Volume 2 — THIRTY-FIRST JUBILEE.

THIRTY-FIRST JUBILEE.

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

120. CYCLE.

Gaspard received his son with the usual stately coldness of the first hour, as letters begin more coldly than they end. Not until this morning-frost had melted away and it grew warmer around him, did Albano disclose to him, without fear or pusillanimous blushing, and with matured manliness, the bond which he had forever concluded with Linda and with himself, and begged him for the third yes. "So after all," replied the Knight, "the old enchanter has carried it through at last; of course under the reinforcement of a young enchantress. That I shall never disturb thee in anything which thou seizest upon with whole soul and forever, that thou knowest already from a similar case in the last year." Albano grew red at the bitter mention of his first love, but had gained strength within a half-year to preserve a manly silence, in cases where he once spoke out like a youth. Gaspard, more glad and warm than usual towards him to-day, nevertheless went on, when he perceived his sensitiveness: "I pronounce it good! As the seal-engraver in the beginning stamps the arms in wax, and then, and not till then, etches them on the precious stone, so does man essay to impress his upon more than one heart, until he at last gets the firmest. It must be owned thou hast not made the worst choice in my ward, and I gladly give my word of assent to it."

Albano pressed the hand which drew the sweet knot of love still tighter, and said, in the entrancement of gratitude: "I found my sister, too, the Princess. I put no question to her, however, as lately, but count upon time." "Mocker!" said Gaspard, and assumed, seemingly by way of cooling him off, the cruel appearance of thinking his pure, noble son had been disposed to retort upon him the bantering allusion to having many love-affairs. "Only be silent about all in thy innermost heart, as I myself have hitherto been, and conceal thy knowledge from the court. Give me thy word of honor."

Albano said he had already given it to Julienne also. He was, however, driven back, by Gaspard's whole deportment, upon conclusions which placed moral garlands neither upon his father nor upon Julienne's mother.

Gaspard added, furthermore, that it was a misfortune for a man to be entangled with fantastic women,—as Albano already knew his mother to have been,—and, in fact, with three at once, and advised him to march on boldly, as hitherto, through all riddles, and leave them to solve themselves. Thereupon he proposed to him, as a test of the third female fancy-monger, the question whether he already knew that the Countess, notwithstanding his guardianship, had still her living father, who would appear for the first time on her wedding-day. He said, "Yes." Gaspard then continued: This reason, of itself,—in order that Linda might find her father, and all of them the peace of clearness at last,—decided him for an early, secret marriage of the two through the honorable Spener.

Albano, really terrified at the prospect of the near and speedy transformation of blissful hours into blissful years, and no more able to think of his Titaness as wife than to think of her as child, answered, modestly and with disinterested reference to Linda's dread of wedlock, that, as to the time of sealing his happiness, no one must or could decide but Linda herself.

Gaspard was well content. "I only insist upon your adjourning the matter awhile," he subjoined. "My friend the Prince is again near his end; the beneficial effect which a spiritual apparition had wrought upon him has gradually subsided, and he fears daily the return of the phantom, which has promised to foretell him his last hours. At such a time your festival does not serve my purpose. To speak in confidence, the poor patient had himself an eye to the fair bride. It is, after all, but fair to spare him the highest certainty of his loss. On his account I also postpone my departure."

As if a man should enter into the new-created paradise, and all birds at once—nightingales and eagles and owls and birds-of-paradise and vultures and larks—should beset him, so confusedly did Albano feel himself excited by these mutually crossing prospects, and he perceived that there could be no dependence nor defence here, except in his own heart and Linda's.

Gaspard seemed to be impatient to see the Countess again, whom he called his only friend. "Unfortunately, I did not believe my brother in Rome," he added, "when he insisted on having met both ladies in Naples. Apropos, that brother passed through here some time ago, on his way to Spain; in Rome he asserted he was travelling to Greece. Thou seest with what poetic pleasure and geniality he carries on pure lying."

Gaspard parted from him very warmly, with the words, "Albano, I am very well satisfied with thee; I should be infinitely so if the purity of the youth had passed over into the man; I have not yet found it so." Albano was about to affirm and swear with emotion. "That is why," he continued, waving away the oath with a light motion of the hand, "thou foundest me so glad about thy good fortune, for the Princess's friend had already announced to me thy love in the morning. Take heed to thyself before her, for she hates thee without bounds."

With a hard and horrible aspect, like a new and extraordinary beast of prey behind the grating, does a real though unarmed hatred present itself for the first time before a good heart. Albano demanded no confirmation or explanation of this sad intelligence, for the love and error of the Princess, her acquaintance with his former coldness toward Linda, her silent bitterness toward Linda herself, were quite flames enough for her to cook the strongest poison by.

