening his spiritual lordship): "It's my Telemachus, and I am the Mentor. I am the milling-machine and the die which coins him,—the wolf's tooth and flattening mill which polishes him down,—the man, in short, that regulates him"?

The glowing form of the youthful Cesara was still more ennobled by the earnestness of an eye always buried in the future, and of a firmly shut, manly mouth, and by the daring decision of young, fresh faculties; he seemed as yet to be a burning-glass in the moonlight, or a dark precious stone of too much color, which the world, as in the case of other jewels, can brighten and improve only by cutting hollow.

As he drew nearer and nearer, the island attracted him, as one world does another, more and more intensely. His internal restlessness rose as the outward tranquillity deepened. Beside all this, Dian, a Greek by birth and an artist, who had often circumnavigated and sketched Isola Bella and Isola Madre, brought these obelisks of Nature still nearer to his soul in glowing pictures; and Schoppe often spoke of the great man whom the youth was to see to-morrow for the first time. As the people were carrying by, down below in the street, an old man fast asleep, into whose strongly marked face the setting sun cast fire and life, and who was, in short, a corpse borne uncovered, after the Italian custom, suddenly, in a wild and hurried tone, he asked his friends, "Does my father look thus?"

But what impels him with such intense emotions towards the island is this: He had, on Isola Bella, with his sister, who afterward went to Spain, and by the side of his mother, who had since passed to the shadowy land, sweetly toyed and dreamed away the first three years of his life, lying in the bosom of the high flowers of Nature; the island had been, to the morning slumber of life, to his childhood's hours, a Raphael's painted sleeping-chamber. But he had retained nothing of it all in his head and heart, save in the one a deep, sadly sweet emotion at the name, and in the other the squirrel, which, as the family scutcheon of the Borromæans, stands on the upper terrace of the island.

After the death of his mother his father transplanted him from the garden-mould of Italy—some of which, however, still adhered to the tap-roots—into the royal forest of Germany; namely, to Blumenbühl, in the principality of Hohenfliess, which is as good as unknown to the Germans; there he had him educated in the house of a worthy nobleman, or, to speak more meaningly and allegorically, he caused the pedagogical professional gardeners to run round him with their water-pots, grafting-knives, and pruning-shears, till the tall, slender palm-tree, full of sago-pith and protecting thorns, outgrew them, and could no longer be reached by their pots and shears.

And now, when he shall have returned from the island, he is to pass from the field-bed of the country to the tanvat and hot-bed of the city, and to the trellises of the court garden; in a word, to Pestitz, the university and chief city of Hohenfliess, even the sight of which, until this time, his father had strictly forbidden him.

And to-morrow he sees that father for the first time! He must have burned with desire, since his whole life had been one preparation for this meeting, and his foster-parents and teachers had been a sort of chalcographic company, who had engraved in copper a portrait of the author of his life-book so magnificently opposite the title-page. His father, Gaspard de Cesara, Knight of the Golden Fleece (whether Spanish or Austrian I should be glad to be precisely informed myself), a spirit naturally three-edged, sharp, and brightly polished, had in his youth wild energies, for whose play only a battle-field or a kingdom would have been roomy enough, and which in high life had as little power of motion as a sea-monster in a harbor. He satisfied them by playing star-parts with all ranks in comedies and tragedies, by the prosecution of all sciences, and by an eternal tour: he was intimate and often involved with great and small men and courts, yet always marched along as a stream with its own waves through the sea of the world. And now, after having completed his travels by land and sea round the whole circumference of life, round its joys and capacities and systems, he still continues (especially since the Present, that ape of the Past, is always running after him) to pursue his studies and geographical journeyings; but always for scientific purposes, just as he visits now the European battle-fields. As for the rest, he is not at all gloomy, still less gay, but composed and calm; he does not even hate and love, blame and praise other men any more than he does himself, but values every one in his kind, the dove in hers and the tiger in his. What often seems vengeance is merely the determined, soldier-like tread wherewith a man, who can never flee and fear, but only knows how to advance and stand his ground, tramples down larks'-eggs and ears of corn.

I think that the corner which I have thus snipped off from the Whistonian chart of this comet, for the benefit of mankind, is broad enough. I will, before I discourse further, reserve the privilege to myself, of sometimes calling Don Gaspard the Knight, without appending to him the Golden Fleece; and, secondly, of not being obliged by courtesy towards the short memory of readers to steal from his son Cesara (under which designation the old man will never appear) his Christian name, which, to be sure, is Albano.

As Don Gaspard was about leaving Italy for Spain, he had, through Schoppe, caused our Albano, or Cesara, to be brought hither without any one's knowing why he did it at so late a period. Was it his pleasure, perhaps, to gaze into the full spring-time of the young twigs? Did he wish to unfold to the youth some rules for rustics in the century-almanac of court life? Would he imitate the old Gauls, or the modern inhabitants of the Cape, who never suffered their sons in their presence till they were grown up and capable of bearing arms? Was nothing less than that his idea? This much only I comprehend, that I should be a very good-natured fool if I were, in the very fore-court of the work, to suffer myself to be burdened with the task of drawing and dotting out from the few data that I now have, in the case of a man so remarkable, and whose magnetic needle declines so many degrees,—a Wilkes's magnetic table of inclinations;—he, not I, is the father of his son, to be sure, and he knows of course why he did not send for him till his beard was grown.

When it struck twenty-three o'clock (the hour before sundown), and Albano would have counted up the tedious strokes, he was so excited that he was not in a condition to ascend the long tone-ladder;[2] he must away to the shore of the Lago, in which the up-towering islands rise like sceptred sea-gods. Here stood the noble youth, his inspired countenance full of the evening glow, with exalted emotions of heart, sighing for his veiled father, who, hitherto, with an influence like that of the sun behind a bank of clouds, had made the day of his life warm and light. This longing was not filial love,—that belonged to his foster-parents, for childlike love can only spring up toward a heart whereon we have long reposed, and which has protected us, as it were, with the first heart's-leaves against cold nights and hot days,—his love was higher or rarer. Across his soul had been cast a gigantic shadow of his father's image, which lost nothing by Gaspard's coldness. Dian compared it to the repose on the sublime countenance of the Juno Ludovici; and the enthusiastic son likened it to another sudden chill which often comes into the heart in company with too great warmth from another's heart, as burning-glasses burn feeblest precisely in the hottest days. He even hoped he might perchance melt off by his love this father's heart, so painfully frozen to the glaciers of life: the youth comprehended not how possible it was to resist a true, warm heart, at least his.

Our hero, reared in the Carthusian monastery of rural life, and more in past ages than his own, applied to every subject antediluvian gigantic standards of measurement; the invisibility of the Knight constituted a part of his greatness, and the Moses'-veil doubled the glory which it concealed. Our youth had, in general, a singular leaning toward extraordinary men, of whom others stand in dread. He read the eulogies of every great man with as much delight as if they were meant for him; and if the mass of people consider uncommon spirits as, for that very reason, bad,—just as they take all strange petrifactions to be Devil's bones,—in him the reverse was the case: in him love dwelt a neighbor to wonder, and his breast was always at the same time wide and warm. To be sure, every young man and every great man who looks upon another as great, considers him for that very reason as too great. But in every noble heart burns a perpetual thirst for a nobler, in the fair, for a fairer; it wishes to behold its ideal out of itself, in bodily presence, with glorified or adopted form, in order the more easily to attain to it, because the lofty man can ripen only by a lofty one, as diamond can be polished only by diamond. On the other hand, does a litterateur, a cit, a newspaper carrier or contributor wish to get a glimpse of a great head,—and is he as greedy for a great head as for an abortion with three heads,—or a Pope with as many caps,—or a stuffed shark,—or a speaking-machine or a butter-machine,—it is not because his inner man is burdened and beset by the soul-inspiring ideal of a great man, pope, shark, three-headed monster, or butter-model, but it is because he thinks, in the morning, "I can't help wondering how the creature looks," and because, in the evening, he means to tell how he looks, over a glass of beer.

Albano looked from the shore with increasing restlessness across the shining water toward the holy dwelling-place of his past childhood, his departed mother, his absent sister. The songs of gladness thrilled through him as they came floating along on the distant boats; every running wave—the foaming surge—raised a higher in his bosom; the giant statue of St. Borromæus,[3] looking away over the cities, embodied the exalted one (his father) who stood erect in his heart, and the blooming pyramid, the island, was the paternal throne; the sparkling chain of the mountains and glaciers wound itself fast around his spirit, and lifted him up to lofty beings and lofty thoughts.

The first journey, especially when Nature casts over the long road nothing but white radiance and orange-blossoms and chestnut-shadows, imparts to the youth what the last journey often takes away from the man,—a dreaming heart, wings for the ice-chasms of life, and wide-open arms for every human breast.

He went back, and with his commanding eye begged his friends to set sail this very evening, although Don Gaspard was not to come to the island till to-morrow morning. Often, what he wanted to do in a week, he proposed to himself for the next day, and at last did it at once. Dian tapped the impetuous Boreas on the head lovingly, and said: "Impatient being, thou hast here the wings of a Mercury, and down there too (pointing to his feet)! But just cool off! In the pleasant after-midnight we embark, and when the dawn reddens in the sky we land." Dian had not merely an artistic eye to his well-formed darling, but also a tender interest in him, because he had often, in Blumenbühl, where he had business as public architect, been the friend and guide of his childhood and youth, and because now on the island he must tear himself from his arms for some time and be absent at Rome. Since he (the public architect) considered the same extravagance which he would rebuke in an old man to be no extravagance in a youth,—an inundation to be no inundation in Egypt, though it would be in Holland,—and since he assumed a different average temperature for every individual, age, and people, and in holy human nature found no string to be cut off, but only at most to be tuned, surely Cesara must have cherished toward the cheerful and indulgent teacher, on whose two tables of laws stood only, Joy and moderation! a right hearty attachment, even more hearty than for the laws themselves.

The images of the present and of the near future and of his father had so filled the breast of the Count with greatness and immortality, that he could not comprehend how any one could let himself be buried without having achieved both, and that as often as the landlord brought in anything, he pitied the man, particularly as he was always singing, and, like the Neapolitans and Russians, in the minor key, because he was never to be anything, certainly not immortal. The latter is a mistake; for he gets his immortality here, and I take pleasure in giving place and life to his name, Pippo (abbreviated from Philippo). When, at last, they paid and were about to go, and Pippo kissed a Kremnitz ducat, saying, "Praised be the holy Virgin with the child on her right arm," Albano was pleased that the father took after his pious little daughter, who had been all the evening rocking and feeding an image of the child Jesus. To be sure, Schoppe remarked, she would carry the child more lightly on her left arm;[4] but the error of the good youth is a merit in him as well as the truth.

Beneath the splendor of a full moon they went on board the bark, and glided away over the gleaming waters. Schoppe shipped some wines with them, "not so much," said he, "that there is nothing to be had on the island, as for this reason, that if the vessel should leak, then there would be no need of pumping out anything but the flagons,[5] and she would float again."

Cesara sank, silently, deeper and deeper into the glimmering beauties of the shore and of the night. The nightingales warbled as if inspired on the triumphal gate of spring. His heart grew in his breast like a melon under its glass-bell, and his breast heaved higher and higher over the swelling fruit. All at once he reflected that he should in this way see the tulip-tree of the sparkling morn and the garlands of the island put together only like an artificial, Italian silk-flower, stamen by stamen, leaf by leaf; then was he seized with his old thirst for one single draining draught from Nature's horn of plenty; he shut his eyes, not to open them again, till he should stand upon the highest terrace of the island before the morning sun. Schoppe thought he was asleep; but the Greek smilingly guessed the epicurism of this artificial blindness, and bound, himself, before those great insatiable eyes the broad, black taffeta-ribbon, which, like a woman's ribbon or lace mask, contrasted singularly and sweetly with his blooming but manly face.

