Volume 2 — THIRTY-FIFTH JUBILEE.

THIRTY-FIFTH JUBILEE.

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

140. CYCLE.

Long lay Albano in the solitary, dark abyss, till at length light illuminated the depths and the green height from which he had been precipitated. The once life-colored, manly face of his friend lay white before him; the red mantle only heightened the snow of the corpse. The dog lay with his head on his breast, as if he would warm and protect it. When Albano saw the naked blade, he looked round him on all sides, shuddered at the cold uncle, at the living brotherly image of the dead, and at the first shadow of a doubt whether it had been murder or suicide, and asked in a low tone, "How did he die?" "By me," said Siebenkäs; "our similarity killed him; he thought he saw himself, as this gentleman here will assure you." The uncle related several particulars. Albano turned eye and ear away from him, but he buried in the warm reflection of the friend's face that look to which the daylight of friendship had sunk below the horizon of earth. Siebenkäs seemed to assert himself by a rare manly bearing. Even Albano, the younger friend, concealed his anguish that he had lost so much, and that his orphan-heart was now exposed, like a helpless child, in the wilderness of life.

Wehrfritz asked him whether he should still send him a horse to ride into the city. "Me! I ever go into the city again?" asked Albano. "No, good father; Schoppe and I go to-day into the Prince's garden." He was terrified at the mere black churchyard-landscape of the city, where once had bloomed for him a golden sunshine, and leafy avenues and heaven's-gates full of flowery festoons. O, the young honey of love, the old wine of friendship; both were indeed poured by fate into graves!

The dead man was carried into the new castle of the Prince's garden. Only Albano and Siebenkäs followed him. When they were alone, Albano saw for the first time that the friend of his friend trembled and wavered, and that until now only the spirit had sustained the body. "Now can we both," said Albano, "mourn before each other; but only in you do I believe. God, how then was his end?" Siebenkäs described to him the last looks and tones of the poor man. "O God!" said Albano, "he died not easily; when the madness of months became one minute,—rending must have been the hell-flood which snatched away so firm a life." Siebenkäs could with difficulty admit the belief of his madness, because the deceased had so often, in his best moments, been similarly misapprehended; but Albano at last convinced him. He related further, that on his journey home he had been startled, when the repeated mistaking of his person for the deceased led him to the presumption that his long separated Leibgeber must be sojourning here, although he could not but dread to think of the first appearing and comparison. "For, Sir Count," said he, "years and business, particularly juristical, ah! and life itself, always draw man farther down,—at first out of ether into air, then out of the air on to the earth. 'Will he know me?' said I. I am truly no more the man that I was, and the physiognomical likeness might well have still remained the only and strongest one. But this, too, had passed away; the blessed one there looks still as he did ten years ago. O, only a free soul never grows old! Sir Count, I was once a man, who played one and another joke with life, and with death too, and I would cry out, 'Heavens! if hell should get loose!' and more of the like. Ah, Leibgeber, Leibgeber! Time has delicate little waves, but the sharpest-cornered pebble, after all, becomes smooth and blunt therein at last."^[145]

"Enumerate to me every trifle of his former days," begged Albano,—"every dew-drop out of his morning redness: he was so chary of his dark history!" "And that to every one," said the stranger. "This much will I one day prove to you, from dates gathered on the spot, that he is a Dutchman, like Hemsterhuis, and properly named Kees, like Vaillant's ape, to which he prefixed Sieben, or seven; for Siebenkäs is his first name. He drew his income out of the Bank of Amsterdam. Every New Year's night he burnt up the papers of the preceding year; and how his Clavis Leibgeriana^[146] has become known I do not yet comprehend." Thereupon he related his first change of name, when Schoppe took from him the name Leibgeber; then every hour and act of his true heart toward the (former) poor-man's-attorney; then their second exchange of names, when Siebenkäs let himself nominally be buried, and went on as Leibgeber, and their eternal farewell in a village of Voigtland.

As Siebenkäs here stopped in his narrative, he grasped the cold hand, with the words: "Schoppe, I thought I should not find thee till I found thee with God!" and bent weeping over the dead. Albano let his tears stream down, and took the other dead hand and said: "We grasp true, pure, valiant hands." "True, pure, valiant," repeated Siebenkäs, and said, with a Schoppeish smile, "His dog looks on and testifies as much." But he became pale with emotion, and looked now exactly like the dead. Then did he and Albano, sinking, touch the cold face to theirs, and Albano said, "Be thou, too, my friend, Leibgeber; we can love each other, because he loved us. Pale one, let thy form be the seal of my love toward thy old friend!"

Albano now pushed up the window, and showed him a grave in the east, and one in the south, near the third open one, out there in the night, and said, "Thus have I thrice wept over life." Siebenkäs pressed his hand, and only said, "The Fates, and Furies, too, glide with linked hands over life, as well as the Graces and Sirens." He looked upon the singular, beautiful, fiery youth with the most hearty love; but Albano, who always imagined himself to be loved but little, and whom the fiery meteors of a Dian and a Roquairol had accustomed to bad habits of thinking, knew not how very much he had won this more tranquil heart.

141. CYCLE.

On the morrow more sunshine and strength returned to Albano's breast. He had now himself to heave up the mountain in the flat-pressed plain of his life. Only to see Pestitz again, where all the tournament-pleasures of his shining days had vanished, except the single Dian,—he abhorred the thought. "When this friend has once his grave-mound over his breast, then I go, and take leave of no one," said he.

Just then the hated uncle arrived, with the carriages full of magic wands, and said, weepingly, he was going to the Carthusian cloister, to atone for many sins, and he would first willingly explain to his nephew, as well with words as by the carriages, all that he desired. "I believe nothing you say," said Albano. "I can now tell the whole truth, for the gloomy one has nothing more to do with me, I think, cousin," replied the Spaniard. "Is not that," he added, in a low tone, with a shy look at Siebenkäs, "the gloomy one, cousin?" Albano would not know nor hear anything. Siebenkäs asked him who the gloomy one was. It was the infinite man, he began, very black and gloomy, and had for the first time stalked over toward him across the sea, when he stood on the coast before a fog. At night he had often heard him call, and sometimes had repeated his ventriloquial speeches. He had immediately appeared to him, with a handful of threatenings, whenever he had told many truths after sundown. Therefore had he feared exceedingly before the present gentleman in the Chapel of the Cross; but now, since he had been converted without suffering any harm in the chapel, he would tell truths all day long, and in the Carthusian convent he intended to do so still more.

"Cloisters are the very places where they do not generally dwell; for this reason, I suppose, the vow of silence is required, the observance of which is always more favorable to truth than its breach is," replied Siebenkäs. "O heretic, heretic!" cried the Spaniard, with such an unexpected anger that Albano at once received, through this sign of human feeling, pledges of his present sincerity, as well as of his narrower spiritual circumference. Now, for the first time, he asked him outright about the soil and the seed which he had hitherto used, in order to force the swift flowers of his miracles.

At this question he caused a casket to be brought up. "Ask," said he. "How did Romeiro's form rise out of Lago Maggiore?" said Albano. The uncle unlocked the casket, showed a wax figure, and said, "It was only her mother." Albano shuddered before this near mock-sun of his sunken one, and at the presumption of relationship with which Schoppe had inspired him. "Am I related to her?" he quickly asked. The uncle replied, with confusion, "It may haply be otherwise." Albano asked about the monk who made the heavenly ascension in Mola. "He stood overhead filled with gas;^[147] I down below on the wall," said the uncle. Albano would hear no further. The casket contained, besides, ear-trumpets and speaking-trumpets, a face-skin, blue glass, through which landscapes appeared snowed over, silk flowers, with powder of an endormeur, &c. Albano would not see anything more.

"Evil being! who set thee on to this?" asked Albano. "My strong brother," said the uncle, for so he usually called the Knight. "He gave me my living, and he would fain shoot me dead; for he laughs very much when men are very finely cheated." "O, not a syllable of that!" cried Albano, painfully, whose anger against the Knight made all his veins spirt out fiery tears and poison. "Wretch! how didst thou become what thou art?" "So! a wretch am I?" he asked, with icy coldness. He then stated—but in an abrupt and confused manner, which attended him in every language in his own part, whereas in a strange name (for instance, the Baldhead's) he could speak long and well—that he had a dark-gray and a blue eye, a hidden bald head, and a remarkable memory since coming to manhood, and had therefore wished to become an actor, because he had nothing to do, for he had never been in love; but, so long as he did not improvisate, it had not gone well with him. He had always had in his mind Joseph Clark, who could counterfeit any grown person, and the deceiver Price, who went round in a threefold character. Then the gloomy one had again come over to him one evening in a shore fog across the water, and had murmured, as out of a belly, "Peppo, Peppo,^[148] swallow back the true word; I will directly utter another"; and from that hour forth he had had the faculty of ventriloquizing. He had thereby caused dead and dumb persons, and speaking-machines, and parrots, and sleepers, and strange people in the theatre, to speak well, but never any one in church, and that was indeed a satisfaction to him. He had often given an unceasing echo to rocks, so that men did not know at all when to go away. He had also once caused a whole battle-field full of dead men to talk with itself, in all languages, to the astonishment of the old general.