He took up his residence again, at the request of his father, at the house of Doctor Sphex, situated, unmeaningly to him, down in the valley; and Gaspard resumed his abode in the palace, near his sick friend. The Knight speedily presented him to the court, which soon observed and remarked the brown of travel, the sharper lightning of the eye, and the whole latest development of his great form. The Princess received him with the lightest, finest coldness, a sort of aqua toffana, which seems only pure, tasteless water. The Prince sat upright in his sick-bed, with peevish face, before drawings of Herculaneum, and was letting himself be informed on the subject by Bouverot. As a face upon which, in the late, gray years of life, fair joyousness can still picture itself, announces a fair life and fair heart, so the saint never wears a more heavenly smile than on his sick-bed, nor the reprobate a more hard and painful one. Albano turned his eye away from the sickly, withered brother of his sister.

Languishing, he looked back toward the past Hesperia, and forward to the gate of paradise which was finally to open, and show Linda and his sister in Eden. "It will certainly meet your approval," Gaspard had said, "that, under the pretext of Luigi's sickness, I have had them both quartered in the old palace at Lilar, where thou canst see them more unobserved." He met the Minister Froulay, and the Lector came to meet him; with both came a dark, manifold shadowy retinue of hard, old recollections. He had not yet seen Captain Roquairol, who was now to him the evening cloud of a sunken spring day.

He carried as speedily as he could his dumb heart—which was an Æolian-harp in a dead calm—to his childhood's Blumenbühl, to greet the parental beings, and to read the papers of his soul's nearest neighbor, Schoppe, for whose promised return he now longed more than ever.

121. CYCLE.

It was a fresh, blue, summer day when Albano went to his old Blumenbühl, without knowing that he did so precisely on the St. James's day, or paternal birthday, which he had once, in childhood, spent in such singular preludes of his life. In the old gardens and on the old heights round about, even over to Lilar's wood, lay everywhere, even now, the young, glistening dew of childhood, not yet dried up by the western sun; many tear-drops, too, stood among the drops of dew on the flowers; but his fresh, healing spirit was on its guard against effeminately floating away into soft transport, that Lethe of the present. In the village he was struck with the sight of a horse whom they were shoeing, for, by the caparison and all, he recognized it as Roquairol's festive steed. He introduced a festival into a festival, when he entered the noisy paternal apartment, full of birthday electors, blooming, fully developed, erect, a confirmed man, with determined look and gait. Rabette screamed out; Roquairol cried, "Aha!" and the old teacher Wehmeier, "God and my master!" and his childhood's angels, the parents, embraced him just as ever, and out of Albina's blue eyes ran the bright drops.

But a change had come over the youth of the others, compared with his. Rabette's countenance, the once full cheeks and blooming lips, had fallen in, and were overlaid and overgrown with the white veil, and she had two gray tears instead of eyes ; yet she smiled a great deal. Like his own Gorgon-head, Roquairol's face appeared pale and hard, as if chiselled on his gravestone; only naked piers stood in the water,—the light arches of the beautiful bridge were gone. Albina and Rabette looked up with a steady gaze at Albano's blooming figure; he seemed to be an Italian growth, a Neapolitan nerved by daily bathing in the gulf. Roquairol had his part immediately at command more easily than Albano his truth; he demeaned himself with the highest courteousness toward one who had broken in two for him the magic wand of life and thrown it away as a pair of beggar's sticks,—kissed him on the cheek, kept up the lightest, often a French tone of conversation, requested the latest intelligence about Italy, and retailed in turn the most edifying news from the country, as well, he said, as he could muster it up for a man with a Hesperian standard of measurement. He related, also, "that the Knight's brother had been there,—a man full of talent, especially the mimetic and that sort, and of the most singularly intense fancy with the highest coldness of character, though perhaps not always sufficiently true. For my tragedy," added he, "he would be worth his weight in gold. Dear brother, hold yourself forthwith as invited on the occasion. The play is called The Tragedian; I give it soon. Rabette is acquainted with it." She nodded. Albano glowed, but was silent. Among all parts, the Captain succeeded most perfectly in that of a world's-man; the show of coldness is more easy and true, also, than the show of warmth. Albano kept a proud distance. Roquairol could not gain in any respect by being opposite to the afflicted, faded Rabette, not even by the intercession of that form of his, full of the ruins of life. Albano found there something forever confused, and the wax wings crushed down into a lump; and it was as close and confining to him as to one who from the bright world creeps down at once into a low, damp cavern of a cellar.

The Captain rose, reminded him once more of his invitation to the "Tragedian," and springing on his festive horse rode away.

