Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source: http://books.google.com/books?id=p-ukFFdXOVoC&dq

TITAN:

A ROMANCE.

FROM THE GERMAN OF

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

TRANSLATED BY

CHARLES T. BROOKS.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO., 60 Paternoster Row.
1863.

Contents of Vol. II.

TITAN.

What a universal joy of the people could now ring and roar, for a space of eight days, from one frontier of the land to the other! For so long was the public sorrow suspended; the bells sounded for something better than a march to the grave; music was again allowed to all musical clocks and people; all theatres would have been opened, had there been one there, or had the court been shut up, which was a continual play-house; and now one could walk and visit and promulgate decrees in high places, without the black border. By and by, when this refreshing interlude was over, during which one enjoyed orchestra, punch, and cakes, they were to go back again with the more zest to weeping and tragedies.

On the morning of the tedious procession of carriages going forth to form the escort, the Prince rode out beforehand over the limits, with Bouverot and Albano,—all three as being the only people in the land who were independent and uninterested in the festival. Poor Luigi! I have already very distinctly stated, in the first volume of "Titan," that the princely bridegroom who to-day mounts the bridal bed can only be a father of his country, not father of a family. Under the heaven of his princely throne, as on the first row of the chess-field, all is to be made and regenerated,—officers, even the queen of chess, but not the Schach[^[2]] himself. It were to be wished, since the circumstance makes the festival shade into the ridiculous, that the bridegroom could only, by way of shaming many old families that laugh at him,—old so often, even in the heraldic and medical sense at once,—show them some dozen of the princes ranged around the nuptial altar, whom he has seated in Calabria, Wales, Asturia, in Dauphiny,—all Europe was a Dauphiny to him,—in short, in so many active[^[3]] hereditary lands,—that is, the heirs, not heirlooms, of foreign princes. Could he do that, then would he look more contentedly into this day's congratulations, because some dozen fulfilments would be already standing by, and awaiting his nod. But as the Marchioness of Exeter can transform the bed of the Marquis in London, which costs three thousand pounds, into a throne, so must the Princess also do with hers, without being able, like her, to reverse the transformation.

I will therefore introduce and lead him out on the dancing-floor of to-day's joy, not at all as bridegroom, but, in every instance,—just as we speak of the crown without the crowned head,—merely as Bridegroom's-coat, so as not to make him ridiculous. Albano rode along with a breast full of indignation, scorn, and pity beside this victim of dark state policy, and simply could not comprehend how it was that Luigi did not send the German gentleman, that hired axe and uprooter of his family tree, with one kick far behind him howling. Good youth! a prince more easily sets himself free from men whom he loves, than from such as he has full long hated; for his fear is stronger than his love.

The great-hearted, never narrow-chested, always broad-breasted youth found to-day, in his solemn, painful frame of mind, everything tragical, noble and ignoble, greater than it was. He showed, indeed, only a fiery eye and animated countenance, because he was too young and modest to make a display of personal grief; but beneath the eye, which was fixed on the spot of blue in the heavens where his dark clouds were this day to break away or fall upon him, stood the glistening tear-drop. The coming evening, into which he had so often looked as into a hell, and full as often as into a heaven, stood now, as a confused medium between the two, so near,—ah, hard by him! A throng of kindred feelings attended him to the (in his opinion unhappy) bride of—his father and this prince.

A quarter of a mile the other side of Hohenfliess might already be seen jogging on her Gibbon, well known among all natural historians—not among the politicians—by the long arms which this owner of the Moluccas and Ape notoriously carries. "Where is my Gibbon?" the Princess usually asked (even supposing she had in her hand, at the moment, the English namesake,—the historian with long nails and short sentences against the Christians) when she wanted her Longimanus.

At last she came prancing along—all plumed and in riding-habit—on the finest English steed,—a tall, majestic figure, who, indifferent to her court-retinue, although freighted with relatives, would much rather have looked a welcome to the blue morning sun behind a rearing horse's and swan's neck. She gave the Bridegroom's-coat with propriety greeting and kiss, but neither with emotion nor dissimulation nor embarrassment, but freely and frankly and cordially, too far exalted above the ridiculousness of her genealogical disproportion to do otherwise; yes, even above every thought of that disproportion which necessity or tyranny created. In her otherwise fairly built—rather than finely drawn—face, her nose alone was not so, but angularly cut and presenting more bones than cartilage in contrast to the commonplace character of regents. With women, marked, irregular noses, e. g. with deep indenture of the bridge, or with concave or convex archings, or with facettes at the knob, &c., signify far more for talent than with men; and—except in the case of a few whom I myself have seen—beauty must always sacrifice something to genius, although not so much as afterward the genius of others sacrifices to beauty, as we men in general have, unfortunately perhaps, done.

The Count was presented to the Princess; she had not known him,—although she had heard of him and seen his father so long,—but had rather fancied him to resemble the Bridegroom's-coat. The coat could not—or should not—have failed to be flattered by this blooming likeness. The likeness entirely explains the beautiful interest which she now must needs take in both, because it always takes a couple of people to make a resemblance.

She spoke with the son without any embarrassment about the Knight of the Fleece having been presented by her and her Court with a (flower-) basket,[^[4]] and extolled his knowledge of art. "Art," said she, "makes in the end all lands alike and agreeable. When that is once had, one thinks of nothing further. At Dresden, in the inner gallery, I really believed I was in joyous Italy. Yes, if one should go to Italy itself, one would forget even Italy in the midst of all that one finds there." Albano answered, "I know, I too shall one day intoxicate myself with the old wine of art, and glow under it; but for the present it is to me merely a beautiful, blooming vineyard, whose powers I certainly know beforehand, without as yet feeling them." The Princess won his esteem so exceedingly, that he put the question to her, when the Prince, a few steps onward, was surveying from the window the swelling flood of the Pestitz escort, how the German ceremonies of her rank struck her artistic taste. "Tell me," said she, lightly, "what station among us has not full as many, and where, in the whole range of situations, do not priests and advocates play their part? Just look for once at the marriages of the imperial cities. The Germans are herein no better nor worse than any other nation, old or new, wild or polished. Think of Louis Fourteenth. Once for all, such is man; but I do not, of course, respect him for that."

The Prince reminded them now of the hour of march; and the Princess mustered together, by way of attiring herself for the grand entrée, more, dressing-maids and toilet-boxes than Albano, according to her words, or we, according to the cartilages of her nose,—which seemed spiritual wing-bones,—should have expected. Her hurrying people followed her with more dread than reverence for her rank or character; and some, who occasionally ran by out of the dressing-chamber, had downcast faces.

At last she appeared again, but much fairer than before. There must surely belong to the manliest woman more charming womanliness than we think, since such a one gains by female finery, by which the most effeminate man would only lose. "Rank," said she to Albano, showing a great candor in opinions, which easily consists with a quite as great reserve in emotions, "oppresses and confines a great soul oftentimes less than sex." Her calling herself a great soul could not but strike the Count, because he now saw before him the first example—another man knows innumerable examples—of the fact, that distinguished women praise themselves outright, and far more than distinguished men.

The grand movement began. On a boundary bridge, which, like the printer's hyphen, was at once sign of separation and of connection between the two principalities, half Hohenfliess already sat halting in carriages and on horseback, until an upset, shabby old vehicle, with village comedians, could be raised again on the fourth wheel, and the mythological household furniture which they had in hand packed in. But when the Princess made her way by main force on to the bridge, suddenly passengers and packers converted themselves into muses, gods of music, gods of love, and a pretty little Hymen, and, in theatrical decoration and apparatus, flooded the encircled bride with their poetic effusions, representing the war of the other gods against the virgin-stealer Hymen. The son of the muses who had versified the matter acted a part himself, as father of the muses. I dare say that this original invention of the Minister was very favorably received, as well by Haarhaar as by Hohenfliess.

Froulay, all prinked and powdered, as if he were stretching himself out on the bed of state between funeral-gueridons,[^[5]] marched out before her as spokesman of the country, which wished to testify its happy participation in her marriage to the Bridegroom's-coat. The Princess abridged and clipped short all festal lying with a fine pair of ladies' scissors.

Froulay had, among other carriages, brought with him also one containing several trumpeters and kettle-drummers, levied from all quarters, in which, for joke's sake, Schoppe stood, too, who did not often stay away from great processions of men, for this reason, because men never looked more ridiculous than when they did anything in mass and multitude. By way of bringing salt to the solemnities, he set up in his carriage the hypothesis that they were doing all this merely, with the best intention, for the sake of driving the bride back again to where she had come from, partly by way of sparing her the sham- and stage-marriage, partly by way of sparing the land the new court-state. Her ear, he assumed, when the cannon drawn up on the surrounding hills mingled with the trumpeting of his thunder-car, and three postmasters, with fifteen postilions, who had not been posted there for nothing, with their best horns and lungs, blew their horns at the same moment,—her ear must be very much tortured, and she somewhat repelled, by such a welcome. Hence they even send empty state-coaches with the rest, just for the sake of the rattling, even as, in the province of Anspach, the farmer, merely by frightful screaming, without ammunition or dogs, drives the stags from his crops.[^[6]] As ships do in the fog by lanterns and drums, so would states fain keep themselves apart by illumination and firing.

She still, however, I see, moves onward, said he, on the way,—sometimes taking into his hands with profit the diphthong of the kettle-drum,—and we must all accordingly follow after; but perhaps her ear is already dead, and she is now only to be come at through the eye. In this hope he was exceedingly delighted with the dapple uniform of the assembled officers and feather scarecrows of the court-liveries. Now there is still to come, he predicted, joyfully, the gold-spangled, triumphal arch, with vases and pipers, through which she must directly pass; and do not people scare away sparrows from the cherry trees, then, with gold leaf and Selzer pitchers?

O, thought he, when she was through, if that Gothic tyrant suffered himself to be led back from his plundering expedition into holy Rome by the suppliant procession of the Pope that came to meet him, then certainly it must prevail with her, when the orphan children in the suburbs come imploringly to meet her with their foster-father, then the schoolmasters with their pages, then the gymnasium and the university,—all which, however, to be sure, is only a skirmish with the outposts; for the gate is occupied with infantry, the whole market with citizens capable of bearing arms, the cathedral is guarded by the clergy, the council-house by the magistracy, all ready, if she does not turn back, to march after her at a certain distance, as police-patrol and choirs of observation; and are there not seven bridal couples stationed at the palace-gate, as seven prayers and penitential psalms? and do they not bring to meet her—upon a pillory of satin, quite unconscious of the effect—a dismal Pereat-Carmen[^[7]] composed by myself, a decree of the 19th June?

All right! said he, when the whole train, by way of affording an easier inspection to the powers and principalities clustered at the palace-windows, rode twice through the palace-yard; this double dose must take hold. Schoppe's hopes were farthest from falling when he found that, because it was gala, they kept themselves up-stairs long concealed and silent; and at length the Prince, as victor, but exhausted, was brought down by court-cavaliers into the chapel, in order publicly to give thanks for the retreat of the hostile forces. Nay, when presently the bride, too, pressed after, held back, however, by the arms of chamberlains,—even drawn back by her court-dames holding her train,—then could the Librarian easily afford to dismiss all anxiety.

Albano's tossing soul imaged the confused court world as still more wild and misshapen than it was. He heard the princely cousins, even the future successor to chair and throne, wish their cousin Luigi health, a happy marriage, and sequel thereto, although they, through their friend,—a living succession-poison,[^[8]]—had caused so much of these three things to be taken away from him that they could assign him precisely their cold-blooded kinswoman as crown-guard of their next succession. He heard the same marriage-songs from all court Pestitzers, who, like a muscle, manifested a special effort to make themselves short. He saw how lightly, coldly, and with what malicious pleasure, the Prince, although with the feeling that he should soon drown in his dropsy, his water or fat in the limbs, carried off all the lies. O, must not princes themselves lie, because they are eternally cheated? themselves learn to flatter, because they are forever flattered? He himself could not bring himself to cast so much as the smallest mite of a lying congratulation into the general treasury of lies.

The Princess flung the Count—as often as it would do, and almost oftener—two or three looks or words; for this blooming one, among the throne-coasters, from whom one more easily hears an echo than an answer, was reminded only of his powerful father. The Captain—who, like all enthusiasts, and like moths and crickets, loved warmth and shunned light, and because all people of mere understanding were tedious to him—complained several times to Albano, that the Princess displeased him with her cold, witty understanding; but the Count—out of regard for the beloved of his father, and out of hatred toward her sacrificial priests and butchers—could only pity a being, who perhaps must hate now, because her greatest love had set. How many noble women, who would otherwise have held it a higher thing to admire than to be admired, have become powerful, rich in knowledge, almost great, but unhappy and coquettish and cold, because they found only a pair of arms, but no heart between them, and because their ardently devoted souls met with no likeness of themselves, by which a woman means an unlike image, namely one higher than her own! Then the tree with its frozen blossoms stands there in autumn high, broad, green, and fresh, and dark with foliage, but with empty, fruitless twigs.

At last they came out of the sweltry dining-halls into the fresh evening of Lilar, into the open air and freedom. Half indignant, half bewildered with love, Albano went to meet a veiled hour, in which so many a riddle and his dearest one were to be solved. What does man see before him, when with the thread in his hand he steps out of the subterranean labyrinth? Nothing but the open entrances into other labyrinths, and the choice among them is his only wish.

78. CYCLE.

On the loveliest evening, when the heavens were transparent to the very bottom of all the stars, the Prince let the weary assembly drive to Lilar, in order to make a better illusion with his two invisibilities, with the Illumination and with Liana's tableau vivant. With what growing anxiety and tenderness did the honest Albano's susceptible heart beat, as, during the rolling down from the woodland bridge into the expectant throng of the tumultuous populace, he thought to himself,—She, too, went this way into the Lilar which used to be so dear to her. His whole realm of ideas became an evening rain before the sun, of which one half trembles glistening before the sun and the other vanishes in a gray mist. Ah, before Liana it had rained without sunshine, when she to-day secretly went over merely into the Temple of Dream, in order only to personate a beloved being, but not to be one.

Not a lamp was yet burning. Albano looked into every green depth after his angel of light. Even the Prince himself, who kept the sudden kindling up of the St. Peter's dome still awaiting his nod and beck, anticipated the pleasure, so rare at courts, of giving a twofold surprise. The Princess had spared the Minister the dilemma of a lie or an answer, for she had not inquired at all after her future court-dame Liana, like the whole of that strong class of women, indifferent to her sex, but attaching herself so much the more fixedly to a select one. Albano espied, in the dark, driving whirl, his foster-parents and Rabette; but in this reeling of the ground and of the soul he could only, like others, direct his eyes toward the veil (itself veiled) behind which he had more than all others to find and to lose. In the years of youth, however, no black veil, only a motley one, hangs down, and in all its sorrows are still hopes!

The people awaited the splendor and the music. The Prince at last led his bride toward the Temple of Dream; Charles, to-day blind to his Rabette, not for her, took with him the glowing Count. In the outer temple nothing could be detected corresponding to its magic name; only the windows went from the roof of this Pavilion down to the very ground; and, instead of frames and window-sills, were set in twigs and leaves. But when the Princess had gone in through a glass door, the Pavilion seemed to her to have vanished away; one seemed to stand on a solitary, open spot, guarded with some tree-stems, which all vistas of the garden met and crossed. Wondrously, as if by sportive dreams, were the regions of Lilar intermingled, and opposites drawn together; beside the mountain with the thunder-house stood the one with the altar, and hard by the enchanted wood the high, dark Tartarus reared itself. The near and the far swallowed each other up; a fresh rainbow of garden-hues and a faded mock-rainbow ran on beside each other, as, when one wakes, the shadow of the dream-image glides away, still visible, before the glittering present. While the Princess was still sinking away into the dreamy illusion,[^[9]] Liana—as if gliding out of the air through a glass side-door, in Idoine's favorite attire,—in a white dress with silver flowers, and in unadorned hair, with a veil, which, fastened only on the left side, flowed down at full length—came tremulously forth, and when the deceived Princess cried out, "Idoine!" she whispered, with a trembling and scarcely audible voice: "Je ne suis qu'un songe."[^[10]] She was to say more and offer a flower; but when the Princess, with emotion, went on to exclaim: "Sœur chérie!"[^[11]] and folded her passionately in her arms, then she forgot all, and only wept out her heart upon another heart, because to her another's vain languishing after a sister was so touching. Albano stood near to the sublime scene; the bandage was torn off from all his wounds, and their blood flowed down warmly out of them all. O, never had she, or any other form, been so ethereally beautiful, so heavenly-blooming, and so meek and lowly!