"Where was that?" asked Siebenkäs. The Spaniard came to himself, and replied, "I don't know; is it true, then? 'Omnes homines sunt mendaces,' says the Holy Scripture." "As little true," said Albano, "as your gloomy ghost!" "O Mary, no!" said he, decidedly; "when I predicted anything, he caused it indeed, after all, to turn out true. Then he appeared to me, and said, 'Dost thou see, Peppo, mind and only never speak a truth!' And in the night, when I went by your side to Lilar, he went down in the valley as a man through the air." "I saw that too," said Albano; "he floated onward without stirring." "That was one," said Siebenkäs, smiling, "who stood, with his legs hidden, in a boat that glided onward, and nothing more." Then the Spaniard looked at this fac-simile of the corpse with the old horror with which he had hitherto secretly taken it for the gloomy spirit himself, murmured in Albano's ear, "See, this being knows it," and said, in justification of his truths, "The sun is not yet gone down," and, without listening to human entreaties, whose power had never been known to him, without sorrow or joy, hurried off to enter before sundown into the neighboring Carthusian monastery. All the implements of deception he had left where they were.

"A frightful man!" said Siebenkäs. "Some time ago, when he would fain rejoice at something, he looked as if a pang seized upon his face. And that he should stand there so thin and haggard, and look down sidewise, and swallow his syllables! I am certain he could kill without changing his look, even to anger." "O, he is the gloomy spirit that he sees; don't call him up!" said Albano, hurrying away into a wholly new world, which had now suddenly risen before his spirit.

142. CYCLE.

He thought, namely, of the paper, hitherto hidden by the cloud of sorrow, which Schoppe had brought out of the princely vault, and of the maternal image which he was to have found under the ocular glass. Before he began to read, he held the image under the glass before the stranger, to see if by any accident he might know it. "Very well! It is the deceased Princess Eleonore, so far as a frontispiece engraving to the provincial hymn-book allows one to presume upon resemblances; for the Princess herself I never saw."

With emotion, Albano drew the paper out of the cracked marble capsule; but he was still more moved when he read the signature, "Eleonore," and then the following in French:—

"My Son: To-day have I seen thee again,^[149] after long times in thy B. (Blumenbühl); my heart is full of joy and anxiety, and thy beautiful image floats before my weeping eyes. Why can I not have thee about me and in my daily sight? How am I bound and distressed! But always did I forge for myself fetters, and beg others to fasten them upon me. Hear thine own history from the mouth of thy mother; from no other will it come to thee more acceptably and truly.

"The Prince and I lived long in an unfruitful marriage, which flattered our cousin Hh. (Haarhaar) with more and more lively hopes of the succession. At a late period thy brother L. (Luigi) annihilated them. One could hardly forgive us that. The Count C. (Cesara) retains the proofs of some dark actions (de quelques noirceurs) which were to cost thy poor brother, otherwise weakly, his life. Thy father was with me in Rome just as we learned it. 'They will surely get the better of us at last,' said thy father. In Rome we made the acquaintance of the Prince di Lauria, who would not give his beautiful daughter to the Count C. (Cesara) till he should have become Knight of the Golden Fleece. The Prince procured this order for him at the Imperial Court.

"For this Madam Cesara thought she ought to be very grateful to me, une femme fort décidée, se repliant sur elle-même, son individualité exagératrice perca à travers ses vertus et ses vices et son sexe. We learned to love each other. Her romantic spirit communicated with mine, particularly in the Land of Romance. This result was helped by the fact that she and I found ourselves at the same time in the right condition of female enthusiasm, namely, the hope of being mothers. She was confined with an exquisitely beautiful girl, exactly like her, Severina, or as she was called afterward, Linda. Here we made the singular contract, that, if I bore a son, we would exchange; I could educate a daughter without hazard, and with her my son could grow up without incurring that danger which had always threatened thy brother in my house. She said, too, I could better guide a daughter, she a son, as she had little respect for her sex. The Count was well satisfied with the plan; the Hh. Court had just before refused him the oldest princess, for whom he had been a suitor, under the ironical and insulting pretext of her yet childish youth, and he for the sake of avenging offended honor and injured vanity,—for he was a very handsome man, and used only to victory,—was ready for any measures and contests against the haughty court. Only the Prince did not approve of it; he considered an education abroad, &c., quite ambiguous and critical. But we women interwove ourselves so much the more deeply into our romantic idea.

"Two days after I brought forth thee and—Julienne at a birth. On this rich emergency no one had reckoned. Here much turned up quite otherwise and more easily than had been expected. 'I keep,' said I to the Countess, 'my daughter, thou keepest thine; as to Albano (so shall he be called), let the Prince decide.' Thy father allowed that thou shouldst be brought up as son of the Count, indeed, but under his eye, with the honest W. (Wehrfritz). Meanwhile he made provisions whose solid value I then, in the fanciful enthusiasm of friendship, was not in a condition wholly to weigh. At present I only wonder that I was then so full of spirit. The documents of thy genealogy were not only thrice made out,—I, the Count, and the Court Chaplain Spener, were put in possession of them,—but subsequently thou wast presented even to the Emperor Joseph II. as our princely son, and his gracious letter, which I shall one day commit to thy brothers and sisters, is of itself sufficiently decisive.

"The Count himself now took an active part in the mystery,—whether out of love for his daughter or from spite against the H. court,—by demanding, as a reward for his participation, that one day thou and Linda should make a match. Here the Countess stepped in again with her wonders and fancies. 'Linda will certainly resemble me in soul as she now does in form,—force can then never move her,—but magic of the heart, of the fairy-world, the charm of wonder, may draw and melt and bind her.' I know her very words. A singular plan of enchantment was then sketched, whose limits the Count, through the submissiveness with which his brother, adept in a thousand arts, let himself be hired for everything, extended still further, beside making the plan thereby more agreeable. Linda will, long before thou hast read this, have appeared to thee; her name will have been named; thy birth mysteriously announced. May thy spirit, O may it be happily reconciled to it all, and may the difficult play pour winnings into thy lap when the cards are turned up. I am anxious; how can I be otherwise? O what tidings have I not received even from Italy through the Count, before which now all the hopes I have set upon my Lewis (Luigi) are at once extinguished! Now would Hh. (Haarhaar) have conquered through the wicked B. (Bouverot), had it not been that thou livest. And I cannot but be so happy, that thou livest clear of his poisonous influences. Yes, it seems as if the Count had intentionally and gladly let the destruction of thy brother take place in order to strike so much the stronger terror with thy resurrection. Yet I will not do him injustice. But whom shall a mother trust, whom mistrust, at court? And which danger is the greater?

"For the space of three years thou wast obliged, for appearance' sake, to stay on Isola Bella with thy pretended twin-sister, Severina, although under the eye of the Prince, while I, with Julienne, went back to Germany. Longer, however, it could not last, much as thy foster-mother wished it; thou wast too much like thy father. This resemblance cost me many tears,—for on this account thou couldst never go from B. to P. (Pestitz) so long as the Prince still wore youthful features,—even the portraits of his youthful form I had, therefore, gradually to steal away and give in charge to the faithful Spener. Yes, this learned man told me that a convex mirror, which transformed young faces into old ones, had to be put aside, because thou immediately stoodst there as the old Prince when thou didst look into it. O, when my good, pious prince in his feeble days unconsciously prattled all sorts of things, and made me more and more anxious about the fate of the weighty secret, how I trembled, when he one morning (fortunately only Spener and a certain daughter of the Minister von Fr., a gentle, pure spirit, were by), said right out and joyfully, 'Our dear son, Eleonore, was up at the altar last evening; he is certainly a good young man, he knelt down and prayed beautifully, and I said to him only, for I would not discover myself, Go home, go home, my friend; the thunder is already near.'^[150] I know that several individuals have already let fall hints about a natural son of the Prince.