Behind his back every one was silent about him, as if embarrassed. The women, a little shy of Albano's brilliant presence, found some difficulty in venturing forth upon the subject of the old familiar past, while the foster-father, Wehrfritz, who having steadily grown on in his opinions and manners, and being still encased in the old cry of dogs and canary-birds, knew nothing at all about time, expressed his hearty thanks to his foster-son for the obliging recollection and choice of his birthday festival, which Albano necessarily and vainly declined, continued in his old thouing and patronizing, wrought himself into ecstasies on the subject of the French and their future victories, and bestowed more premiums of praise now on the older foster-son than he ever had on the younger, in order thereby, as he hoped, to give him as great pleasure as ever. The Magister backed the praise from a distance, although he could not let slip the opportunity, so soon as his pupil had pronounced Napel, Baia, Cuma, to pronounce Neapel, Baiæ, Cumæ. Albano was pure, true, human, frank, and hearty toward all; there was no vanity in his self-forgetting pride.

Rabette found at last a lifting-screw to wind her polished and yet familiar brother out of the receiving-room up into her or his former apartment, so as to be alone on his breast. As they stepped in, she immediately began, as she said, "Dost thou still know the chamber, Albano?" to weep infinitely, with the tears which had been so long gathering; and Albano showed her in his own, his long-cherished sympathy, but tore open thereby all the wounds of the past. She herself seized upon the remedy, namely, the telling of her story,—however earnestly he persisted that he knew, and, indeed, could well guess all,—and drying her eyes, informed him how all stood,—and that Charles was a good deal with his mother in Arcadia; that the Minister still acted the old tyrant toward his only child, and did not dole out to him a farthing more than ever, although he was always heaping up greater and greater debts, especially since there was no longer any Liana silently to wipe them away; that he borrowed everywhere, only, however, he never would accept anything from her; that he still continued to desire and know nothing but the Countess, and that God knew what all this would come to. Anticipating all inquiry, she added: "He knows the whole already, all thy intercourse with that same person. He behaves quietly and pleasantly about it, but I know him as well as I want to. Ah!" she sighed, in the fulness of anguish, and added immediately, with the same voice: "Thou lookest at me; is it not true thou findest me very haggard to what I once was?" "Yes, indeed, poor girl!" "I drank much vinegar on his account, because Charles loves slender figures; and grief has much to do with it too," said she.

Albano would have consoled her with the nearer possibility of a union of Charles with her, since the impossibility of every other union had been decided, and readily tendered his services for any prefatory word or coercive measure. "Before God and us, he is thy husband," said he. "That he never could have been," replied she, blushing, "for he never could have been honest; and did I not write thee that I am now too proud for it, too?" "Then cast him off forever!" said he. "Ah!" said she, fearfully, "do I know, then, that he meditates no harm against himself? Then I should reproach myself with it eternally." Involuntarily he could not but compare with this loving, holy fear, the hardness of the Princess, who could relate so gladly and proudly how many a love-smitten life had fallen a victim to her prudish heart and coquettish face. "What wilt thou do now?" he asked. "I weep," said she. "Ah, Albano, that is enough, indeed, that thou hast given me hearing and counsel; I am cheerful again. But be once more his friend."

He was silent, a little angry at the naughtiness of women, which, under pretence of seeking advice, only desires a hearing. "What is that?" he asked, showing her a leaf. "That is perfectly my hand, and I never wrote it!" She looked at it, and said Charles was often trying experiments with her in this way at handwriting. He wondered, and said: "Nothing, but imitating and counterfeiting all the time! But how canst thou think of my forgiving him?" Some descriptions of travels on her table, formerly so poor in books, met his eye. "I wanted to know, of course," said she, "how you might probably be faring in this, that, and the other place, and that is why I read the long stuff." "Thou art still my sister!" said he, and kissed her heartily. She still asked him much and urgently about his new connection; but chary of words with his full heart, he hastened down stairs.

The first word down below to the Provincial Director was a request for the "deposed letter of Schoppe's." Wehrfritz brought the broad letter, which had been laid up in the little iron box of bonds, and delivered it he hoped, he said, in good order. Hardly could Albano keep back his tears, when he held the crinkled but precious traces of the beloved hand, which certainly never in its life had swerved or stained itself, in his own. As he did not break the seal, they all began good-naturedly to portray to him his friend Schoppe, according to the presumptions and views which man so boldly and complacently indulges upon every higher spirit, with all his actions or colors, as if actions or colors were strokes and outlines. Wehrfritz and Wehmeier deplored that he was growing mad, if not already so. The Magister held back with his main-proof, till the Provincial Director should have contributed the lesser auxiliary ones.