When she raised her eyes out of the embrace, they fell upon Albano's pale countenance. It was pale, not with sickness, but with emotion. She started back, quivering, and embraced the Princess again; the pale youth had wrung from her agitated heart one tear after another; but the two did not greet each other,—and thus began their evening.

During the illusion and the embrace, at a nod from the Prince, all twigs and gates of the garden were involved in a glistening conflagration; all water-works of the enchanted wood started up, and fluttered aloft with golden wings; in the inverted rain played a white, green, golden, and gloomy world, and the jets of water and of flame flew up mischievously against each other, like silver and gold pheasants. And the splendor of the burning Eden embraced the Temple of Dream, and the reflection fell on its inner green foliage-work, and turned it to gold.

Liana, holding the hand of the admiring Princess, stepped out, with downcast, bashful eyes, into the bright, busy city of the sun, into the din of the music and of the exultant spectators. Upon Albano the stormy scene came shooting like a torrent; such opposite and strangely intermingled parts played before such opposite persons, the splendor of the evening's gladness, and the nightly bewilderment in his bosom, made it hard for him to walk through this evening with a firm step.

The Princess soon drew him onward in her wake and vortex; Liana she let not go from her side. The Minister daubed and starched up with old gallantries the erotic slave; but to every one he appeared, as the Princess settles with creditors after the death of the Prince, to imitate only the manner of ministers, whose spirit loves to proceed from Father and Dauphin—filioque[^[12]]—at once, in order to seat itself, not between, but upon two princely chairs. She seemed, however, since his manœuvring with Liana, to receive him more haughtily. He was sufficiently blessed in the good fortune of his daughter, as his step-son Bouverot was by her nearness, and this pair of knaves lay deeply buried and revelling in nothing but flowers. Albano could divine nothing more than that even a cold dragon, an orang-outang of souls, was darkly spying out the charms of this angel.

The Minister's lady and the Lector took turns, with an easy alternation, in guarding Liana from every word—of Albano. The Princess let herself be conducted through the sparkling pleasure-avenues, through the enchanted wood which was standing in moist lightnings, and finally to the thunder-house, by way of taking the burning garden from all points into her picturesque eye; Liana and Albano attended her through all the walks of her withered, stale Arcadia, and held their shattered hearts mutely and steadfastly together. True to her word with her parents, she gave him no warmer look or tone than any other, but no colder one neither; for her soul would not torment, but only suffer and obey. He made—he thought—all his looks and tones gentle, nor did the noble man avenge himself by a single manifestation of coldness, or in fact of any insincere making-of-friends with the princely female-recruiting-officer of crowns and hearts.

The Princess began to be unintelligible to him. They passed from the romantic to romance, then to the question, why it did not portray marriage. "Because," she replied, "it [romance] cannot be without love." "And marriage?" asked Albano, uncourteously. "Cannot exist without a friend," said she; "but Love is a god, nec Deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus inciderit,"[^[13]] she added, for she had learned Latin for the sake of the poets.

Bouverot finished the verse, in order to make the sense ambiguous,—"Nec quarta loqui persona laboret."[^[14]] No one understood this last but the Lector and the Princess.

"Why are there no lamps in that house?" she inquired. "Who lives there?" She meant Spener's house. Liana answered only the latter question, and concluded her glowing picture with the words, "He lives for immortality." "What does he write?" inquired the Princess, misunderstanding her; and Liana must needs give a Christian explanation of the matter, whereupon the unbelieving woman smiled. There arose forthwith a dispute for and against the eternal sleep, which took up not much less time than they needed for making the circle of the thunder-house. The Princess began: "We should have quite as much to say against our every-day sleep, if it were not a fact, as against the eternal one." "More, too, however, against our ever waking out of it," said Albano, striking in, and cut short the religious disturbances.

The Princess came back again with her inquiries after Spener, who had interested her by his long mourning for her deceased father-in-law; and Liana, sure of her mother's concurrence, poured herself out into a stream of speech and emotion,—her eyes were forbidden to shed one,—on which was borne along a sublime image of her teacher. How the exaltation of this so delicate, tender soul thrilled her friend! So in the pale, small moon and evening star do higher mountains rear themselves than on our larger earth! "She was once inspired for thee, too, but now no more," said Albano to himself, and stayed behind after all the rest had gone on, because his soul had been long since full of pains, and because now the Princess began to displease him.

He posted himself alone, and looked at the ringing, gleaming war-dance of joy. The children ran illuminated through the uproar and in the bright green foliage. The tones hovered and hung twining together into one wreath, high in their ether above the noisy swarm of men, and sang down to them their heavenly songs. Only in me, said he to himself, do the tones and the lights toss a sea of agony to and fro, in no one else, in her not at all; she has brought with her for all others her old gladdening heart of love, not for me; she has not thus far suffered, she blooms in health. He considered not, however, that in fact his struggles also had shed not a drop of water into the dark red glow of his youth; in Liana well might wounds from such conflicts, like those of the scratched Aphrodite, only dye the white roses red.

But he determined to remain a man before so many eyes, and to await the crisis and Liana's solitude. He therefore exchanged several rational words with his foster relatives from Blumenbühl;—he said to Rabette: "It pleases you, does it not?" He startled, unintentionally, the Captain, who was hovering about some new faces from Haarhaar, with the unmeaning question, "Why dost thou leave my sister so alone?"

But as often as he looked at Liana, who to-day went in her long veil, as the only one without any thick, heavy gala-wrappage, as if she were a young, breathing, tender form among painted stone statues, so bashfully putting others to the blush, glistening and trembling like an egrette,—so often did masses of flame fly wildly to and fro within him. Passion, as the epilepsy often does with its victims, hurries us away, precisely at the dangerous crises of life, to shores and precipices. He leaned his head against a tree, slightly bowed down; then Charles came along out of his waltzes of joy, and asked him, with alarm, what provoked him so; for his bending down had cast gloomy, wild shadows upon his tense, muscular face; "Nothing," said he, and the face gleamed mildly when he lifted it up. At this moment, also, came the unreflecting Rabette, and would fain draw him into the general joy, and said, "Does anything ail thee?" "Thou!" he replied, and looked at her very indignantly.

"Go into the gloomy oak-grove to Gaspard's rock!" cried his heart. "Thy father never bowed; be his son!" Thereupon he strode away through the world of brilliancy; but when, far within, amidst the darkness, he leaned his head upon the rock, and the tones came toyingly and teasingly in after him, and he thought to himself, how he could have loved such a noble soul,—O how exceedingly!—then it was as if something said within him, "Now thou hast thy first sorrow on earth!"

As during an earthquake doors fly open and bells ring, so at the thought, "first sorrow," was his soul rent asunder, and hard tears dashed down. But he wondered at hearing himself weep, and indignantly wiped his face on the cool moss.

Weakened, not hardened, he stepped out into the enchanted land, besprinkled with glimmering jewels, and among the tones which came dancing more rapturously to meet him, and would fain snatch his soul away and lift it up and set it on high places, so that it might look down into far and wide spring-times of life! Here on this once blessed soil he saw lying the shattered, trampled pearl-string of his future days. "O how happy we might have been this evening!" thought he, and looked into the bright Feast of Tabernacles, into the gilded but living branchwork,—into the green, flitting reflection, rocked by the night-wind, and into the wild-fire of burning bushes in the flowing waters. On the arched triumphal gates stood lights like heaven-descended constellations of the wain, and behind him the dark cloister-wall of Tartarus, which showed sublimely in its summits only single small lights; and, over beyond, the silent mountains sleeping in night, and here the noisy life of men, playing with the night-butterflies about the lamps!

Thus does the fire within us of itself create in us the storm-wind which fans it still higher. The tones that floated by him spoke to him every thought which he would fain kill. As man sees himself, so does he often hear himself, in the presence of a sound of music.

At this moment Liana went off some distance from the crowd with Augusti. "I will speak with her, then it will be over," said he to himself, as he drew near her, battling and wrestling with himself: he saw plainly that she wanted to be back again among strange listeners. "Liana, what have I then done to thee?" said he, with the deep-souled tone of a tender heart, bitterly despising the Lector's presence and powers. "Only do not desire an answer to-day, dear Count," said she, turning back, and took in haste Augusti's arm; but he remarked not that she did it to avoid sinking. Upon this he cast at the Lector a fiery look, hoping to be offended and then avenged,—left her in haste and silence;—the sweetest wine of love a hot ray had sharpened into vinegar;—and he slipped away, without knowing it, into the temple of dream.

He went up and down therein, murmuring, "Je ne suis qu'un songe"; but was soon driven out into Tartarus by his disgust at so many copies of himself moving round with him, and by the eternal spring of tones flying after him, which just now beside the upturned flower-bed of life was so intolerable.

In Tartarus all the apparatus of horror seemed to him now very diminutive and ridiculous. Just then, not far from the Catacomb avenue, Roquairol and Rabette came to meet him. Roquairol's flaming face was extinguished and Rabette's turned backward, when Albano passionately strode forth to meet them, and, still more imbittered by the remembrance of the time when their heavens were contemporaneous, and flaming up under the wind which blew upon his glowing ruins, attacked the Captain with: "Art thou a friend? Art thou no devil? Thou hast referred me to this evening: never, never say a word more of it!" Both trembled, confused and colorless; Albano, without further reflection, ascribed the growing pale and turning away to their sympathy for his martyrdom. What a confounding, hostile night!

He roved onward and onward, the licking fire of the joy and music that pursued him tormented him unspeakably,—the tones were to him mocking tropical birds of fairer, warmer zones that came fluttering to meet him. "I will just go to my bed, so soon as it once becomes still within there!" He was half a mile off, when the music of Lilar still continued to sound after him; he sternly stopped his ears, but Lilar still sounded on within them,—then he perceived that he was only listening to himself. But all the time it seemed to him as if the merry ringing must, as in Don Juan, resolve itself into a cry of murder at the presence of ghosts.

The avenue of coming days ran to a frightful point before him, when he now snatched out from them the moon of his heaven, which had once gleamed upon his childish heart and upon the paths of Blumenbühl. The blooming, dancing genius of his past, all unseen, with only the wreath of joy in its hand, stole away behind him, while he struggled with the dark angel of futurity going before him, who dragged him along after him through sounding thickets,—through sleepy villages,—through moist, trickling valleys. At last Albano looked up to heaven, beneath the innumerable eternal stars, to the hanging blossom-garden of God. "I am not ashamed before you," said he, "because I weep on this ball, and am oppressed before your immensity. Up there ye stand, all of you, far asunder,—and on all great worlds every poor spirit has, after all, only one little spot beneath its feet where it is happy or miserable. When only this night has once gone by, and I am gone to my bed; to-morrow I shall certainly be a man and stand fast!"

Suddenly he heard several times an almost exasperated cry of lamentation. At length he beheld, near a stream, outstretched white sleeves or arms; he went to the female form. "Alas! I am blind of God," said she; "I too was at the illumination, and have strayed away; I am generally acquainted with road and lane; over yonder lies our village; I hear the shepherd dog, but I cannot find the bridge over the water." It was the grown-up blind girl of the herdsman's hut. "Does it still go on pleasantly there?" he asked, as he guided her along. "All over!" said she. On the bridge of the Rosana she would not, out of vanity, let herself be directed any farther.

He returned through the pleasant bushes, which were already dripping with the dew of morning, to an eminence before Lilar. All was still down below there; a few scattered lamps flickered in the flute-dell, and in Tartarus a couple, like deadly tiger-eyes, still lingered. He went down into the vacant land away over the silent, flat grave,—up through his gloomy, downward-ascending cavern-avenue,—and into his bed. "To-morrow!" said he with energy, and meant his vow of steadfastness.

[EIGHTEENTH JUBILEE.]

Gaspard's Letter.—The Blumenbühl Church.—Eclipse of the Sun and of the Soul.

79. CYCLE.

If in the foregoing night a strange, hostile spirit cruelly drove against each other and away from each other human beings with bandaged eyes, so will that spirit on the morning after, when from a cold cloud he surveyed his battle-field with sparkling eyes, have almost smiled at all the joys and harvests which lie prostrate round about him down below there.

In Blumenbühl, Rabette, in lonely corners, wrings her hands with trembling arms, and breathes upon the wall-plaster, to wipe away the redness of wet eyes; out of Lilar comes Albano, gloomily looks upon the earth instead of its inhabitants, and from the astronomical tower gazes eagerly into the heavens, and seeks no friend; Roquairol musters up horses and riders, and makes himself, out in the country, a merry, drunken evening; Augusti shakes his head over letters from Spain, and reflects upon them disagreeably, but deeply; Liana leans in an easy-chair, all crushed, with her face falling towards her shoulder, and nothing blooming in it any longer save innocence; her father strides up and down, with a reddish-brown complexion; she answers but faintly, lifting from time to time her folded hands a little. Before the night-spirit on the cloud men's time goes swiftly by, as a fleeting pair of wings without beak or tail; the spirit has near him the distant week when Albano shall see by night from the observatory how in the Blumenbühl church there burns an altar-light, how Liana kneels therein with uplifted hands, and how an old man lays his own on her serene, shining brow, which directs itself with tearless eyes toward heaven.

The spirit looks down deeper into the months; he writhes around himself for delight, and grins over all dwelling-places and pleasure-haunts of men which lie about him; often a laugh runs round along all his open hell-teeth, only sometimes he gnashes them under the cover of the lip-flesh.

Look away,—for he too sees and wills it,—and step down from the wintry spectre among the warm children of men, and on the firm ground of reality, where flying time, like the flying earth, seems to rest upon steadfast roots, and where only eternity, like the sun, seems to rise.

Albano's wound, which cut through his whole inner man, you can best measure by the bandage which he sought to bind around it. Our grief may be guessed from the solace and self-deception we resort to. The next morning he let his griefs discourse across one another, and lay still, before their funeral wail, as a corpse; then he rose up, and spoke thus to himself: "Only one of two things is possible,—either she is still true to me, and only her parents now constrain her,—then they again must be constrained, and there is nothing at all to be lamented,—or else, from some weakness or other, perhaps towards her tyrannical and beloved parents, she is no longer true to me, or it may be out of coldness toward me, or from religious scruples, error, and so on; in that case I see," he continued, and tried to tread his two feet deeper and firmer into the ground, without, however, having any purchase, "nothing else to be done than to do nothing; not to be a crying suckling, a groaning sickling, but an iron man; not to weep blood over a past heart, over the ashes of death lying deep upon all fields and plantations of my youth, and over my monstrous grief." Thus did he delude himself, and mistake the necessity of consolation for its actual presence.

Every evening he visited the star-tower out of the city, on the Blumenbühl heights. He found the old, solitary, meagre, eternally-reckoning, wifeless, and childless keeper, always friendly and unembarrassed as a child, making no inquiries after war-news, journals of fashion, and poesies, and never paying money for his pleasure, except on the coach to Bode and Zach. But the old eye sparkled when it looked from under the sparse eyebrows into heaven, and his heart and tongue rose to poetry when he spoke of the highest mundane spot, the light heaven over the dark, low earth,—of the immense, universal sea without shore, wherein the spirit, which in vain seeks to fly across it, sinks exhausted, and whose ebb and flow only the Infinite One sees at the foot of his throne,—and of the hope of a starry heaven after death, which then no earthly disk, as now, shall intersect, but which shall arch itself around itself, without beginning and without end.

If Socrates humbled the proud Alcibiades with a map of the world, so, when this in turn is annihilated by a chart of the heavens, must our pride and sorrow on the earth be still more put to the blush. Albano was ashamed to think of himself, when he looked up into the immense ascending night above him, wherein days and morning twilights abide and move. He edified himself and his teacher when he spoke of this: how even now overhead, in the immensity, spring-times and paradises of new-born worlds and thundering[^[15]] suns and earths burning up are flying across each other's paths, and we stand here below like deaf men under the sublime hurricane, and the roaring tempest and torrent shows itself to us, so far off, only as a still, stationary, white rainbow on the brow of night.

As often as Albano's great eye came back from heaven, it found the earth brighter and lighter. But at length the night came, which the hostile spirit had already so long lived in anticipation. It was already very late, and the heavens quite serene; the nebulæ crowded down nearer, as higher market-towns;[^[16]] the sky seemed more white than blue. Albano thought of the hidden loved one, who, were she by his side, would still more consecrate the heavens and himself with her heartful of unceasing prayers; when suddenly, through his lowered telescope, he espied light in the Blumenbühl church,—the princely vault open,—Liana kneeling at the altar, with uplifted hands,—and an old man near her, as if blessing her. Fearfully stood the torch-flames and Liana's face and arms upside down; for the telescope caused everything to appear inverted.