Now the two began to tease and tantalize him in a friendly way with oral night-pictures of the magnificent adornments of the shores between which they passed. "How proudly," said Dian to Schoppe, "rises yonder the castle of Lizanza, and its mountain, like a Hercules, with twelvefold girdles of vine-clusters!" "The Count," said Schoppe in a lower tone to Dian, "loses a vast deal by this bandaging of his eyes. See you not, architect, to speak poetically, the glimmer of the city of Arona? How beautifully she lays on Luna's blanc d'Espagne, and seems to be setting herself out and prinking up for to-morrow in the powder-mantle of moonshine which is flung around her! But that is nothing; still better looks St. Borromæus yonder, who has the moon on his head like a freshly-washed night-cap; stands not the giant there like the Micromegas of the German body politic, just as high, just as stiff and stark?"

The happy youth was silent, and returned for answer a hand-pressure of love;—he only dreamed of the present, and signified he could wait and deny himself. With the heart of a child from whom the curtains and the after-midnight hide the approaching Christmas present of the morrow, he was borne along in the pleasure-boat, with tightly bandaged eyes, toward the approaching, heavenly kingdom. Dian drew, as well as the double light of the moonshine and the aurora permitted, a sketch of the veiled dreamer in his scrap-book. I wish I had it here, and could see in it how my darling, with the optic nerves tied up, strains at once the eye of dream directed toward the inner world, and the ear of attention so sharply set toward the outer. How beautiful is such a thing, painted,—how much more beautiful realized in life!

The mantle of night grew thinner and cooler,—the morning air fanned livingly against the breast,—the larks mingled with the nightingales and with the singing boatmen,—and he heard, beneath his bandage, which was growing lighter and lighter, the joyful discoveries of his friends, who saw in the open cities along the shore the reviving stir of human life, and on the waterfalls of the mountains the alternate reflections of clouds and ruddy sky. At last the breaking splendors of morn hung like a festoon of Hesperides-apples around the distant tops of the chestnut-trees; and now they disembarked upon Isola Bella.

The veiled dreamer heard, as they ascended with him the ten terraces of the garden, the deep-drawn sigh and shudder of joy close beside him, and all the quick entreaties of astonishment; but he held the bandage fast, and went blindfold from terrace to terrace, thrilled with orange-fragrance, refreshed by higher, freer breezes, fanned by laurel-foliage,—and when they had gained at last the highest terrace, and looked down upon the lake, heaving its green waters sixty ells below, then Schoppe cried, "Now! now!" But Cesara said, "No! the sun first!" and at that moment the morning wind flung up the sunlight gleaming through the dark twigs, and it flamed free on the summits,—and Dian snatched off the bandage, and said, "Look round!" "O God!" cried he with a shriek of ecstasy, as all the gates of the new heaven flew open, and the Olympus of nature, with its thousand reposing gods, stood around him. What a world! There stood the Alps, like brother giants of the Old World, linked together, far away in the past, holding high up over against the sun the shining shields of the glaciers. The giants wore blue girdles of forest, and at their feet lay hills and vineyards, and through the aisles and arches of grape-clusters the morning winds played with cascades as with watered-silk ribbons, and the liquid brimming mirror of the lake hung down by the ribbons from the mountains, and they fluttered down into the mirror, and a carved work of chestnut woods formed its frame.... Albano turned slowly round and round, looked into the heights, into the depths, into the sun, into the blossoms; and on all summits burned the alarm-fires of mighty Nature, and in all depths their reflections,—a creative earthquake beat like a heart under the earth and sent forth mountains and seas.... O then, when he saw on the bosom of the infinite mother the little swarming children, as they darted by under every wave and under every cloud,—and when the morning breeze drove distant ships in between the Alps,—and when Isola Madre towered up opposite to him, with her seven gardens, and tempted him to lean upon the air and be wafted over on level sweep from his summit to her own,—and when he saw the pheasants darting down from the Madre into the waves,—then did he seem to stand like a storm-bird with ruffled plumage on his blooming nest, his arms were lifted like wings by the morning wind, and he longed to cast himself over the terrace after the pheasants, and cool his heart in the tide of Nature.

Ashamed, he took, without looking round him, the hands of his friends and pressed them in mute fervor, that he might not be obliged to speak. The magnificent universe had painfully expanded, and then blissfully overflowed his great breast; and now, when he opened his eyes, like an eagle, wide and full upon the sun, and when the blinding brightness hid the earth, and he began to be lonely, and the earth became smoke and the sun a soft, white world, which gleamed only around the margin,—then did his whole, full soul, like a thunder-cloud, burst asunder and burn and weep, and from the pure, white sun his mother looked upon him, and in the fire and smoke of the earth his father and his life stood veiled.

Silently he went down the terraces, often passing his hand across his moist eyes to wipe away the dazzling shadow which danced on all the summits and all the steps.

Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our fellow-men more warmly; and when we must pity or forget them, thou still remainest with us, reposing before the moist eye like a verdant chain of mountains in the evening red. Ah, before the soul in whose sight the morning dew of its ideals has faded to a cold, gray drizzle,—and before the heart, which, in the subterranean passages of this life, meets no longer men, but only dry, crooked-up mummies on crutches in catacombs,—and before the eye which is impoverished and forsaken, and which no human creature will any longer gladden,—and before the proud son of the gods whom his unbelief and his lonely bosom, emptied of humanity, rivet down to an eternal, unchangeable anguish,—before all these thou remainest, quickening Nature, with thy flowers and mountains and cataracts, a faithful comforter; and the bleeding son of the gods, cold and speechless, dashes the drop of anguish from his eyes, that they may rest, far and clear, on thy volcanoes, and on thy Springs, and on thy suns!

2. CYCLE.

I could wish nothing finer for one whom I held dear, than a mother,—a sister,—three years of living together on Isola Bella,—and then in the twentieth, a morning hour when he should land on the Eden-island, and, enjoying all this with the eye and memory at once, clasp and strain it to his open soul. O thou all too happy Albano, on the rose-parterre of childhood,—under the deep, blue sky of Italy,—in the midst of luxuriant, blossom-laden citron-foliage,—in the bosom of beautiful nature, who caresses and holds thee like a mother, and in the presence of sublime nature, which stands like a father in the distance, and with a heart which expects its own father to-day!

The three now roamed with slow, unsteady steps through the swimming paradise. Although both of the others had often trodden it before, still their silver age became a golden age, by sympathy with Albano's ecstasy; the sight of another's rapture wakes the old impression of our own. As people who live near breakers and cataracts speak louder than others, so did the majestic sounding of the swollen sea of life impart to them all, even Schoppe, a stronger language; only he never could hit upon such imposing words, at least gestures, as another man.

Schoppe, who must needs fling a farewell kiss back to dear Italy, would gladly still have conserved the last scattered drops that hung around the cup of joy, which were sweet as Italian wines, full of German fire without the German acid. By acid he meant leave-taking and emotion. "If fate," said he, "fires a single retreating shot, by Heaven, I quietly turn my nag and ride whistling back. The deuce must be in the beast (or on him) if a clever jockey could not so break his mourning steed that the creature should carry himself very well as a companion-horse to the festive steed.[6] I school my sun-horse as well as my sumpter-horse far otherwise."

First of all, now, they took possession of this Otaheite-island by marches, and every one of its provinces must pay them, as a Persian province does its emperor, a different pleasure. "The lower terraces," said Schoppe, "must deliver to us squatter-sovereigns the tithe of fruit and sack, in citron and orange fragrance,—the upper pays off the imperial tax in prospects,—the Grotto down below there will pay, I hope, Jews-scot in the murmur of waters, and the cypress-wood up yonder its princess's tribute in coolness,—the ships will not defraud us of their Rhine and Neckar toll, but pay that down by showing themselves in the distance."

It is not difficult for me to perceive that Schoppe, by these quizzical sallies, aimed to allay the violent commotions of Cesara's brain and heart; for the splendor of the morning enchantment, although the youth spoke composedly of lesser things, had not yet gone from his sight. In him every excitement vibrated long after (one in the morning lasted the whole day), for the same reason that an alarm-bell keeps on humming longer than a sheep-bell; although such a continuing echo could neither distract his attention nor disturb his actions or his words.

The Knight was to come at noon. Meanwhile they roamed and revelled and went humming about in stiller enjoyment with bees-wings and bees-probosces through the richly-honeyed Flora of the island; and they had that serene naturalness of children, artists, and Southern people, which sips only from the honey-cup of the moment; and, accordingly, they found in every dashing wave, in every citron-frame, in every statue among blossoms, in every dancing reflection, in every darting ship, more than one flower which opened its full cup wider under the warm sky, whereas, with us, under our cold one, it fares as with the bees, against whom the frosts of May shut the flowers up. O, the islanders are right! Our greatest and most lasting error is, that we look for life, that is, its happiness, as the materialists look for the soul, in the combination of parts, as if the whole or the relation of its component parts could give us anything which each individual part had not already. Does then the heaven of our existence, like the blue one over our heads, consist of mere empty air, which, when near to, and in little, is only a transparent nothing, and which only in the distance and in gross becomes blue ether? The century casts the flower-seeds of thy joy only from the porous sowing-machine of minutes, or rather, to the blest eternity itself there is no other handle than the instant. It is not that life consists of seventy years, but the seventy years consist of a continuous life, and one has lived, at all events, and lived enough, die when one may.

3. CYCLE.

When, at length, the three sons of joy were about to seat themselves in the dining-hall of a laurel grove before their meat-and-drink offering, which Schoppe had stored away in the provision ship at Sesto, at that moment, a genteel stranger, elegantly dressed in one color, came through the twigs, with slow, stately steps, up to the reclining company, and addressed himself, forthwith, without inquiry, to Cesara, in slow, soft, and precisely pronounced German: "I am intrusted with an apology to Sir Count Cesara."—"From my father?" asked he quickly. "Beg pardon,—from my prince," replied the stranger; "he forbade your noble father, who arose ill, to travel in the cool of the morning, but towards evening he will meet you. In the mean time," he added, with a gracious smile and a slight bow, "I sacrifice something on the noble Knight's account, in commencing the pleasure of being longer with you hereafter, Sir Count, by bringing you disappointment." Schoppe, who was neater at guessing than at speaking, immediately broke out,—for he never let himself be imposed upon by any man: "We are then pedagogic copartners and confederates. Welcome, dear Gray-leaguesman!"[7] "It gives me pleasure," said the stranger, coldly, who was dressed in gray.

But Schoppe had hit it; the stranger was hereafter to occupy the place of chief tutor to Cesara, and Schoppe was collaborator. To me this seems judicious; the electric-sparkling Schoppe could serve as the cat's-skin, the fox-tail, the glass cylinder, which should completely charge our youth, composed as he was of conductors and non-conductors; the chief tutor, as principal, being the operator and spark-taker, who should discharge him with his Franklin's-points.

The man was named Von Augusti, was Lector to the prince, and had lived much in the great world; he seemed, as is the case with all of this court-stamp, ten years older than he really was, for he was in fact only just thirty-seven.

One would have to suffer for it from the inverted ink-pots of the reviewing Xanthippes, if one should leave the reviewers or Xanthippes in any uncertainty as to who the prince really was of whom we have all made mention above. It was the hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess, in whose village of Blumenbühl the Count had been brought up, and into whose chief city he was next to remove. The Hohenfliess Infante was hurrying back, in a great dust and all out of breath, from Italy, wherein he had left much spare coin and land-scrip, to Germany, in order there to coin, upon his own account, allegiance-medals, because his reigning father was going down the steps into the hereditary sepulchre, and was even now within a few paces of his coffin.

During dinner the Lector Augusti spoke of the lovely scenery with true taste, but with little warmth and impulse, preferring it by far to some Tempestas[8] in the Borromæan palace. Thence he passed on, in order to have occasion of mentioning the Knight as often as possible, to the personalities of the Court, and confessed that the German gentleman, M. de Bouverot, stood in especial favor,—for with courtiers and saints everything goes by grace,—and that the Prince was uncommonly afflicted in his nerves, &c. Courtiers, who, for the most part, cut their very souls according to the pattern of another's, do, however, draw up their ministerial reports of court so copiously and seriously for the uninitiated, that the reader of their gazettes must needs either laugh or go to sleep; a court-man and the book Des Erreurs et de la Verité call the general of the Jesuits God, the Jesuits men, and the non-Jesuits beasts. Schoppe listened with a dreadful pucker and twist of feature; he hated courts bitterly. Young Albano thought not much better of them; nay, as he was fond of venture, and liked much better to work and fight with the arm than with the fingers of the inner man, and delighted in tackling to the snow-plough and harrow and sowing-machine of life war-horses and thunder-steeds, instead of a team of clever home-and field-horses, of course people who went carefully and considerately to work, and would rather do light, lacquered work, and delicate ladies' work, than Hercules'-labors, he did not particularly fancy. However he could not but feel a respect for the modesty of Augusti, (based as it was upon a noble self-reliance,) which never let him say a word about himself, as well as for the knowledge he had gained by travel.