His life beneath this palace-roof was uncovered and showed up, but in a friendly spirit. "He had hitherto"—so went the reports—"had no real or solid aim." Wehrfritz swore he had himself seen him reading the Literary Gazette, just as it was folded together half-sheetwise, and said he of course ascribed it less to insanity than to absence of mind, because he knew with what pleasure the man always took into his hands and understandingly perused the Imperial Advertiser, which the same declared to be the gate-key to the great imperial city, Germany. In the midst of company the Librarian had looked upon his hands with the words: "There sits a gentleman here in bodily presence, and I in him, but who is the same?" Of work he had done very little, seldom looked into a book of any importance, as Herr Wehmeier knew, but got along more easily with the worst of all stuff, for instance, whole volumes of dream-interpretations. His dearest society had been his wolf-dog, with whom for whole hours he would carry on regular discourse, and of whose growling he seriously asserted it sounded like a very distant thunder. He had been fond of sitting before the looking-glass, and had entered into a long conversation with himself. Sometimes he had looked into the camera-obscura, then on a sudden out into the landscape again, to compare the two, and had asserted, unoptically enough, that the busy, gliding images of the camera were magnified by the outer world, but deceptively imitated. "It was a shy bird," added the Director, "for all that. Divers of my acquaintances in the neighboring estates let him paint them, because he did it cheap; he always knew, however, how to slip something into the face so that one's physiognomy should appear quite ridiculous or simple, and that he called his flattering. Of course after that, no one could expect in the long run anything honnette from him."

"Were it permitted me," Wehmeier began, "I would now communicate to Mr. Count a fact in regard to Mr. Librarian, which, perhaps—such is at least my opinion—is as frappant as many another. The school-house, as you certainly still well remember, stands close to the church." Thereupon he related, in a long narrative, the following: "Once, at dead of night, he heard the organ going. He listened at the church door, and distinctly heard Schoppe sing and play a short stanza of a popular hymn. Thereupon the said Schoppe came down, with a loud noise, from the choir, and mounted the pulpit, and commenced an occasional sermon to himself with the words: 'My devout hearer and friend in Christ.' In the exordium he touched upon the silent, but unhappily so fleeting bliss which one enjoyed before life, although not according to correct Homiletic principles, since the second part almost repeated the introduction. Thereupon he sang a pulpit stanza to himself, and taking from the 3d chapter of Job, where the writer shows the happiness of non-existence, the 26th verse as his text, which reads thus: 'Was I not in safety, had I not rest, was I not quiet? Yet trouble came,'^[111]—he proposed to himself as his theme the joys and sorrows of a Christian; in the first part the sorrows, in the second the joys. Thereupon he crowded together concisely, but in a droll style and speech, and yet with Scriptural expressions, too, all the misery and distress on earth,—under which he enumerated singular things: long sermons, the two poles, ugly faces, compliments, games, and the world's stupidity. Thereupon he passed over abruptly to the consolation in the second part, and described the future joys of a Christian, which, as he blasphemously said, consisted in a heavenly ascension into future nothingness, in the death after death, in an eternal deliverance from self. Then (shocking it was to hear it) he addressed the neighboring dead down below under the church and in the princely vault, and asked, whether they had aught to complain of? 'Arise,' said he; 'seat yourselves in the pews, and open your eyes, in case they are wet with weeping. But they are drier than your dust. O how still and lovely lies the infinite past world, swathed in its own shadow, softly laid on the bed of its own ashes, without a single remaining dream-limb upon which a wound can be inflicted. Swift, old Swift, thou who once in thy latter days wast not so very much in thy head, and didst read through, every birthday, the whole chapter from which the text of our harvest sermon is taken,—Swift, how contented thou now art and entirely restored, the hatred of thy bosom burnt out, the round pearl, thy Self, eaten up, at last, and dissolved in the hot tear of life, and the tear alone stands there sparkling! And thou, too, hadst once preached before the Sexton like me!' Here Schoppe wept, and excused himself for his emotion, God knows before whom. Thereupon he passed to the practical improvement, and sharply insisted on both hearer and preacher growing better; upon downright honest truthfulness; fidelity of friends; high-mindedness, bitter hatred of suavity, snake-like movements, and weak lasciviousness. Finally, he had concluded the devotions with a prayer to God, that, if it should be his lot some day to lose his health or understanding, or the like, he would still be pleased to let him die like a man, and darted at once out of the church door. He put me," added Wehmeir, "almost out of my senses for terror, when he all at once flew at me angrily; 'Mock corpse, why creepest thou about the grave?' and I, pale and hurried, made my way home without having made the least reply to him. But what says Mr. Count?"

Albano shook his head with vehemence without one enlightening word, with pain and tears on his face. He merely took a sudden leave of all, and begged them to pardon his haste; and sought the evening sun and freedom, in order to read the letter of the noble man, and learn the purpose of his journey. He struck into the old road to Lilar, where he hoped to find, on the joyous southern breast of his radiant Dian Southern gayety and Southern ways again; for his heart had been upheaved by an earthquake, because, after all, many a wild sign in this Schoppe, as it were an immoderate lightening and flashing of this star, seemed to him to announce a setting and doomsday, which to his extreme pain he was constrained to ascribe to the rising of the new star of love, which had kindled this world of his nature.