"The Countess C. (Cesara) went off with S. (Severina) to V. (Valencia); previously, however, giving herself the name R. (Romeiro), and her daughter the name L. (Linda). The Prince di Lauria had to be drawn into this game, and his consent obtained, for the sake of the inheritance. By this change of names all could be covered up as closely as it now stands. Nine years after, the noble R. (Romeiro) died, and the Count had, under the prerogative of a guardian, the daughter in his sole protection and care.

"I saw her here shortly after the death of her mother.^[151] When the flower has entirely unfolded itself out of this full bud, it belongs, as the fullest rose, to thy heart; only may the ghostly game, which I have too light-mindedly sworn to the Countess, pass over without mishap! Should I come to my death-bed before the Prince, I must also draw thy sister and thy brother into thy secret, so as to close my eyes in perfect assurance. Ah, I shall not live to be permitted openly to clasp my son in my arms! The symptoms of my decline come more and more frequent. May it go well with thee, dearest child! Grow up to be holy and honest as thy father! God guide all our weak expedients for the best!

"Thy faithful mother, "Eleonore.

"P. S. Certain other very weighty secrets I cannot trust to paper, but my dying lips shall let them sink into the heart of thy sister. Farewell! Farewell!"

143. CYCLE.

Albano stood for a long time speechless, looked to heaven, let the leaf fall, and folded his hands, and said, "Thou sendest peace,—I must not choose war,—well, my lot is fixed!" Joy of life, new powers and plans, delight in the prospect of the throne, where only mental effort tells, as rather physical does on the battle-field, the images of new parents and relations, and displeasure at the past, stormed through each other in his spirit. He tore himself loose from his whole former life, the ropes of the whole previous death-chime were broken, he must, in order to win Eurydice out of Orcus, like Orpheus, shun looking back upon the way which he had past. He unveiled all to his new friend, for he battled, he said, now at length, on a free open field for his hitherto concealed right, and should set out immediately for the city. During the recital, the long and daring game which had been played with his holiest rights and relations incensed him still more, and his mistrust of his powers and weapons against the adversaries to whom Luigi fell a victim, and that very brother himself, who could hitherto embrace him in so hard and unbrotherly a mask. "How different was the true sister!" said he. "Why," he went on, "did they oblige me to owe so many thanks to so many a proud, stern spirit for my mere—birthright? Why did they not trust my silence quite as well? O, thus was I forced to misinterpret the poor dead one over yonder,^[152] because she, in that hostile night, at the altar sacrificed her fair heart to my revealed rank! Thus was I compelled by presumptions and purposes to injure so many a genuine soul! How innocent might I be but for all this!" "Calm yourself," said Siebenkäs, with keen resentment, "the strength of the foe is driven to resistance, and drawn off from the defeat; and what would a victory have been on an empty battle-field?"

Siebenkäs had, at the revelation of his friend's illustrious rank, and at seeing the fire of his passionateness, which he knew only in common, not in noble manifestations, stepped back some paces,—a movement which Albano did not observe, because he had not presumed upon it. Siebenkäs sought as well as he could,—for his inner man was gradually unfolding again its limbs, which had been frozen stiff in the grave of his friend,—to win back his gentle mirthfulness, and with these flowery chains to bind the impetuous youth. "I rejoice," said he, "that I am the first to offer you wishes on your birth- and coronation-day, all which, however, merge in the single one that you may always assert your baptismal name,—for Alban is the well-known patron saint of the peasants. Except the Haarhaar Prince, whom the Knight truly hits off with the device of the founder of his order, Philip: ante ferit quam flamma micet,^[153] no one, perhaps, is to be pitied in this connection but the financial stamp-cutter, who now receives nothing new to cut, as the old line continues in power." He added lightly, because he had never seen the heavy wooded and cloud-bearing rock, Gaspard: "What a singular game of names, which few Cavalleros del Tuzone have ever played, it is, that he happens to call himself De Cesara, since, as you know, the Spaniards, like the old Romans, often appropriate to themselves the names of their actions or accidents. Thus it is everywhere known from the Pieces Interassantes, Tom. I., that Orendayn, for example, took the name La Pas, because he, in 1725, signed the peace between Austria and Spain,—he baptized himself with a third name, Transport Real, in order to remember and remark that he had carried away the Infante to Italy. Cesara is of course more accidental."

Albano was, for the first time, by such resemblances of spirit to the free Schoppe, really drawn to his heart. He took leave of him, and said, "Friend of our friend, will we keep together?" "Verily, the doubt which rests upon the decision of your fate, Prince," replied Siebenkäs, "were alone sufficient to settle that, if only my heart alone had the business of settling it; but—" Albano shrugged his shoulders, as if irritated, but was silent; "meanwhile I will remain here," the other continued, more softly, "until the earth rests on the deceased; then I set up the black wooden cross over it, and write all his names thereupon." "Well, so be it!" said Albano. "But his dog I take, because he has been longer acquainted with me. I am a young man, still young in lost years, but already very old in lost times, and understand as well as many another who is bent by age what it is to lose fellow-creatures. Singular it is, that I always find on graves mirrors wherein the dead walk and look, alive again. Thus I found on Liana's grave her living image and echo; my old prostrate Schoppe I found, also, as you know, erect and stirring, behind a looking-glass, which my hand could as little break through. I assure you, even my parents were conjured before me; my father I can see in a cylindrical mirror, and my mother through an object-glass. Here, now, there is nothing to do, when one stands in a night, where all stars of life move downward, but stand very firm therein. But to my old humorist must I still say Adio."

He went into the chamber of death. Silently Siebenkäs followed him, struck with the unwonted quaintness of his—grief. With dry eyes, Albano drew the white cloth from the earnest face, whose fixed eyebrows no longer shaped themselves for any joke, and which slept away in an iron sleep without time. The dog seemed to be shy of the cold man. Albano sought, by sharp, vehement, dry looks, to imprint the dead face, even to every wrinkle, deeply on his brain, as in plaster, especially as the most living copy, the friend, had escaped him. Then he lifted the heavy hand, and placed it on the brow which was to wear the princely hat, as if therewith to bless and consecrate it. At last he bent down to the face, and lay for a long time on the cold mouth; but, when he finally raised himself up, his eyes were weeping, and his whole heart, and he tremblingly held out his hand to the spectator, and said, "Well, so mayest thou, too, fare well!" "No," cried Siebenkäs; "I cannot do that, if I go. Schoppe! I stay with thy Albano!"

Just then came Wehrfritz and Augusti, and interrupted the weeping solemnity of the threefold love with gay looks and words.

144. CYCLE.

The old foster-father called him Prince, indeed, and no longer thou; but, in patriotic rapture, he fervently pressed the nursling of his house to his heart. Augusti handed him, with grave courtliness and a brief congratulation, the following epistle from Julienne:—

"Dearest Brother: Now, at length, I can, for the first time, call thee rightly brother. I have in one eye tears of mourning, and yet in the other tears of gladness, now that all clouds are taken from thy birth; and in Haarhaar, too, all goes tolerably well. The Lector is despatched to tell thee all: where should I find time? He must also tell thee of Herr von Bouverot, whose red nose and bent-up chin, and greedy barbarity toward his few people and many creditors, and whose grossness and sensuality and dry malice I hate to such a degree. However, he is now so properly punished by thy manifestation. Of course all is, like myself, in disorder and confusion. Ludwig's testament was opened this morning, according to his will, and he gave thee thy whole right. I will not be angry about this, brother, in the midst of weeping. He was properly hard toward his brother and sister,—toward me exceedingly so; for he hated all women, even to his wife, who is only of some use when it goes well with her, and works of art themselves really hardened him against men. But let him rest in his peace, of which, indeed, he has found little! He must this very evening, on account of the nature of his complaint, and on account of the length of the way to Blumenbühl, be interred temporarily. Here am I now with thy foster-parents, in the neighborhood of our buried parents. On this account, come without fail! Thou art my only solace in the night of sadness. I must hold thee again to my heart, which will beat hard against thine, and weep and speak, if it only can. Do come! Now, at length, surely, as all stands ready in the hall for the dance, God will let no cold spectres or frightful masks creep in, I pray. Ah, only on thy account am I so happy, and weep enough.

"Julia."

Hardly had Albano given his foster-father the joyful promise to be this evening at his house, when the latter, without further words, hastened off to prepare his "folks" for the joy of the twofold visit.