Cesara,—by the way I shall continue through this Cycle to write it with a C, agreeably to the Spanish orthography; but in and after the 4th, since I am not used to that letter in my orthography, and cannot be forever misrepresenting myself through a long book, it will be written with a Z,—Cesara could not hear enough from the Lector about his father. He related to him the last act of the Knight in Rome, but with an irreligious coldness which produced in the youth a chill of a different kind. Don Gaspard, namely, had laid a wager with a German Nuncius, picture against picture, that he would take a certain German (Augusti would not name him), whose life was only one prolonged, moral filth-month in the princely stable of Epicurus, and in two days, without seeing him, would convert him for as long a time as the Nuncio should desire. The latter accepted the wager, but caused the German to be secretly watched. After two days the German locked himself up, became devout, pale, still, bed-ridden, and in conduct came near to a true Christian. The Nuncio watched the mischief for a week, then demanded the sudden retransformation, or the Circe's wand, which should bring back again the beastly shape. The Knight touched the German with the wand, and the Epicurean swine stood there perfectly sound and well. I know not which is the more inexplicable, the miracle, or the cold-bloodedness of the thing. But the Lector could not say with what menstrua Gaspard forced these rapid solutions and evaporations and precipitations.

At length the Lector, who had long been frappé with the vocation and the collaboratorship of the singular Schoppe, came, by polite circumlocutions, upon the question, how the Knight had become acquainted with him. "Through the Pasquino," he replied. "He was just stepping round the corner of the Palazzo degli Ursini, when he saw some Romans and our hereditary prince standing round a man who was on his knees (they were my knees) before the statues of Pasquino and Marforio, and offering to them the following prayer: Dear Castor and Pollux! why do ye not secularize yourselves out of the ecclesiastical estate, and travel through my Germany in partibus infidelium, or as two diligent vicars? Could you not go round among the cities of the empire as missionary preachers and referendaries, or post yourselves as chevaliers d'honneur and armorial bearers on either side of a throne? Would to God they might at least vote thee, Pasquino, royal high-chaplain and master of ceremonies in the court chapels, or let thee down from the roof by a rope at the christening as baptismal angel! Say, could not you twins, now, once come forward and speak as petition-masters-general in the halls of the Diet, or, as magistri sententiarum, oppugn one another within the walls of the universities on Commencement days? Pasquino, can no Delia Porta[9] restore thee, were it only so far that thou mightest, at least, at Congresses and treaty-makings of the diplomatic corps, play the silhouetteur as the figure-head of the stove, or must you serve at the highest only in university libraries, as the busts of critical editors? Ah, gay pair, would that Chigi, who stands here beside me, might only model you into a portable pocket edition for ladies, I would put you by, and not take you out of my pocket till I reached Germany! I can, however, do it even here on the island," said Schoppe; whereupon he drew forth the satirical work of art; for the renowned architect and modeller, Chigi, who heard him, had really cast a copy of it. Schoppe went on to tell how Don Gaspard then seriously stepped up to him, and asked him, in Spanish, who he was. "I am (he answered also in Spanish) actual Titular librarian to the Grand Master at Malta, and a descendant of the so-called grammatical dog, the toothed humanist, Scioppius (German Schoppe); my baptismal name is Pero, Piero, Pietro (Peter). But many here call me, by mistake, Sciupio or Sciopio (extravagance)."

Gaspard had an impartial, deep-reaching eye for every spirit, even though it were most unlike his own; and, least of all, did he seek a repetition of himself. He therefore took the librarian home with him. Since, now, the latter seemed to live solely by portrait-painting, and was besides just meaning to go back to Germany, he accordingly proposed to this rich, many-eyed, rough spirit, Albano's society, which only the present fellow-laborer, Augusti, was to share with him. But there were four things which the librarian demanded beforehand, as preliminaries,—a sitting from the Count, his profile, and—when both these had been granted—yet a third and a fourth, in the following terms: "Must I suffer myself to be calendered[10] by the three estates, and forced to take on gloss and smoothness by polishing-presses? I will not; whithersoever else, be it to heaven or hell, I will accompany your son, but not into the stamping-washing-roasting-melting-and-forcing-works of great houses." This was granted easiest of all; besides, the second Imperial vicegerent of the paternal supremacy, Augusti, was appointed to the business in question. But upon the fourth point they came near falling out. Schoppe, who would rather be an outlaw than a slave or a freedman, and whose ground, no less imperially free than fruitful, would not endure a hedge, could accommodate himself only to accidental, undetermined services, and felt obliged to decline the fixum of a salary. "I will," said he, "deliver occasional sermons, but none of your weekly sermons; nay, it may be, oftentimes, I shall not enter the desk for a half-year together." The Knight considered it beneath him to be under obligations, and drew back, till Schoppe hit upon the diagonal road, and said he would give his society as a don gratuit, and should expect of the Knight, from time to time, a considerable don gratuit in return. As for the rest, Schoppe was now full as dear to the Knight as the first-best Turk of the Court who had ever helped him up his carriage-steps; his trial of a man was like a post-mortem examination, and after the trial he neither loved nor hated more cordially; to him, as he looked into the show-piece of blustering life, the manager and the first and second mistresses, and the Lears and Iphigenias and heroes were no friends, nor were the Kasperls and the tyrants and supernumeraries foes, but they were simply different actors in different parts. Ah, Gaspard, standest thou, then, in the front box, and not also on the stage of life itself? And dost thou not in the great drama recognize, like Hamlet, a lesser one? Ay, does not every stage imply, after all, a twofold life,—a copying and a copied?

Either the glass or two (or more) of wine, or else his annoying contrast to the elegant, sedate Lector, set Schoppe's winnowing-mill with all its wheels in motion, though this humor of his found small scope on the enchanting island; and when Augusti expressed a wish that Schoppe might go to Germany under happier auspices than other painters, the latter drew forth a pack of gilded pictures of German patron saints, and said, shuffling them: "Many a one would here lay a papal miserere on the desk and sing it off, particularly if, like me, he had to go into winter quarters among the German ice and fog-banks in the middle of spring;—and it is with reluctance, I am free to confess, I leave the Harlequin and Pulzinella and Scapin, and the whole comedia dell' arte behind. But the gentlemen saints whom I here shuffle have brought the lands under their charge into high and dry condition, and one passes through them with comfort. Mr. Architect, you laugh, but you know altogether too little of what these painted heavenly advowees hourly undertake in behalf of the German circles. Mr. Architect, show me, after all, a country anywhere, in which so many cudgels, programmes, professors, Perukes-allongées, learned advertisements, imperial notices, cits and surburbans, ceremonies, coronations, and Heidelberg tubs, but without indwelling Diogeneses, are to be mustered together as in the aforementioned? Or I appeal to you, Mr. Von Augusti! Point out to me, I pray, one single territory which is provided with such a Long Parliament, namely, a most lengthy Diet of the Empire, as it were, an extraordinarily wholesome pillula perpetua[11] which the patient is incessantly swallowing, and which as incessantly purges him; and who is not reminded, as well as myself, in this connection, of the capitulatio perpetua, and in general of the body politic of the Empire, that perpetuum immobile,—and on good grounds?" Here Schoppe drank. "The body of the Empire becomes thereby, like the first principle of morals, or like virgin earth, altogether insoluble; nay, supposing one of us were to take an electoral sword, and cut it in two therewith, as if it were an earwig, still the half with the teeth would, like the cloven earwig, turn round and eat the latter half clean up,—and then there would be the whole continuous earwig rejoined and well fed into the bargain. It is not by any means to be regretted as a consequence of this close nexus of the Empire, that the corpus can devour and digest its own limbs, as the brook-crab does its stomach, without any real harm to itself, so that the corpus, like a Homeric god, can only be wounded, but not killed. Take this bunchy polypus-stalk, I often say, mash it to a pulp with Rösel,—turn it wrong side outward like a glove,—like Lichtenberg, cut the polypus in two dexterously with a hair,—like Trembley, stick and incorporate several severed limbs into one another, as other naturalists do imperial cities, abbeys, small provinces into greater, or the reverse,—and then examine after some days; verily, magnificent and whole and well, thy polypus will be found sitting there again, or my name is not Schoppe."

The Count had heard him again and again on this subject, and could therefore more easily and properly smile; the Lector, however, was learning all this for the first time, and even the comic actor is not such to his new hearers. But amidst all these diversions there still sounded on in Albano's soul a confused tumult, like the murmuring of the waterfall of the coming times. He peered longingly through the wavering seams of the laurel-foliage, out toward the shining hills, when Dian said, in his painter's-language: "Is it not as if all the gods stood, with thousands of cornucopias, on the mountains around Lago Maggiore, and poured down wine and cascades, till the lake, like a goblet of joy, foams over and gushes down with the brimming juice?" Schoppe replied: "Pleasures of exceeding flavor, like pineapples, have the misfortune, that, like pineapples, they make the gums bleed." "I think," said Augusti, "that one ought not to reflect much upon the pleasures of life, any more than upon the beauties of a good poem; one enjoys both better without counting or dissecting them." "And I," said Cesara, "would calculate and dissect from very pride; whatever came of it I would abide, and I should be ashamed to be unhappy about it. If life, like the olive, is a bitter fruit, then grasp both with the press, and they will afford the sweetest oil." Here he rose to remain alone on the island till evening; he asked indulgence, but gave no excuse. His lofty, ambitious soul was incapable of descending to the smallest lie, even towards an animal. In Blumenbühl he used daily to entice the tame pigeons near him by holding out food; and his foster-sister often begged him to catch one; but he always said, "No," for he would not betray the confidence even of a brute creature.

While they followed him with their eyes, as he slowly retired through the laurel shades, with the shadows dancing after him and stray sunbeams gliding down over him, and, as in a dream, gently bent the branches apart with his hands extended before him, Dian broke forth: "What a statue of Jupiter!" "And the ancients," said Schoppe, joining in, "believed, moreover, that every god dwelt in his own statue." "A magnificent, threefold breadth of brow, nasal bridge, and breast!" continued Dian. "A Hercules planting olive-trees on Olympus!" "It struck me very much," said the Lector, "that, after considerable study, I could read in his countenance what I wished and what was mutually contradictory,—coldness, warmth, innocence and gentleness, most readily defiance and force." Schoppe added: "It may be still harder for himself to compel such a congress of warring powers within him to become a peace-congress." "How beautifully," said the humanly feeling Dian, "must love sit upon so mighty a form, and how sublimely must anger!" "Those are two poetic beauties," replied Schoppe, "out of which two Pedagogiarchs and Zenophons, like us, can make little with their Cyrus in their Cyropædia."

4. CYCLE.

Zesara had tasted only three glasses of wine; but the must of his thick, hot blood fermented under it mightily. The day grew more and more into a Daphnian and Delphic grove, in whose whispering and steamy thicket he lost himself deeper and deeper,—the sun hung in the blue like a white glistening snow-ball,—the glaciers cast their silvery glances down into the green,—from distant clouds it thundered occasionally,[12] as if spring were rolling along in his triumphal chariot far away towards us at the north,—the living glow of the climate and the hour, and the holy fire of two raptures, the remembered and the expected, warmed to life all his powers. And now that fever of young health seized upon him, in which it always seemed to him as if a particular heart beat in every limb,—the lungs and the heart are heavy and full of blood,—the breath is hot as a Harmattan wind,—and the eye dark in its own blaze,—and the limbs are weary with energy. In this overcharge of the electrical cloud he had a peculiar passion for destroying. When younger, he often relieved himself by rolling fragments of rock to a summit and letting them roll down, or by running on the full gallop till his breath grew longer, or most surely by hurting himself with a penknife (as he had heard of Cardan's doing), and even bleeding himself a little occasionally. Seldom do ordinary, and still seldomer extraordinary, men attain full-blooming youth of body and spirit, but when it does happen, so much the more luxuriantly does one root bear a whole flower-garden.