122. CYCLE.

He read the following letter from Schoppe:—

"Thy letter, my dear youth, came duly to hand. I praise thy tears and flames, which alternately sustain, instead of extinguishing each other. Only become something, much, too, but not everything, in order that thou mayest be able, in so extremely empty a thing as life is—(I should be glad to know who invented it)—to hold out for all the desolateness. A Homer, an Alexander, who have at length vanquished the whole world and got it under them, must needs be plagued often with the most tiresome and annoying hours, because their life, from being a bride, has now become a wife. Much as I had palisaded and fortified myself against that, in order not to mount over everybody's head, and sit up top as Factotum of the world; I nevertheless, after all, came out at last, unobserved and all standing, on the summit, merely because, under my long contemplation, the whole circle of the earth, full of foam-mountains and cloud-giants, had been melting down lower and lower and crawling together; and now I gazed alone and dry-shod down from my mountain-peak, wholly possessed with the bloodsuckers of disgust at the world.

"Brother, it has changed, however, during this year, and I am afloat. For that reason a long, and to me quite tiresome, letter is written thee here in February, which shall tell thee about my approaching grub- and chrysalis-state, where and how; for when I am once a shining chrysalis, then I can only feebly stir and show myself any longer.

"I will explain myself more clearly,—the Germans add, when they have explained themselves clearly. It fits and hits most luckily—which I prize as much as another—that precisely the end of the year is the end of the paternal property upon which I have thus far lived, and consequently, if Amsterdam ceases to pay, I also fail, and have nothing more on hand than weak, chiromantic prophecies, and nothing in my body except my stomach. I would I could still live by my navel, as in my earlier times, and make myself such a soft bed.

"What, then, shall I do? As to accepting presents from my lords, men, year out and year in, I do not respect them enough for that; and the few, whom one does somewhat respect upon occasions, must in their turn respect me too highly to make such an offer. What! shall I be a flea, attached to the thinnest little golden chain, and a gentleman who has fastened me by it, that I may spring with him but not away from him, shall draw me up now and then upon his arm and say, 'Suck away, my little creature!' Devil! I will remain free upon so contemptible an earth,—no salary will I take, no orders in this great servants' apartment,—sound to the core, so as not to awaken any sympathy or any house-doctor,—yes, if one should knock off to me the heart of the Countess Romeiro on the condition of my kneeling down to it, I would take the heart, indeed, and kiss it, but immediately thereupon get up and run away (either into the new world or the next) before she had time to recapitulate the matter to herself and bring it before me.

"As to being something, and thereby earning in proportion, that I could, if one should propose it to me, of course undertake, without any special forfeiture of freedom and disparity. In fact, I see here from my centre three hundred and sixty roads radiate, and I hardly know how to choose among them, so that one would choose rather to flatten out the centre into a circumference, or to seek to draw the latter into the former, so as only to continue standing upon it. Serving, as the staff-officers of the regiments say, were, to be sure, next to commanding. Thou wilt thyself, as thou writest, take the field. (I have duly received thy letter, and found therein thy shyness and passion all right and good, and thyself entire.) And, in truth, if the Archangel Michael were to array a holy legion, a legio fulminatrix of some weak Septuagints, against the commonwealth of the world,—were he to proclaim a giant war against the domineering populace, in order to drive four or five quarters of the world out of the world or into prison by a sixth (on an island there would be good room for it), and to make all spiritual slaves bodily ones,—be assured, in that happy case I would plant myself foremost in the van, and would bring on the cannon, with the short, flying remark, that, as Handel first introduced cannon into music, so here for the first time, inversely, they were bringing music into cannon. When we at length came back in a body,—when the holy militia again swept hitherward,—then would God's throne stand upon the earth, and holy men, with lofty fires in their hands, should go up, much less to rule therefrom the world's body than to sacrifice to the soul of the worlds.

"With the flower of France, then, thou wilt, as thou writest, for thy individual self, for one man, hereafter stand up. Of course it is hard for me to think highly of five and twenty millions, of which it is true the cubic root must have grown and run up freely, but stem and twig have, after all, for whole centuries, been drying and withering in a slave's dungeon. He who was not, before the Revolution, a silent Revolutionist,—somewhat as Chamfort was, against whose fire-proof breast I once in Paris struck fire with mine, or like Montesquieu and J. J. Rousseau,—let him not, with his silly spatterings, spread himself out far beyond his house-door. Freedom, like everything godlike, is not learned and acquired, but inborn. Of course, all over France and Germany there sit young authors and sons of the muses, who admire and proclaim their own sudden worth, only they are cursedly astonished that they had not earlier felt their sense of freedom,—soft, sickly knaves, who look upon themselves as complete blowing whales, because they have found some bone or other of the said fish, and buckled it to their ribs. I should always, in a war such as these dead times can furnish, believe that I was fighting against fools, indeed, but for fools too.