Albano, shuddering, begged the astronomer to look that way. He too saw the apparitions, to him, however, nameless. "There are probably people in the church," said he, indifferently. But Albano rushed down,—hardly allowing the astonished astronomer time to call out after him with an invitation to the total eclipse of the sun tomorrow,—and ran toward Blumenbühl. How his heart wore itself out in the race, and most of all in the hollows, where he lost sight of the illuminated church, must remain a secret, because it was hidden even from himself in the tempest of his feelings. At last he saw the white church before him, but the church-windows were without any light. He knocked hard at the iron church-door, and cried, "Open!" he heard only the echo in the empty church, and nothing more.

So he went back, with a stormy past in his bosom, through the sleeping night: the earth was to him a spirit-island, the spirit-islands were to him earths; his being, his city of God was burning up, he felt.

It lay on the morrow still in full glow, when the Lector came to him, and brought him the incomprehensible message from Liana, that she wished, about noon, to speak with him alone in Lilar. He was not this time enraged against the suspected messenger, and said, full of wonder, "Yes." With what bold, adventurous forms does our life-cloud rise to heaven, ere it disappears!

80. CYCLE.

Let us go to Liana, with whom the riddles dwell! On the morning after the illuminated night she felt, upon reflection, for the first time, the horrible effort with which she had kept the promise of silence made to her parents; she sank down with unstrung energies, but also with renewed and ardent fidelity. "What," she kept continually saying to herself,—"what then had this noble man done to deserve that I should cause him a whole evening full of pangs? How often he looked at me imploringly and judgingly! O that I might have been permitted to hold up thy beautiful head, when thou leanedst it heavily against the rough pine-bark!" What had made her most melancholy in the heavy midnight had been his silent disappearance; how often had she looked up at his thunder-house outwardly illuminated with lamps, while within only darkness lay at the window! Now she felt how near he dwelt to her soul; and she wept the whole morning over the night, and the ray of love stung her more and more hotly, just as burning-glasses bring the sun before us more potently when it looks down just after rain. The mother showed her gratitude to her to-day for her yesterday's sacrifice in keeping her word by returning love and confidence; though the father did not by any means, since with him one was as little saved by good works as with the elder Lutherans, but only damned for the want of them; even now, however, when the parents had drawn from the previous night the newest hopes of renunciation, the daughter could not humor a single one of them.

How often she thought of Gaspard's letter! Is it a shot-off arrow, which, with a wound on its poisonous point, is on its slow way from Spain to Germany, or the friendly light of a never yet seen fixed star, just entered upon its distant track towards our lower world?

Augusti had, however, received the letter even before the night of the illumination, only he had not found good reasons for delivering it. Here it is:—

"I must needs value your anxiety very much, without, however, adopting it. Albano's love for Mademoiselle von Fr., in whom I have already formerly remarked, with great pleasure, a certain virtuosity[^[17]] in virtue, so to speak, secures us and him against the influence of the ghostly machinery, and against connections of other kinds which might well be more dangerous for his studies and his warm blood. Only one must leave this kind of youthful plays to their own course. If he becomes too closely attached to her, then he may see to the dénouement of the affair. Why shall we cut this pleasure still shorter for him, when you, too, already complain to me of the sickliness of the fair one? In the latter part of autumn I shall see him. His brave, vigorous nature will know well how to bear privation. Assure the Froulay house of my best sentiments.

G. d. C."

The Lector would gladly have thrown this letter into the paper-mill, so little was there in it that was "ostensible." To be sure, Gaspard's murderously polished and pointed irony about Liana's sickliness, if he showed her the letter, would still remain, to this innocent, unsuspecting peace-princess, a sheathed blade. The north-wind of egotism, too, which ran through the communication would not, as it was, after all, a favorable side-wind for Albano's prosperous passage through life, be felt or heeded by the lovers; but that was the very rub; for she might look upon Gaspard's disguised "No" as a "Yes," and just fatally entangle herself in the thread whereby a friend would draw her up over her steep precipice.

Meanwhile the letter must be delivered; but he did it with long, hesitating evasions, which were intended apparently to withdraw the veil for her from the covered "No." She read it with fear, smiled, weeping, at the murderous irony, and said, softly, "Yes indeed!" The Lector had already half a hope in his eye. "If the knight," said she, "thinks so, can I do less? No, good Albano; now I remain true to thee. My life is so short, therefore let it be cheering and devoted to him as long as is in my power."

She thanked the Lector so warmly and pleasantly for the arrow from Spain, that he had not the capacity of being hard enough to thrust home its darkly poisoned end into the fair heart. She begged him, for the sake of sparing him, not to be present at her firm explanation with her father, but rather, at most, out of indulgence to her own and her mother's feelings, to take upon himself the task of making her explanation to her mother. He consented simply to—both, instead of one, of these things.

The gentle form stepped quietly into her father's presence, and there, shrinking not before thunder and lightning, carried her explanation through to a close, saying that she severely rued her disapproved love, that she would bear all penalties, and do and suffer all, both here and with the Princess, as "cher père" should demand, but that she dared not longer offend the innocent Count of Zesara by the show of a most undutiful desertion. At this address the Minister, who had suffered himself, in consequence of her recent submissive self-denial, to be lifted up by refreshing expectations, now stretched prostrate on the ground, dashed down from his Tarpeian rock, could not utter a single sound but this: "Imbécille! thou marriest Herr von Bouverot; he takes thy picture tomorrow; thou sittest to him." He took her, with stern hand and three terribly long strides, to his lady. "She will remain," said he, "under guard in her chamber; no one may visit her except my son-in-law; he will paint the Imbécille en miniature." "Go, Imbécille!" said he, beside himself. Her entire want of womanly cunning had actually, to the statesman, drawn a curtain over her deep, sharp eye. A straightforward man and mind resembles a straight alley, which appears only half as long as one which runs by crooks and turns.

The Lector, who never meant to be regarded as a special amateur of connubial sham-fights, had already taken himself off. The thirty years' war of the spouses—for it only wanted a few years of that—gained life and reinforcement. The old bridegroom diffused over his face that convulsive smile which, with some men, resembles the convulsive quiver of the cork when it announces the bite of the fish. He asked whether he were now wrong in trusting neither daughter nor mother, both of whom he charged with a partisan understanding against him, and insisted that now, after such proofs, he ought not to be blamed either for stricter measures or for a straightforward march to his object; and with the sitting, for which the German gentleman had twice begged him, he commenced the campaign. The Minister's lady, as a punishment for Liana, remained silent on the subject of so excessively great a present to Bouverot as a miniature likeness would be.

The tender daughter, jammed and crushed in the meeting between two stone statues, represented to her mother, that she could not possibly hold out under so long inspection of a man's eye, and least of all Herr von Bouverot's, whose looks often went like thorns into her soul. Hereupon the father replied and retorted in the mother's name, by drawing a chair up to the desk, and inviting, on the spot, the German gentleman to come to-morrow and paint. Then Liana was sent away with a word which drew even from this delicate flower the lightning-spark of a momentary hatred.

The Imperial peace-protocol lay open now before the two spouses, and there merely wanted some one to dictate, when the Minister's lady rose up, and said, "You must learn to respect me more."

She had the coach tackled, and drove off to the Court Chaplain, Spener's. She knew Liana's respect for him, and his omnipotence over her pious disposition. Even to herself he was still imposing. Down from that earlier theological age in which the Lutheran Father-confessor still reigned nearer to the Catholic, he had, through the power and magnanimity of his character, brought a shepherd's staff, which was distinguished from a bishop's staff only by being made of better wood. She must needs narrate to him twice over Liana's relations; the ardent, indignant old man could not at all comprehend or believe a love which must have been spun out right under his old eyes without his knowledge. "Your excellence," he at length answered, "has, indeed, committed a mistake in not communicating to me this important circumstance before to-day. How easily, with God's help, would I have conducted all to a blessed issue! However, there is nothing lost. Let your excellence send the maiden this very night to me, but alone, without you; that must be done; then I stand pledged for the rest!"

Objections and cautions would merely have inflamed the old man's ambition and anger,—both which still worked on beneath the ice of his hoary hair; she therefore confidently promised him all, with that submissiveness, which she had also transmitted as an inheritance to Liana.

Right hopefully did Liana receive the command of a night ride to the good, pious father. She started off with only her devoted maiden. With deeply agitated soul she appeared before her father-confessor. She opened herself to him as to a God; he decided just as if he were one. What a sight for another eye less proud than Spener's would have been this lowly, but composed saint, whose heart, like a sunbeam, always appeared loveliest in its breaking asunder.

But here the history moves in veils! The old man commanded her maiden to stay behind, and took her alone over into the silent Blumenbühl. He unlocked for her the church, lighted a torch at the altar, in order that the desolate darkness might not play any prelude to her timid eye, and completed what her parents could not.

How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano forever is a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the oath which she swore to him,—only the far-off man, who lost the fair soul, had from the observatory of the suns gazed at the bright church-windows and discovered behind them disturbing apparitions, without knowing that they were true, and decided his life.

She went back again coldly across the meadows and mountains of old days, which had once been so bright, to the dwelling of the old man, who dismissed her with greater reverence than had marked his reception of her. On the night-journey she was mute, and wrapped up in herself, and exchanged not a word with her maiden. Her parents still awaited her; the mother looked anxiously out into the night and into the future. At length the living carriage rolled into the court. Great and mighty as one who, having been executed in innocence, starts up into life again before the dissector and, regarding him as the judge on high, speaks with unfettered freedom and gladness, so did she come into the presence of her parents: like the cold marble of a god's form, she stood there, pale, tearlessly cold and calm. She knew it not, and she willed it not, but she soared high over life, even beyond a child's love,—she could not kiss her mother so fervently as once,—she stood undismayed before her blustering father, and said, then, without a tear, without emotion, without a blush, and with soft voice, "I have this night renounced my love before God. The pious father has convinced me." "And had the man better reasons for it in petto than I?" said Froulay. "Yes," said she; "but I have sworn in the Temple to keep silence until time discloses all. Now I pray you by the All-just One only to allow me to give him back in person his letters, and tell him that I cease to be his, not, however, from fickleness, but from duty; I entreat this, dear parents. Then may God dispose of the rest, and I shall never be disobedient to you again." The wretched father, puffed up still more by this triumph, would fain have made this last prayer of the dying heart bitter to her, and even insinuated a flying suspicion of the motive of the interview; but the mother, smitten in her fair soul by the fairest, interceded warmly, and contemptuously and arbitrarily decided in the affirmative. Nor did Liana seem to take much notice of the paternal No. When he had gone, the mother, weeping for bliss, snatched the silent form to her embrace; but Liana wept not so easily upon her bosom as once out of love, whether it was that her heart was too much exalted, or that it came back just as slowly into the old condition as it went out of it. "Receive thanks, daughter," said the mother; "I shall now make thy life more happy." "It was happy enough. I was to die; therefore I must needs love," said she. So she went smiling into the arms of sleep, with hard-beating heart. But in dream it appeared to her as if she were sinking away in a swoon, losing her mother, and struggling up again fearfully out of the grasp of flying death, and then weeping for joy that she lived again. Thereupon she awoke, and the glad drops, softly released by the dream, still flowed from her open eyes, and softened like a thawing-wind the stiff soil of life.

Ye great or blessed spirits above us! When man here, under the poor clouds of life, throws away his fortune, because he prizes it less than his heart, then is he as blessed and as great as you. And we are all worthy of a holier earth, because the sight of the sacrifice exalts, and does not oppress us, and because we shed burning tears, not from pity, but from the deepest, holiest love and joy.

81. CYCLE.

Warmly and brilliantly did the sun, who today, like the unhappy one, was to be eclipsed, begin his morning race. Liana awoke on the burial-day of her love, not with yesterday's strength, but faint and languid, somewhat cheered, however, by the prospect of a return of her peaceful time. The mother, although herself sickly, pressed her, early in the morning, to her heart, in order to prove the pulse of the heart most precious to her. Liana looked affectionately and yearningly, with moist eye, into her moist eye a long time, and was silent. "What wilt thou?" asked her mother. "Mother, love me more now, as I am alone," said she. Then in her mother's presence she bound together all Albano's letters, without reading them, except the one in which he begs her brother for his love. She sported with her mother, as fate does with us and as poor parents do with their children, who at first give them bright, gay garments, because these are more easily dyed into dark ones.

Her mother sought gradually to take away from her her spiritual fantasies, the death-moss, as it were, which clung sucking to her green, young life. "Thou seest," said she, "how thy angel can err, since he approved thy love, which thou now condemnest." But she had an answer: "No, the pious father said, it had been right until the time when he told me the secret, and that the Bible says, one must forsake everything for love." Thus, then, does this poor creature, as they tell of the bird of Paradise, soar straight upward in heaven, until she drops down dead.

She manifested to her mother almost a feverish gayety,—a sunshine on the last day of the year. She said, how it refreshed her, that she could now speak freely with her dear mother of her former lovely days. She portrayed to her Albano's great, glowing heart, and how he deserved the sacrifice, and the "pearly hours" which they had lived together. "After all," said she, cheerfully, but in such a way that tears came into the hearer's eyes, "nothing of it has really passed away. Remembrances last longer than present reality, as I have conserved blossoms many years, but never fruits." Yes, there are tender female souls which intoxicate themselves only among the blossoms of the vineyard of joy, as others do only with the berries of the vine-hill. The Lector's note arrived with the intelligence that Albano was awaiting her in Lilar.

Now, as the hour of interview drew so near, she grew more and more uneasy. "If I can only persuade him," said she, "that I have acted as an upright maiden!" Before exchanging her morning chamber for the mourning-carriage, she set all things to rights there for drawing, when she should return; she had, she said, had a very bad dream, but she hoped it would not come to pass.

With her work-basket on her arm, in which the letters lay, she stepped into the carriage, which they had to open, because its sultry air oppressed her. But the sultriness was the breath and atmosphere of her own spirit, and everything beautiful which met her became to her to-day a benumbing poison-flower. Fearfully she kept grasping and pressing the hand of her mother, because every cry, every form that darted by, fluttered over her like a rustling storm-bird; a crier, with his rough tone, cut across her nerves; they trembled more gently again, only when a pastor and his servant passed by with the sick-cup for the evening drink of weary people. O, the fair way was long to her! She had so long to hold together with fainting powers the breaking heart, which was to speak so firmly and decidedly and distinctly with her beloved.

The sky was blue, and yet neither of them remarked that it was beginning to be dark without clouds, since the moon already stood with her night upon the sun. As they passed over the woodland bridge into the living Lilar, where on all branches hung the old bridal-dresses of a decorated past, Liana said, with intense earnestness, to her mother: "For God's sake, not into the old castle of the dead!"[^[18]] "But which way then? That is his rendezvous," said the mother. "Anywhere else,—into the Dream-temple. He sees us already; yonder he goes over the gates," said she. "God Almighty be with thee, and speak not long," said the weeping mother, as she went from her into the temple, in whose mirrors she could behold the parting of the innocent beings.

Albano came slowly along down through the walks; he had cleared his eye of tears and his heart of storms. O, how had he hitherto, like a long-tossed mariner, peered into his dark clouds, in order between their misty peaks to discover the mountain-peaks of a green continent!—that he was to-day to lose so much, namely all, his most mournful conclusions had not gone so far as that; nay, he maintained so much tranquillity, that he sent back overhead the little Pollux, who came dancing after, not with threats, but with presents.

At last he stood with quivering lips before the beloved, beautiful form, who, childlike, pale, trembling, and watching her work-basket, looked upon him a little, and then struggled with her sinking eyes. Then his heart melted; the flood of old love rushed back high into his life. "Liana," said he, in the softest tone, and drops fell from his eyes, "art thou still my Liana? I am still the same as ever; and hast thou too not changed?" But she could not say no. A gash was made into the arteries of her life, and tears sprang up instead of blood. His good form, his familiar, brotherly voice stood again so near to her, and his hand held hers again, and yet all was over; a hot sun-glance flashed across her former flowery garden-life, and showed it in a melancholy illumination, but it lay far from her. "Let us," he went on, "be strong now at this singular meeting again. Tell me very briefly everything, why thou hast hitherto been so silent and done so. I have nothing to say,—then let all be forgotten." He had unconsciously raised her hand, but the hand pressed itself down and trembled withal. "Dost thou tremble, or do I?" said he. "I, Albano," said she, "but not from any fault: I am true, O God, I am true even unto death!" He looked upon her with a wild, wondering look. "To you, to you I am so, but it is all over," she cried, confounded and confounding. "No," she added, commandingly, as he was accidentally on the point of going with her out of the perspective range of the Dream-temple,—"no, my mother wishes to see us from the Dream-temple yonder."

He grew red at the maternal espionage; his eye flashed into hers a certain resentment against the "you," and his hot looks wanted to draw out of her agitated face the delaying riddle. Necessity commanded strength; she began.

