Read Ebook: Titan: A Romance. v. 1 (of 2) by Jean Paul Brooks Charles Timothy Translator

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seemed to have hung on him, and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests. The former in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,--the one flapping up like a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A magnificent set-off, I repeat!

When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed more inwardly than outwardly.

Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old, speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes, cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider, ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody, because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I," that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly, not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only honey .

"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow; and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went slowly out.

And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,--just now must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his bosom,--he determined to pass through the coming years as through a white colonnade of monumental pillars,--already a mere Alumnus from the city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic author,--and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father? Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of his inner world into a sweltry mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,--rush into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered at the little pilgrim without a hat.

But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party. This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.

The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins, wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste--because she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping hands--demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta haughtily turned upon him her splendid back, covered with ringlets; beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the fifth or sixth "No!" before the whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,--so that nothing more can be hung on that,--and grazed the side of his head. She instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down, bleeding, and was carried home.

This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of anxiety, out through the village. A good genius--the yard-dog, Melak--had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves, should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted reasons,--namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy, whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed, could not give him a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these inversions,--during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,--he was found by his innocent mother.

"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately, strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender emotion.

When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling threads the heaven-flower , which does not appear in the sun. He placed himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,--the sign of the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.

FOOTNOTES:

With this Evangelist, as is well known, an angel is associated.

Compass.

Odious, or tabooed.--TR.

For Boyle found in his experiments that ranunculi, mints, &c., which he suffered to grow large in the water, developed the usual aromatic virtues.

The female Valisneria lies rolled up under the water, out of which it lifts its bud, to bloom in the open air; the male then loosens itself from the too short stalk and swims to her with its dry blossom-dust.

THIRD JUBILEE.

METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.

Now Wehmeier, as well as his competitor, was fain to take possession of his pupil with wholly new instructions; but what were new to him were new to himself. Like most of the older schoolmasters, he knew--of astronomy, except the little that was found in the book of Joshua, and of physics, except the few errors which existed in his rather-forgotten than torn-up manuscript books, and of philosophy, except that of Gottsched, which required, however, a riper pupil, and of other real sciences--strictly speaking, nothing, except a little history. If ever--in the literary Sahara, to which the tormenting screw of school-lessons, without end, and the beggar's or cripple's wagon of a life without pay, that had been turned rather into dross than into ore, had exiled him--new methods of teaching or new discoveries came to his ears , he noted, at the moment, that they were his own, only with a shade of variation; and he concealed from no one the plagiarism. I heartily beg, however, all silken and powdered and curly-haired Princes' instructors, blame not too sorely my poor Wehmeier, so deeply overlaid with the heavy, thick strata of fate, for his subterranean optics and his crookedness of posture, but reckon his eight children and his eight school-hours and his approaching fifties in his life's grotto of Antiparos, and then decide whether the man can, under these circumstances, come out again into light?

But yet of history he knew, as was said, something; and this he seized upon as pedagogical lucky-bone and Fortunatus's wishing-cap. Had he not already, in that epical, picturesque style of paraphrase,--whereby he could relate the smallest market-town history in such an interesting and fictitious way, --lectured out to his Albano H?bner's Biblical History, in a manner extremely touching? And which wept most during the delivery, teacher or scholar?

Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in the world,--the history of countries. But only the British and the French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history, on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer, most disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?

The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the 22d October, hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the 29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is compelled to listen to the case.

This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange. He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning, walk along several times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen, ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within, although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,--the biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,--not the shadowy world of states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher, as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality? Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so, from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,--hair, moss, roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,--was hidden by the floor of the Old World, which, like the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full of broken inscriptions.

I am not wholly on thy side here, Magister, since vigorous youths too easily, without any prompting, tear in pieces the thin plate of the ceremonial law, and often the platers, the head masters of ceremonies, into the bargain. For weaklings, the method is good.

The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate vain persons much too violently; for such persons, after all, are more diseased in the head than in the will. I can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader, whether he ever, even when he was going about with an uncommonly vain feeling, remembers to have detected any deep qualms of conscience or discords in himself, which, however, were never wanting, when he lied very much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such occasions, experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking of his inner man in the cradle of state. Hence a vain man is as hard to cure as a gambler; but for this further reason,--most sins are occasional sermons and occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word, cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness against himself, any more than he can play ninepins or fight a duel with himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter-Fair or New-Year's Day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal, margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life; many never at all,--for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost. On the contrary, one can praise and crown himself inwardly day and night, summer and winter, in every place,--in the pulpit, in the Prater, in the general's tent, on the back seat of a sleigh, in the princely chair, in any part of Germany,--for instance, in Weimar. What! and must one let this perennial balsam-plant, which continually perfumes the inner man, be plucked up or lopped off?