"The cynical, naive, free nature's-men of the present day—Franks and Germans—are almost like the naked honorables, whom I have seen bathing in the Pleisse, Spree, and Saale. They were, as was said, very naked, white, and natural, and savages, but the black cue-tail of culture fell down over their white backs. Some great, tall men, and fathers of their times, like Rousseau, Diderot, Sidney, Ferguson, Plato, have laid aside their worn-out breeches, and their disciples have taken them and worn them, and because they sat so wide, long, and open upon their diminutive bodies, have called themselves sansculottes (men without breeches).

"Truly, instead of the sword, I could also very well grasp the penknife, and, as writing Cæsar, rise, to better the world, and be useful to it, and use it. I shall always remember the conversation which I once held upon this subject with a universal German librarian of Berlin, as we walked quietly up and down in the menagerie. 'Every one should surely enrich his native land with his talents, which else would lie buried,' said the German librarian. 'To constitute a native land, it is necessary, first and foremost, that there should be some land,' said I. 'The Maltese librarian, however, who here speaks, first saw the light at sea under a pitch-black storm. Of knowledge I possess, of course, enough, and know that one has it, like a glassful of cow-pock rationally taken, only to inoculate one's self withal. The scholar, for his part, only swallows it again, in order to give it out from himself, and so it goes on. Thus does the light, like the glimmering brand in the game, "Kill the Fox, and Sell the Skin," pass from hand to hand, until, however, to be sure, the brand goes out in one,—mine,—and there remains.'

"'Droll enough!' said the universal German librarian. 'With such a humor as this only connect the study of bad men and good models, and then you create for us a second Rabener, to scourge fools.' 'Sir,' replied I, in a rage, 'I should prefer to transfer the first blow to the backs of the wise ones and you. Philosophers suffer themselves to be enlightened and washed, have always their insight into things, and are good fools, and just my people. Let a man like a universal German farrier, who takes the pulse of the muses' horse, holds his out to me, and I will feel it with great pleasure. But the rest and refuse of the world, sir? Who can skim off the world sea, if he does not break away its banks? Is it not a sorrow and a shame that all men of genius, from Plato even to Herder, have become noisy, and die printed, and frequently read and studied by the learned rabble and custom-house, without having the least power to change them? Librarian, call and whistle out, I pray you, all that lies in the critical dog-kennels on the watch beside those temples, and ask the whole body of greyhounds, bulldogs, and boar-hounds whether anything else is stirring in their souls than a potentiated maw, instead of a poetic and holy heart? In the mountain-cauldron they see the pudding-pot and brewer's-kettle, in the leaves the spades^[112] on the play-cards, and the thunder has for them, as a greater electric spark, a very sour taste, which it afterward infuses into the March beer.'

"'Do you mean any allusion?' he asked. 'Assuredly!' said I. 'But further, Librarian, suppose we too were so lucky as to turn on our heels, and, with one whirl of a breath, to blow over all fools, as if they were infected with an arsenical fume, and lay them dead as a mouse: I cannot see, for all that, where the blessing is coming out, because, besides that we are still standing before each other, and have to breathe on ourselves too, I see, in all corners round about, women sitting, who will hatch the slain world anew.'

"'My dear fellow, best pair of bellows,^[113] full of fire,' I continued, 'can this, however, call and stamp one very strongly to be of the satirical handicraft? O no! This is genuine humor with me, perhaps strange madness, also, perhaps—but O, will not the rare joke-maker, even in your uncommon library, resemble the porcupine-man in London (the son) who had the office under the beast-dealer, Brook, of acting as Cicerone to the stranger among the wild stock and through the park of outlandish beasts, and who commenced on the threshold with the observation that he showed himself as one of the species man? Consider it coolly and first of all! I still swing my satirical horsetail loosely and merrily, and perhaps against an occasional horse-fly; but let a book be tied to it, as in Poland they tie a cradle to the cow's tail, and the beast shall rock the cradle of the readers and give pleasure; the tail, however, becomes a slave.'

"'To such images,' said the Librarian, 'sure enough, the cultivated world could never be accustomed by any Rabener or Voltaire, and I now perceive myself that satire is not your department.' 'O, most true!' replied I, and we parted on very good terms.

"But to take things seriously, brother, what is there now left for a man (in the shape of prospects as well as of wishes) to whom the age is so over-salted and so bitter and briny as it is to me, and to whom life is made so by living men,—who is annoyed to death with the universal insipid hypocrisy and the glistening polish of the most poisonous wood,—and the horrible commonness of the German life-theatre, and the still greater commonness of the German theatre-life,—and the Pontine marshes of infamous and immoral Kotzebuean weakliness, which no Holy Father can drain and make into sound land,—and the murdered pride, together with the living vanity, that stalk about, so that I, only for the sake of drawing breath, can betake myself for whole hours to the plays of children and of cattle, because there I am assured, at least, that neither of them are coquetting with me, that, on the contrary, they have nothing in mind and are in love with nothing but their work,—what is there left, I asked at the top of this page, for one in whose nostrils, as was said, so many sorts of things stink, and especially this further particular, that improvement is hard, but deterioration not so by any means, because even the best do somewhat impose upon the worst, and thereby on themselves too, and because with their secret cursings of the age, and trimming and truckling to it, they dance at least for gold and glory, and in consideration thereof willingly let themselves be used by the more steady mass, as wine-casks are used for meat-barrels,—what is there, friend, I say, for a man in times when, as now, one makes in print, not black white, indeed, but yet gray, and where one, as good catechists must, always avoids precisely the question, yes or no,—what remains except hatred of tyrants and slaves at once, and indignation at the maltreated no less than at the maltreatment? And what shall a man to whom the armor of life in such situations is worked thin or worn thin, seriously resolve upon?"