The Lector was now entreated for his news, with which he seemed to hesitate cautiously on account of Siebenkäs, till Albano begged him freely to impart all to him and his new friend. His account, including some interpolations which came to Albano afterward, was this:—

Bouverot (with whom he began at the questioning of Albano, whose curiosity was excited) had been hitherto in secret league with the aspiring Prince of Haarhaar, and had, in the confident calculation of making through him his permanent fortune, and even an unexpected marriage, upon his word unhung his order-cross of a German Herr, linked at once to infamy and income, and caused to be delivered to the sister of this Prince, Idoine, through the Prince himself, who stood pledged to him for the repeal of her similar vow,^[154] a miniature of her, which he insisted that he had stolen in his flight, together with half a picture-gallery, and with many fine allusions to his adopted name Zefisio, as that of a Romish Arcadian, and to the name of her Arcadia. "Oh la différence de cet homme au diable, comme est-elle petite!" said Augusti, with quite an unexpected vehemence. Albano must needs ask why. "He passed off an entirely different picture for that of the Princess," said the Lector. Of course it was Liana's own, Albano concluded, and had easily, by a few questions, drawn out that mournful history of the blind Liana chased by the tiger Bouverot.

"O wretched me!" cried Albano, half in fury, and half in pain. It distressed him to think of the sufferings wherewith the holy heart had had to pay for its short, pure, chary love toward him,—who became blind the first time because she so loved his father,^[155] and the second time because the son misunderstood and loved her. But he restrained himself, and spoke not on the subject; the past was to him, as echo is to bees, hurtful. Siebenkäs testified his joy at Bouverot's punishment through the miscarriage of all his plans.

Albano heard that even Luigi had assumed the appearance of supporting Bouverot's connubial intentions, merely for the sake of seeing him fall from so much the higher elevation. "With what a long, cold, bitter, malicious pleasure," thought Albano, "could my brother, in the hope of the ditch which his death would dig for the hostile court and its adherents, look upon all their expectations, and graciously accept all their measures, from the marriage of the Princess even to the congratulations thereto appertaining, while he hated the Princess and all! And how could he maintain that life-long silent coldness toward me?" But Albano neglected to consider two reasons,—his own proud deportment toward the Prince, and the customary avarice of princes, which is shy of apanage^[156] moneys.

Gaspard's transactions in Haarhaar, which the Lector gave, only with some omissions enjoined by Julienne, were these:—

With characteristic pleasure and silence had the Knight looked, of old, upon the intricacies of human relations, and given them over to their own disentanglement or dilaceration. Here he let all the dreams of others grow more and more lively and wild, until, with one snatch at the breast, he swept them all from the sleeper at once. His old indignation at the proud refusal of the princely bride was appeased, when he could show them, below the glittering triumphal gate of their wishes and efforts, the documents of Albano's birth, from the hand of the old Prince down even to that of the brother Luigi, as just the same number of armed guards, who should drive them back again out of the gate of victory. A sympathetic astonishment was expressed; nothing was agreed to. Albano had neither been presented to the country nor the empire. Gaspard brought on very calmly an early acknowledgment from Joseph II. This, too, was found out of rule and invalid. Thereupon he confessed, with the determined anger with whose lightning-sparks he so often suddenly pierced through men and relations, that he was going to unveil, without further ceremony, the whole conduct of the court toward Luigi in his eighth year and in his travelling years to all the courts of Europe.

Here they broke off in terror the forenoon's negotiations, to prepare themselves for new ones in the afternoon. In these—which the Lector was ordered to conceal from Albano—the wish of a continued nearer union between the two houses was shown at a distance. By the union was meant Idoine, whose resemblance to Liana, and thereby Albano's love for the latter, had long been known as gossip. But the involving of this guiltless angel ran counter to Gaspard's whole plan of his complete satisfaction; he—who with his high, jagged antlers easily flew through the confused low brush-wood of worldly life—pushed against the barriers of his complete power, gave a downright No! and they broke off in a rage, with the courtly reminder that Herr von Hafenreffer was to accompany him as plenipotentiary and transact the rest of the business in Pestitz.

So both arrived. Hafenreffer, quite as fine and cold as he was honest, easily searched out all the real relations of the case. Gaspard imparted to Julienne—still fancying that she retained her old love for his daughter Linda—the wish of the rival Court; but he was astounded at her disclosures, which spoke as much for Idoine as her former secret influences upon Albano. In addition to this, she further provoked him, in the confused twilight of her situation, by the well-meant offer to make good to him in some measure his paternal outlays upon Albano. "The Spaniard reads no household accounts, he merely pays them," said he, and sensitively took leave forever, in order to travel over all the islands of the earth. Albano he wished not to see any more, from chagrin at the accident that he had been cheated out of the enjoyment, by Schoppe's church- and grave-robbery, of punishing and humbling Albano, by the disclosure that he was only Linda's father and not his, for cherishing bold doubts of his worth. Whither Linda had gone on that night of his discovery as father, he coldly concealed from all.

Thereupon he took also solemn leave of his former bride, the Prince's widow. "He held it as his bounden duty," he said to her, "to let her into the secret of the newest succession, since he had in some measure let himself be entangled in the progress of the business." Never was her look more proud and poisonous. "You seem," said she, composedly, "to have been led off into more than one error. If it so interests you, as you seem upon the whole to be interested for this land, then I take pleasure in telling you, that I dare no longer hesitate about making known the good fortune which I anticipate, of sparing the country, perhaps, by a son of their beloved, deceased Prince, the necessity of any change. At least, we cannot, before time has decided the thing, admit any foreign admixture." Gaspard, enraged at what he had expected, spoke in reply merely an infinitely impudent word—because he had a faculty of more easily forgetting and violating sex than rank,—and thereupon took his courteous leave of her, with the assurance that he was certain, wherever he might be, to receive confirmation of this already so agreeable intelligence, and that it would then pain him to be obliged, out of love for the truth, to make public against her some extraordinary—judicial papers, which he would not gladly put in circulation. "You are a real devil," said the Princess, beside herself. "Vis-à-vis d'un ange? Mais pourquoi non?" replied he, and departed with the old ceremonies.—

Albano, whose heart had in all these depths and abysses naked, wounded roots and fibres, could not say a word. But his friend Siebenkäs declared, without further ceremony, that "Gaspard, at every step, and with his everlasting, fine dallying and hesitating,—as, for example, about the marriage of his daughter, and other things,—had betrayed nothing but the incarnate Spaniard, as Gundling, in the first part of his Otia, so well portrays him." Augusti wondered at this openness, while it seemed to him more tolerable and decorous than Schoppe's roughness. "What would strike me most," added Siebenkäs, who, as it seemed, had taken the world's history as a subordinate department, "would be the long concealment of so weighty a pedigree among so many partakers of the secret, if I did not know too well from Hume, that the Gunpowder Plot, under Charles I., had been kept secret for a whole year and a half by more than twenty conspirators."

Much wounded, and yet thoroughly cleansed, Albano departed, in the afternoon after these narrations, into the discordant kingdom, but with cheerful, holy boldness. He was conscious to himself of higher aims and powers than any of the hard souls would dispute with him; from the serene, free, ethereal sphere of eternal good he would not let himself be drawn down into the dirty isthmus of common existence; a higher realm than what a metallic sceptre sways, one which man first creates, in order to govern it, opened itself before him; in every, even the smallest country, was something great,—not population, but prosperity; the highest justice was his determination, and the promotion of old foes, particularly of the sensible Froulay. Thus did he now, full of confidence, leap out of his former slender vessel, propelled only by strange hands, on to a free earth, where he can move himself alone without strange rudder, and instead of the empty, bare watery way, find a firm, blooming land and object. And with this consolation he parted from the dead Schoppe and the living friend.

145. CYCLE.

In the twilight he came upon the mountain, whence he could overlook, but with other eyes than once, the city, which was to be the circus and the theatre of his powers. He belongs now to a German house,—the people around him are his kinsmen,—the prefiguring ideals, which he had once sketched to himself at the coronation of his brother, of the warm rays wherewith a prince as a constellation can enlighten and enrich lands, were now put into his hands for fulfilment. His pious father, still blessed by the grandchildren of the country, pointed to him the pure sun-track of his princely duty: only actions give life strength, only moderation gives it a charm. He thought of the beings who lay sunk in graves around him, hard and barren indeed as rocks, but high as rocks, too,—of the beings whom fate had sacrificed, who would fain have used the milky-way of infinity and the rainbow of fancy as a bow in the hand, without ever being able to draw a string across it. "Why did not, then, I, too, go down like those whom I esteemed? Did not, in me also, that scum of excess boil up and overspread the clearness?"