All these occupations and thorns were to Albano right good, sharp earthquake-conductors, since in his bosom already more subterranean storm-matter circulated than is needed to burst the thin wall of a man's chest. Now he began to get on deeper and deeper into the wild thunder-months of life. The longing to see Don Zesara caught new warmth from the Roman history, which lifted up on high before him Caesar's colossal image, and wrote under it, "Zesara." The veiled Linden-city was carried over by his fancy and set upon seven hills, and exalted to a Rome. A post-horn rang through his innermost being, like a Swiss Ranz des Vaches, which builds out into the ether all summits of our wishes in long and shining mountain-chains; and it blew for him the signal of a tent-striking, and all cities of the earth lay with open gates and with broad highways round about him. And when, at this period, on a cool, clear summer morning, he marched along metrically by the side of a regiment on its way to Pestitz, so long as he could hear the sound of the drums and fifes, then did his soul celebrate a Handel's Alexander's Feast; the past became audible,--the rattling of the triumphal cars, the movement of the Spartan bands and their flutes, and the clear trumpet of Fame,--and, as if at the sound of the last trumpets, his soul arose among none but glorified dead on the unbolted earth, and, with them, still marched onward.

When History leads a noble youth to the plains of Marathon, and up to the Capitol, he would fain have at his side a friend,--a comrade,--a brother-in-arms, but no more than this,--no sister-in-arms; for a heroine injures a hero greatly. Into the energetic youth friendship enters earlier than love: the former appears, like the lark, in the early spring of life, and goes not away till late autumn; the latter comes and flees, like the quail, with the warm season. Albano already heard this lark warbling, invisible, in the air: he found a friend, not in Blumenb?hl, not in the Linden-city, not in any place, but in his own bosom; and the name of that friend was--Roquairol.

The case was this: For people like myself, country life is the honey wherein they take the pill of city life. Falterle, on the contrary, could not worry down the bitter country life without the silvering-over of city life: thrice every week he ran over to Pestitz, either into the boxes of the amateur-theatre as dramaturgist, or on the stage itself as actor. Now, on every such occasion, he took his little part-book out into the village with him, and there, relying on this rehearsal of the play, studied his part independently of those of his colleagues; just as, to this day, every state-servant commits his to memory without a glance at those of his fellow-performers: hence every one of us consists of only one faculty, and, as in the Russian hunting-music, knows how to fife only one tone, and must throw his strength into the pauses. Into these fragments of theatricals, then, borrowed from Falterle, Albano entered with a rapture which his master soon sought to increase by exchanging for these limited sectors of the globe the whole dramatic world.

The Viennite had long since eulogized before him the suicidal mad-cap Roquairol as a genius in learning,--and himself as particularly such in teaching; and now he adduced the proof of it from the great parts which the mad-cap always played so well. For the rest, it was not his fault that he did not exceedingly disparage the Minister's son, whom he envied, not only for his theatrical, but for his erotic achievements. For the inventively rich Roquairol had with that shot at himself in his thirteenth year saluted and won the whole female sex, and made himself, out of a sacrificial victim, priest of sacrifices, and manager of the amateuress-theatre, attached to the amateur-theatre; whereas the shy, stupid Falterle, with his still-born fancy, could never bring a charmer to any other step than the pas retrograde in a minuet, or to anything more than a setting of the fingers, when he wanted to get himself set in her heart. But the vain man cannot deny others any praise which is also his own.

Our Zesara, on entering into the years when the song of poets and nightingales flows more deeply into the softened soul, became suddenly another being. He grew stiller and wilder at once, more tender and more impetuous, as, for instance, he once flew in the highest rage to the help of a dog yelping under the blows of the cudgel. Heaven and earth, which hitherto in his bosom, as in the Egyptian system, had run into each other, that is to say, the ideal and the real, worked themselves free from each other, and Heaven ascended and receded, pure and high and brilliant,--upon the inner world rose a sun and upon the outer a moon, but the two worlds and hemispheres attracted each other and made one whole,--his step became slower, his bright eye dreamy, his athlete-gymnastics less frequent,--he could not now help loving all human beings more warmly, and feeling them more near to him; and often with closed eyes he fell trembling upon the neck of his foster-mother, or out in the open air bade his foster-father, at his starting on his journeys, a more lonely and heartfelt farewell.