I, for my part, if the question is about myself, resolved, half in joke, upon inserting a fine-spun, lucid demand in the Imperial Advertiser, which you perhaps have already read in Rome, without even guessing the author.

"'TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.

"'It may well be taken for granted, that a sound understanding and reason (mens sana in c. s.), next to a clear conscience, holds among the prizeworthy goods of life the highest place,—a proposition which I venture to assume as an axiom with the readers of this paper. As to what may further be said on the subject, as well by as against Kantners, (so Campe writes it, and much more correctly, instead of Kantians,) it does not certainly belong to an entirely popular paper for the people like this present. The undersigned is now in the sorry case that he is obliged here to consult the physicians of Germany and foreign parts. Have sympathy for suffering; send in your answers; say when he is to be (out with it before all Germany!!) completely insane, for as to the beginning thereof the fact has already answered.

"'The when, but not the whether, it now lies with and upon noble philanthropists to answer. Here are my reasons, Germans! Leaving out of sight that many a reason might be deduced from the very publication of this request,—which, to be sure, decides little,—the following items are noticeable and sure:—1. The motley style of the author itself, which is to be known less from this insertion (composed at very considerable intervals) than from the similarity between his style and that of a very favorite and tasteless writer,^[114] which, denoting a gay exuberance of the most wild and strange images in the head, betokens an approaching crack, as does a motley play of colors upon glass; 2. The prediction of a scamp,^[115] of which he is always thinking,—a circumstance which must have bad effects; 3. His love and study of Swift, whose madness is no novelty to the learned; 4. His complete loss of memory; 5. His frequent bad trick of confounding things dreamed of with things really experienced, and vice versa; 6. His misfortune not to know what he writes till he has read it over afterward, because he now leaves out something bearing upon his subject, or again puts in something that has nothing to do with it, as the crossed and blotted manuscript unfortunately best proves; 7. His whole previous life, all his thinking and joking, the details under which head it would be tedious here to specify; and, 8. His most unreasonable dreams. Now the question is, when, in such circumstances (that is to say, if no fevers, or cases of love intervene), complete distraction (idea fixa, mania, raptus) comes on. With Swift it fell very late, in old age, when he might already, besides, have been naturally half foolish, and only showed it more afterward. When one considers that Professor Busch once reckoned that his weakness of sight might very well grow upon him from year to year without any serious consequence, because the period of complete blindness fell quite out beyond the end of his whole life, merely upon his grave, so must I assume that my infirmity might swell so gradually, that I should have no occasion for any other petites maisons than the coffin itself; so that I might, in the mean time, have married and held an office as well as any other honest man.

"'My object in this communication is simply to bring myself into correspondence on the subject with some philanthropist or other (he must be, however, a philosophical physician!). My address may be had at the office of the Imperial Advertiser. I make myself, perhaps, more clearly known, bodily and civilly, in this very paper, in the column where I inquire after a wife.

"'Pestitz, February. S——s, L——d, L——r, G——l, S——e.'^[116]

"Albano, thou knowest under what bush my serious meaning lies hid. The Advertiser of the Empire and of Schoppe has eight reasons for the thing, which are not only my serious meaning, but my fun. Since the Baldhead announced to me the rising of my mad-dog-star after a year, I have always seen the aurora of this fixed star before me, and seen myself thereupon blind and cowardly at last; I must speak it out. O I had in January, brother, eight frightful dreams, one after another, according to the number of reasons assigned in the Advertiser, and themselves appertaining to the eighth,—dreams wherein a Wild Huntsman of the brain went hunting through the mind, and a stream full of worlds, full of faces, and mountains and hands, billowed along, bearing all before it—I will not distress thee with the details,—Dante and his head were heaven to it.

"Then I grew sullen about the matter of cowardice, and said to myself, 'Hast thou hitherto lived so long, and easily flung overboard the richest cargoes, even this world and the next, and divested thyself so clean of everything, even of glory and of books and of hearts, and kept nothing but thyself, in order to stand up therewith free and naked and cold on the ball of earth before the face of the sun, and now must thou unexpectedly cringe before the mere crazy fixed thought of a crazy fixed idea, which any stroke of a feverish pulse, any blow of a fist, any grain of poison may stamp into thy head, and thus must thou throw away at once thy old, godlike freedom?—Schoppe, I know not at all what I am to think of thee! Whoso still fears anything in the universe, and though it were hell itself, he is still a slave!