Fate now carried on again games of repetition with him; a flaming carriage rolled away on a road leading off sidewise from the Prince's garden; slowly moved the hearse of the brother with dead lights up the Blumenbühl mountain. "The slow carriage I know; whose is the swift one?" asked Albano of the Lector. "Herr von Cesara has left us," replied he. Albano was silent, but he experienced the last pang which the Knight would give him. He begged the Lector earnestly to let him go alone on the way to Blumenbühl, because he should take altogether circuitous routes.

He wished to visit in Tartarus the grave of the paternal heart without a breast. As he passed through the noisy suburbs, an old man stared at him for a long time, suddenly fled away with terror, and cried to a woman, who met him, "The old man is walking round!" The man had been in his youth a servant of the Prince, had become blind and had recovered again a short time since; therefore he took the son for the father whom he so resembled. In the city the usual public joy at change was making itself heard. In one house was a children's ball, in another a group of players at proverbs; while the public mourning shut up every dancing-hall and every theatre. Strange, merry sons of the muses were looking out of Roquairol's chamber. In the hotel of the Spaniard a boy had the jay by a string. He heard some people say in passing, "Who would have dreamed of it?" "Quite natural," replied the other; "I was helping make, at the very time, a wall to the princely vault, and saw him as I see thee." In the upper city all the rows of windows in the palace of mourning were brightly illuminated, as if there were a happier festival. In the house of the Minister all were dark; overhead among the statues on the roof a single little light crept round.

"No," thought Albano, "I need not reflect, why I, too, sank not with them. O enough, enough has fallen from me into graves. I must surely yearn forever after all the beings who have flown from me; like divers, the dead swim along with me below, and hold my life-bark or bear the anchor." He saw the old corpse-seeress standing out there on the Blumenbühl road, who once met him in the company of the Baldhead; she stared up after the lighted hearse and fancied she was seeing dreams and the future, when she was looking at reality. Everywhere in his path lay the quivering spider-feet which had been torn out from the crushed Tarantula of the past. He saw life through a veil, though not a black but a green one.

Passing through Tartarus, he longingly, but with a shudder, because the past with its spirits glided after him, arrived at the Moravian churchyard, where, in a garden without flowers, surrounded by sunken, slumbering mourning-birches, the white altar with the paternal heart and the golden inscription glimmered: "Take my last offering, all-gracious one!" Before the heart shut up in a breast of stone, in which nothing stirred, not even a particle of dust, he made his childlike prayer to God, and felt that he would have loved his parents, and swore to himself to please them, if their lofty eyes still looked down into the low vale of life. He pressed the cold stone like a breast to himself; and went away with soft steps, as if the old man were walking along beside him in this his own form, so like his.

He looked up from his road to the mountain where his father had found him at evening on Whitsuntide and Sacrament day, as to a Tabor of the past; and in his walk through the little birch wood he still recollected well the spot^[157] where once two voices (his parents) had pronounced his name. Thus consecrated by the holy past, he arrived in the village of his childhood, and saw the church, as well as the house of Wehrfritz, filled with lights, the former, however, for a mournful object, and the latter for the glad one of welcoming of guests.

146. CYCLE.

Albano found in the glorification, wherein Heaven was to him only the magnifying mirror of a glimmering earth, and the past only the fatherland and mother-country of holy parents,—in this splendor of the soul he found the house of his boyhood, into which he entered, festal and like a temple, and everything common and clumsy refined or only represented as upon a stage. His mother Albina and his sister Rabette came with their glad looks as higher beings to his moved heart. They drew hastily back, Julienne flew down stairs and kissed her brother, for the first time openly, in a silent blending of pleasure and sadness. When she released him, the tolling began out of the gloom of the church-tower, as a signal that the dead brother was passing into the church; then she rushed back upon Albano, and wept infinitely. She went up with him, without saying whom he should find up there with his foster-father. An old flute-clock, whose laborious music was offered from time immemorial to rare guests, welled out to welcome him, as he opened the door, with the resonances of the days of his childhood.

A tall, black-dressed female form, with a veil falling down sidewise, who sat talking with his foster-father, turned round towards him as he entered. It was Idoine; but the old magic semblance passed again over his to-day so excited soul, as if it were Liana from heaven, arrayed in immortality, prouder and bolder in the possession of unearthly powers, retaining nothing more of her former earth than goodness and charms. Both met each other again here with mutual astonishment. Julienne—conscious to herself of her little concealments and arrangements—saw a little red cloud of displeasure flit across Idoine's mild face; it was, however, gone below the horizon, so soon as Idoine perceived that the sister during the tolling for her brother's funeral could not restrain her tears, and she went kindly to meet her, seeking her hand. Idoine, easily inclined by her severity to fits of vexation, that little skirmish of wrath, had freed herself by long, sharp exercise from this finest, but strongest poison of the soul's happiness, till she at last stood in her heaven as a pure, light moon, without a rainy and cloudy atmosphere of earth.

Albano, to whom the earth, filled with the past and the dead, had become an air-globe that soared into the ether, felt himself free amidst his stars, and without earthly anxiety. He approached Idoine,—although with the consciousness of the conflicting relations of his and her house, yet with holy courage. "Her last wish in the last garden," he said, "had been heard by Heaven." With maiden-like decision of perception she went through the wilderness wherein she had to bend aside, now flowers, now thorns, in order to be neither embarrassed nor injured. She answered him, "I rejoice from my heart that you have found your faithful sister forever." Wehrfritz was quite as much delighted as astonished at the frankness with which she honestly spoke the truth against all family relations. "So must one always lose much on the earth," Albano replied to her, "in order to gain much," and turned to his sister, as if he would thereby guard this word against a more ambiguous sense.

The funeral bell tolled on. The strange, happy and sad mingling of earthly lots gave all a solemn and free tone of spirit. Albina and Rabette came up, arrayed in festive dark dresses, for the procession to the burial church. Julienne divided herself between two brothers, and never did her heart, which stood at once in tears and flames, swell more romantically. She guessed how her friend Idoine thought respecting her brother Albano, for she knew her to have a steadier voice than to-day's was, and her sweet confusion was most easily evident to her from the short report which the open soul had made to her of meeting Albano again in Liana's garden; the slight maidenly recoil, too, of her pride to-day, when she was embarrassed to find herself taken everywhere for a risen Liana, that beloved of the youth, made Julienne not more doubtful, but more sure.

"On a fine evening," said Albano to Idoine, "I once looked down into your lovely Arcadia, but I was not in Arcadia." "The name," replied she, and her clear eyes sank again to the earth, "is nothing more than play; properly it is an alp, and yet only with herdsmen's huts in a vale." She raised not again her large eyes, when Julienne silently took her hand and drew her away, because now the funeral bell sounded out with single, sad strokes, as a sign that the funeral ceremony was coming on, in which Julienne could not possibly deny her sisterly heart the comfort of participating. "We are going to the church," said Idoine to the company. "So are we all, indeed," replied Wehrfritz, quickly. As the two maidens passed by Albano, he observed for the first time on Idoine three little freckles, as it were traces of earth and life, which made her a mortal. He looked after the lofty, noble form, with the long floating veil, who, beside his sister, appeared like Linda, quite as majestically, only more delicately built, and whose holy gait announced a priestess, who had been wont to walk in temples before gods.

Hardly had the two disappeared, when Albano's old acquaintances, especially the women, to whom Julienne's presence had always held near in view Albano's family-tree, crowded on his heart with all signs of long-repressed cordiality, full of wishes, joys, and tears. "Be my parents still," said Albano. "Bravery is everything in this world," said the Director. "I did my part like a mother," said Albina, "but who could have known this!" Rabette said nothing; her joy and love were overpowering as her recollections. "My sister Rabette," said Albano, "gave me, when I first went to Italy, the words embroidered on a purse, 'Think of us.' This prayer I will fulfil for you all in every vicissitude of fortune";—and here, although too modest to say it, he thought of things which he might perhaps do, as Prince, for his foster-father, among which came first the restoration of his reverting male fee. "Thus, then, is many a former sorrow of the heart, for us—" began Albina. "O, what's to do with hearts? what's to do with sorrows?" said Wehrfritz; "to-day all is right and smooth." But Rabette understood her mother very well.