The shallow Viennite, who, if he spied a man of rank standing up on the cupola of a mountain, could never take off his hat before him, down in the marsh, without saying, in a low tone, at the same time, "Your most profoundly obedient servant!" and who spoke of distinguished people, at the farthest, only in familiar or satirical tones , but never in earnest criticism, was, of course, as became him, not the man to call old Froulay a stiff, sharp gravestone, under which two such tender flowers as his lady with the ivy twining round her, crooked and crowded, had to wind their way out into light. Mr. Von Hafenreffer, to his honor,--in respect that he is a Legation's-Counsellor and Fee-Court-Provost,--makes here the quite different but more feeling observation, that the hard strata of such connections as those through which Liana's life-rill must needs filter and force its way, make it purer and clearer, just as all hard strata are filtering-stones of water,--and all her charms become, indeed, through her father's tyranny, torments, but also all her torments become, through her own patience, charms....

FOOTNOTES:

The preceding fine October days, as well as the Dog-holidays and April, and, in short, the rest of the previous part of the year, were created on the above-mentioned 22d October, and the said day itself also, after their time. I thus easily shift the inquiry about all that earlier period. For if any one dates the world differently, e. g. from the 20th March, as Lipsius and the Fathers did, still he must fall in with my after-creation of the forepart of the year, when I thrust home upon him with his own previous question.

It used to be believed that a ruby gave pleasant dreams.

FOURTH JUBILEE.

HIGH STYLE OF LOVE.--THE GOTHA POCKET-ALMANAC.--DREAMS ON THE TOWER.--THE SACRAMENT AND THE THUNDER-STORM.--THE NIGHT-JOURNEY INTO ELYSIUM.--NEW ACTORS AND STAGES, AND THE ULTIMATUM OF THE SCHOOL-YEARS.

How many blessed Adams of sixteen and a half years will be at this moment enjoying their siesta in the grass of Paradise, and seeing their future bosom-companion created out of the materials of their own hearts! But they seek her not, like the first Adam, close beside them on the building-spot, but at a good distance from their own couch, because distance of space lends as much enchantment to the view as distance of time. Accordingly, every youth seats himself in the mail-coach with the full persuasion that in the cities for which he is booked quite different and more divine Madonnas stand at the doors of the houses than in his curs?d one; and the young men of those cities, again, on their part, take passage in the arriving stage-coach, and go riding hopefully into his.

So have I often longingly wished I could have only a pound of earth from the moon, or as much as a horn of sun-dust from the sun, before me on my table and in my hands. So do most of us authors of consequence hover before a reader out of our own country in like manner as fine, ethereal images, of whom it is hard to comprehend how they can eat a slice of bacon, or drink a glass of March beer, or wear a pair of boots; it seems as if people would collapse when they read anything about Lessing's razor, Shakespeare's English saddle, Rousseau's bear-skin cap, Psalmist David's navel, Homer's sleeve, Gellert's queue-tie, Ramler's night-cap, and the bald-pate under mine, though that is not of much more consequence.

As he believed Liana to be much tenderer and better than he, and as she appeared to his fancy like Hesper, who, among all the planets, moves around the sun with the least eccentricity, and he to himself like the distant Uranus, who does so with the greatest; and since he could not, without a blaze of shame on his cheek, think of falling behind the daughter and mother in moral polish, he became at once more gentle, mild, compliant, attentive to his person, obedient to the Vienna teacher,--for Liana had been so too,--and his whole Vesuvius was kept under by the veil of a saint. The North American adores the form which appears to him in dreams, as his guardian spirit. O, does not even thus, to the youth, a fair dream often become his genius?

A Whitsuntide, such as I am now about to describe, Albano, excepting in the Acts of the Apostles, one can hardly find anywhere else than in thine!