"Here"—she stammered, and could hardly raise the basket for trembling, "your letters to me!" He took them gently. "I have resigned you," she continued; "my parents are not to blame, although they did not like our love. There is a mystery, which concerns merely you and your happiness, that has constrained me to part from you and from every joy." "Do you wish your letters too?" said he. "My parents—" said she. "The mystery about me?" said he. "An oath binds me," said she. "Last night in the church at Blumenbühl before the priest?" he asked. She covered her eyes with her hand and nodded slowly.

"O God!" cried he, weeping aloud, "is it thus with life and joy and all truth? So? How ye have lied"—he looked at his letters—"about eternal fidelity and love! Whom did you mean then, ye hellish liars?" He flung them away. Liana was about to pick them up; he trod on them violently, and looked bitterly upon the affrighted one. Now he fell into a storm, and drew and poured out, like a water-wheel during the influx of the floods, his tumultuous, suffering breast, and ceased not his cruel pictures of his love, her weakness, her coldness, his pain, her former oaths, and her present violated one about his mysterious fortune, which he said he did not want at all. Her silence wrought him up to a wilder whirl. Her quick, intense breathing he heard not.

"Do not torment thyself. It is all impossible now," she answered, imploringly. "O," said he indignantly, "I will not re-change the change, for the Lector and the Pope would again change that!" He fell now into that induration and palsy of the heart which is peculiar to man; the stream of love hung as a frozen, jagged waterfall over the rocks.

"I did not think thou wert so hard," said she, and smiled strangely. "I am harder still," said he; "I speak as thou actest." "Leave off, leave off, Albano,—it grows so dark to me. O, I will instantly to my mother!" she cried suddenly. The two old black spiders, let down by Fate, stood again over her fair eyes and overspun them, busily spinning, with a closer and closer web; and over the golden strips of life already grew a gray mould.

"It is the solar eclipse," said he, ascribing the blindness to the faintly gleaming sickle of the quarter-sun. He saw overhead in the blue heaven the lunar lump cast like a gravestone into the pure sun. Not so much as a real shadow, but only enervated shadows lived in the uncertain gray light; the birds fluttered timidly around; cold shudders played like ghosts of the noonday hour in the little, faint lustre which was neither sunlight nor moonlight. Gloomy, gloomy lay life before the youth; through the long black marble colonnade of the years sorrows came stalking on like panthers, and grew brightly spotted under the retreating sun-glances of the past.

"This is indeed very fitting for to-day," he continued; "such a sudden night without evening-twilight. Lilar must be covered up to-day. Look up at the moon,—how darkly it has rolled over the sun; once she too was our friend. O, make it still gloomier, utter night!" "Albano, forbear; I am innocent, and I am blind. Where is the temple and my mother?" she cried, moaning; the spiders had fast closed the wet, tearful eyes.

"By the Devil, it is the eclipse of the sun!" said he, and gazed into the blindly groping, timid face, and guessed all; but he could not weep, he could not console. The black tiger of the most cruel anguish hung clambering on his breast and carried him away. "No, no," said Liana, "I am blind, and I am innocent too."

Little Pollux, made happy by his presents, had led along a begging mute, who followed with the ringing mute's-bell. "The dumb man cannot say anything," said Pollux. Liana cried, "Mother, mother! my dream comes, the death-bell tolls."

The Minister's lady rushed out. "Your daughter," said Albano, "is blind again, and God send the father and the mother, and whoever is to blame for it, their retribution of misery." "What is the matter?" cried Spener, suddenly stepping out, who had previously seen the meeting, and had come to the mother. "A wretched maiden; your work too!" replied Albano.

"Farewell, unhappy Liana!" said he, and was about to depart; but stopped, and after gazing wildly on the beautiful, tortured countenance which wept with its blind eyes, he cried, "Dreadful!" and went away.

Long did he lie, up in the thunder-house, with his eyes buried in his arms, and when he at last, and quite late, without knowing where he was, roused himself, as from a dream, he saw the whole landscape illumined by a serene day, the sunshine unveiled and warm in the pure blue, and the close carriage with the blind one rolled rapidly across the woodland bridge. Then Albano sank down again on his arms.

[NINETEENTH JUBILEE.]

Schoppe's Office of Comforter.—Arcadia.—Bouverot's Portrait-painting.

82. CYCLE.

Now that Albano lived without love or hope; now that he had seen the polar-star of his life fall like a shooting-star into a wilderness still as death; now that every one of his actions and every recollection darted out a scorpion-sting, and he sent back Liana's letters, forsook Lilar, the house of the Doctor, the Lector, Liana's relatives, and the pious father; now that he directed his face, gradually growing pale, only to books and stars; men who know no higher sorrow than selfish sorrow must needs imagine that nothing weighs upon his bosom but the ruins and rubbish of the shattered air-castles of his hope and youthful love. But he was more nobly unhappy and disconsolate: he was so, because he had for the first time made a human creature and the best of beings miserable,—his beloved blind! Into this abyss of his heart all neighboring fountains of sorrow flowed together. The smallest gayly-painted shards of his urn of fortune were as if shattered afresh, when he heard from day to day that the poor girl, although daily stationed in the bath-house before the healing fountains, was nevertheless brought back each time without a ray of light or hope, and that she now feared nothing more, lamented nothing more on this robbers' earth, than that death might perhaps close her eyes before they had seen her mother again.

O, the wound of conscience is no sear, and time cools it not with his wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe! Albano called back to remembrance Liana's bitter entreaty for indulgence; and then it was no consolation to him, that, during that eclipse of the sun, he had not wished to sacrifice her eyes, but only her heart. In the burning-glass and magnifying-mirror of consequences fate shows us the light, playing worms of our inner man as grown-up and armed furies and serpents. How many sins pass through us unseen and with soft looks, like nightly robbers, because, like their sisters in dreams, they steal not out from the circle of the breast, and get no outward object to fall upon and strangle. The fair soul readily detects in an accident a sin. Only those hard stormers of heaven and earth before whose triumphal chariots there starts up beforehand a wagon-rampart full of wounds and corpses,—that is, the fathers of war, which, in the long course of history, ministers have oftener been than princes,—only these can calmly kindle all the volcanoes of earth, and let all their lava-torrents stream down, merely that they may have—fair prospects. They manure Elysian fields into a battle-field, in order to raise therein a redder rose-bush for a mistress.

The first thing Albano did, when he arrived at the Doctor's house, was to trudge out of it down into the remote valley town, in order neither to see the suspected Lector, still less to hear daily the malicious Doctor Sphex upon the relapse of the blindness. Only the faithful Schoppe jogged off with him, especially as he, by a well-adapted course of behavior, had contrived to get up an opposition party against himself in the Sphex family, which could no longer suffer him in the house. The Librarian's warmth toward the Count had grown very much with the Lector's coldness, and on similar grounds. The bold march out to Lilar and the passionate wildness of the youth had fastened him more closely to Albano's side. "I thought at first," said Schoppe, "the young man was coming to be nothing but an elderly one, when I saw him stalking along so to school. I often held the man in the moon—where notoriously, from an absence of thirst and atmosphere, there is nothing to drink—to be a greater tippler than he. But at last he strikes out. A youth must not, like old Spener, represent everything in bird's-eye perspective, from the apex downward. He must, in the beginning, like incipients in authors' studies and painters' studios, make all lines a little too large, because the little ones come of themselves. There are thunder-steeds, but no thunder-asses and thunder-sheep; as, however, the tutors and lectors would be glad if there were, and would be glad to have such to drive along before them,—they who, like the billiard-markers, suffer no open fire in the pipe, but only one under cover."

Albano lived alone now among books. Liana's brother came to him seldom, and then ice-cold, and said nothing of the patient, although he always stayed for her sake. As he himself had once woven the first web of her blindness, he must, of course, especially with his unpainted fire of love for his sister, have a real hatred for him who had drawn it over her again; so Albano thought, and gladly bore it as a punishment. So much the oftener did the Captain let himself be drawn to the German gentleman's, upon whose good graces he now, contrary to what was to be expected, always won. It is a question—that is to say, there can be no question—whether his talent and inclination for winding himself around the most unlike men was not mere coldness toward all hearts, all of which he only travels over, because he does not mean to dwell in any one.

Rabette, also, wrote the Count several bills of impeachment about the Captain's growing coolness. In one she even says, "Could I only see thee, in order for once to have some one who would let me weep, for laughter I have not for a considerable time any longer known." The good Albano entered this desertion also upon his sin-register, as if it were grandchild to his devil's children.

The Princess prevailed occasionally to allure him out of solitude, when she put the gentle bird-whistle to her fair lips. She seemed, for the father's sake, to take a veritable interest in the melancholy son, who showed no grief, to be sure, but also no joy. Besides, the masculine woman, more helmeted than hooded, loves to place the pillow of rest under the sick head, and under the faint head her arm as a chair-back; and such a one consoles fondly and tenderly, often more tenderly than the too feminine woman. Almost every day she visited her future court-dame and visionary sister[^[19]] at the Minister's, and could therefore tell the lover all about her. Meanwhile, she acted as if she knew nothing of Albano's relations to the blind one;—the very dissembling betrays tender forbearance toward two beings at once, Albano said;—so she could freely give him all the medical reports of the fair sufferer's case, as well as the opinions entertained about her in general. After the manner of the strong women, she bestowed upon her all just praise, without any petty womanish deduction, and wished nothing so much as her restoration and future company.

"I am capable of doing everything for an uncommon woman, as well as everything against a common one," said she, and asked whether his father had already written him about her plan with Liana. He said no, and begged her for it. She referred him, however, to the paternal letter, which must soon come. She found fault only with Liana's propensity to be always embroidering fantasy-flowers into the groundwork of her life, and called her a rich Baroque pearl.

But from all these conversations Albano returned only more confused to Schoppe; he heard only lip-solace, and the death-sentence, that the long-suffering soul from whom he had stolen creation was becoming more and more immured in the deepest cavern of life, near which only the deeper one of the grave lies bright and open. Every soft, soothing, warm gale wafted to him by the sciences or by human beings passed over that cold cavern, and became to him a sharp norther. O, had he been called to release her from his sinking arms amidst lovely days, into a long, eternal Paradise, and had she forgotten him in the intoxication of rapture, he too could have forgotten that; but that he should have thrust her away into a cold realm of shadows, and that she must needs remember him for sorrow,—this must he forever remember.

Schoppe knew no "plaster" for all this distress (to use his own fine play on words) "except the plaster of Paris,"[^[20]] namely, an excursion. At least, he concluded, when one is out in the country, all inquiries about one's health are done with, and all these poisonous anxieties about the answer; and on return one finds much pain spared or in fact all the trouble gone.

Albano obeyed his last friend; and they rode off into the Principality of Haarhaar.

83. CYCLE.

Whoever thinks that Schoppe, on the way, was to Albano a flying field-lazaretto of consolation,—an antispasmodicum,—a Struve's table of ailments and remedies,—a pulverized Fox's lung for the hectic of the heart, &c., and that at every milestone he delivered a consolatory sermon,—whoever thinks so, Schoppe himself laughs him to scorn.

"What then," said he, "if misfortune does knead a young man thoroughly and soundly in her kneading-trough? The next time, he, who is now in the power of grief, will have her in his power. Whoso has never borne anything, never learns to bear up under anything."[^[21]] As regards weeping, he, as a Stoic, was, as may well be imagined, an enemy to it at least; Epictetus, Antonine, Cato, and several such, men made less of ice than of iron, would very willingly, as he so often said, have allowed the body these extreme unctions of sorrow, provided only the spirit beneath and behind all had kept itself dry. The true disconsolateness is to desire and to accept consolation; why will not one then for once just go through with the pang out and out without any physic?

But his view of things and his actual life became, without his express intention, powerful over the Count, whom everything great only enlarged, as it belittles others. Schoppe sat like a Cato upon ruins, but, to be sure, upon the greatest of all; if the wise man ought to be a barometer-tube at the Equator, in which even the tornado produces little displacement, he was a wise man. Accidentally he tore open the Count's glued-up wings at an inn by means of the Hamburg Impartial Correspondent, which he found lying there. Schoppe read aloud out of it two extensive battles, wherein, as by an earthquake, lands instead of houses were buried, and whose wounds and tears only the evil genius of the earth could be willing to know; thereupon he read,—after the death-marches of whole generations, and the rending open of the craters of humanity,—with uninterrupted seriousness, the notices, under the head of Intelligence, where one solitary individual mounts upon an unknown little grave and announces and asseverates to the world, which surely condoles with him,—"Frightful was the blow which laid our child of five weeks—"; or, "In the bitterest anguish which ever—"; or, "Overwhelmed with the loss of our father in the eighty-first year of his age," &c.

Schoppe said, he pronounced that to be right; for every distress, even a universal one, after all, housed itself only in one individual breast; and were he himself lying on a red battle-field full of fallen sheaves, he would sit up among them, if only he could, and deliver to those lying around him a short funeral sermon upon his shot-wound. "So has Galvani observed," he said, "that a frog which stands in electrical relations quivers as often as thunder rolls over the earth."

He adhered to this position, also, out of doors. He cited with disapprobation what Matthison remarks,—as a traveller's note by the way,—that in the modern town, Avenches, in Switzerland, on the site of the Helvetian capital, Aventicum, which was laid in ruins by the Romans, the plan of the streets and walls may be traced by the thinner strips of grass; whereas, in fact, the same stereographic projections of the past lay manifestly all about in every meadow,—every mountain was the shore of a deluged old world; every spot here below was actually six thousand years old and a relic; all was churchyards and ruins on the earth, particularly the earth itself; "Heavens!" he continued, "what is there, in fact, which is not already gone by,—nations, fixed stars, female virtue, the best Paradises, many just men, all Reviews, Eternity a parte ante, and just now even my feeble description of all this? Now, if life is such a game of nothingness, one must prefer to be card-painter rather than king of cards."

A vigorous, high-minded man, like Albano, will hardly, then, in the midst of thirty-years' wars, last days, emigrating nations, crumbling suns, strip off his coat, and exhibit to himself or the universe the ruptured vein which bleeds on his breast.

So stood matters, when the two friends at evening climbed a half-open woodland height, from which they saw below them a wonderful glory-land, so friendly and foreign, as if it were the remains of a time when the whole earth was still warm, and an ever-green orient land. It seemed, so far as they could see for the trees and the evening-sun, to be a valley formed by the angle of mutually approaching mountains, and stretching away immeasurably toward the west. A party-colored windmill, flinging round its broad wings before the sun, confused the eye, which would fain analyze the throng of evening lights, gardens, sheep, and children; on both steeps white-clad children, with long, green hat-ribbons flowing behind them, were keeping watch; a motley Swissery ran through the meadow-green along the dark brook; on a high-arched hay-wagon there drove along a peasant-woman, dressed as if for a marriage festival, and at the side went country-people in Sunday finery; the sun withdrew behind a colonnade of round, leafy oaks,—those German liberty-trees and temple-pillars,—and they soared aloft, transfigured and magnified in the golden blue. At this moment the surprised travellers saw the shaded Dutch village near below,—composed, as it were, of neat, painted garden-houses clustered together, with a linden-circle in the middle, and a young, blooming hunter not far off, or an Amazon, who with one hand took off her hat, stuck full of twigs, and with the other let the crossbeam with the bucket mount high over the well.

"My friend," inquired Schoppe of an official messenger who came behind them with tin-plate and knapsack, "what do you call this village?" "Arcadia," was the reply. "But to speak without any poetic white-heat or culminating of fancy, my poetic friend, how is that canton down below there properly named?" asked Schoppe again. Petulantly the official messenger answered, "Arcadia, I say, if you cannot retain it,—it is an old crown-domain; our Princess Idone (Idoine) keeps herself there year in and year out for constancy, and does everything there at her own pleasure; what will you have more?" "Are you, too, in Arcadia?"[^[22]] "No, in Sowbow," answered the messenger, very loud, over his shoulders, for he was already five steps ahead.

The Librarian, who saw his friend in great commotion at the messenger's discourse, put to him joyfully the question, whether they could have found better night-quarters than these, except these very same in the moon of May. But how was he astounded at Albano's plunging back into the limbo which conscience and his love had kindled! Idoine's illusive resemblance to Liana had suddenly flashed across his thoughts. "Know'st thou," said he, continuing to tremble more violently in his agitation by reason of the magic of evening, "wherein Idoine is unlike her? She can see," he himself added, "for she has not seen me yet. O forgive, forgive, firm man! truly I am not always so. She is dying at this moment, or some calamity or other draws near to her; like a smoke before a conflagration, it mounts up duskily and in long clouds within my soul. I must absolutely go back."