With such emotions Albano now stood alone behind the palace towards the south, when a sport of his boyish years occurred to him.

He had, namely, often in May, during a heavy wind, climbed up into a thick-limbed apple-tree, which supported a whole green hanging cabinet, and had laid himself down in the arms of its branches. And when, in this situation, the wavering pleasure-grove swung him about amidst the juggling play of the lily-butterflies and the hum of bees and insects and the clouds of blossoms, and when the flaunting top now buried him in rich green, now launched him into deep blue, and now into the sunshine, then did his fancy stretch the tree to gigantic dimensions: it grew alone in the Universe, as if it were the tree of endless life, its root pierced far down into the abyss, the white-red clouds hung upon it as blossoms, the moon as a fruit, the little stars glistened like dew, and Albano reposed in its infinite summit, and a storm swayed the summit from day into night and from night into day.

And now he stood looking up to a tall cypress. A southeast breeze had arisen from its siesta in Rome, and flying along had cooled itself by the way in the tops of the lemon-trees and in a thousand brooks and shadows, and now lay cradled in the arms of the cypress. Then he climbed up the tree, in order at least to tire himself. But how did the world stretch out before him, with its woods, its islands, and its mountains, when he saw the thunder-cloud lying over Rome's seven hills, just as if that old spirit were speaking from the gloom which once wrought in the seven hills as in seven Vesuviuses, that had stood before the face of the earth so many centuries with fiery columns, with erect tempests, and had overspread it with clouds and ashes and fertility, till they at last burst themselves asunder! The mirror-wall of the glaciers stood, like his father, unmelted before the warm rays of heaven, and only glistened and remained cold and hard,—from the broad expanse of the lake the sunny hills seemed on every hand to rise as from their bath, and the little ships of men seemed to lie fast stranded in the distance,—and, floating far and wide around him, the great spirits of the past went by, and under their invisible tread only the woods bowed themselves, the flower-beds scarcely at all. Then did the outward past become in Albano his own future,—no melancholy, but a thirst after all greatness that inhabits and uplifts the spirit, and a shrinking from the unclean baits of the future painfully compressed his eyelids, and heavy drops fell from them. He came down, because his internal dizziness grew at last to a physical. His rural education and the influence of Dian, who reverenced the modest course of nature, had preserved the budding garden of his faculties from the untimely morning sun and hasty growth; but the expectation of the evening and the journey he had taken had conspired to make the day of his life now too warm and stimulating.

Roaming and dreaming, he lost himself among orange-blossoms. Suddenly it was to him as if a sweet stirring in his inmost heart made it enlarge painfully, and grow void, and then full again. Ah, he knew not that it was the fragrances which he had here in childhood so often drunk into his bosom, and which now darkly but powerfully called back every fantasy and remembrance of the past, for the very reason that fragrances, unlike the worn-out objects of the eye and ear, seldomer present themselves, and therefore the more easily and intensely renew the faded sensations. But when he happened into an arcade of the palace, which was colored mosaically with variegated stones and shells, and when he saw the waves playing and dancing on the threshold of the grotto, then did a moss-grown past all at once reveal itself: he sounded his recollections,—the colored stones of the grotto lay as it were full of inscriptions of a former time before his memory. Ah, here had he been a thousand times with his mother! She had showed him the shells and forbidden him to approach the waves; and once, as the sun was rising and the rippled lake and all the pebbles glistened, he had waked up on her bosom, in the midst of the blaze of lights.

O, was not, then, the place sacred, and was not here the overpowering desire pardonable, which he had so long felt to-day, to open a wound in his arm for the relief of the restless and tormenting blood?

He scratched himself, but accidentally too deep, and with a cool and pleasant exaltation of his more lightly-breathing nature he watched the red fountain of his arm in the setting sun, and became, as if a burden had fallen off from him, calm, sober, still, and tender. He thought of his departed mother, whose love remained now forever unrequited. Ah, gladly would he have poured out this blood for her,—and now, too, love for his sickly father gushed up more warmly than ever in his bosom. O come soon, said his heart, I will love thee so inexpressibly, thou dear Father!

The sun grew cold on the damp earth,—and now only the indented mural crown formed by the gold wedges of the glacier-peaks glowed above the spent clouds,—and the magic-lantern of nature threw its images longer and fainter every moment, when a tall form, in an open red mantle, came slowly along towards him round the cedar-trees, pressed with the right hand the region of its heart, where little sparks glimmered, and with the half-raised left crushed a waxen mask into a lump, and looked down into its own breast. Suddenly it stiffened against the wall of the palace in a petrified posture. Albano placed his hand upon his light wound, and drew near to the petrified one. What a form! From a dry, haggard face projected between eyes which gleamed on, half hid beneath their sockets, a contemptuous nose with a proud curl,—there stood a cherub with the germ of the fall, a scornful, imperious spirit, who could not love aught, not even his own heart, hardly a higher,—one of those terrible beings who exalt themselves above men, above misfortune, above the earth, and above conscience, and to whom it is all the same whatever human blood they shed, whether another's or their own.

It was Don Gaspard.

The sparkling chain of his order, made of steel and precious stones, betrayed him. He had been seized with the catalepsy, his old complaint. "O father!" said Albano, with terror, and embraced the immovable form; but it was as if he clasped cold death to his heart. He tasted the bitterness of a hell,—he kissed the rigid lip, and cried more loudly,—at last, letting fall his arm, he started back from him, and the exposed wound bled again without his feeling it; and gnashing his teeth with wild, youthful love and with anguish, and with great ice-drops in his eyes, he gazed upon the mute form, and tore its hand from its heart. At this Gaspard, awaking, opened his eyes, and said, "Welcome, my dear son!" Then the child, with overmastering bliss and love, sank on his father's heart, and wept, and was silent. "Thou bleedest, Albano," said Gaspard, softly holding him off; "bandage thyself!" "Let me bleed; I will die with thee, if thou diest! O, how long have I pined for thee, my good father!" said Albano, yet more deeply agitated by his father's sick heart, which he now felt beating more heavily against his own. "Very good; but bandage thyself!" said he; and as the son did it, and while hurrying on the bandage, gazed with insatiable love into the eye of his father,—that eye which cast only cold glances like his jewelled ring; just then, on the chestnut-tops which had been to-day the throne of the morning sun, the soft moon opened soothingly her holy eye, and it was to the inflamed Albano, in this home of his childhood and his mother, as if the spirit of his mother were looking from heaven, and calling down, "I shall weep if you do not love each other." His swelling heart overflowed, and he said softly to his father, who was growing paler in the moonlight, "Dost thou not love me, then?" "Dear Alban," replied the father, "one cannot answer thee enough: thou art very good,—it is very good." But with the pride of a love which boldly measured itself with his father's, he seized firmly the hand with the mask, and looked on the Knight with fiery eyes. "My son," replied the weary one, "I have yet much to say to thee to-day, and little time, because I travel to-morrow,—and I know not how long the beating of my heart will let me speak." Ah, then, that previous sign of a touched soul had been only the sign of a disordered pulse. Thou poor son, how must thy swollen sea stiffen before this sharp air,—ah, how must thy warm heart cleave to the ice-cold metal, and tear itself away not without a skin-peeling wound!

But, good youth! who of us could blame thee that wounds should attach thee as it were by a tie of blood to thy true or false demigod,—although a demigod is oftener joined to a demi-beast than a demi-man,—and that thou shouldst so painfully love! Ah, what ardent soul has not once uttered the prayer of love in vain, and then, lamed by the chilling poison, like other poisoned victims, not been able any longer to move its heavy tongue and heavy heart! But love on, thou warm soul! like spring-flowers, like night-butterflies, tender love at last breaks through the hard-frozen soil, and every heart, which desires nothing else than a heart, finds at last its bosom!

5. CYCLE.

The Knight took him up to a gallery supported by a row of stone pillars, which lemon-trees strewed all over with perfumes and with little, lively shadows, silver-edged by the moon. He drew two medallions from his pocket-book,—one represented a remarkably youthful-looking female face, with the circumscription, "Nous ne nous verrons jamais, mon fils." "Here is thy mother," said Gaspard, giving it to him, "and here thy sister"; and handed him the second, whose lines ran into an indistinct, antiquated shape, with the circumscription, "Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère." He now began his discourse, which he delivered in such a low tone and in so many loose sheets (one comma often coming at one end of the gallery and the next at the other), and with such an alternation of quick and slow paces, that the ear of any eavesdropping inquisitor keeping step with them, under the gallery, had there been one down there, could not have caught three drops of connected sound. "Thy attention, dear Alban," he continued, "not thy fancy, must now be put on the stretch. Thou art, unhappily, to-day too romantic for one who is to hear so many romantic things. The Countess of Cesara ever loved the mysterious; thou wilt perceive it in the commission which she gave me a few days before her death, and which I was obliged to promise I would execute this very Good-Friday."

He said further, before beginning, that, as his catalepsy and palpitation of the heart increased critically, he must hasten to Spain to arrange his affairs, and, still more, those of his ward, the Countess of Romeiro. Alban made one brotherly inquiry about his dear sister, so long separated from him; his father gave him to hope he should soon see her, as she intended to visit Switzerland with the Countess.

As I do not perceive what people will gain by it, if I insert those (to me) annoying geese-feet[13] with the everlasting "said he," I will relate the commission in person. There would, at a certain time (the Knight said), come to him three unknown persons,—one in the morning, one at noon, and one in the evening,—and each one would present him a card, in a sealed envelope, containing merely the name of the city and the house wherein the picture-cabinet, which Albano must visit the very same night, was to be found. In this cabinet he must touch and press all the nails of the pictures till he comes to one behind which the pressure makes a repeating-clock, built into the wall, strike twelve. Here he finds behind the picture a secret arras-door, behind which sits a female form with an open souvenir and three rings on her left hand, and a crayon in her right. When he presses the ring of the middle finger, the form will rise amidst the rolling of the internal wheel-work, step out into the chamber, and the wheel-work, which is running down, will stop with her at a wall whereon she indicates, by the crayon, a hidden compartment, in which lie a pocket-perspective glass and the waxen impression of a coffin-key. The eye-glass of the perspective arranges by an optical anamorphosis the snarl of withering lines on the medallion of his sister, which he had to-day received, into a sweet, young form, and the object-glass gives back to the immature image of his mother the lineaments of mature life. Then he is to press the ring-finger, and immediately the dumb, cold figure will begin to write with the crayon in the souvenir, and designate to him, in a few words, the place of the coffin, of whose key he has the waxen impression. In the coffin lies a black marble slab, in the form of a black Bible; and when he has broken it he will find a kernel therein, from which is to grow the Christmas-tree of his whole life. If the slab is not in the coffin, then he is to give the last ring of the little finger a pressure,—but what this wooden Guerike's weather-prophet of his destiny would do, the Knight himself could not predict.

I am fully of opinion that from this bizarre testament the repeating-work and half of the wheel-work might easily be broken out, (just as clocks are now made in London with only two wheels,) without doing the dial-work or the movement of the hands the least injury.

Upon Albano all this testamentary whirl and whiz had, contrary to my expectation, almost no effect; excepting to produce a more tender love for the good mother who, when she already beheld, in the stream of life below, the swift image of the pouncing hawk of death, thought only of her son. Upon the fixed, iron countenance of his father he so gazed during this narrative with tender gratitude for the pains he had taken to remember and relate, as almost to lose the thread of the discourse, and in the moonshine and to the eye of his fancy the Knight grew to a Colossus of Rhodes, hiding half the horizon of the present, a being for whom this testamentary memory-work seemed almost too trivial.

Thus far Don Gaspard had spoken merely as a genuine man of the world, who always excludes from his speech (into which no special, intimate relations enter) all mention or flattery of a person, of others as well as of himself, and regards even historical persons merely as conditions of things, so that two such impersonalities with their grim coldness seemed to be only two speaking logics or sciences, not living beings with beating hearts. O, how softly did it flow, like a tender melody, into Albano's lovesick heart, which the pure and mild moon, and the glimmering island-garden of his early days, and the voice of his mother sounding on and echoing in his soul, all conspired to melt, when at length the father said: "So much have I to tell of the Countess. Of myself I have nothing to say to thee but to express my constant satisfaction hitherto with thy life." "O, give me, dearest father, instruction and counsel for my future government," said the enraptured man, and as Gaspard's right hand twitched convulsively toward his more hurriedly beating heart, he followed it with his left to the sick spot and pressed intensely the hysterical heart as if he could arrest by grasping at the spokes this down-hill-rolling wheel of life. The Knight replied: "I have nothing more to say to thee. The Linden City (Pestitz) is now open to thee; thy mother had shut it against thee. The hereditary Prince, who will soon be Prince, and the minister, Von Froulay, who is my friend, will be thine. I believe it will be of service to thee to cultivate their acquaintance."