All betook themselves on their way to the temple of mourning. They heard as they approached the church the music of the hymn, "How softly they rest"; at a considerable distance bugles were essaying gladder tones. Rabette pressed Albano's hand and said, very softly, "It has been well with me, because I have learned all." She had, since hearing how Roquairol had murdered a manifold happiness and himself, cast all her love after the wretched man into his grave to moulder with him, without shedding a tear as she did it. Her heart leaped at the thought of Idoine's goodness, of her resemblance, with the mention of which her father had to-day made the angel blush, and of her beautiful comforting of Julienne, who had wept incessantly before Albano's arrival. Albina praised Julienne more on account of her sisterly affection. Rabette was silent about her; the two were sisterly rivals; moreover, Julienne had, according to her sharp, inexorable system, looked upon her very coldly as a victim of the Roquairol whom she so despised; whereas Idoine, who, by her greater knowledge of human nature, had learned to unite mildness toward female errors of the heart and moment with severity toward men, had only been gentle and just.

When they stepped into the church full of mourning lamps, Albano stole away into an unlighted corner, so as neither to disturb nor be disturbed. At the bright altar stood the serene and venerable Spener, with his uncovered head full of silver locks; the long coffin of the brother stood before the altar between rows of lights. In the arch of the church hung night, and forms were lost in the gloom; below rays and bright shadows and people crossed each other. Albano saw the iron-grated door of the hereditary sepulchre, through which his blessed parents had gone down, standing open like a gate of death; and it was to him as if once more Schoppe's tumultuous spirit stalked in, to break into the last house of man. The thought of his brother affected him but little, but the neighborhood of his still parents, who had so long watched for him, and whom he had never thanked, and the incessant tears of his sister, whom he saw in the gallery over the gate of death, took mighty hold of his heart, out of which the deep, eternal tones of lamentation drew tears, like the warm blood of sorrow and of love. He saw Idoine, with her half red, half white Lancaster rose on the black silk, standing beside his sister, drawing the veil over her eyes against many a comparing look. Here, near such altar-lights, had once the oppressed Liana knelt while swearing the renunciation of her love. The whole constellation of his shining past, of his lofty beings, had gone down below the horizon, and only one bright star of all the group stood glimmering still above the earth: Idoine.

Just then the youth was seen by his friend Dian, who came hastening towards him. Without much ceremony, the Greek embraced him, and said, "Hail, hail to the beautiful transformation! There stands my Chariton; she, too, would greet thee after the manner of her speech."^[158] But Chariton was looking continually at Idoine, on account of her resemblance. "Well, my good Dian, I have paid many a heart and fortune for it, and I wonder that fate has spared me thee," said Albano. Thereupon he asked him, as architect of the church, about the condition of the hereditary sepulchre, because he wished afterward to have the ashes of his parents uncovered, in order at least to kneel down before them in silent gratitude. "Of that," said Dian, surprised, "I know very little; but it is a shocking purpose, and what good is to come of it?"

The music ceased; Spener, in a low tone, began his discourse. He spoke not, however, of the Prince at his feet, nor yet of his loved ones in the hereditary tomb, but of the real life that knows no death, and which man must beget in himself. He said that, for himself, though an old man, he wished neither to die nor to live, because one could already, even here, be with God, so soon as one only had God within him, and that we ought to be able to see without grief our holiest wishes wither like sunflowers, because, after all, the lofty sun still beams on, which forever raises and nourishes new ones, and that a man must not so much prepare himself for eternity as plant in himself the eternity which is still, pure, light, deep, and everything.

Many a human breast in the church felt the poisonous point of the past broken off by this discourse. On Albano's rising sea it had poured smooth oil, and all about his life was even and radiant. Julienne's eyes had grown dry and full of serene light, and Idoine's had filled with glimmering moisture, for her heart had to-day been stirred too often not to weep in this sweet, devout, and exalting emotion. Once it seemed to Albano, as he looked towards her, as if she shone supernaturally, and as if, just as the sun from under the earth beams upon a moon, so Liana from the other world were beaming upon her countenance, and adorning this likeness of herself with a holiness beyond the reach of earth.

At the close of the discourse, Albano went quietly to the two friends, pressed his sister's hand, and begged her not to wait for the end of the sad festival. She was comforted and willing. As they stepped out of the church, a wondrous bright moonlight was spread over earth, like a sweet morning light of the higher world. Julienne begged them, instead of going in between four walls, into the prison of eyes and words, and the midst of all the din, rather to behold first the still, bright landscape.

All of them bore in their breasts the holy world of the serene old man out into the fair night. Not a speck of cloud, not a breath of air, stirred through the wide heaven; the stars reigned alone; earthly distances were lost in the depth of white shadows; and all mountains stood in the silvery fire of the moon. "O, how I love your serene, holy old man!" said Idoine to Albano, when she had already often pressed Julienne's hand. "How happy I am! Ah, life, like the water of the sea, is not quite sweet till it rises towards heaven." Suddenly distant bugle-tones came pealing out to them, which well-meaning country-folk sounded as a greeting before Albano's foster-home. "How comes it," said Julienne, "that in the open air and at night even the most insignificant music is pleasant and stirring?" "Perhaps because our inner music harmonizes with it more clearly and purely," said Idoine. "And because, before the spheral music of the universe, human art and human simplicity are, at last, equally great!" added Albano. "That is just what I meant, for that is also, after all, only within ourselves," said Idoine, and looked lovingly and frankly into his eyes, which sank before hers, as if the moon, the mild after-summer of the sun, now dazzled him with its splendor.

Since the church festival, she had addressed herself to him oftener; her sweet voice was more tender, though more tremulous; her maidenly shyness of the resemblance to Liana seemed conquered or forgotten, as on that evening in the last garden. During Spener's discourse, her existence had decided itself within her, and on her virgin love, as on a spring soil by one warm evening rain, all buds had been opened into bloom. As he now looked upon this clear, mild eye, under the pure, cloudless brow, and the fine mouth, with inexhaustible good-will towards every living thing breathing over it, he could hardly conceive that this delicate lily, this light incense exhaled from morning redness and morning flowers, was the habitation of that firm spirit which could rule life, just as the tender cloud or the little nightingale's breast contains the thrilling peal of sound.

They stood now on the bright mountain, covered with the evergreen of youthful remembrance, where Albano had once slumbered in dreams of the future, as on a light and lofty island in the midst of the shadow-sea of two vales. The mountain-ridges of the linden city, the eternal goal of his youthful days, were snowed over by the moon, and the constellations stood upon them gleaming and great. He looked now upon Idoine: how truly did this soul belong among the stars! "When the world is purged from this low day; when heaven, with its holiest, farthest suns, looks upon this earthly land; when the heart and the nightingale alone speak,—then only does her holy time come up in heaven; then is her lofty, tranquil spirit seen and understood, and by day only her charms," thought Albano.

"How many a time, my good Albano," said the sister, "hast thou here, in thy long-left youthful years, looked toward the mountains for thine own ones,—for thy hidden parents and brothers and sisters,—for thou hadst always a good heart!" Here Idoine unconsciously looked at him with inexpressible love, and his eye met hers. "Idoine," said he,—and their souls gazed into each other, as into suddenly rising heavens, and he took the maiden's hand,—"I have that heart still; it is unhappy, but unstained." Then Idoine hid herself quickly and passionately in Julienne's bosom, and said, scarce audibly, "Julienne, if Albano rightly knows me, then be my sister!"

"I do know thee, holy being!" said Albano, and clasped to one bosom sister and bride; and from all of them there wept but one joy-enraptured heart. "O ye parents," prayed the sister, "O thou God, bless, then, both of them and me, that so it may be forever!" And as she lifted her eyes to heaven, while the lovers lingered in the short, holy elysium of the first kiss, innumerable immortals looked down out of the deep-blue eternity, the distant tones and the mild rays were blended together, and the slumbering realm of the moon resounded. "Look up to the fair heaven!" cried the sister to the lovers, in the ecstasy of her joy; "the rainbow of eternal peace blooms there, and the tempests are over, and the world is all so bright and green. Wake up, my brother and sister!"

FOOTNOTES:

Footnote 1: Jean Paul here Germanizes (or Frenchifies) the Latin word territio (a terrifying). The meaning is, that this marriage might well be an in terrorem affair to poor Luigi (as well as to the bride, according to Schoppe's droll conceit, that all this furor of joy was a mere noise made to scare her back). The only other case in which the author uses this word is near the end of the third paragraph of Cycle 15, where the reader should have been informed that real territion is an expression borrowed from the inquisitors, who, when verbal threatenings fail, bring on ocular ones by showing the instruments of torture to the victim. This is applied to Froulay's system with his children. In this sense the rod which used to hang over the fireplace or looking-glass when some of us were children was a real territion.—Tr.

Footnote 2: Schach means both chess and the Persian king,—the Shah—Tr.

Footnote 3: In the (French and German) sense of active property, namely, that does something, brings in something. Active debts are one's assets.-Tr.