"Believe me," said Schoppe, "I shall one day tell you all that I now think; for the present, however, I will spare you." Neither did this, however, produce any effect; he turned about; but through the whole of the next day's journey his cup of sorrow, which Schoppe had scoured so shiny, continued to be stained with moisture and blackness. They could not arrive till evening, when a magic mist of twilight, moonlight, smoke, vapor, and cloud-red made the city a somewhat strange place. Albano's eagle eye clove the smoke in twain, and it vanished. He saw only the blind Liana, on the high Italian roof, run against the statues, or headlong down over the edge. Wildly, and without uttering a sound, he ran through the deep streets,—lost sight of the Palace buried in buildings, and ran so much the more furiously; he imagined to find her crushed to atoms on the pavement,—he sees the white statues again, she holds one entwined within her arms, and the old gardener, he of the Cereus serpens, stands with his hat on his head before her. When, at length, he arrived directly under the walls of the Palace, there stood overhead a strange maiden beside her, and below women, running together, looked up, asking one another, "God, what is the matter now?" Liana looked (so it seemed) to the heavens, wherein only a few stars burned, and then for a long space into the moon, and then down upon the people; but directly she stepped back from the statues. The gardener came out of the court, and said, as he passed, to his inquiring wife, "She can see." "O my good man," said Albano, "what do you say?" "Only just go up there!" he replied, and strode busily away. At this moment came Bouverot on foot,—Albano, with a short bow and greeting, stepped across his path. Bouverot looked at him a moment: "I have not the honor of your acquaintance," said he, wildly, and hurried off.

84. CYCLE.

Take now a nearer look at the blind Liana! From the day when her mother bore her home, a ruined creature, there gradually began for her, under her solar eclipse, a cooler and a tranquil life. Earth had changed; her duties towards it seemed rolled off from her; the silver-glance of youth, like a human look, now blinded; her short joys, those little May-flowers, plucked off already under the morning-star; the object of her first love, alas! as her mother had predicted, not so tender as she had thought, but very masculine, rough, and wild, like her father, time and the future extinguished, and the coming days for her only a blind, painted show-gate, which men's hands do not open, and through which she can no longer force her way, except with her unencumbered soul, when it has thrown back on the earth the heavy trailing mantle of the flesh.

Her heart clung now—as Albano did to a man's—more than ever to a female heart, which beat more tenderly and without the fever of the passions; just as the compass-needle shows itself as a spiral lily, so did virtue show itself to her as female beauty.

Her mother never left her blind-chair; she read to her, even the French prayers, and kept her up by consolation; and she was easily consoled, for she saw not her mother's distressed face, and heard only the quiet tones of her voice. Julienne, since the burial of the first love, had thrown off an old crust, and a fresh flame for her friend sprang up in her heart. "I have dealt by thee honestly," said she, upon one occasion; then they secretly declared themselves to each other, and then their souls, like flower-leaves, linked themselves together to form one sweet cup. The Princess spoke seriously about studies and sciences, and gained even the mother, whom in men's society she had pleased less. At evening, before retiring, Caroline flew down, still, as from the heaven of joy, into her realm of shadows, and grew daily in brilliancy and beauty of complexion, but spoke no more; and Liana fell softly to sleep, while they looked upon each other.

At times a pang came to her when she thought that she should perhaps never see her precious parents, especially her mother, any more; then it seemed to her as if she were herself invisible and already making her pilgrimage alone down the deep, dark avenue to the next world and heard her friends and companions at the gate far behind calling after her. Then she tenderly sent her love over, as if out of death, and rejoiced in the great reunion. Spener visited his pupil daily; his manly voice, full of strengthening and solace, was, in her darkness, the evening-prayer-bell, which leads the traveller out of the dusky thicket back to the more cheerful lights. Thus was her holy heart drawn up to still greater heights of holiness, and the dark passion-flowers of her sorrows shut themselves up to sleep in the tepid night of blindness. How different are the sufferings of the sinner and those of the saint! The former are an eclipse of the moon, by which the dark night becomes still blacker and wilder; the latter are a solar eclipse, which cools off the hot day, and casts a romantic shade, and wherein the nightingales begin to warble.

In this way Liana maintained, in the midst of the sighs of others around her, and in the tempestuous weather that enveloped her, a tranquil, healing bosom. So does the tender white cloud often in the beginning hurry away, a torn and tattered fugitive through the heavens, but at last move along in rounded form and slow pace overhead there, when down below the storm still sweeps over the earth, and whirls and tears everything. But, good Liana, all the thirty-two winds, let them waft pleasant days to thee or blow them away, hold on longer than the dead calm of repose!

85. CYCLE.

The Minister, when she came home from Lilar with murdered eyes, had set in his right eye a hell, and into his left a purgatory, for no fatality had ever before so cheated him, namely, so completely upset all his projects and prospects,—the office of court-dame for his daughter, that ring guard on the finger of the Princess, and finally every chance of a haul with his double-woven net.

Unspeakably did the man struggle against the spoon in which fate offered him the powder wherein he was to let the swallowed diamonds of his plans go down; he delivered the strongest sermons,—so did he, like Horace, name his Satires against "his women"; he was a war-god, a hell-god, a beast, a monster, a satan,—everything;—he was in a frame now to undertake anything and everything,—but what availed it?—Much, when the German gentleman surprised him just in this mood of moral feeling. He made no scruple of refreshing the paternal memory on the subject of the promised sitting of the daughter for a miniature, and asserting his claim to it; for the rest he was all-knowing, and seemed to know nothing. For the sitting-scene of a blind girl he had cut out certain original, romantic situations, according to the notices which he had drawn out of the Captain. His artistic love for Liana had hitherto suffered little, and his slow, stealthy advances and reconnoitrings were in accordance with his viper-coldness and his worldsman-like energy. The old father—who in life, as in an imperial advertiser, always sought a partner with 60-80,000 dollars for his business—declared himself anything but averse to the match. These two falcons on one pole, trained by one falcon-master, the Devil, understood and agreed with each other excellently well. The German gentleman gave to understand that her miniature-likeness would, through her striking resemblance to Idoine, who, like her, had never been willing to sit, be serviceable for many a piece of pleasantry with the Princess, but still more indispensable to his "flame" for Liana, and just now, in her blindness, one might, indeed, sketch her without her knowledge,—and he would write under the picture, La belle aveugle, or something of the kind. The old Minister, as was said, swallowed the idea with perfect goût. As the Italian female singers carry a so-called mother instead of a passport on their journeys, so did he regard himself as in a similar sense a so-called father; he thought to himself: at all events there is little more to be done with the girl; she lies there as so much dead capital, and pays a miserable interest; I can take the god-penny-medal which the German gentleman in his godfatherly capacity offers to me as the father like a name for the child, and just put it in my pocket.

This duplicate of rogues was held back in mid-current merely by a drag-rake, which threatened to draw the prey out of their pike-like teeth. An old, scolding, but true-souled chambermaid from Nuremberg was the rake; she could not be drawn away from Liana, or reduced to silence. Bouverot, to be sure, a Robespierre and destroying angel to his servants, would, in Froulay's place, have caused the Nuremberg dame, a couple of days beforehand, to be furnished by a servant with some complex fractures, and then thrown upon the street; but the Minister—his heart was soft—could not do that. All that was possible for him was this: He sent for her to his chamber; represented to her that she had stolen his Magdeburg ear; remained, in his present state of hearing, deaf to every objection, but not to every incivility, and at last found himself under the necessity (a word and a blow) of driving the thievish wench out of service. With every successor to the office, as being a new one, money would have weight, he knew.

He proposed thereupon to beg of the Princess an invitation for himself and his lady to tea and supper, to bespeak the miniature-painter, to instruct the new chambermaid, and put all things in a right train.

Two tigers, according to the legend, digged the Apostle Paul's grave; so do our two men here scratch away at one for a saint. So much the more confidently do I say this, as I do not otherwise see through—if nothing is to be made but a picture—the meaning of so many circumstances. But the father I could almost excuse. In the first place, he said expressly to the German gentleman, the Abigail might, in his opinion, as well stay in the chamber, or in the adjoining one, in case the patient wanted anything; secondly, the otherwise soft man had contracted, from his ministerial commerce with justice, a certain grit, a certain barbarity, which is so much the more natural to Themis, passing sentence behind the bandage, and, as an Areopagus, without the sight of the pains, as even Diderot[^[23]] asserts that blind people are more cruel than others; and, thirdly, no one could well be more ready than he to pity the more deeply, in case she should die, the very child whom he, as it was once pretended Jews and witches did with Christian children, crucified, in order, like them, to do something with the blood (as parents generally, and particularly human parents, can indeed get over easily the misfortunes of those who are near and dear to them, but hardly their loss, just as we, in the case of the hair of the head, which is still nearer to us, feel not the singeing or cutting of it, but very painfully the tearing of it up by the root); and, fourthly, Froulay had always the misfortune that thoughts which in his head had a tolerable, innocent hue, became, like muriate of silver or good ink, black on the spot, when they once came to light.

Otherwise, and without taking these alleviating circumstances into view, there remains, indeed, much in his conduct which I do not vindicate.

The evening appeared. The Minister's lady went on her husband's arm to the court. The new chambermaid had, as Bouverot's bridesmaid, already, three days beforehand, made the most necessary arrangements or manœuvres. She had, with great ease, borrowed for him Liana's letters to Albano, as the mother, from habit, forgot that a present eye was not necessarily a seeing one; and he could extract from them the historical touches or watercolors, wherewith he could assume, before the blind one, in case of a recognition on the stage, the semblance of her hero,—namely, Albano's. With Roquairol he had played often enough to have his voice, consequently Albano's, in his power. Methinks his preparation-days for the festal evening were suitably spent.

He could, as little residences drink tea earlier than others, make his appearance quite as early as a miniature-painter in September absolutely must. When he beheld the silent form in the easy-chair, with the discolored flower-cups of the cheeks, but more firmly rooted in every purpose, a more coldly commanding saint, then did the exasperation and inflammation which he had imbibed at once from her letters kindle each other into a higher flame. Only in such chests, strung at once with metal and catgut, with cruelty and sensuality, is such an alliance of lust and gall conceivable. Bouverot's whole past, the books of his life's history, ought, as those of Herodotus are to the nine Muses, to have been dedicated to the three Fates, one to each.

He stole to the window, seated himself, set down his paint-box, and began hastily to dot. Meanwhile Liana heard her very cultivated, well-read chambermaid read to her out of the second volume of Fénelon's Œuvres Spirituelles. Zefisio was not affected by the Archbishop in the least,—what he caught about pure love (sur le pur amour de Dieu) he perverted into an impure by applications, and let himself be devilishly inflamed by the divine,—for the rest what there was touching in Liana's relations he left as it was, as he had now to paint. Odiously did his motley-colored panther-eyes lick like red, sharp tiger-tongues over the sweet, soft countenance!—"Dear Justa, stop, the reading is disagreeable to thee, thou breathest so short!" said she at last, because she heard the portrait-painter breathe. It was no sacrifice to him, but a foretaste, a sweet early-bit, to put off the kiss of this tender little hand and lip and the whole exhibition of his burning heart, until he saw her outline dotted off with the poison-tints on the white ivory by the rapid dotting machine of his hand. At length he had her, many-colored[^[24]] on white. "Very well, dear Justa," said she, "the prayer bell tolls; thou canst not see any longer. Rather lead me to the instrument,"—namely the harmonica. She did so. Bouverot gave Justa a sign to retire. She did that too. The yellow garden-spider now ran up to the tender, white flower. The spider heard her evening choral not without enjoyment, and the devout upcasting of her ruined eyes seemed to him a right picturesque idea, which the true painter[^[25]] resolved to transfer to the ivory leaf, if it could be done.

"Lovely goddess!" cried he, suddenly, with Albano's stolen voice, into the midst of those holy tones, which Albano had once, in a happier hour, but more nobly, interrupted. She listened with alarm, but hardly believing her own ear in this night. The astonishment did not displease the prospect painter—for her face was his prospect—by any means whatever; "remember this harmonica in the thunder-house." He confounded it with the water-house. "You here, Count?—Justa! where art thou?" cried she distressfully. "Justa, come here!" he added, calling after her. The maiden followed his voice and his—eye. "Gracious damsel?" asked she. But now Liana had not the heart to ask about the door and the admission-ticket of the Count. To speak French with her lover would not do, as the maid understood it; hence it was that in Vienna in the years of the Revolution they forbade this language very judiciously, because it so surely and pestilentially spreads a certain equality,—freedom follows,—between the nobility and the servile orders.

Maliciously and joyfully did Bouverot, to whom she now seemed to betray a serviceable mistrust about the Count, which pointed out a freer play-room for his character mask, remind the perplexed maiden of her commands for Justa; she must now cause her to bring a light.

"Infidèle," he thereupon began, "I have overcome all obstacles, in order to throw myself at your feet and supplicate your forgiveness. Je m'en flatte à tort pent être, mais je l'ose," he went on, made more passionate through her. "O cruelle! de grace, pourquoi ces régards, ces mouvements? Je suis ton Alban et il t'aime encore,—Pense à Blumenbühl, cé sejour charmant,—Ingrate, j'esperais te trouver un peu plus reconnaisante. Souviens-toi de ce que tu m'a promis," said he, by way of sounding her, "quand tu me pressas contre ton sein divin." ...

A pure soul mirrors, without staining itself, the unclean one and feels darkly the distressing neighborhood, just as doves, they say, bathe themselves in limpid water, in order to see therein the images of the hovering birds of prey. The short breath, the wavering tone of speech, every word, and an indefinable something, drove the frightful spectre close before her soul, the suspicion that it was not Albano. She started up; "Who are you? God, you are not the Count. Justa, Justa!" "Who else could it be," replied he, coldly, "that would dare to assume my name? O, je voudrais que je ne le fusse pas. Vous m'avez écrit, que l'esperance est la lune de la vie. Ah, ma lune s'est couchée, mais j'adore encore le soleil, qui l'éclaire."

Here he grasped the hand of this eclipsed sun fighting with a dragon. Then his gnawed finger-nails and dry fingers, and a passing touch of his order-cross, discovered to her the real name. She tore herself loose with a shriek, and ran away without seeing whither, and fell into his hands again. He snatched her violently to his meagre hot lips: "Yes, it is I," said he, "and I love you more than does your Count with his étourderie."

"You are wicked and godless toward a blind maiden; what will you? Justa! is there no one then to help me? Ah, good God, give me my eyes," she cried, flying, without knowing whither, and again overtaken. "Bouverot! Thou evil spirit!" she cried, warding off in places where he was not. He, like gunpowder, cooling on the tongue, and singeing and shattering when greed kindled him, placed himself at a considerable darting-distance from her, threw a painter's eye at the charming waves and bendings of her tempest-struck flowerage, and said quietly, with that mildness which resembles the eating and devouring milk of spunges: "Only be calm, fairest; it is I still; and what would it all avail thee, child?"

Giddy with the snake-breath of distress, wandering nature began to sing, but only beginnings: "Joy, thou spark of Heaven-born fire!"—"I am a German maiden." She ran round and sang again: "Know'st thou the land?" "Thou evil spirit!"

At this moment the giant snake, thus charmed, reared himself aloft on his cold rings, with darting tongue, to spring and to coil; "Mon cœur," said the snake, who always in passion spoke French, "vole sur cette bouche qui enchante tous les sens." "Mother!" cried she, "Caroline! O God, let me see, O God—my eyes!" Then did the All-gracious give them back to her once more; the agony of nature, the noisy preparations for the burial, opened again the eye of the tranced victim.

How eagerly she flew out of the chamber of torture! The disappointed, mortified beast of prey was still reckoning on blindness and distraction. But when Bouverot saw that she ran lightly up the stairway to the Italian roof, then he merely sent the maid, who came running in, after her, to see that she received no injury; and now again he held her previous blindness for dissimulation. He himself took from the chamber the miniature sketch, and dragged himself like a hungry, wounded monster sullenly and slowly out of the house.

[TWENTIETH JUBILEE.]

Gaspard's Letter.—Partings.

86. CYCLE.

"She can see again," cried Charles to the Count the morning after, in the intoxication of joy, without concerning himself at all about the cold relations of the recent period; and was entirely his old self. His enmity was more frail and fleeting than his love, for the former dwelt, in his case, on the ice, which soon melted and ran away, the latter upon the fluid element, on which he always sailed. Coloring, Albano asked who had been the ophthalmist. "A well-meant fright," said he; "the German gentleman made as if he would paint her, when my parents, according to appointment, were not there,—or he really painted her,—at this moment I have but a confused idea of the whole,—all at once she heard a strange man's voice, and terror and fright worked naturally like electric shocks!" Although the Captain heard, down on the bottom of his billowy sea, all voices only confusedly, nevertheless he had this time heard correctly; for Liana had extorted from her mother the concealment of the martyrology, in order to take away from her brother the occasion of proving his love to her by a duel with her adversary.