The sharp-sighted Gaspard saw at this moment suddenly flit across the pure, open countenance of the youth strange emotions and hot blushes, which nothing immediate could explain, and which instantly passed away, as if annihilated, when he thus continued: "To a man of rank, sciences and polite learning, which to others are final ends, are only means and recreations; and great as thy inclination for them may be, thou wilt, however, surely, in the end give actions the preference over enjoyments; thou wilt not feel thyself born to instruct or amuse men merely, but to manage and to rule them. It were well if thou couldst gain the minister, and thereby the knowledge of government and political economy which he can give thee; for in the sketch of one country as well as of one court thou hast the grand outlines of every greater one to which thou mayest be called, and for which thou wilt have to educate thyself. It is my wish that thou shouldst be even a favorite of the Prince and the Court, less because thou hast need of connections than because thou needest experience. Only through men are men to be subdued and surpassed, not by books and superior qualities. One must not display his worth in order to gain men, but gain them first, and then, and not until then, show his worth. There is no calamity like ignorance; and not so much by virtue as by understanding is man made formidable and fortunate. Thou hast at most to shun men who are too like thee, particularly the noble." The corrosive sublimate of his irony consisted here, not in his pronouncing "noble" with an accented, ironical tone, but in his pronouncing it, contrary to what might have been expected, coldly and without any tone at all. Albano's hand, still on his, had for some time slipped down from his father's heart along the sharp-edged steel chain of his order to the golden, metal-cold lamb that hung from it. The youth, like all young men and hermits, had too severe notions of courtiers and men of the world: he held them to be decided basilisks and dragons,—although I can still excuse that, if he means by basilisks only what the naturalists mean,—wingless lizards,—and by dragons, nothing but winged ones, and thus regards them only as amphibia, hardly less cold and odious than Linnæus defines such to be. Besides, he cherished (so easily does Plutarch become the seducer of youth whose biographer he might have been, like me) more contempt than reverence for the artolatry (loaf and fish service) of our age, always transubstantiating (inversely) its god into bread,—for the best bread-studies or bread-carts,—for the making of a carrière,—for every one, in short, who was not a dare-devil, and who, instead of catapultas and war machines, operated with some sort of invisible magnetic wands, suction-works, and cupping-glasses, and took anything in that way. Every young man has a fine season in his life when he will accept no office, and every young woman has the same in hers, when she will accept no husband; by and by they both change, and often take one another into the bargain.

As the Knight advanced the above propositions, certainly not offensive to any man of the world, there swelled in his son a holy, generous pride,—it seemed to him as if his heart and even his body, like that of a praying saint, were lifted by a soaring genius far above the race-courses of a greedy, creeping age,—the great men of a greater time passed before him under their triumphal arches, and beckoned him to come nearer to them: in the east lay Rome and the moon, and before him the Circus of the Alps,—a mighty Past by the side of a mighty Present. With the proud and generous consciousness that there is something more godlike in us than prudence and understanding, he laid hold of his father, and said: "This whole day, dear father, has been one increasing agitation in my heart. I cannot speak nor think rightly for emotion. Father, I will visit them all; I will soar away above men; but I despise the dirty road to the object. I will in the sea of the world rise like a living man by swimming, and not like a drowned man by corruption. Yes, father, let Fate cast a gravestone upon this breast, and crush it, when it has lost virtue and the divinity and its own heart."

What made Albano speak so warmly was that he could not avoid an irrepressible veneration for the great soul of the Knight; he continually represented to himself the pangs and the lingering death of so strong a life, the sharp smoke of so great a coldly quenched fire, and inferred from the emotions of his own living soul what must be those of his father, who in his opinion had only gradually thus crumbled upon a broad bed of black, cold worldlings, as the diamond cannot be volatilized except on a bed of dead, burnt-out, blacksmith's coals. Don Gaspard, who seldom, and then only mildly, found fault with men,—not from love, but from indifference,—patiently replied to the youth: "Thy warmth is to be praised. All will come right in good time. Now let us eat."

6. CYCLE.

The banquet-hall of our Islanders was in the rich palace of the absent Borromæan family. They conceded to the lovely island the prize-apple of Paris and the laurel-wreath. Augusti and Gaspard wrote their eulogies upon it in a clear, easy style, only Gaspard used the more antitheses. Albano's breast was filled with a new world, his eye with radiance, his cheeks with joyous blood. The Architect extolled as well the taste as the purse of the hereditary Prince, who by means of both had brought with him to his country, not artistic masters indeed, but still masterpieces, and at whose instance this very Dian was going to Italy to take casts for him there of the antiques. Schoppe replied: "I hope the German is as well supplied with painters' academies and painters' colics as any other people; our pictures on goods, our illuminated Theses in Augsburg, our margins of newspapers, and our vignettes in every dramatic work, (whereby we had an earlier Shakespeare Gallery than London,) our gallows-birds hung in effigy,—are well known to every one, and show at first sight how far we carry the thing. But I will even allow that Greeks and Italians paint as well as we; still we tower far above them in this, that we, like nature and noble suitors, never seek isolated beauty, without connected advantage. A beauty which we cannot also roast, sell at auction, wear, or marry, passes with us only for just what it is worth; beauty is with us (I hope) never anything else but selvage and trimming to utility, just as, also, at the Diet of the Empire, it is not the side-tables of confectionery, but the session-tables, that are the proper work-tables of the body politic. Genuine Beauty and Art are therefore with us set, painted, stamped only on things which at the same time bring in something; e. g. fine Madonnas only in the journals of fashion,—etched leaves only on packages of tobacco-leaves,—cameos on pipe-bowls,—gems on seals, and wood-cuts on tallies; flower-pieces are sought, but on bandboxes,—faithful Wouwermanns, but in horses' stalls before the stallions,[14]—bas-reliefs of princes' heads, either on dollars or on Bavarian beer-pitcher covers, but both must be of unalloyed pewter,—rose-pieces and lily-pieces, but on tattooed women. On a similar principle, in Basedow's system of education, beautiful painting and the Latin vocabulary were always linked together, because the Institute more easily retains the latter by the help of the former. So, too, Van der Kabel never painted a hare to order, without requiring for himself one freshly-shot model after another to eat and copy. So again, the artist Calear painted beautiful hose, but painted them immediately on to his own legs."

The Knight heard such talk with pleasure, though he neither laughed at nor imitated it; to him all colors in the prism of genius were agreeable. Only to the Architect it was not enough in Greek taste, and not courtly enough for the Lector. The latter turned round to the departing Dian, with a somewhat flattering air, while Schoppe was recovering breath for renewed detraction of us Germans, and said: "Formerly Rome took away from other lands only works of art, but now artists themselves."

Schoppe continued: "So also our statues are no idle, dawdling citizens, but they all drive a trade;—such as are caryates hold up houses; such as are angels bear baptismal vessels; and heathen water-gods labor at the public fountains, and pour out water into the pitchers of the maidens."

The Count spoke warmly for us, the Lector brilliantly: the Knight remarked, that the German taste and the German talent for poetic beauties made good and explained their want of both for other beauties (on the ground of climate, form of government, poverty, &c.). The Knight resembled a celestial telescope, through which the planets appear larger and the suns smaller; like that instrument, he took away from suns their borrowed lustre, without restoring to them their true and greater glory; he cut in twain, indeed, the noose of a Judas, but he extinguished the halo on a Christ's head, and in general he sought to make out ingeniously a parity and equality between darkness and light.

Schoppe was never silenced (I am sorry that in his toleration-mandate for Europe the German Circles should have been left out). He began again: "The little which I just brought forward in praise of the serviceable Germans has, it seems, provoked contradiction. But the slight laurel-crown which I place upon the holy body of the Empire shall never blind my eyes to the bald spots. I have often thought it commendable in Socrates and Christ, that they did not teach in Hamburg, in Vienna, or in any Brandenburg city, and go through the streets with their disciples; they would have been questioned, in the name of the magistrates, whether they could not work; and had both been with families in Wetzlar, they would have extorted from the latter the negligence-money.[15] Touching the poetic art, Sir Knight, I have known many a citizen of the Empire who could make but little out of an ode unless it were upon himself: he fancied he could tell when poetic liberties infringed upon the liberty of the Empire: such a man, who certainly always marched to his work regularly, composedly, and considerately in Saxon term-times, was exceedingly pained and perplexed by poetic flights. And is it, then, so unaccountable and bad? The worthy inhabitant of an imperial city binds on in front a napkin when he wishes to weep, in order that he may not stain his satin vest, and the tears which fall from his eyes upon a letter of condolence he marks as he would any darker punctuation: what wonder, if, like the ranger, he should know no fairer flower than that on the posteriors of the stag, and if the poetical violets, like the botanical,[16] should operate upon him as a mild emetic. Such were, according to my notion, one way at least of warding off the reproach which is flung at us Germans."

7. CYCLE.

What a singular night followed upon this singular day! Sleepy with travelling, all went to rest; only Albano, in whom the hot eventful day still burned on, said to the Knight that he could not now, with his breast full of fire, find coolness and rest anywhere but under the cold stars and the blossoms of the Italian spring. He leaned against a statue on the upper terrace, near a blooming balustrade of citrons, that he might sweetly shut his eyes beneath the starry heaven, and still more sweetly open them in the morning. Even in his earlier youth had he, as well as myself, wished himself upon the Italian roofs of warm lands, in order, not as a night-walker, but as a regular sleeper, to wake up thereon.

How magnificently there does the eye open upon the radiant hanging gardens full of eternal blossoms above thee, whereas on thy German sweltry feather-pillow thou hast nothing before thee, when thou lookest up, but the bed-tail!

While Zesara was thus traversing waves, mountains, and stars with a stiller and stiller soul, and when at last garden and sky and lake ran together into one dark Colossus, and he sadly thought of his pale mother, and of his sister, and of the announced wonders of his future life, a figure dressed all in black, with the image of a death's-head on its breast, came slowly and painfully, and with trembling breath, up the terraces behind him. "Remember death!" it said. "Thou art Albano de Zesara?" "Yes," said Zesara, "who art thou?" "I am," it said, "a father of death.[17] It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so."

The limbs of the man continued to quake all over, in a frightful and almost audible manner. Zesara had often wished an adventure for his idle bravery; now he had it before him. Meantime, however, he kept a sharp watch with his eye, and when the monk said, "Look up to the evening star and tell me when it goes down, for my sight is weak," he threw only a hasty glance upwards. "Three stars," said he, "are still between it and the Alps." "When it sets," the father continued, "then thy sister in Spain gives up the ghost, and thereupon she will speak with thee here from Heaven." Zesara was hardly touched by a finger of the cold hand of horror, simply because he was not in a room, but in the midst of young Nature, who stations her mountains and stars as watchmen around the trembling spirit; or it may have been because the vast and substantial bodily world, so near before us, crowds out and hides with its building-work the world of spirits. He asked, with indignation: "Who art thou? What knowest thou? What wilt thou?" and grasped at the folded hands of the monk, and held both imprisoned in one of his. "Thou dost not know me, my son," said the father of death, calmly. "I am a Zahouri,[18] and come from Spain from thy sister; I see the dead down in the earth, and know beforehand when they will appear and discourse. But their apparition above ground I do not see, and their discourse I cannot hear."