The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass bell much greater yet; namely, to such a degree, that he touchingly begged his foster-parents to let him on the first Whitsuntide holiday go to the--Holy Sacrament. The dilapidated state of the village church, wherein it could hardly be partaken a year longer, must needs speak as strongly in his favor, as the dilapidated state of Liana's health did in hers. Always will there remain in our poor human souls, separated from each other by bodies and wildernesses, the longing to be at least doing the same thing at the same time with one another, at one and the same hour to look up at the moon, or to send our prayers above it; and thus is thy wish, Albano, a human, a tender one, to kneel at the same hour with thy invisible Liana, at the steps of the altar, and then to rise fiery and commanding after the coronation of the inner man! He had in the still country built up the altar of religion high and firm in his soul, as all men of lofty fancy do: on mountains are always seen temples and chapels.

Let us now step into the Whitsuntide church, where the deep stream of his fancy, for the first time in his life, overflowed, and carried his heart far away, and sounded on with it in a new channel: a physical storm had swollen this stream. Early in the forenoon, the dark powder-house of a storm-cloud stood mute near the hot sun, and was glowing with his beams; and only occasionally, during divine service, some distant, strange cloud let fall a clap on the fire-drum: but when Albano stepped before the altar with exalted, glorified emotions, and when he ventured only to mask his love for Liana in an inward prayer for her, and in a picture of her to-day's devotion, and of her pale form in the dark bride-attire of piety, and when he softly felt as if his purified, sanctified soul were now more worthy of that lovely one,--just then, the tempest, with all its playing war-machines and revolving cannons, marched over from the Linden-city, and passed, armed and hot, right over the church. Albano, however, in the consciousness of a holy inspiration, felt no fear; but so soon as he heard the distant rumbling of the falling avalanche, he thought only of Liana, and of its striking the Linden-city church; and now, when over his head the sun kindled with his hot looks the powder-tower of the storm-cloud, and made it fly into a thousand flashes and claps, then did that partiality for the death by lightning which had been nourished in him by the ancients drive the terrible supposition into his heart, that Liana was now dead and lost to him in the glory of transfigured holiness. O then, must he indeed also believe that now the wing of the lightning snatches him above the clouds. And when long flashes blazed about the saint and the angels of the altar, and when the trembling voices of the singers, growing louder, and the tolling of the familiar bells, mingled with the crashing thunder, and he caught, amid the deafening din, a high, fine organ-tone, which he took for one of the tones of that unheard harmonica,--then did he mount, deified, upon the triumphal and thunder-car by the side of his Liana; the theatre-curtain of life and the stage burned away from under him; and they soared away, linked together and radiant, far through the cool, pure ether!...

But the twelfth hour banished these spiritual apparitions and the tempest; Albano stepped out into a bluer, cooler, breezier sky,--and the glistening sun looked down with a friendly smile on the affrighted earth, whose bright tears still quivered in all her flower-eyes. And now when in the afternoon Albano heard of the peaceful march of the thunder through Liana's city, then by his faith in her newly-assured life, and by the soft dead-gold of resting fancy, and by the holy stillness of the regenerated bosom, and by the increased fervor of his love, there grew up out of all regions of his soul an evening-red, magic Arcadia,--and never did a man enter upon a fairer one.

IT arises not merely from my courtesy towards a reading posterity, my dear Zesara, but also from a real courtesy toward thee, that I so faithfully transcribe all acts in this pastoral of thy life; in thy later days these melodious ones shall echo in thy ears refreshingly out of my book, and in the evening, after thy labors, thou wilt read nothing more gladly than my labors here.

The foliage, with its spiral alleys, wound him round into a deeper and deeper night, through which not the moon, but only the heat lightnings, could break, with which the warm, cloudless heavens were overcharged. The magic circles of the mount rose ever smaller and smaller out of the leaves into the blossoms,--two naked children, among myrtles, had twined their arms caressingly about each other's bent head,--they were statues of Cupid and Psyche,--rosy night-butterflies were licking, with their short tongues, the honey-dew from the leaves, and the glowworms, like sparks struck off from the glow of evening, went trailing like gold threads around the rose-bushes; he climbed amid summits and roots behind the aromatic balustrade toward heaven; but the little spiral alley running round with him hung before the stars purple night-violets, and hid the deep gardens with orange summits; at length he sprang from the highest round of his Jacob's-ladder, with all his senses, out into an uncovered, living heaven; a light hill-top, only fringed with variegated flower-cups, received and cradled him under the stars, and a white altar gleamed brightly beside him in the moonlight.