Albano laid up many questions about the dark history in his breast; and broke off the conversation by a description of his journey.

After some days he heard that Liana with her mother had left the city, and gone to visit the mountain-castle of a solitary old noble widow, which lay above Blumenbühl. Out in the clean country, it was hoped light would fall again upon her life, and the maternal hand was to paint over anew its fading colors. The Minister, who, like other old men and like old hair, was hard to frizzle and to shape, was, in this last and deepest pitfall of fate, struck quite spiritless, so that he did not devour Liana, who was also caught therein, but let her go. The whole story was to the public eye very much covered over and beflowered like the wall of a park. Only the Lector knew it in full, but he could hold his tongue. He demanded back the miniature from the German gentleman, in the name of the mother; that personage gave in its stead cold, hollow lies; nevertheless Augusti, at the entreaty of mother and daughter, knew how to control himself, and sacrifice to them the challenge wherewith he was going to take satisfaction for all.

Our friend was now, since his conscience had been appeased with respect to accidental consequences, smitten with new and unmingled sorrow over the emptiness of his present condition; the most precious soul was nothing to him any longer; his hours were no more harmoniously sounded out by the chime of love and poesy, but monotonously by the steeple-clock of every-day routine. Therefore he took refuge with men and friendship, as under trees still blooming in greenness near the smouldering ruins of a conflagration; women he shunned, because they—as strange children do a mother who has lost hers—too painfully reminded him of his loss. How gayly, on the contrary, does a general lover, who celebrates only all-souls' and all-saints' days, go about like one new-born, when he has happily slipped the noose of a heart which had caught him, and now can reckon up all female forms again with the prospect of a redeemed estate! The very feeling of this freedom may animate him to surrender himself the oftener, by way of tasting it again, as prisoner to a female heart.

Albano let himself be drawn by the hands of Roquairol and Schoppe to wild festivals of men,—which would fain render the sphere-music of joy on the kettle-drum;—they were only the thorn-festivals after the feasts of roses. So there is a despair which relieves itself by revelry; as, for example, during the plague at Athens,—or in the expectation of the last day,—or in the anticipation of a Robespierre's butcher-knife. The Captain went back deeper into his old labyrinth and wilderness, and drew, so far as he could, the innocent youth into his popular festivals with so-called sons of the muses, into his recruiting places of pleasure, just as if he had need on his own account to bring his friend down to himself a little.

Albano fancied, with these Dithyrambics, his weeping soul would be quite sung to sleep, and he only gave it in addition a gentle rocking. Meanwhile, although he would not have confessed it, his young rosy cheeks grew as pale as a forehead, and his face fell in like a piano-forte key upon the snapping of a string. It was touching and hard at once, when he sat laughing among his friends and their friends with a colorless face,—with higher, sharper bones of eyes and nose,—with a wilder eye, which blazed out of a darker socket. From music, especially Roquairol's, wherein under the hackneyed, artistical alternation of damper and thunder, the passionate rolling and plunging of our ship were too vividly represented, his ear and heart fled as from a destroying siren. The broken-off lance-splinter of the wound rankled and festered in his whole being. O, as, in the years of childhood, when the rosy cloud in heaven seemed to him to lie directly on the mountain where it was so easy to be reached, the magnificent pile retired far into the sky so soon as he had climbed the mountain, so now did the aurora of life and the spirit, which he would fain seize and hold near to him, stand so high and far overhead beyond his reach in the blue! Painfully does man attain the alp of ideal love; still more painful and dangerous—as in the case of other alps—is the descent from it.

One day Chariton came into town, merely to hand him at last a letter of her husband's,—for Dian, like all artists, much more easily and agreeably executed a work of art than a letter,—wherein he expressed his joy that he should see Albano so soon. "Is he coming back, then?" asked the Count. She exclaimed, with a sad tone: "Body o' me!—that indeed!—according to his former letter he has still to stay his year longer." "I do not understand him so," said Albano.

The same evening he was invited by the Princess to see the engravings of Herculaneum, which had come by the same post with Chariton's letter. She welcomed him with that animated look of love which we put on before one who will immediately, as we hope, pour out before us the unmeasured thanks of his heart. But he had nothing to pour out from his. She asked at length, somewhat surprised, whether he had received no letters to-day from Spain. She forgot that the post is courteous and expeditious toward no house except the princely house. As, however, his letter must certainly be already lying in his chamber, she allowed herself to take upon herself the part of Time, who brings all things to daylight, and told what was in the letter, namely, "that she should in autumn undertake a little artistic journey to Rome, upon which his father would accompany her, and he him if he liked; that was the whole secret." It was only the half; for she soon added, that she should be most glad to extend the pleasure of this tour to the best draughtsman in the city, as soon as she recovered,—Liana.

As the whole heart is suddenly illuminated with joy, when, after a long, dark rainy day, at last in the evening the sun arches for himself under the heavy water a golden, open western gate, stands therein pure and brilliant as in a rose-bower before the mirroring earth, announces to her a fairer day, and then, with warm looks, disappears from the open rose-bower, so was it with our Albano.

The fair day had not yet come, but the fair evening had. He left the Herculanean pictures under their rubbish, and hastened, as quickly as gratitude allowed, back to the letter of his father, who so seldom sent such a favor.

Here it is:—

"Dearest Albano: My affairs and my health are at length in such order, that I can conveniently carry out my plan, which I have proposed, in conjunction with the Princess, of making a short artistical tour to Rome this very autumn, to which I invite thee, and will come myself to take thee in October. The rest of the travelling party will not displease thee, as it consists entirely of clever connoisseurs, Herr von Bouverot, Mr. Counseller of Arts Fraischdörfer, Mr. Librarian Schoppe (if he will). Unfortunately Herr von Augusti must stay behind as Lector. Thy teacher in Rome (Dian) is expecting thee with much eagerness. They have written to me that thou art particularly partial to the new court-dame of the good Princess, Madlle. von Fr., whom I recollect as a very capital draughtsman. It will interest thee, therefore, to know, that the Princess takes her, too, with her, especially since, as I hear, a journey for health is as needful to her as to me. In spring, which, besides, is not the pleasantest season of the year in Italy, thou wilt return to Germany to thy studies. One thing more, in confidence, my best one! They have unreservedly communicated to my ward, the Countess of Romeiro, thy ghost-visions in Pestitz. Now, as she is to spend the autumn and winter during my absence with her friend, the Princess Julienne, and besides will arrive earlier than I, let it not strike thee as strange that she shuns thy acquaintance, because her female and personal pride has been mortified by the juggling use of her name, and feels itself challenged to a direct refutation of the juggler. In fact, if the game has really a serious object, one could not well choose worse means to effect it.—Thou wilt do what honor bids, and, although she is my ward, not insist upon seeking her company. All this between ourselves. Adio!

"G. v. C."

These prospects,—the elevating one of being so long with his father; the healing one of wading out from this deep ashes into a freer, lighter land; the flattering one that the sick, tormented heart in the mountain-castle might perhaps, in citron and laurel groves, find, yes, and haply give back, too, joy and health again,—these prospects were, what the joys of human beings are, very pleasant walks in a prison-yard.

On this happy walk he was soon disturbed by the image of the coming Linda, not, however, on his own account, but on that of his poor sister and his friend. How malignantly must this strange ignis fatuus, thought he, dance into the nightly conflict of all these clashing relations! Roquairol seemed, besides, to leave the too intensely loving Rabette alone with her solitary wishes. She sent him weekly, under cover to Albano,—once it was the reverse,—her epistolary sighs and tears, all which he coldly pocketed, without speaking of them or of the forlorn one.

Albano, weighing in silence Liana and Rabette, compassionated, himself, the unequal lot of his over-hasty friend, over whose sun-steeds only an Amazon and Titaness, but not a good country-girl, could fling the bridle, and whose Psyche's-chariot and thunder-car seemed to him too good for a mere connubial post-chaise or child's carriage. What a strangling struggle of all feelings will there be, thought he, when he, kneeling at the nuptial altar with Rabette, accidentally looks up, and discovers among the spectators the never-to-be-forgotten lofty bride of his whole youth, and must stammer out the renouncing "Yes!"

He was therefore in doubt whether he might venture to disclose to him the contents of the letter, but not long indeed. "Shall I," said he, "dissemble and juggle before a friend? May I dare to presuppose him weak, and shun the acceleration of connections, which, after all, must come with her?"

So soon as Charles came to him, he spoke to him first of the intended journey, and even added the request for his company, moved by the thought of the first parting with his youthful friend. The Captain, whose heart always needed the sounding-board of fancy for musical utterance, was not able, on the spot, to have or to picture any considerable emotions about the farewell. Then Albano, who could not get it over his lips, gave him the whole letter.

During the reading, Roquairol's whole face became hateful, even in his friend's eye. He darted then such a flaming look of indignation at Albano, that the latter involuntarily and unconsciously returned it. "O, verily, I understand it all," said Charles; "so was the thing to be solved. Only wait till to-morrow!" All muscles in him were alive, all features distorted, everything in commotion, just as, in a violent tempest, little cloudlets whirl around each other. Albano would fain question and detain him. "To-morrow, to-morrow!" he cried, and went off like a storm.

87. CYCLE.

On the morrow, Albano received a singular letter from Roquairol, for the understanding of which some notices of his connection with Rabette must be prefixed.

Nothing is harder, when one really loves one's friend, than scarcely to look at that friend's sister. Nothing is easier (except only the converse) than, after being disenchanted by city hearts, to be enchanted by country hearts. Nothing is more natural for a general lover, who loves all, than to love one among them. It needs not be proved that the Captain had been in all three cases at once, when he, for the first time, told Rabette she had his heart, as he was pleased to call it. She, of course, should not have worshipped, at such a nearness, the Hamadryad in such a Upas-tree, with whose sap so many of Cupid's arrows are poisoned; but she and most of her sisters are so dazzled by men's advantages as not to see men's misuse of them.

In the beginning many things went well; the pure innocence of his sister and his friend threw a strange magic light upon the unnatural union. The prominent advantage was, that he, as concert-master of his love, needed little more of Rabette than her ears; loving was with him talking, and he looked upon actions merely as the drawing of our soul; words being the colors. There is a twofold love,—love of the feeling and love of the object. The former is more man's love; it wishes the enjoyment of its own being, the foreign object is to it only the microscopic object-bearer, or much rather subject-bearer, whereupon it beholds its "I" magnified; it can therefore easily let its objects change, if only the flame into which they are thrown as fuel continues to blaze up high; and it enjoys itself less through actions, which are always long, tedious, and troublesome, than by words, which picture and promote it at the same time. The love of the object, on the contrary, enjoys and desires nothing but its welfare (such is for the most part female and parental love), and only deeds and sacrifices give it peace and satisfaction; it loves for the sake of blessing, whereas the other only blesses for the sake of loving.

Roquairol had long since devoted himself to the love of the feeling. Hence it was that he must make so many words; at the Rhine-fall of Schaffhausen he would not have been in the best, that is, the most excited mood, merely because he could not—since the flood out-thunders everything—have delivered anything himself in praise thereof, on account of the sublime uproar.

His Romance with Rabette after the declaration of love was divided into distinct chapters.

The first chapter he sweetened for himself in her society, by the consideration that she was new and belonged to him and yielded him an admiring obedience. He painted for her therein great pieces of beautiful nature, mixed therewith some nearer emotions, and thereupon kissed her; so that she really enjoyed his lips in two forms, that of action and that of speech; from her, as has been said, he wanted only a pair of open ears. In this chapter he assumed also some possibility of their marriage; men so easily confound the charm of a new love with the worth and duration of it.

He set himself about his second chapter, and swam therein blissfully in the tears with which he sought to write it out. In fact, this ocular pleasure afforded him more true joy than almost the best chapters. When, in such mood, he sat and drank by her side,—for, like a dead prince's heart, he loved to bury his living one in cups,—and then began to describe his life, particularly his death, and his sorrows and errors in the interval, and his suicide and infanticide at the masquerade, and his rejected and spurned love for Linda: who was then more moved to tears than himself? No one but Rabette, whose eyes,—having been, through her father and brother, as little acquainted with men's tears as with elephants', stags', or crocodiles' tears,—so much the more richly, but not so sweetly as bitterly, streamed over into his sorrow and love. This poured fresh oil again into his flame and lamp, until he at last, like that pupil of Goethe's master wizard, with the brooms that carried water, could no longer govern his spirits. Poetic natures have a sympathetic one; like justice, they keep a surgeon in their pay near the rack, who immediately sets again the broken limbs, yes, even regulates beforehand the places for the crushing fractures.[^[26]]

A man should never weep on his own account, except for ecstasy. But poets and all people of much fancy are magicians who—exact counterparts of the burnt enchantresses—weep more easily, although more at images, than at the rough, sore calamity itself, in order to put the poor enchantresses to the worst water-ordeal. Trust them not! On the machinelle-poison-tree the rain-drops are poisonous which roll from its leaves.

Meanwhile it must never be concealed, that the Captain in this second chapter strengthened his resolution of really marrying the good and so tender Rabette. "Thou knowest," he said to himself, "what upon the whole there is in and about women, one or two deficiencies, more or less, make little difference; thy man-like folly of requiring her, as they do hired animals, to be warranted without fault, may surely be regarded as gone by, friend."

Now he set himself down to dip into the ink for his third chapter, wherein he merely sported. His lip-omnipotence over the listening heart refreshed him to such a degree, that he made frequent experiments to see whether she could not laugh herself almost to death. Women in love, by reason of weakness and fire, take the laughter-plant most easily; they hold the comic heroic-poet still more as their hero, and prove therewith the innocence of their laughing at him. But Roquairol loved her less when she laughed.

In his fourth chapter,—or sector, or Dog-Post-day, or letter-box,[^[27]] or in whatever other way I have (ludicrously enough) made my divisions, instead of using the Cycle,—in his fourth Jubilee, I say, it went, so to speak, harder with him. Rabette grew at last sated and sick of his eternally jumping off and opening the pot of the lachrymal glands that hung between the wheels, to grease his mourning-coach. Deep emotion was every day made more disagreeable and bitter to him; he must be ever giving longer and more vivid tragedies. Then he began to perceive that the tongue of the country maiden is not the very greatest landscape-painter, soul-portrayer, and silhouettiste, and that she hardly knew how to say much more to him than, "Thou, my heart!" He made, on that account, in the fourth chapter, rarer visits; that again helped him considerably, but only for a short time. Fortunately, the half-mile from Pestitz to Blumenbühl counted in with Rabette's lines and rays of beauty; in the city, in the same street, or in fact under the same roof, he would have remained too cold from very nearness.

The most natural consequence of such a chapter is the fifth, or the chapter of alternations, which still blows up some flames by the ever-swifter interchange of reproaches and reconciliations, so that the two, as electrical bodies do little ones, alternately attract and repel each other. Sometimes he drank nothing, and merely treated her harshly. Sometimes he took his glass, and said to her: "I am the devil, thou the angel." The greatest offence to his love his father gave, by the approbation which, most unexpectedly, he bestowed upon it. It was to the Captain exactly as if he should realize the silver-wedding if he ever solemnized the golden one. In the service of the goddess of love one more easily grows bald than gray; he was already morally bald toward the silver-bride. Fortunately, a short time before the illumination Sunday in Lilar,[^[28]] he carried all sins of omission and commission so far, that on Sunday he was in a condition to curse them; only after scolding and sinning could he with comparative ease love and pray, as the grovelling spring-scarabee snaps up only when turned over on his back. It has probably slipped, or at least escaped, the memory of few readers, among the events of that Sunday, that Roquairol sat in the morning with Rabette in the flute-dell, that Rabette sang there in a depressed and lonesome mood, and how he, dissolved thereby, encountered his friend glorified by love. The dell affair is natural; after so long coolness (not coldness) on this breezy, free Otaheite-day, with all that he had in his hands (another's hand—and a flask) beside that heart of hers, as warm and yet as tranquil as the sun in the heavens,—and then the solitary orphan flute which he made play its call,—and with his most hearty wish to profit somewhat by such a day and sky,—under these circumstances he found himself actually compelled to draw upon his genuine emotions, to give himself vent on the subject of his past life (he resembled the old languages, which, according to Herder, have many Preterites and no Present),—yes, even on the subject of his death (also a fragment of the past),—and then as on a heavenly way to move forward. Of course he went not far; he let his blood of St. Januarius, namely, his eyes, become fluid again, (his own blood having previously become so,) and then demanded of the enraptured soul, whirled about in the fairest heaven nothing less than—since she was mute before the pocket-handkerchief thrown to her as the canary-bird is under the one thrown over him,—a faint singing. Rabette could not sing; she said so, she declined, at last she sang; but during the empty singing she thought of nothing save him and his wild, wet face.