Here he looked sharply at the youth, whose features suddenly grew rigid and lengthened, for a voice like a female and familiar one began slowly over his head: "Take the crown,—take the crown,—I will help thee." The monk asked: "Is the evening-star already gone down? Is it talking with thee?" Zesara looked upward, and could not answer; the voice from Heaven spake again, and said the same thing. The monk guessed as much, and said: "Thus did thy father hear thy mother from on high, when he was in Germany; but he had me thrown into prison for a long time, because he thought I deceived him." At the mention of his "father," whose disbelief of the spiritual Zesara knew, he hurried the monk, by his two hands held fast in his own single and strong one, down the terraces, in order to hear where the voice might now be. The old man smiled softly; the voice again spake above him, but in these words: "Love the beautiful one,—love the beautiful one,—I will help thee." A skiff was moored to the shore, which he had already seen during the day. The monk, who apparently wished to do away the suspicion of a voice being concealed anywhere, stepped into the gondola, and beckoned him to follow. The youth, relying on his bodily and mental strength and his skill in swimming, boldly pushed off with the monk from the island; but what a shudder seized upon his innermost fibres, when not only the voice above him called again, "Love the beautiful one whom I will show thee,—I will help thee," but when he even saw, off toward the terrace, a female form, with long, chestnut-brown hair, and dark eyes, and a shining, swan-like neck, and with the complexion and vigor of the richest climate, rise, like a nobler Aphrodite, revealed down to her bosom, from out the deepest waves. But in a few seconds the Goddess sank back again beneath the surface, and the spirit-voice continued to whisper overhead, "Love the beautiful one whom I showed thee." The monk coldly and silently prayed during the scene, of which he heard and saw nothing. At length he said: "On the next Ascension-day, at the hour of thy birth, thou wilt stand beside a heart which is not within a breast, and thy sister will announce to thee from Heaven the name of thy bride."

When before us feeble, rheumy creatures, who, like Polypuses and flowers, only feel and seek, but cannot see the light of a higher element, a flash darts, in the total eclipse of our life, through the earthly mass which hangs before our higher sun,[19] that ray cuts in pieces the nerve of vision, which can bear only forms, not light; no burning terror wings the heart and the blood, but a cold shudder at our own thoughts, and in the presence of a new, incomprehensible world, chains the warm stream, and life becomes ice.

Albano, from whose teeming fancy a chaos might spring as easily as a universe, grew pale; but it was with him as if he lost not so much his spirit as his understanding. He rowed impetuously, almost unconsciously, to the shore,—he could not look the father of death in the face, because his wild fancy, tearing everything to pieces, distorted and distended all forms, like clouds, into horrid shapes,—he hardly heard the monk when he said, by way of farewell, "Next Good Friday, perhaps, I may come again." The monk stepped on board a skiff which came along of itself (propelled, probably, by a wheel under the water), and soon disappeared behind, or in, the little Fisher's island (Isola peschiere).

For the space of a minute Alban reeled, and it appeared to him as if the garden and the sky and all were a floating and fleeting fog-bank,—as if nothing were, as if he had not lived. This arsenical qualm was at once blown away from his stifled breast by the breath of the Librarian, Schoppe, who was piping merrily at the chamber window; all at once his life grew warm again, the earth came back, and existence was. Schoppe, who could not sleep for warmth, now came down to make his own bed also on the tenth terrace. He saw in Zesara an intense inward agitation, but he had long been accustomed to such, and made no inquiries.

8. CYCLE.

Not by reasonings, but by pleasantries, is the ice most easily melted in our choked-up wheel-work. After a chatty hour, not much more was left of all that had passed in the youth's mind than a vexatious feeling and a happy one; the former, to think that he had not taken the monk by the cowl and carried him before the Knight; and the latter, at the remembrance of the noble female form, and at the very prospect of a life full of adventures. Still, when he closed his eyes, monsters full of wings, worlds full of flames, and a deep-weltering chaos, swept around his soul.

At last, in the cool of the after-midnight, his tired senses, under a slow and dissolving influence, approached the magnetic mountain of slumber; but what a dream came to him on that still mountain! He lay (so he dreamed) on the crater of Hecla. An upheaved column of water lifted him with it, and held him balanced on its hot waves in mid-heaven. High in the ethereal night above him stretched a gloomy tempest, like a long dragon, swollen with devoured constellations; near below hung a bright little cloud, attracted by the tempest,—through the light gauze of the little cloud flowed a dark red, either of two rose-buds or of two lips, and a green stripe of a veil or of an olive-twig, and a ring of milk-blue pearls or of forget-me-not,—at length a little vapor diffused itself over the red, and nothing was there but an open, blue eye, which looked up to Albano infinitely mild and imploring; and he stretched out his hands towards the enveloped form, but the water-column was too low. Then the black tempest flung hailstones, but in their fall they became snow, and then dew-drops, and at last, in the little cloud, silvery light; and the green veil swept illuminated in the vapor. Then Albano exclaimed, "I will shed all my tears and swell the column, that I may reach thee, fair eye!" And the blue eye grew moist with longing, and closed with love. The column grew with a loud roaring, the tempest lowered itself, and pressed down the little cloud before it, but he could not touch it. Then he tore open his veins and cried, "I have no more tears, but all my blood will I pour out for thee, that I may reach thy heart." Under the bleeding the column rose higher and faster,—the broad, blue ether began to swim, and the tempest was dissipated like spray, and all the stars that it had swallowed came forth with living looks,—the little cloud, hovering freely, floated gleaming down to the column,—the blue eye, as it approached, opened slowly, and suddenly closed and buried itself deeper in its light; but a soft sigh whispered in the cloud, "Draw me to thy heart!" O, then he flung his arms through the flashing light and swept away the mist, and snatched a white form, that seemed to be made of moonlight, to his glowing breast. But ah! the melting snow of the light escaped from his hot arms,—the beloved one melted away and became a tear, and the warm tear found its way through his breast, and sank into his heart, and burned therein; and his heart began to dissolve, and seemed as if it would die.... Then he opened his eyes.

But what an unearthly waking! The little, white, spent cloud, stained with storm-drops, still hung bending down over him, in Heaven,—it was the bright, lovingly near moon, that had come in above him. He had bled in his sleep, the bandage of his wounded arm having been pushed off by its violent movement. His raptures had melted the night-frost of ghostly terror. In a transfiguring euthanasia, his firm being fluttered loosely around like an uncertain dream,—he had been wafted and rocked upward into the starry heaven as on a mother's breast, and all the stars had flowed into the moon and enlarged her glory,—his heart, flung into a warm tear, gently dissolved therein,—out of him was only shadow, within him dazzling light,—the wind of the flying earth swept by before the upright flame of his soul, and it bent not. Ah, his Psyche glided with keen, unruffled, inaudible falcon-pinions, in silent ecstasy through the thin air of life....

It appeared to him as if he were dying, for it was some time before he became aware of the increasing warmth of his bleeding left arm, which had lifted him into the long Elysium that reached over from his dreaming into his waking state. He refastened the bandage more tightly.

All at once he heard, during the operation, a louder plashing below him than mere waters could make. He looked over the balcony, and saw his father and Dian, without a farewell,—which, with Gaspard, was only the poisonous meadow-saffron in the autumnal moment of leave-taking,—fleeing, like blossom-leaves dropped out of the flower-wreath of his life, away across the waves amid the swan-song of the nightingales!... O, thou good young man, how often has this night befooled and robbed thee! He spread out his arms after them,—the pain of the dream still continued, and inspired him,—his flying father seemed to him a loving father again,—in anguish he called down, "Father, look round upon me! Ah, how canst thou thus forsake me without a syllable? And thou too, Dian! O comfort me, if you hear me!" Dian threw kisses to him, and Gaspard laid his hand upon his sick heart. Albano thought of that copyist of death, the palsy, and would gladly have held out his wounded arm over the waves, and poured out his warm life as a libation for his father, and he called after them, "Farewell! farewell!" Languishing, he pressed the cold, stony limbs of a colossal statue to his burning veins, and tears of vain longing gushed down his fair face, while the warm tones of the Italian nightingales, trilling in response to each other from bank and island, sucked his heart till it was sore with soft vampyre-tongues.——Ah, when thou shalt be loved, glowing youth, how thou wilt love!—In his thirst for a warm, communicative soul, he woke up his Schoppe, and pointed out to him the fugitives. But while the latter was saying something or other consolatory, Albano gazed fixedly at the gray speck of the skiff, and heard not a word.

9. CYCLE.

The two continued up, and refreshed themselves by a stroll through the dewy island; and the sight of the alto-rilievo of day, as it came out in glistening colors from the fading crayon-drawings of the moonlight, woke them to full life. Augusti joined them, and proposed to them to take the half-hour's sail over to Isola Madre. Albano heartily besought the two to sail over alone, and leave him here to his solitary walks. The Lector now detected, with a sharper look, the traces of the young man's nightly adventures,—how beautifully had the dream, the monk, the sleeplessness, the bleeding, subdued the bold, defiant form, and softened every tone, and that mighty energy was now only a magic waterfall by moonlight! Augusti took it for caprice, and went alone with Schoppe; but the fewest persons possible comprehend, that it is only with the fewest persons possible, (and not with an army of visitors,) properly only with two,—the most intimate and like-minded friend and the beloved object,—one can bear to take a walk. Verily, I had as lief kneel down to make a declaration of love openly, in the face of a whole court, on the birthday of a princess,—for show me, I pray, the difference,—as to gaze on thee, Nature, my beloved, through a long vanguard and rear-guard of witnesses to my enraptured attitude!

How happy did solitude make Albano, whose heart and eyes were full of tears, which he concealed for shame, and which yet so justified and exalted him in his own mind! For he labored under the singular mistake of fiery and vigorous youths,—the idea that he had not a tender heart, had too little feeling, and was hard to be moved. But now his enervation gave him a soft, poetical forenoon, such as he had never before known, and in which he would fain have embraced tearfully all that he had ever loved,—his good, dear, far-off foster parents in Blumenbühl; his poor father, ill just in spring, when death always builds his flower-decked gate of sacrifice; and his sister, buried in the veil of the past, whose likeness he had gotten, whose after-voice he had heard this night, and whose last hour the nightly liar had brought so near to him in his fiction. Even the nocturnal magic-lantern show, still going on in his heart, troubled him by its mysteriousness, since he could not ascribe it to any known person, and by the prediction that at his birth-hour, which was so near,—the next Ascension-day,—he should learn the name of his bride. The laughing day took away, indeed, from the ghost-scenes their deathly hue, but gave to the crown and the water-goddess fresh radiance.

He roamed dreamily through all holy places in this promised land. He went into the dark Arcade where he had found his childhood's relics and his father, and took up, with a sad feeling, the crushed mask which had fallen on the ground. He ascended the gallery, checkered with lemon-shadows and sunbeams, and looked toward the tall cypresses and the chestnut summits in the far blue, where the moon had appeared to him like an opening mother's eye. He approached a cascade, behind the laurel-grove, which was broken into twenty landing-places, as his life was into twenty years, and he felt not its thin rain upon his hot cheeks.

He then went back again to the top of the high terrace to look for his returning friends. How brokenly and magically did the sunshine of the outward world steal into the dark, holy labyrinth of the inner! Nature, which yesterday had been a flaming sun-ball, was to-day an evening star, full of twilight: the world and the future lay around him so vast, and yet so near and tangible, as glaciers before a rain appear nearer in the deepening blue. He stationed himself on the balcony, and held on by the colossal statue; and his eye glanced down to the lake, and up to the Alps and to the heavens, and down again; and, under the friendly air of Hesperia, all the waves and all the leaves fluttered beneath their light veil. White towers glistened from the green of the shore, and bells and birds crossed their music in the wind: a painful yearning seized him, as he looked along the track of his father; and, ah! toward the warmer Spain, full of voluptuous spring-times, full of soft orange-nights, full of the scattered limbs of dismembered giant mountain-ridges, heaped around in wild grandeur,—thither how gladly would he have flown through the lovely sky! At length, joy and dreaming and parting were all melted into that nameless melancholy, in which the excess of delight clothes the pain of limitation,—because, indeed, it is easier to overflow than to fill our hearts.

All at once Albano was touched and smitten,—as if the Divinity of Love had sent an earthquake into his inner temple, to consecrate him for her approaching apparition,—as he read on a young Indian-tree near him the little sign bearing its name,—the "Liana." He gazed upon it tenderly, and said again and again, "Dear Liana!" He would fain have broken off a twig for himself; but when he reflected, that if he did water would run out of it, he said, "No, Liana, I will not cause thee to weep!" and so forbore, because in his memory the plant stood in some sort of relationship to an unknown dear being. With inexpressible longings to be away, he now looked toward the temple-gates of Germany,—the Alps. The snow-white angel of his dream seemed to veil herself deep in a spring-cloud, and to glide along in it speechless,—and it was to him as if he heard from afar harmonica-tones. He drew forth, just for the sake of having something German, a letter-case, whereon his foster-sister Rabette had embroidered the words, "Gedenke unserer" (Think of us): he felt himself alone, and was now glad to see his friends, who were gayly rowing back from Isola Madre.