But gaze down, fiery man, with thy fresh heart, full of youth, on the magnificent, immeasurable, enchanted Lilar! A second twilight-world, such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon lingers now only on the groves and triumphal gates, and on the silver-dust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all waters and vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands of our present world,--wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage, and all is one lovely, magic confusion. What mean those high, open doors or arches, and the pierced groves and the ruddy splendor behind them, and a white child sleeping among orange-lilies and gold-flowers, from whose cups delicate flames trickle, as if angels had flown too near over them? The lightnings reveal swans, sleeping on the waves under clouds drunk with light, and their flaming trains blaze like gold after them in among the thick trees, as goldfishes turn their burning backs out of the water,--and even around thy summit, Albano, the great eyes of the sunflowers turn on thee their fiery looks, as if kindled by the sparks of the glowworms.

This startled him, and he came to himself; he was indeed on the mountain,--but he had forgotten the sickness. Now, kneeling, he threw his arms around the cold stone, and prayed for her whom he so loved, and who, also, surely had prayed here; and his head sank, weeping and darkened, upon the altar. He heard human steps approaching down below on the winding hill, and, with trembling joy, he thought it might be his father; but he boldly remained on his knees. At last there stepped in across the flowery border a tall, bent old man, like the noble bishop of Spangenberg; his calm countenance smiled full of eternal love, and no pains appeared upon it, and it seemed to fear none. The old man, in mute gladness, pressed the youth's hands together as a sign that he should pray on, knelt down beside him, and that ecstasy to which frequent prayer transfigures one spread its saintly radiance over that form full of years. Singular was this union and this silence. The fragment of the moon, which was all that yet jutted above the earth, burned darklier, and at last went down; then the old man rose, and, with that easiness of transition which comes from being habituated to devotion, put questions about Albano's name and residence; after the answer, he merely said, "Pray on thy way to God, the all-gracious,--and go to sleep before the storm comes, my son!"

Never can that voice and form pass away out of Albano's heart; the soul of the old man peered, like the sun in an annular eclipse, shining, full circle, out over the dark body, which strove to hide it with its earth-mould. Deeply struck, to the very roots of his nerves, Albano rose, and the broadening flashes of the lightning showed him now, down below near the enchanted garden, a second dark, entangled, horrible one, a sort of Tartarus to the Elysium. He departed with singular and conflicting emotions,--the future, and the beings therein, appeared to him, on his way, to stand very near, and already to run to and fro like theatre lights behind the transparent curtain,--and he longed for some weighty enterprise as a refreshment for his inflamed heart; but he had to rest his head, full of this heath-fire, on the pillow, and the high thunder, like a god of the night, mingled with its first claps in his dreams.

THE unknown old man lingered many days in Albano's soul, and would not stir. In fact, the channel of his life now needed a bend, to break the stress of the stream. Fate can educate men like him only by a change of circumstances, just as it can weak ones only by a continuance of the same. For if it went on much longer in this way, and the chandelier in his temple should, by inner earthquakes, be thrown into ever increasing vibrations, the consequence would be, at last, that no candle could any longer burn therein. What Imperial-Diet-grievances did not Wehrfritz and Hafenreffer already jointly present on the subject, when the shipmaster Blanchard, in Blumenb?hl, went up with his aerostatic soap-bubbles, and Zesara could hardly, by almost the absolute despotism of the Director, be kept back from embarking! And how divine a thing does he not imagine it would be, not only to hurl down to the earth its iron rings and arrest warrants, and soar away, perpendicularly, above all its market-rubbish and boundary-trees and Hercules'-pillars, and sweep around it as a constellation, but also to hover above the magic Lilar and the hermetically-sealed Linden-city with devouring eyes, and to lift a whole, full, heavy world to his thirsty heart, by the handle of a single look!

But fate broke the fall of this swift stream. Namely, as good luck would have it, the Blumenb?hl church had this long time been daily threatening to tumble down,--and I was wishing the Whitsuntide lightning had gone in there, and had made ears and legs for the building committee,--when by still greater good luck the old Prince was taken sick. Now in the church was the hereditary sepulchre of the Prince, which could not conveniently serve, on the other hand, as the hereditary sepulchre of the church.

About this time it must needs happen that the old Princess, with the Minister Froulay, passed through the village. The two had long since commissioned themselves as Imperial vicars, business-agents, and sceptre bearers of the State, because the feeble old gentleman had been glad to give up the amusements and burdens, the glitter and weight of the crown, and admit those two feudal guardians into the hereditary office of the sceptre. In short, the age of the church, together with that of the princely couple, decided the building of a new roofing and covering for the vault.

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