The most miserable chapter of all, which he brought out in his Romance, may well be the sixth, which he wrote down on the night of the illumination in Lilar. In the beginning he had left Rabette to stand alone a mute, inglorious[^[29]] spectator, while he ran, jumping up behind the car of Venus full of strange goddesses. Gradually one pleasure after another crept along toward him and gave him the Tarantula bite, which was followed by a sick raving. As moderation is a true strengthening medicine of life, so did he uncommonly seldom resort to this powerful medicine, in order not to be obliged to use it in stronger and stronger doses, and he did not accustom himself to it at all. At last, when he was full, forms appeared in him as in Chinese porcelain;[^[30]] he stepped sympathizingly and lovingly to Rabette, and fancied, as she did, that he was tender or affectionate towards her, when he merely was so towards all.

He would fain draw her away from the hostile array of eyes, to seek from her the kiss to which interdiction and privation lent honey again; but she refused, because there, where the eye stops, suspicion begins, when he unfortunately caught sight of the blind girl from Blumenbühl, and could call her as a pretended guard of Rabette, in order to lead her out of the temptation among men to the temptation in the wilderness. Pressing her to him with such a passionate impetuosity of love as he had never showed before,—so that the poor soul who had been so forsaken and forlorn this evening wept over the return of all her joys,—and speaking to her like an angel, who acts like none, he involuntarily arrived with her at the silent Tartarus, where all was blind and dumb.

Rabette had not suffered the blind girl to leave her; but when they entered the catacomb-avenue, which holds only two persons, unless the third will creep along in the water, the eyeless maid was stationed at the gate, and so much the more, because he would not willingly let himself be checked by a superfluous listener. And besides, what then was there to fear in the very raree-show of the grave?

Within there he spoke about the everywhere stretched-out index-finger of death,—how "it indicated that life, stupid as it is, should not be made by us more stupid, but joyous." He seated himself by her side, caressing her,—as the destroying angel sits invisible beside the blooming child that plays in the old masonry, and into whose tender hands he presses the black scorpion. It was the very spot where he had sat in that first covenant-night, with Albano, opposite the skeleton with the Æolian-harp, when his friend swore to him his renunciation of Linda. His tongue streamed like his eye. He was tender, as, according to the popular superstition, corpses are tender which mourners die after. He threw fire-wreaths into Rabette's heart, but she had not, like him, streams of words to quench them withal. She could only sigh, only embrace; and men fall into sin most easily from weariness of good, but tedious hearts. More swiftly did laughter and weeping, death and drollery, love and wantonness, spring over into each other; moral poison makes the tongue as light as physical makes it heavy. Poor girl! the maidenly soul is a ripe rose, out of which, so soon as one leaf is plucked, all its mates easily fall after. His wild kisses broke out the first leaves; then others fell. In vain the good genius wafts holy tones from the harp of death, and sends up angry murmurs in the orcus-flood of the catacomb,—in vain! The darkest angel, who loves to torture, but rather innocent ones than the guilty, has already torn from heaven the star of love, to bear it as a murder-brand into the cavern. The poor, narrow little life-garden of the defenceless maid, wherein but little grows, stands over the long mine-passage which runs away under Roquairol's wide-extended pleasure-camp; and the darkest, angel has the lint-stock already lighted. With fiery greediness the spark-point eats its way onward; as yet her garden stands full of sunshine, and its flowers wave; the spark gnaws a little into the black powder. Suddenly it tears open a monstrous flame-throat; and the green garden reels, then flies, blown up, scattered to atoms, falls in black clods out of the air down upon far distant places; and the life of the poor maiden is all smoke and ruin.

But Roquairol's wide-spread and jointly rooted pleasure-parks withstood the earthquake much more vigorously. Both then came up out of the mine-passage sorrowfully, for the Captain had lost a little arbor in the explosion; but they found no more the blind girl, who, in her search for them, had lost herself. They encountered only the roving Albano, who himself was sorely wailing and raving, although he this evening had lost nothing but—pleasures.

Let us lead up the deluded maiden and her million companions with some words before a mild judge! This is not the only thing which that judge will weigh, that she, stupefied by the blossom-dust of a reeking spring season of joys, smothered into dumbness with the virgin's veil, prostrate before the storm of fancy (as women fall so much the more easily before another's fancy and a poetic one, the seldomer their own blows upon them, and accustoms them to standing firmly), suffered the reward of a whole virgin life to die; but this is what most strongly mitigates the sentence, that she bore love in her heart. Why, then, do not the male sex recognize that the loving female, in the hour of love, will really do nothing less than all for her beloved, that woman has all power for love, against which she has so little, and that she, with the same soul and at the same moment, would just as readily sacrifice her life as her virtue, and that only the demanding and taking party is bad, deliberately and selfishly?

The last or seventh chapter of his robber romance is very short and contradictory. The third day he visited her in her garden, was delicate, rational, temperate, reserved, as if he were a married man. As he found her full of trouble, which she, however, only half expressed, he accordingly, out of anxiety for her health, came again several times; and, when he found that she had not suffered in the least, he stayed—away. Towards Albano, during the aforesaid anxiety, he behaved meekly, and, after it, he was the same as ever, but not long; for when his sister, whom of all human beings he perhaps loved most purely, became blind through Albano's wildness, he then, even on account of a similarity of guilt, flung at him a real hatred, and something like it at all his (Albano's) relations. Rabette got nothing from him now but—letters and apologies, short pictures of his wild nature, which must, he said, have free play-room, and which, fastened to another, must beat and bruise and gall that one with the chain quite as much as itself. All objections of Rabette's he knew how to remove so well, as they consisted only in words, and not in looks and tears, that he at last himself began to perceive he was right; and almost nothing was left to the poor May-flower, crushed by the fall of this smooth May-pole, than the real last word,—namely, the mute life, which is not the first thing to announce to the murderer that he has smitten and destroyed a heart.

88. CYCLE.

Here is Roquairol's letter to Albano:—

"It must once be, and be over; we must see each other as we are, and then hate each other, if it must be so. I make thy sister unhappy; thou makest mine unhappy and me too; these things just balance each other. Thou distortedst thyself out of an angel to me more and more passionately into a destroying angel. Strangle me, then, but I grapple thee too.

"Now look upon me, I draw off my mask, I have convulsive movements on my face, like people who live after drinking sweet poison. I have made myself drunk with poison, I have swallowed the poison-pill, the great poison globule, the earth-globe. Out with it freely! I exult no more, I believe nothing more, I do not even lament right valiantly. My tree is hollowed out, burnt to a coal by fantastic fire. When, occasionally, in this state, the intestinal worms of the soul, exasperation, ecstasy, love, and the like, crawl round again, and gnaw and devour each other, then do I look down from myself to them; like polypuses, I cut them in twain and turn them wrong end foremost and stick them into each other. Then I look again at my own act of looking, and as this goes on ad infinitum, what then comes to one from it all? If others have an idealism of faith, so have I an idealism of the heart, and every one who has often gone through with all sensations on the stage, on paper, and on the earth, is in the same case. What boots it? If thou shouldst die at this moment, I often say to myself, then, as all radii of life run together into the minute point of a moment, all would verily be wiped out, invisible; to me, then, it is as if I had been nothing. Often I look upon the mountains and floods and the ground about me, and it seems to me as if they could at any and every moment flutter asunder and melt away in smoke, and I with them. The future life (as even the present is hardly to be called a life), and all that hangs thereupon, belongs to the ecstasies which one winks at; especially it belongs to the ecstasy of love.

"As thou so readily assumest every difference from thyself to be enervation, so do I say to thee outright: Only ascend farther, only knead thyself more thoroughly, only lift thy head higher out of the hot waves of the feelings, then wilt thou no longer lose thyself in them, but let them billow on alone. There is a cold, daring spirit in man, which nothing touches at all,—not even virtue; for it alone chooses that, and is its creator, not its creature. I once experienced at sea a storm, in which the whole element furiously and jaggedly and foamingly lashed itself into commotion, and flung its waters pell-mell through each other, while overhead the sun looked on in silence;—so be thou! The heart is the storm; self is the heaven.

"Believest thou that the romancers and tragedians, that is, the men of genius among them, who have a thousand times aped, and aped their own apings of everything, divine and human, are other than I? What keeps them and the world's people still real is the hunger after money and praise; this eating gastric-juice is the animal glue, the salient point in the soft floating and fleeting world. The apes are geniuses among beasts; and the geniuses are—not merely before higher beings, as Pope says of Newton, but even here below—apes, in aesthetic imitation, in heartlessness, malignity, malicious pleasure, sensuality, and—merriment.

"The last and last but one I reserve for myself. Against the longueurs (lengthy passages) in life's book,—a book which no man understands,—there is no remedy except some merry passages, of which I think no more so soon as I have read them. In order only to get over this cold, hobbly life, I will surely sooner scatter below me rose-cups than thistles. Joy is of itself worth something, if only that it crowds out something worse before one lays down his heavy head and sinks into nothingness.

"Such am I; such was I; then I saw thee, and would be thy Thou—but it serves not, for I cannot go back; thou, however, goest forward, thou becomest my very self one day,—and then I would have loved thy sister! May she forgive me for it! Here drink pure wine! I know best how one fares with the women,—how their love blesses and robs,—how all love, like other fire, kindles itself with much better wood than that which feeds it,-and how, universally, the Devil gets all he brings.

"O, why then can no woman love but just so far as one will have her, and no further,—absolutely none? Hear me now: everywhere lazy preachers would fain hold us back from all transitory pleasure by telling us of the discomfort that comes after. Is not then the discomfort transitory too? Rabette meant well with me, on the same ground of desire upon which I meant well with her and myself. But does any one know, then, what purgatorial hours one wades through with a strange heart, which is full, without making full, and whose love one at last hates,—before which, but not with which, one weeps, and never about the same thing, and to which one dreads to unveil any emotion, for fear of seeing it transmuted into nourishment of love,—from whose anger one imbibes the greater wrath, and from its love the lesser! And now to have absolutely the more joyous relations screwed down forever to this state of torment, when they ought rather to exalt us above the tormenting ones, the long wished for gods'-bliss of life perverted forever into a flat show and copper-plate engraving,—the heart into a breast and mask,—the marrow of existence into sharp bones,—and yet, as to all reproaches of coldness, chained only to silence, bound innocent and dumb to the rack,—and that, too, without end!

"No, sooner give me the frenzy which one draws from the temple of love as well as from that of the Eumenides! Better burn up in a real flame of misery, without hope, without utterance, even to paleness and madness, than be so loving and not loved! He who has once burned in this hell, Albano, continues to frequent it forevermore: that is the last misery. Can I not worry down life and death, and wounds and stings beforehand?—and certainly I am not weak. Nevertheless, I am not the man to put restraints upon a sentimental discourse, or harpsichord fantasy, or reading or singing, not though sorrow in person should hold before me a menace, undersigned by all the gods, that a female listener whom I cannot endure would immediately thereupon become my lover, and from that my mistress and my hell.

"The Greeks gave Love and Death the same form, beauty, and torch; for me it is a murderous torch; but I love Death, and therefore Cupid. Long has life been to me a tragic muse; willingly to the dagger of a muse do I offer my breast; a wound is almost half a heart.

"Hear further! Rabette has a fine nature, and follows it; but mine is for her a cloud of empty, transitory form and structure; she does not understand me. Could she, then would she be the first to forgive me. O, I have indeed treated her hardly, as if I were a destiny, and she I. Resent, but hear![^[31]] On the night of the Illumination her longing and my emptiness brought us in the fiery rain of joy more warmly together; among the shiningly mailed and smoothly polished court-faces her ingenuous one bloomed lovely and living as a fresh child on the stage or at court; we happened into Tartarus,—we sat down in the place where thou didst swear to me thy resignation of Linda; in my senses wine glowed, in hers the heart. O, why is it that, when one speaks and streams, she has no other words than kisses, and makes one sensual from ennui, and forces one to speak her speech? My mad boldness, which fancy and intoxication breathe into me, and which I see coming on and yet await, seized me and drove me like a night-walker. But always is there in me something clear-seeing, which itself weaves the drag-net of delusion, throws it over me, and carries me away entangled in its meshes. So behold me on that night with the burning net-work about my head; the rivulet of death murmurs to me, the skeleton sweeps across the harp-strings,—but, enveloped, imprisoned, darkened, dazzled with the fiery hurdle-work of pleasure, I heed neither annihilation nor heaven, nor thyself and that evening, but I drag all together and into the hurdle,—and so sank thy sister's innocence into the grave, and I stood upright on the royal coffin, and went down with it.

"I lost nothing,—in me there is no innocence; I gained nothing,—I hate sensual pleasure. The black shadow, which some call remorse, swept broadly along after the vanished motley-colored pleasure-images of the magic-lantern; but is the black less optical than the motley?

"Condemn not thy poor sister; she is now more miserable than I, for she was happier; but her soul remains innocent. Her innocence lay treasured up in her heart as a kernel in the stony peach; the kernel itself burst its mail-coat in the warm, nourishing earth, and forced a way for its green leaves to the light.

"I visited her afterward. All her soul's pangs passed over into me; for all actions and sacrifices on her account, I felt myself ready; but for no feelings. Do what you will, thou and my father, I will positively, in this stupid stubble-field of life, where one reaps so little in freedom, not banish myself into the narrow thirty-years' hedge of marriage. By Heaven! for the miserable, forced intoxication of the senses, and under it, I have already endured more than it is worth.

"Not that which I yesterday read in thy presence gives me this resolution,—as to that, ask Rabette about it,—and my frankness toward thee is a voluntary offering, since the mystery between two might, but for me, have remained a mystery still: but I will not be misapprehended by thee,—by thee, the very one who, with so little reflection upon thy inner being, so easily makest unfavorable comparisons, and dost not perceive that thou didst sacrifice my sister in Lilar precisely so, only with more spiritual arms, and didst cast her eyes and joys into Orcus. I blame thee not; fate makes man a sub-fate to woman. The passions are poetic liberties, which the moral liberty takes to itself. Thou didst not, I assure thee, have too good an opinion of me; I am all for which thou tookest me, only, however, still more too; and the more too is still wanting to thyself.

"O, how much swifter my life flies since I know that she[^[32]] is coming! Fate, which so oft plays weight and wheels, and swings the pendulum of life with its own hand, heaves off mine, and all wheels roll unrestrainedly to meet the blissful hour. She is my first love; before her I tore up all my blooming years, and flung them to her on her path as flowers; for her I sacrifice, I dare, I do all, when she comes. O, whoso fears nothing in the empty froth-and-sham-love, what should he dread or decline in the real, living sun-love? Thou angel, thou destroying angel, thou camest flying down into my stale, flat life, thou fleest and appearest, now here, now there, on all my paths and pastures: O tarry only long enough for me to dig my grave at thy feet, while thou lookest down upon me!

"Albano, I behold the future and anticipate it; I see full clearly the long net stretched over the whole stream which is to catch, entangle, and strangle thee; thy father and others, too, are drawing you both toward one another therein, God knows for what. It is for that she comes now, and thy tour is only show. My poor sister is soon conquered, that is, murdered; particularly, as one needs for the purpose, with her belief in spirits, no other voice than that incorporeal one, which over the old Prince's heart pointed out to thine its limits!

"What lights burn in the future, between dark situations and bushes, in murderous corners! Be it as it may, I march forward into the caverns; I thank God, that this impotent cold-sweating life gains again a pulsation of the heart, a passion; and then or now do to me, who could act safely and secretly and dishonestly, what thou choosest. Fight with me to-day or to-morrow. It shall rejoice me, if thou layest me on my back in the last, long sleep. O the opium of life makes one in the beginning lively, then drowsy, how drowsy! Willingly will I love no more, if I can die. And so without a word further, hate or love me, but farewell!

"Thy Friend, Or Thy Foe."

89. CYCLE.

"My foe!" cried Albano. The second hot pain darted from Heaven into his life, and the lightning-flash blazed up fiercely again. As a heartless carcass of the former friendship, Roquairol had been thrown at his feet; and he felt the first hatred. That poison-mixing of sensual and spiritual debauchery, that fermenting-vat of the dregs of the senses and the scum and froth of the heart,—that conspiracy of lust and bloodthirstiness, and against the same guiltless heart,—that spiritual suicide of the affections, which left behind only an airy, roaming spectre, ever changing its forms of incarnation, upon which there no longer remains any dependence, and which a brave man already begins to hate for the very reason that he cannot lay hold of this yielding poison-cloud and give it battle,—all this seemed to the Count, who, without the transitions and mezzotintos of habit and fancy, had been ushered over out of the former light of friendship into this evening-twilight, still blacker than it was. Beside the superficial wound which his family pride received in the maltreatment of his sister, came the deep, poisonous one that Roquairol should compare him with himself, and Liana's ruin with Rabette's. "Villain!" said he, gnashing his teeth; even the least shadow of resemblance seemed to him a calumny.