Footnote 4: Referring, of course, to her refusal of him.—Tr.

Footnote 5: A French name for candlesticks.—Tr.

Footnote 6: Frightfully is this true cry of humanity echoed in Hess's Flying Journeys, Part IV. p. 156; at present a more humane administration has quieted it by means of the game-tax.

Footnote 7: It was to him a hearty pleasure to present such a marriage-poem with the rhymes, flights, and notes of admiration and exclamation by the very best new-year's rhymer in the world; and the consciousness of his pure, though satirical, purpose set him entirely at ease about any charge of being elaborate or too servile in particular applications. [The Pereat-Carmen means, an Ode of Anathema.—Tr.]

Footnote 8: Poison administered to obtain a succession or inheritance. Adler.—Tr.

Footnote 9: Between every two windows stood a pier-glass, which blended its reflection of the distant vista with those of the windows. Opposite each mirror stood only one window; the interval between the two was filled and concealed with foliage.

Footnote 10: "I am but a dream."

Footnote 11: "Cherished sister."

Footnote 12: An allusion, of course, to the theological dogma of the procession of the Holy Spirit from Father and Son.—Tr.

Footnote 13: "Nor let a god interpose unless a knot occurs which is worthy of such helper."

Footnote 14: "Nor let a fourth person (i. e. when you have the married couple and friend) intrude his advice."

Footnote 15: Angels' Song in Faust, where the sun completes his course with Donnergang.—Tr.

Footnote 16: Nebelflechen and Marktflecken are the German words; Flecken, like our spot, having two meanings, as if we should say spots of mist and dwelling-spots.—Tr.

Footnote 17: A coquetting with virtue as a virtuoso, of course Gaspard means. The word corresponds to religiosity.—Tr.

Footnote 18: Where the Prince had died and she had been made blind.

Footnote 19: Gesichts-schwester. Visionary is here used in the sense of seen in vision, as in the line where Æneas describes seeing Hector's ghost,

"I wept to see the visionary man."

The reference probably is to the scene in the dream-temple, where Liana personated Idoine, Cycle 78.—Tr.

Footnote 20: Stein-pflaster means pavement.—Tr.

Footnote 21: Or one might paraphrase Schoppe's half-punning and half-proverbial saying: "Who has never known her durance, never learns endurance."—Tr.

Footnote 22: Schoppe here alludes to the poem of Schiller, "Auch ich war in Arcadien geboren."—Tr.

Footnote 23: His Lettres sur les Aveugles.

Footnote 24: Bunt auf weiss is the German phrase, answering to "Schwarz auf weiss" (in black and white). There seems to be no way in English of keeping up the analogous neatness of the expression.—Tr.

Footnote 25: This word is in English in the original, and Jean Paul adds in a foot-note: Die helle Kammer (the bright chamber). Does he mean the camera obscura?—Tr.

Footnote 26: This passage may throw some light for the reader on a somewhat obscure one at the end of the first paragraph in Cycle 31, where Jean Paul seems to intimate the wish that, as there are surgeons employed at the rack to point out how far torture may go without killing the victim, and so defeating the very object of the cruelty, so there might be in regard to the enjoyments of princes, in order to point out how far they may go without spoiling themselves and imposing sickly, worthless, burdensome rulers upon the country.—Tr.

Footnote 27: Titles of the chapters respectively in "The Invisible Lodge," in "Hesperus," and in "Quintus Fixlein."—Tr.

Footnote 28: Where Albano for the last time was happy with Liana.

Footnote 29: Jean Paul does not quote Gray's Elegy, though this somewhat literal translation might seem to imply it.—Tr.

Footnote 30: The Chinese could once paint fishes and other shapes on porcelain, which were only visible when one filled up the vessel. Lettres Edifiantes, etc., XII. Recueil.

Footnote 31: "Strike, but hear me."—Tr.

Footnote 32: Linda.

Footnote 33: For instance, the German imperial court allows no servants' livery.

Footnote 34: Buildings in Rome which appear to consist of one or the other of these have only an outside layer thereof.

Footnote 35: "Pretended secret of making one's self invulnerable." Adler.—Tr.

Footnote 36: These distinctions are given for the German Princessinn and Fürstinn.—Tr.

Footnote 37: These distinctions are given for the German Princessinn and Fürstinn.—Tr.

Footnote 38: 5. Cycle.

Footnote 39: The Diana-tree of the chemists is a crystallized composition of silver, mercury, and spirits of nitre.—Tr.

Footnote 40: Literally, the pastoral, &c.—Tr.

Footnote 41: Symmer observed the following: White and black stockings drawn over each other in dry, cold weather, when one draws them apart, the outer by the lower end, the inner by the upper end, become charged with opposite electricities, the white positive, the black negative; when separate, they swell out toward each other, and seek each other; when in contact, they hang down flat and broad.—Fisher's Physical Dictionary, Vol. I.

Footnote 42: The pastoral hour of sentimental love.—Tr.

Footnote 43: The "vant-courier" of the "thunderbolt."—Tr.

Footnote 44: On Wilhelmshöhe a long musical tone precedes the falling of the water.

Footnote 45: Both are names of the old German God of Thunder; he means himself, however, by this.

Footnote 46: The Molossi called all beautiful women Proserpines.

Footnote 47: Thus ought Schiller's Holy Virgin to be named.

Footnote 48: His Albano.

Footnote 49: Schoppe means very south-east.—Tr.

Footnote 50: So the Vandals named Death.

Footnote 51: Simon and Judas's day, when the weather was apt to be stormy. See Act I. Scene 1, of Schiller's William Tell. "To-day is Simon and Judas's day. Hark! how the deep howls!"—Tr.

Footnote 52: "Two of a trade can never agree."—Tr.

Footnote 53: An Englishman observed, that, among the fixed ideas of the madhouse, that of subserviency rarely occurs; its inhabitants being mostly gods, kings, popes, savants.

Footnote 54: Who and what and with what help and why and how and when.

Footnote 55: Where, as is well known, the uncorrupted corpses lean against each other.

Footnote 56: Who had appeared to him on Isola Bella.

Footnote 57: Where she had melted away from him in the cloud when he was about to embrace her.

Footnote 58: The swan, with a stroke of her wing, can break an arm.

Footnote 59: The reader may not remember that "the little Linda" was the cipher under which Julienne disguised in her letters the name of Liana, as mentioned in the third paragraph of the 43d Cycle.—Tr.

Footnote 60: She regarded her present life as a quiet play-life, like that of children, and only the second as the actual one.

Footnote 61: Here and henceforward she talks, indeed, wildly; but she knows, nevertheless, that the wreath of wild-flowers is from Chariton's children.

Footnote 62: I am only a dream.

Footnote 63: She sees the autumn-foliage.

Footnote 64: The passage reads in Cardan. Præcept. ad Filios, c. 16, thus: "Longobardo rubro, Germano nigro, Hetrusco lusco, Veneto claudo, Hispano longo et procero, mulieri barbatæ, viro crispo, Græco nulli confidere nolite." [Let no ruddy Lombard, black German, purblind Etrurian, limping Venetian, long and lean Spaniard, bearded woman, curly-haired man, nor any Greek at all, be trusted.]

Footnote 65: E. g. the Leader Naumann.

Footnote 66: He would have said assonance.

Footnote 67: He would have said co-secant.

Footnote 68: Walkyres are charming maidens, who plan battles beforehand, and mark out the heroes who are to fall.

Footnote 69: Here begins Jean Paul's fourth volume of Titan, to which he prefixed the following note (which needs for explanation only the statement that the Author—agreeably to an intimation in the Introductory Programme—accompanied each of the first two volumes with a so-called Comic Appendix, full of all sorts of quizzes having no connection with the Romance):—"This volume concludes the whole Titan, exclusive of any further comic appendices, for which, however, the Author hopes and fears to find still time and material enough. Wide-awake heads may perhaps take the usual learned criticisms on the work for the regular comic appendices thereto. And, indeed, the gay, loose dust on the poetic butterfly-wings turn out often—when more closely examined—to be real plumage. Meiningen, December, 1802. J. P. F. Richter."

Footnote 70: The corpse is borne uncovered to burial; its attendants follow muffled up.

Footnote 71: Such, for instance in Hungary, is the designation of a deacon.

Footnote 72: Screaming and outscreamed are Richter's bold words.— Tr.

Footnote 73: Curiously enough, the German phrase is constructed here so as to mean, in strict grammar, "all tall travellers."—Tr.

Footnote 74: Compact, account.—Tr.

Footnote 75: Ten o'clock.

Footnote 76: Of Jupiter Tonans.