Ah, Albano, what a morning would this have been for a spirit like thine ten years later, when the compact bud of young vigor had unfolded its leaves more widely and tenderly and freely! To a soul like thine would have arisen at such a period, when the present was pale before it, two worlds at once,—the two rings around the Saturn of time,—that of the past and that of the future: then wouldst thou not merely have glanced over a short interval of race-ground to the pure, white goal, but turned thyself round, and surveyed the long, winding track already run. Thou wouldst have reckoned up the thousand mistakes of the will, the missteps of the soul, and the irreparable waste of heart and brain. Couldst thou then have looked upon the ground without asking thyself: "Ah, have the thousand and four earthquakes[20] which have passed through me, as through the land behind me, enriched me as these have enriched the soil? O, since all experiences are so dear,—since they cost us either our days, or our energies, or our illusions,—O why must man every morning, in the presence of Nature, who profits by every dew-drop that stands in a flower-cup, blush with such a sense of impoverishment over the thousand vainly dried tears which he has already shed and caused! From springs this almighty mother draws summers; from winters, springs; from volcanoes, woods and mountains; from hell, a heaven; from this, a greater,—and we, foolish children, know not how from a given past to prepare for ourselves a future, which shall satisfy us! We peck, like the Alpine daw, at everything shiny, and carry the red-hot coals aside as if they were gold-pieces, and set houses on fire with them. Ah! more than one great and glorious world goes down in the heart, and leaves nothing behind; and it is precisely the stream of the higher geniuses which flies to spray and fertilizes nothing, even as high waterfalls break and flutter in thin mist over the earth."

Albano welcomed his friends with atoning tenderness; but the youth became, as the day waxed, as dull and heavy-hearted as one who has stripped his chamber at the inn, settled his bill, and has only a few moments left to walk up and down in the bare, rough stubble-field, before the horses are brought. Like falling bodies, resolutions moved in his impetuous soul with increasing velocity and force every new second: with outward mildness, but inward vehemence, he begged his friends to start with him this very day. And so in the afternoon he went away with them from the still island of his childhood, speedily to enter, through the chestnut avenues of Milan, on a new theatre of his life, and to come upon the trap-door, which opens down into the subterranean passage of so many mysteries.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Scale.—Tr.

[3] This statue, thirty-five ells high, on a pedestal of twenty-five ells, in whose head twelve men can find room, stands near Arona, and is exactly of a height with Isola Bella, which stands over against it, and which rises on ten gardens or terraces built one upon another.—Keysler's Travels, &c., Vol. I.

[4] The old Kremnitz ducats have the infant Jesus on the right arm; but the new and lighter ones on the left.

[5] Franklin advised the preserving and corking up of vessels from which all the liquor had been drunk, in order thereby to keep the ship afloat.

[6] The horse, in the funeral procession of a prince, that comes last, and is decked out gayly for the successor of the deceased.—Tr.

[7] Gray-league (Grau-bünden), the Swiss Canton of the Grisons.—Tr.

[8] Pictures by Peter Molyn, who, on account of his fine storms, was called only Tempesta.

[9] The Pasquino is notoriously mutilated.—Delia Porta was a great restorer of old statues.

[10] I. e. to be pressed between two wooden cylinders and a metallic one.

[11] This pill consists of Antimonia Regia, and by reason of its hardness may be swallowed over and over again with the same effect each time; only a little wine is sprinkled on it before each repetition of the experiment.

[12] Tirare di primavere, the people call it; and Peter Schoppe translated it grandly enough, Electrical pistol-firing of spring.

[13] Quotation-marks.—Tr.

[14] A good Wouwermann means, in painters' language, a well-executed horse, the sight of which has an influence on the beauty of the future colt.

[15] This name is given to the quantum which is withheld from the associate judges of the Supreme Court when they have not worked enough.

[16] The Ipecacuanha belongs to the Violet species.

[17] Of the order of St. Paul, or memento mori, which died in France in the seventeenth century. The above address is its usual greeting.

[18] The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the earth.

[19] According to the account of some astronomers, that the sun, when eclipsed, has sometimes shone through an opening of the moon, Ulloa, e. g., assures us that he once witnessed.

[20] In Calabria (1785) a thousand and four earthquakes happened in the space of three fourths of a year.—Münter's Travels, &c.

INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMME

TO TITAN.

Before I dedicated Titan to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor and Feudal Provost of Flachsenfingen, Mr. Von Hafenreffer, I first requested permission from him in the following terms:—

"Since you have assisted far more in this history than the Russian Court did in Voltaire's Genesis-History of Peter the Great, you cannot confer any handsomer favor upon a heart longing to thank you, than the permission to offer and dedicate to you, as to a Jew's God, what you have created."

But he wrote me back on the spot:—

"For the same reason, you might still better, in imitation of Sonnenfels, dedicate the work to yourself, and, in a more just sense than others, combine in one person author and patron. I beg you then (were it only on Mr. Von **'s and Mrs. Von **'s account) to leave me out of the play, and confine yourself to the most indispensable notices, which you may be pleased to give the public, of the very mechanical interest which I have in your beautiful work; but for the gods' sake, hic hæc hoc hujus huic hunc hanc hoc hoc hac hoc.

"Von Hafenreffer."

The Latin line is a cipher, and shall remain dark to the public. What the same public has to demand in the way of Introductory Programme consists of four explanations of title, and one of fact.

The first nominal explanation, which relates to the Jubilee Period, I get from the founder of the Period, the Rector Franke, who explains it to be an Era or space of time, invented by him, of one hundred and fifty-two Cycles, each of which contains in itself its good forty-nine tropical Lunar-Solar years. The word Jubilee is prefixed by the Rector for this reason, that in every seventh year a lesser, and in every seven times seventh, or forty-ninth, a greater, Jubilee-, Intercalary-, Indulgence-, Sabbath-, or Trumpet-year occurred, in which one lived without debts, without sowing and laboring, and without slavery. I make a sufficiently happy application, as it seems to me, of this title, Jubilee, to my historical chapters, which conduct the business-man and the business-woman round and round in an easy cycle or circle full of free Sabbath-, Indulgence-, Trumpet-, and Jubilee-hours, in which both have neither to sow nor to pay, but only to reap and to rest; for I am the only one who, like the bowed and crooked-up drudge of a ploughman, stand at my writing-table, and see sowing-machines, and debts of honor, and manacles, before and on me. The seven thousand four hundred and forty-eight tropical Lunar-Solar years which one of Franke's Jubilee periods includes are also found with me, but only dramatically, because in every chapter just that number of ideas—and ideas are, indeed, the long and cubic measure of time—will be presented by me to the reader, till the short time has become as long to him as the chapter required.

A Cycle, which is the subject of my second nominal definition, needs by this time no definition at all.

The third nominal definition has to describe the obligato-leaves, which I edit in loose sheets in every Jubilee period. The obligato-leaves admit absolutely none but pure contemporaneous facts, less immediately connected with my hero, concerning persons, however, the more immediately connected with him; in the obligato-leaves, moreover, not the smallest satirical extravasate of digression, no, not of the size of a blister, is perceptible; but the happy reader journeys on with his dear ones, free and wide awake, right through the ample court-residence and riding-ground and landscape of a whole, long volume, amidst purely historical figures, surrounded on all sides by busy mining-companies and Jews'-congregations, advancing columns on the march, mounted hordes, and companies of strolling players,—and his eye cannot be satisfied with seeing.

But when the Tome is ended, then begins—this is the last nominal definition—a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my honey-moons, because I make less honey therein than I eat, busily employed, not as a working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb. Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'Horen,' Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened?

As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the contrat-social among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always stick to the subject-matter,—which is the history,—because otherwise people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this, that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty volumes, or even a longer one,—as in this, for instance,—thinks or laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,—which sentence has been already executed on me more than once.

Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present reduced to a prescriptive right and confirmed into a servitude, the reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,—as I do here,—have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a matter of course, not only the tribute as alms, but also the don gratuit as quarterly assessment. So does not merely the cultivated Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.

I come now to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor, Von Hafenreffer, who is the subject of my promised exposé of fact.

It must have been formerly learned from the 45th Dog-Post-Day, who governs Flachsenfingen, namely, my revered father. This striking promotion of mine was, at the bottom, more a step than a spring; for I was, previously, no less than a Jurist, consequently the germ or bud of an embryo Doctor utriusque, and consequently a nobleman, since in the Doctor the whole spawn and yolk of the Knight lies; therefore the former, as well as the latter, when anything chances by, lives upon his saddle or stirrup, although less in a robber's castle than in a robber's chamber; I have, therefore, since the preferment, changed less myself than my castle of residence;—the paternal seat in Flachsenfingen is at present my own.

I care not now to eat my sugar-cake at court with sin,—although one earns sugar-cake and manna more comfortably than ship-bread,—but I represent, in order to make a profit upon my adventure, the whole Flachsenfingen Department of Foreign Affairs at home here in the castle, together with the requisite deciphering chancery. This, then, is what we shall do: we have a Procurator in Vienna, two Residents in five Imperial cities, a Secretary of the Comitia in Ratisbon under the Cross-Bench,[21] three Chancery-clerks of the circle, and an Envoyé-Plenipotentiary at a well-known and considerable court not far from Hohenfliess, who is no other than the aforementioned Mr. Feudal Provost Von Hafenreffer. To the latter my father has even advanced a complete silver-service, which we lend him, till he shall have received his recall, because it is for our own interest that a Flachsenfingen ambassador should, while abroad, do extraordinary honor, by his extravagance, to the princely hat or coronet of Flachsenfingen.

Now it is no joke to stand on such a post as this of mine; the whole legation-writing-and-reading company write to me under frank, the chiffre banal and the chiffre déchiffrant are in my hands, and I understand, as it seems to me, the whole mess. It is unutterable, all that I thus learn: it could not be read by men nor drawn by horses, if I were disposed to hatch, biographically, and feed and reel off the whole silk-worm seed of novels, which the corps of ambassadors send me every post-day in closely-sealed packages. Yes (to use another metaphor), the biographical timber which my float-inspection launches for me from up above,—now into the Elbe, now into the Saale, now into the Danube,—stands already so high before me in the ship-yard, that I could not use it up, supposing I drove on the æsthetical building of my biographical fools'-ships, masquerade-balls, and enchanted castles, day and night, year out and year in, and never danced, nor rode, nor spoke, nor sneezed again in my life....

Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against many another spawn, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports, would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean cloister-passages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now, for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent women of the world, veimers[22] ministers of justice, as well as jesters pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the Pointeurs.[23]

I come back to my ambassador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies me—without neglecting other duties—from month to month with as many personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;—the smallest trifles are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different way of thinking from that of other ambassadors, who in their reports make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every cul de sac, servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his opera-glass of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a hand-and-horse service of good luck, no one of us can wonder,—that is, I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,—with such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,—with such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,—in short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, or Montgolfiers,[24]—it cannot of course be anything but just what is expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much) on the Sun, on Uranus and Sirius, and for which even the lucky quill-scraper who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself, and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy tooth of time,—especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by the tooth-saw of the critical file,—shall be able to make any impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but unhappily every nature holds itself,—as Dr. Crusius does the world,—not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.