Most assuredly Roquairol had miscalculated upon him, and set out his poetic self-condemnation too much on the reckoned strength of a poetic sentence from the judge. As in an uproar one unconsciously speaks louder, so he, when fancy with her cataracts thundered around him, did not justly know what he cried and how strongly. As he often, to be sure, found less that was black in himself than he depicted, so he presumed that another must find even still less than he himself. He had, too, in his poetic and sinful intoxication, made for himself at last the moral dial-plate itself movable, so that it went with the index; in this confusion it was never indicated to him where innocence was.

Had he foreseen that his epistolary confessions would bound and rebound in more hostile corners than his oral ones did aforetime, he would have prepared them otherwise.

For agitation Albano could not directly write the short parting-letter—not a challenge—to the abandoned one, but delayed, in the certainty that the Captain would not come himself,—when all at once he came. For procrastination he could not bear; bodily and spiritual wounds he received as theatrical ones; too much accustomed to win men, he too easily brought himself to lose men. A terrible apparition for Albano; it was but the long coffin of his murdered favorite set upright!—that now over that powerfully-angular face, once the stronghold of their souls, furrows of weeds should wind, that this mouth, which friendship had so often laid upon his, should have become a plague-cancer, a concealing rose to the tongue-scorpion for the good Rabette when she approached so trustingly,—to see and think of that was clear anguish.

Hardly audible were greeting and thanks; silently they walked up and down, not beside but against each other. Albano sought to get the mastery over his wrath, so as to say nothing but the words: "Begone from me, and let me forget thee!" He meant to spare Liana in her brother, who had reproached him with being sacrificial-knife to her; unjust suspicions keep us better in the time immediately following, because we are not willing to let them grow into just ones. "I am candid, thou seest," Roquairol began, with moderation, because his ebullitions had been half distilled and dropped away from the point of his pen; "be thou so, too, and answer the letter." "I was thy friend,—now, no more," said Albano, choking. "I have not surely done anything to thee," was the reply.

"Heavens! Let me not say much," said Albano. "My miserable sister,—my innocence of the coming of the Countess,-my wretched, abandoned sister! O God! drive me not to frenzy,—I respect thee no more, and so go!"

"Then fight!" said the Captain, half drunk with emotion and half with wine. "No," said Albano, drawing in a long breath, as if for a sigh of indignation; "to thee nothing is sacred, not so much as a life!" This pupil of death so easily threw after his own life-days and joys and plans all those of another into the tomb with them; that was what Albano meant, and thought of the sick Liana, so easily dying of others' wounds; love (instead of friendship) had passed along like a soothing woman before his provoked soul; but the foe misunderstood him.

"Thou must," said the Captain, wildly mocking; "thine shall be precious to me!"

"Heaven and Hell! I meant a better one," said he; "slanderer, toward thy sister I have not acted as thou hast against mine,—I have not wished to make her miserable, I am not as thou!—and I shall not fight; I spare her, not thee." But the hell-flood of wrath, which he through Liana had wished to turn off into a flat land, and make more shallow, swelled up thereby as if under an enchanter's hand, because Roquairol's lie about her being sacrificed came so near home in that connection.

"Thou art afraid," said the exasperated Roquairol, and still took down two swords from the wall. "I respect thee not, and will not fight," said Albano, only stimulating him and himself the more, while he meant to control himself.

Just then Schoppe stepped in. "He is afraid," repeated Roquairol, weapon in hand. Albano, reddening, gave, in three burning words, the history. "You must fight a little before me!" cried the Librarian, full of his old hatred for Roquairol's dazzling and juggling heart. Albano, thirsting for cold steel, grasped at it involuntarily. The fight began. Albano did not attack, but parried more and more furiously; and as, while so doing, he beheld the angry ape of his former friend with the dagger in his hand, which had been ploughed up out of the blooming garden-beds of the loveliest days, and upon which he had trodden with his wounds: and as the Captain with increasing storminess flashed away at him like lightning, unavailingly: then did he see on the grim face that dark hell-shadow standing again, which had stood and played thereon, when he had strangled Rabette struggling in his grasp;—the drawbridge of countenances, whereupon once the two souls met, stood, suddenly raised high in the air. More fiery grew Albano's glance; more drunk with indignation, he set upon the were-wolf of devoured friendship;—suddenly he severed his weapon from him like a claw: when Schoppe, indignant at the unequal forbearing and fighting, would fain invoke vengeance with Rabette's name, and cried, "The sister, Albano!"

But Albano understood by that Charles's sister, and hurled one sword after the other, and fiery drops stood in his eye, and hideously distorted the face of the foe before him. "Albano!" said Roquairol, his wrath exhausted, relying on the tear-built rainbow of peace,—"Albano?" he asked, and gave him his hand. "Farewell; live happily, but go; I am still innocent,—go!" replied Albano, who felt bitterly the tempest of the first wrath overhead, which having settled down, between his mountains, continued to beat upon him. "In the Devil's name, go! I too shall be roused at last," said Schoppe, interfering. "In such a name one goes willingly!" said the Captain, whose tongue-muscles always stiffened in Schoppe's presence, and silently departed; but Albano had for some time ceased to look upon him, because he could never endure another's humiliation, but, like every strong soul, felt himself bowed down at the same time with any abasement of humanity, just as great thrones tolerate no distinguishing marks of servility in their neighborhood.[^[33]]

Schoppe began now to remind him of his own earliest predictions about Roquairol, and to name himself the Great Prophet-Quartette,—to denounce the fellow's incurable scurvy of mouth and heart,—to compare his theatrical firmness with the Roman marble and porphyry, which has on the outside a stone rind, but inwardly only wood,[^[34]]—to remark how his internal possession might be said to be, like that of the German Order, only a tongue,—and in general to declare himself so vehemently against self-decomposition through fancy, against all poetical contempt of the world, that any other but Albano might well have taken his zeal for a defence of himself against the slight feeling of a similarity.

Schoppe had strong hopes Albano would listen to him believingly, and would grow angry, laugh and answer; but he became more grave and silent;—he looked at the honest Librarian—and fell passionately and silently on his neck—and speedily dried his heavy eye. O, it is the gloomy day of mourning, the burial-day of friendship, when the outcast, orphan heart goes home alone, and it sees the death-owl fly screaming from the death-bed of old feeling over the whole creation.

Albano had, in the beginning, inclined to go this very day to Blumenbühl and lead his forsaken sister to the mausoleum of truth; but now his heart was not strong enough to sustain his own words to his sister or her immeasurable and inconsolable tears.

[TWENTY-FIRST JUBILEE.]

The Trial-lesson of Love.—Froulay's Fear of Fortune.—The Biter Bit.—Honors of the Observatory.

90. CYCLE.

Since the extinction of the engagement, and since Gaspard's letters, Albano's eye had been directed toward the fairest ruins of time,—unless one excepts the earth itself,—to Italy; and his injured vision held fast to this new portal of his life, which was to usher him into the presence of the fairest and greatest which nature and man can create. How did the fire-mountains, and Rome's ruins, and her warm, golden-blue heavens, already unfold to him their splendor, when in fancy he led the suffering Liana before them, and her holy eyes refreshed themselves with measuring the heights! A man who travels with his beloved to Italy has in the very fact that he might do without one of the two, both double. And Albano hoped for this felicity, since all testimonies which he met with of Liana's restoration to health promised as much. As to Dr. Sphex,—the only one who opened a pit for her, and in it cast a death-bell, and swore to everybody, she would fall with the leaves of autumn,—him he saw no more. He wished, however,—he said to himself,—in this whole joint-tour, only her happiness, not at all her love. So did he see himself always in his self-mirror, namely, only veiled; so did he regard himself often as too stern, although he was so little of that; so did he take himself to be conqueror of his own heart, when his fair countenance already wore pale, sickly hues.

The present stood as yet dark above him, but its neighboring times, the future and the past, lay full of light. What a journey, in which a beloved, a father, a friend, a female friend, are of themselves, on the very road, the curiosities which others find only when they reach the end!

The Princess was the female friend. Since Gaspard's letters to her and to him, since the hope of a longer and nearer enjoyment of his society, she found more and more pleasure in subduing all clouds round about her, so as to smile and shine upon her friend only out of a blue heaven. She alone at court seemed to take mildly and rightly the blunt youth, whose proud frankness so often ran against the disguised pride of the Count, and particularly against the open pride of the Prince; she alone seemed—as nothing is seldomer guessed in and by circles than fair sensibility, especially by courtly ones and especially manly sensibility—softly to spy out his, and to increase its warmth by her sympathy. She alone honored him with that strict, significant attention which mankind so seldom give, as well as can so seldom appreciate, because they never have occasion but for love and passion, in order to—render justice, incapable, otherwise than by comet-light, by warm-flames and fires of joy, to read the best hand. All that he was, she simply presupposed in him; his pre-eminent qualities were only her demands and his passports; she made his individuality neither her model nor her reflection; both were painters, no pictures. He heard often, indeed, that she had a masculine severity, especially in her dictatorial capacity, but not, however, that she was womanishly inhuman. To the customary vermin of courtlings, which gives itself elevation on its worm-rings only by crawling, she was repulsive and torturing; although, as a new-comer, she should, it would seem, have been a new-born child, that brings with it raisins to the older children. On Sunday, when at courts, as on the stage in Berlin, spiritual popular pieces are always brought out, she was (among the Sunday-born-children, who see more spirits than they have) a Monday's child, which wishes to find for itself one, who, whether he has ever been dubbed noble or not, at all events knows how to distinguish an original from the copy, as well in his own self as in a picture-gallery. On that account many lords, and still more ladies, thanked God, if they had occasion to say nothing more to her than "God bless you!"

In this way she appeared to the Count every day more worthy of his father. As into a warm spring sunshine did he enter for the first time into the flattering magic circle of female friendship, which even here cast and moulded two wings for love out of the wax-cells of the enjoyed honey; it was, however, with him love for Liana, to whom the friend could most easily give wings for Italy. He felt that soon an hour of overflowing esteem would strike, when he could confidingly open the high-walled cloister-garden of his former love. For she made room for him to be near her as often as the narrow compass of a throne and the all-betraying height of its location would admit. But something disturbed, watched, beset both,—a rival neighbor, as it seemed. It was the singular Julienne, who always, when things were getting on, stepped out of her box on to the stage of the Princess, and confounded the play. Frequently she came after him; sometimes he had gotten invitations from her just the moment before others from the Princess followed, which hers, therefore, as it seemed, must have anticipated. What did she mean? Would she possibly win from a youth whom she had so often provoked by her contempt of men, and by the lightning-like dartings of her indignation, his love, merely, perhaps, because he had always so warmly reciprocated her friendly glances, as those of so dear a—friend of his beloved? Or did she want of him only hatred for the honored Princess, and that indeed out of envy and the usual resemblance of women to ivory, whose white hue so readily becomes yellow, and which only by a thorough warming gets the fair color again?

These questions were rather repeated than answered by an evening which he and Julienne spent at the Princess's. A good reading was to give the picture-exhibition of Goethe's Tasso. Fine art, and nothing but art, was with the Princess the art of Passau[^[35]] against court- and life-wounds; and, in general, the world-system was to her only a complete picture-gallery and Pembroke cabinet and gallery of antiques. The reading parts were so distributed by the manager, the Princess, that she herself got the Princess, Julienne the confidente Leonore, Albano the Poet Tasso, a youthful-cheeked Chamberlain the Duke, and Froulay Alphonso. This latter, who had learned to prefer works of artifice to works of art, and the princely cabinet to any cabinet of art, in spite of his heart stood ready there for a journey to the mountain of the muses, arrayed for that purpose by the Princess in a mountain-habit. Thus forced more and more every day into the poetical fashion, he looked, of course, like any other abortion, which has come into the world with pantaloons, queue, and the like all born on him, on purpose to condemn the modish way of the world, just like a street-sweeper in Cassel.

Albano read with outward and inward glow, not toward the reading Princess, but toward the Princess she personated, from a habit of his heart which life always set a-glow; and the Princess read the rôle of her rôle very well, of course. Her artistic feeling told her, even without the prompting of tender sensibility, that in Goethe's Tasso,—which, for the most part, is related to the Italian Tasso, as the heavenly Jerusalem to the Jerusalem delivered,—the Princess is almost Princess of Princesses. Never did the god of the muses and of the sun pass more beautifully through the constellation Virgo than here. Never was veiled love more radiantly unveiled.

The Minister read off the powerful proser Alphonso, as he scolds at Tasso and Albano, as well as a trumpeter of cavalry reads the notes which are affixed to his sleeve; in fact, he found the man quite sensible.

The younger[^[36]] Princess might, in the general poetic concert, have done her share of the talking some quarter of an hour, more or less, when she suddenly threw down, in a lively manner, the beautiful volume of Goethe's works, of which there were three copies there, and said, with her impetuosity, "A stupid part! I cannot abide it!" All the world was silent. The senior[^[37]] Princess looked at her significantly; the junior Princess looked at her still more significantly, and went out, without coming back again. A court dame took up the reading, and went calmly on.

To most of those present this interlude was properly the most interesting; and they willingly continued to think of it during the reading of the latter part. The Princess, who had long believed the Princess loved the Count, was delighted with the inconsiderateness of her adversary. Albano, although her warm eye had struck him of old, explained to himself the absconding on the ground of chagrin at the subordinateness of her part in the reading, and the general incompatibility of the two women; for while Julienne, at her own expense, slighted the Princess, and took little pains to conceal her opinion, so also did that of the Princess appear involuntarily. So soon as one party manifests its hatred, the second can hardly conceal its from the third.

When Albano came home, he found the following leaf on his table:—

Titan: A Romance. v. 2 (of 2)

TITAN:

A ROMANCE.

FROM THE GERMAN OF

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

TRANSLATED BY

CHARLES T. BROOKS.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. II.

Contents of Vol. II.

Princely Nuptial-Territion.—Illumination of Lilar.

Gaspard's Letter.—The Blumenbühl Church.—Eclipse of the Sun and of the Soul.

Schoppe's Office of Comforter.—Arcadia.—Bouverot's Portrait-painting.

Gaspard's Letter Partings.

The Trial-lesson of Love.—Froulay's Fear of Fortune.—The Biter Bit.—Honors of the Observatory.

Schoppe's Heart.—Dangerous Spiritual Acquaintances.

Liana.

The Fever.—The Cube.

The Dream.—The Journey.

The Journey.—The Fountain.—Rome.—The Forum.

St. Peter's.—Rotunda.—Colosseum.—Letter to Schoppe. —The War.—Gaspard.—The Corsican.—Entanglement with the Princess.—Sickness.—Gaspard's Brother.—St. Peter's Dome, and Departure.

Letter From Pestitz.—Mola.—The Heavenly Ascension of a Monk.—Naples.—Ischia.—The New Gift of the Gods.

Julienne.—The Island.—Sundown.—Naples.—Vesuvius.—Linda's Letter.—Fight.—Departure.

Tivoli.—Quarrel.—Isola Bella.—Nursery of Childhood.—Love.—Departure.

Pestitz.—Schoppe.—Dread of Marriage.—Arcadia.—Idoine.—Entanglement

Roquairol.

Albano And Linda.—Schoppe and the Portrait.-The Wax Cabinet.—The Duel.—The Madhouse.—Leibgeber.

Schoppe's Discoveries.—Liana.—The Chapel of the Cross.—Schoppe and the "I" and the Uncle.

Siebenkäs.—Confession of the Uncle.—Letter from Albano's Mother.—The Race for the Crown.—Echo and Swan-song of the Story.

TITAN.

Princely Nuptial-territion.[[1]]—Illumination of Lilar.

77. CYCLE.

78. CYCLE.

Gaspard's Letter.—The Blumenbühl Church.—Eclipse of the Sun and of the Soul.

79. CYCLE.

80. CYCLE.

81. CYCLE.

Schoppe's Office of Comforter.—Arcadia.—Bouverot's Portrait-painting.

82. CYCLE.

83. CYCLE.

84. CYCLE.

85. CYCLE.

Gaspard's Letter.—Partings.

86. CYCLE.

87. CYCLE.

88. CYCLE.

89. CYCLE.

The Trial-lesson of Love.—Froulay's Fear of Fortune.—The Biter Bit.—Honors of the Observatory.

90. CYCLE.

Princely Nuptial-territion.[^[1]]—Illumination of Lilar.