Footnote 77: The body in the Pantheon, the head in St. Luke's Church.

Footnote 78: One is reminded here of the manner in which Macduff receives Rosse's announcement that his wife and children were "all well."—Tr.

Footnote 79: Strasburg cathedral.—Tr.

Footnote 80: The hall of the Pantheon seems too low, because a part of its steps is hidden by the rubbish.

Footnote 81: This opening in the roof is twenty-seven feet in diameter.

Footnote 82: The pole-star, as well as other northern constellations, stands lower in the south.

Footnote 83: The sum and system of electric, galvanic, chemical, anatomical experiments, tactics, a corpus juris, &c., may well put us to astonishment; but humanity itself appears no greater for gigantic structures, which are put together by millions of elephant-ants; but when an elephant carries a building, when an individual shows any one power in new degrees and relations,—Newton the power of mathematical intuition; Raphael the plastic; Aristotle, Lessing, Fichte, penetration; or another goodness, firmness, wit, &c,—then does humanity gain and extend its limits.

Footnote 84: In Greenland the intense cold makes people black and blind.

Footnote 85: Wherein since the time of Servius Tullius all potshards have been thrown.

Footnote 86: This expression seems to be borrowed from Goethe's "Fisher":—

"Lockt dich dein eigen Angesicht, Nicht her in ewigen Thau?"—Tr.

Footnote 87: See Titan, 3d Cycle. [Painting, i. e. rouging of the cheeks.—Tr.]

Footnote 88: How beautiful he is!

Footnote 89: This is the Latin esse, being, and is defined in German as "well-being." The phrase means here something like what we call being in one's element.—Tr.

Footnote 90: Roquairol.

Footnote 91: Gaeta.

Footnote 92: The island Ischia, with its mountain Epomeo high as Vesuvius, Capri, &c.

Footnote 93: "Die Myrte still, und hoch der Lorbeer steht."—Goethe.—Tr.

Footnote 94: Receptions.

Footnote 95: Borgho d' Ischia.

Footnote 96: He means the vintage, which comes in thrice a year there, in December, March, and August.

Footnote 97: Falsetto?—Tr.

Footnote 98: The island of Ischia itself.

Footnote 99: Day-sight (hemeralopy) is common in hot countries; the strongest degree is, to be blind in the night even to light, and only in the morning able to see again.

Footnote 100: There are metamorphosing mirrors which represent young forms as decrepit.

Footnote 101: Him and Liana.

Footnote 102: Campania Felice.—Tr.

Footnote 103: Spurge is a plant which has an emetic effect.—If any reader will try his hand at improving this desperate imitation (or evasion) of an untranslatable pun, of which (in the mouth of the witty Princesse herself) the author might have said, with an equally noted artiste, in a smaller sphere,—"One of our failures,"—he is informed that the German phrases are "Eine bessere Laufbahn" and "Einen bösem Laufgraben."—Tr.

Footnote 104: The reader, however, will know how to explain it who recalls the adventure which Roquairol told Albano of Linda with the snake, when she was a young girl. See Vol. I. p. 331.—Tr.

Footnote 105: At Baja.

Footnote 106: Question her no longer, for her father will come (it is said) on the day of the nuptials.

Footnote 107: A very beautiful Carthusian convent at Valencia.

Footnote 108: Singing-birds are rare in Italy, because they are sold in the market for the kitchen.

Footnote 109: Dian did not love Virgil.

Footnote 110: So heavily and slowly does the broad lava-stream roll down, that a man can travel on in advance of this glowing death-flood, which swallows up, suffocates, and melts down everything it touches, and can see the destruction behind him, without indulging an apprehension of danger to himself.

Footnote 111: Luther's version differs here (for the better) from ours, which makes it a negative assertion instead of a negative question,—"I was not in safety," &c.—Tr.

Footnote 112: Schoppe says schellen (diamonds), but laub means both leaves and spades (in cards), and therefore a liberty has been taken.—Tr.

Footnote 113: Püsterich or Püster, the well-known old German idol, full of holes, flames, and water.

Footnote 114: Of course, Jean Paul himself, a great friend of Schoppe's.—Tr.

Footnote 115: The Baldhead who prophesied that he would go mad in fourteen months.

Footnote 116: These blanks will fill themselves out in the sequel.—Tr.

Footnote 117: Of the Septuagint Old Testament.—Tr.

Footnote 118a and 118b: Similarity of nature, identity of being. Terms of old theological controversy.—Tr.

Footnote 119: The uncle had lied again, for he had previously, as we have seen, gone to Rome, where he delivered to the knight and the Princess the letters from Pestitz.

Footnote 120: The German word partie means a match in matrimony or in cards.—Tr.

Footnote 121: A familiar and favorite German song, "Freut euch des Lebens."—Tr.

Footnote 122: This passage reminds the translator of a beautiful poem of Lenau's, in which the postilion passing a graveyard in the mountains at night, where an old fellow-postilion lies buried, blows an air which the dead man used to love; and a passenger hearing the echo from the mountain-churchyard, says:—

Footnote 123: See Customs of the Morlacks. From the Italian. 1775.

Footnote 124: Go! (Done!)—Tr.

Footnote 125: Chant?—Tr.

Footnote 126: Linda had called him unheimlich ("discomfortable," to use Shakespeare's word); Roquairol, playing on the word, replies, "heimlich (close, sly) I should rather say." But the conceit seems untranslatable.—Tr.

Footnote 127: The German sonnentrunken (sun-drunken) is somewhat strong for our English speech—Tr.

Footnote 128: Richter represents the hero of one of his shorter works as being, when a child, afflicted with such sensitive nerves, that when, during the Sunday sermon, some passage of peculiar eloquence startled the congregation into silence, the awful pause would so oppress and tempt him with the thought, "Supposing thou shouldst cry out, 'I'm here too, Mr. Parson!'" that he absolutely had to run out of the church.—Tr.

Footnote 129: See Vol. I. p. 328.

Footnote 130: A passage from Albano's letter to Roquairol, Vol. I. p. 280.

Footnote 131: Patron in German.—Tr.

Footnote 132: Love and friendship.

Footnote 133: He means the yellow-dressed Athenais, enacted by his quondam mistress, whose dress was described in Vol. I. p. 322.—Tr.

Footnote 134: So much prize-money does every professor get for every best grammar and every best compend; so for every dissertation fifty ducats, &c.—Tychse's Supplement to Bourgoing's Travels, Vol. II.

Footnote 135: One such, e. g. desired to see the king; he appeared on the balcony, and stayed till she was satisfied.

Footnote 136: A Spanish inn.

Footnote 137: His dog.

Footnote 138: Es ist zum Tollwerden and es ist zum Tollsein are the two German phrases.—Tr.

Footnote 139: Livonian?—Tr.

Footnote 140: Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore (literally, greater lake).—Tr.

Footnote 141: See in Howitt's "Student Life in Germany," p. 301, &c., an account of the ceremony at the singing of the "Landesvater," or consecration song, the most impressive part of which is that every student pierces his cap with his sword.—Tr.

Footnote 142: S—s means Siebenkäs. It is known—from the Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-pieces—that Schoppe at an earlier period called himself Siebenkäs,—then gave this name away to his friend Liebgeber, who resembled him even to the face, and from whom he had taken his,—and that the friend for show had a gravestone made and marked "Siebenkäs."

Footnote 143: See Vol. I. p. 35.

Footnote 144: Look! look!

Footnote 145: This and what follows will be remembered by the reader of the "Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces."—Tr.

Footnote 146: Or "Clavis Fichtiana," a little work of Jean Paul's.—Tr.

Footnote 147: One edition has glas (glass) instead of gas,—palpably a blunder,—Tr.

Footnote 148: Josey! Josey!

Footnote 149: Vol. I. pp. 145, 146.

Footnote 150: Vol. I. p. 143.

Footnote 151: Vol. I. p. 103.

Footnote 152: He means Liana, whom Spener, by the solemn revelation of Albano's birth and destiny, forced to renounce a love which had grown up among nothing but poisonous flowers.

Footnote 153: He strikes before the iron is hot, makes it hot by striking,—seizes opportunity by the forelock.—Tr.

Footnote 154: Never to marry beneath her rank.

Footnote 155: Liana became, as is well known, when her brother held his discourse upon the breast without a heart beside the old Prince, sick and blind.

Footnote 156: Portion settled on a younger son in royal families, or on a prince foregoing the succession.—Tr.

Footnote 157: Vol. I. p. 82.

Footnote 158: Namely, rejoice!

THE END.

Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.