The present Titan enjoys, besides, the further advantage that I at this moment inhabit and grace the paternal court, and accordingly, as draughtsman, have certain sins near and bright before my eyes in a position most favorable for observation, of which at least Vanity, Libertinism, and Idleness will stay and sit for their likeness; for fate has sowed these mushrooms and mosses as high as possible among the upper classes, because in the lower and broader they would have spread too much, and sucked them dry,—which seems to be the pattern of that same foresight by which ships always have their assafœtida which they bring from Persia hanging overhead on the mast, in order that its stench may not contaminate the freight on deck. Moreover, I have up here in the court all the new fashions already around me for my observation and contempt, before they have been, down below there, only traduced, not to say commended,—e. g. the fine fashion of the Parisians, that women shall by a slight tuck in their dress show their calves, which they do in Paris, in order to let it be seen that they are not gentlemen, who, as is well known, walk on wooden legs,—this fashion will to-morrow or day after to-morrow (for it has arrived on an individual lady) be certainly introduced. But the females of Flachsenfingen imitate this fashion on quite another ground,—for gentlemen among us have no defect,—and that is, as a way of proving that they are human beings, and not apes (to say nothing less), since, according to Camper and others, man alone has calves. The same proof was adduced ten years ago, only on higher grounds. For since, according to Haller, man is distinguished from monkey in no other respect than by the possession of a posterior, the female officers of the crown, the dressing-maids, sought as much as possible to magnify in the persons of their mistresses this characteristic of their sex by art,—by the so-called cul de Paris; and, with such a penultimate of the ultimate, it became then a jest and an amusement to distinguish at a distance of two hundred paces a woman of the world from her female ape,—a thing which now many who know their Buffon by heart will venture to do, when they are no nearer to her than too near.

Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I maintain in several of the German cities;—my honored father pays for them;—in most places one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much like perspective-glasses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author, from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that a staid, quiet man, whom nobody knows but his barber, and whose course of life is like a dark, unfrequented cul de sac, but whom one of my envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror, which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all, into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,—the case may occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair, buttons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of Indian plants which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter.

People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no ambassadors near me.

But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out. No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery, and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge, has seemed thus far to avert the discovery of the true names of my histories, and, indeed, with such success, that of all the manuscripts which have hitherto been despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject, not one has smelt the mouse,—and truly fortunate for the world; for so soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first volumes of Titan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.

Nothing is to be inferred from the names which I use, for I press into the service God-parents for my heroes in the most singular ways. Have I not, e. g., often of an evening, during the marching and countermarching of the German armies, who made their crusades to the holy sepulchre of freedom, gone up and down through the lanes of the camp, with my writing-tablets in my hands, and caught and entered the names of the privates,—which, just before bedtime, were called out aloud, like the names of saints,—just as they fell, in order to distribute them again among my biographical people? And has not merit been promoted thereby, and many a common soldier risen to be a nobleman fit for table and tournament, and have not provost-marshals been raised to ministers of justice, and red-cloaks to patribus purpuratis? And did ever a cock crow in all the army after this corps of observation slinking round mobilized on two legs?

For authors who wish at the same time to narrate and disguise true anecdotes, I am, perhaps, on the whole, a model and file-leader. I have studied and imitated longer than other historical inquirers those little innocent stretching and wrenching processes which can make a history unrecognizable to the very hero of the same, and I fancy I know how one is to make good biographies of princes, protocols of high traitors, legends of saints, and auto-biographies; no stronger touches decide the matter than those slight ones, by which Peter of Cortona (or Beretino) in the presence of Ferdinand of Tuscany transformed a weeping child into a laughing one, and the reverse.

Voltaire demands more than once, as he always does,—for he gave mankind, like an army, every order of march three times, and repeated himself and everything else most indefatigably,—that the historian shall arrange his history after the law-table of the drama, to a dramatic focal point. It is, however, one of the first dramatic rules which Lessing, Aristotle, and the Greek models give us, that the dramatic poet must lend to every historical circumstance which he treats all that is favorable to the poetic illusion, as well as keep clear of everything opposite, and that he must never sacrifice beauty to truth, but the reverse. Voltaire gave, as is well known, not only the easy rule, but the hard model also; and this great theatre poet of the world's theatre, in his benefit dramas of Peter and Charles, never stuck to the truth where he was sure he could attain sooner to illusion. And that is properly the genuine romantic history corresponding to the historical romance. It is not for me, but for others,—namely, the Provost and the Secretaries of Legation,—to decide how far I have treated a true history illusorily. It is a misfortune that the true history of my hero can hardly ever see the light; otherwise the justice might be done me that connoisseurs would confront my poetical deviations with the truth, and thereafter give each of us more easily his own, as well the truth as myself. But this reward is what all royal historiographers and scandalous chroniclers must resign nolens volens, because the true history never appears in conjunction with their works.

But in the composition of a history an author must also keep a sharp look-out upon this point, that it shall not only hit and betray no real persons, but also no false ones, and in fact nobody at all. Before I, e. g., choose a name for a bad prince, I must look through the genealogical index of all governing and governed families, in order not to use a name which some person or other already bears; thus, in Otaheite, even the words which sound like the name of the king are abolished after his coronation, and supplied by others. Now, as I was formerly acquainted with no living courts at all, I was not in a situation, when preparing the battle-pieces and night-pieces which I painted of the Cabals, the Egoism, and the Libertinism of biographical courts, to succeed in skilfully avoiding every resemblance to real ones; yes, for such an idiot as I, it was a miserable help, even, to be often laying Machiavelli open before me, in order, with the assistance of the French history, by painting from the two, to turn off the edge of the application at least upon countries in which no Frenchman or Italian ever had the influence that is generally attributed to both of them upon other Germans; just as Herder, in opposition to those naturalists who derive certain misshapen tribes of men from a half-parentage of apes, makes the very good remark that most of the resemblances to apes—the retreating skull of the Calmucks, the prominent ears of the Pevas, the slender hands in Carolina—appear just in those countries where there are no apes at all. Formerly, then, as was said, striking unlikenesses I could not succeed in hitting; now, on the contrary, every court around which my legation-flotilla coasts is well known to me, and therefore secure from accidental resemblances, particularly every one which I describe,—that of Flachsenfingen, that of Hohenfliess, &c. The theatrical mask which I have on in my works is not the mask of the Greek comedian, which was embossed after the face of the individual satirized,[25] but the mask of Nero, which, when he acted a goddess on the stage, looked like his mistress,[26] and when he acted a god, like himself.

Enough! This digressive introductory programme has been somewhat long, but the Jubilee-period was so, too: the longer the St. John's day of a country, the longer its St. Thomas's night. And now let us dance along together into the book,—into this free ball of the world,—I first as leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me; so that, amidst the sounding baptismal and funeral bells in the Chinese house of this world-building,—welcomed by the singing-school of the muses,—serenaded from on high by the guitar of Phœbus,—we may dance gayly from Tome to Tome, from Cycle to Cycle, from one digression to another, from one dash to another,—till either the work comes to an end, or the workman, or everybody!

FOOTNOTES:

[21] Querbank,—Bench for Protestant Bishops in the Germanic Diet.

[22] Veimer,—old Westphalian judges.

[23] Tellers in faro-banks.

[24] The inventor of the balloon.—Tr.

[25] Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie, etc. de Dubois, Tom. I. Sect. 42.

[26] Sueton. Nero.

SECOND JUBILEE.

The two Biographical Courts.—The Herdsman's Hut.—The Flying.—The Sale of Hair.—The dangerous Bird-pole.—A Storm locked up in a Coach.—Low Mountain-Music.—The loving child.—Mr. Von Falterle from Vienna.—The Torture-Soupé.—The Shattered Heart.—Werther without Beard, but with a Shot.—The Reconciliation.

10. CYCLE.

In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cluster and the olive often ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan (Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all things which belong to May—in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May butter—he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and fencing-schools, all anticipation of the coming riddles and conflicts of his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with his heart full of the glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double conquest.

The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;—the Librarian sought a physical solution of the acoustic and optical illusion; the Lector sought a political one: he could not at all comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially meant by it all.

This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar. "Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain beats gladly a free heart.

At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and now the Principality of Hohenfliess lay only one principality distant from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is known to geographical readers, Haarhaar. The Lector told the Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much because they were diplomatic relatives—although it is true that, among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old folks among the Brandenburghers—as because they were really relatives, and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two courts,—which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,—with all their heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him, namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial estate of Hohenfliess—its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and breed of horses—in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the shepherd's-flute; not of the energies and matrimonial prospects of others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must ruin!"

As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an excursion to Blumenbühl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short, that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of Blumenbühl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.

It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee, because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however, to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned round, the tower of Blumenbühl below them to the east; from the one and from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village, and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days. He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life, and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.

But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood, when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod, over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.

11. CYCLE.

It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day—and likewise on the birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not received the title yet—that this same director—that was to be—had his chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pestitz, and see the Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the flail of the state, by way of experiment, into a drill-plough. He was a brisk, bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill to others, and to whom nothing made time pass heavily but pastime. "In the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it, for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,—little as there was in it,—and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.

But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to the reader?

Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only inborn not acquired sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclopædia of all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say, the rector of the place,—named Wehmeier, better known by the title of Band-box-master,—after schooling the village youth for the usual number of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest Struve's spare hours, his Otia and Noctes Hagianæ, in teaching Albano, and driving into the mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy—impelled by internal streams—alphabetic pins,—so as to make it the barrel of a speech-organ. Of course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So, also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary, sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests, only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating aura seminalis to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider, you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups, instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,—and who grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the vine-dressers, with your hoeing and your dunging and your clipping. O, can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all, alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt ourselves to the perception of her beauty,—can you ever, in any way, make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence it is that your élèves so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.

Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and made the mark ["with care">[ with which merchants commend valuable boxes of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at evening before the new teacher from the city.

Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in reference to her companion, may be compared with Luke, and mine with Matthew.[28] Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid up against this day as a birthday christening present.

But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house; for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will, however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister, Rabette, that annoying foster) said, without thinking, No, although she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,—then the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and pleaded for him, without knowing why,—then Albina protested at least he should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,—then he marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition, gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.

12. CYCLE.

Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years. Exultingly did his new and old Adam—they flew side by side—flap their wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and earnings,—because an honest man like him finds always in the body politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the stone drapery remains,—nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.

The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the herdsman's mountain fortification, and received from the soldier's wife the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the windows and looked in beckoning,—when Albano beheld, under the window toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,—when at the western window he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,—when he placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!" then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.

The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat. The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who, blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley, and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself free and passive into the broad ether!—and so plashing up and down in the cool, all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,—or to sweep after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun, and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter, intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red clouds!...

Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones? Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,—just as if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness, and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the body the body also can lift up the soul.

The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade along with the brook, which was running away into the pale-green birch thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,[29] and he loved to go with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook, deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He could not accomplish it,—the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the brook broader,—the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high overhead;—but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus, for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as the longest; but the day after either was fatal.[30]

At last, after the progress of some hours in time and space, he heard, beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called out on all sides of him, but in a cry;—it was his private patron saint, the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his account at the foot of the mountain.

He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white, glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,—when he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town—views of which hung in the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the mountains—distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates for him were closed,—and when, indeed, everything seemed flying westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood—ah yes, every age—often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's. Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than they show or we imagine.

Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner, and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,—and the thought that this was the birthday of his foster-father,—and his inexpressible love for his afflicted mother, upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when he was alone,—and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his seeking mother.

He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.

Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep only their promises, but never a threat,—resembling the forest-officers of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws, impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to one hundred kreutzers.[31] They, however, like Solon, who gave out his laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.

13. CYCLE.

I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself, were I not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying back of the table dinner-service.

Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and phosphorescing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,—even as at evening we remember the morning,—and the forms of Nature drew nearer to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the screaming of the cocks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again on the shore of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy lamb-clouds!

Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes and groping too far into the garden,—besides, the blind girl did not see,—holding his arms open before him so as not to run against anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up, he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside, stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one, holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"—and as she, with a modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down on her bowed head with sweet emotion.

Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,—from whose ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give them back,—she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an inner, finer band, and the blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of Dresden into her apron, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came trudging up the Pestitz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly, to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and would rather please herself in the glass than others out of it. The merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon, and a very serviceable leather queue of Würzburg fabric into the bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,—so was Lea with hope,—the Jew said he must pack up,—besides, the hair-queue which he had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French Insigné, and buckled on the Würzburg sheath.

And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-god, to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.

By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of pure monkery and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape, and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires of Pestitz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....

But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious lady,—for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the male support of Titan, firmly planted by some farmers' boys—to whom, moreover, Albina has intrusted the remarche-règlement of hastening his return—on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half as much as the last bird.

I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine figure!

The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.

14. CYCLE.