"Then the man plucked up his manhood and said, 'I will have what I feared'; and Schoppe stepped up nearer to the broad, high cloud, and lo! it was only (one would gladly have put one's self to bed on the spot) the longest dream of the last, long sleep, no more,—what they call madness. Now if one should go for some time into a mad-house, for example, by way of joke, then might one have the dream, if all other things were as well suited to keep the matter in countenance, as in the case of many a one already. And now, thereinto will I gradually sink,—into the dream, where the point of the dagger is broken off against the future, and the rust rubbed off against the past,—where man, undisturbed and alone, is the reigning House in the shadow-realm and Barataria-island of his ideas, and the John Lackland, and, like a philosopher, makes everything that he thinks,—where he also draws his body out of the waves and surges of the external world, and cold and heat and hunger and weak nerves and consumption and dropsy and poverty assail him no more, and no fear, no sin, no error can come near the mind in the mad-house where the three hundred and sixty-five dreams of the nights in the year weave themselves together into a single one, the flying clouds into one great evening red.

"But here lurks something bad! Man must be in a condition to pick out for himself and appropriate with understanding his dream, his good fixed idea,—for a high ant-hill of the most grim and bewitching swims and swarms before him,—otherwise he may fare as ill as if he were still in his senses. I must now, in particular, make my arrangements to find and recognize a good-natured, favorable fixed conceit, which shall deal well with me. If I can bring it about, to be, perhaps, the first man in the crazy house, or the second Momus, or the third Schlegel, or the fourth grace, or the fifth king at cards, or the sixth wise virgin, or the seventh worldly Electorate, or the eighth Wise Man of Greece, or the ninth soul in the ark, or the tenth muse, or the forty-first Academician, or the seventy-first Translator,^[117] or, in fact, the universe, or, in fact, the universal spirit himself,—then, certainly, my fortune is made, and life's scorpion robbed of his whole sting. But what golden jewel of a fortune does not in addition thereto still stand open? Can I not be a very highly-favored lover, who sees the sun of a beloved sail all day long through heaven, and looks up and cries, 'I see only thy sunny eye, but it contents me!' Can I not be a deceased person, who, full of disbelief in the next world, has made the journey into it, and now does not know at all which way to turn there for joy? O can I not—for the shorter dream and old age do indeed, of themselves, make one childish—be an innocent child again, that plays and knows nothing, that takes all men for its parents, and that has now a tear-drop hanging before him, formed out of the collapsing gay bubble of life, and again sends out the drop through the pipe, blown up into a glimmering little world-globe of colors?

"It is full midnight; I must now go to church, to hold my vesper-devotions.

"Three weeks later.

"Nota Bene!

"I had been, since thy departure, in a manner damnably unlucky until about one o'clock this morning. At two o'clock I took up my resolution; I have just (at five) taken the pen; and at six, when I have drunken myself full and written myself empty, I take my travelling cane, the point of which, after two months, shall stand sticking in the Pyrenees. O heavens! there must have been something thorny this long time standing by me, which I so long took for a hedgehog, whereas it is the best musical barrel full of pins, out of which I can get nothing less (I turned it a few hours ago) than the best arrangement of flute-pipes, unadulterated music of the spheres, and rotatory music for the bravura-airs of the three men in the furnace, a whole living Vaucanson's wooden flute-player, and unheard-of things wherewith the machine blows till it bursts—not itself, but certain knaves, whereof need I particularly name the Baldhead?

"O listen, youth! It concerns thee. I will now, for thy sake, be what the world calls frank, namely, shameless, for verily I had rather uncover my haunch than my heart, and am less red when I do so.

"There was, once on a time, in old times, a young time, one full of fire and roses, when old Schoppe, for his part, was also young enough; when the alert, contriving bird easily nosed out where the hare lay, and the female hare, too; when the man could still put himself on good terms with the well-known four quarters of the world; or else, just as easily as a steer, thrust with his horn at every fly; when he (now a silver pheasant of cool times) still strode or flew up and down through all Italy as a warm gold pheasant, perched now on Buanorotti's Moses, now on the Colosseum, now on Ætna, now on the dome of St. Peter's, and crowed for joy, flapped his wings, and soared toward heaven.

"It was at this time that the still unpicked storm-bird, hovering one day to and fro through the waterfalls of Tivoli, preciously blest, saw there occasionally, suddenly, overhead, in Vesta's temple, for the first time, nothing more than—the Princess di Lauria, afterward, I conjecture, carried off by a Knight of the Fleece, as his golden fleece. To see her,—to transform one's self from a storm-bird into a cock-pigeon to the chariot of Venus; to tear one's self loose from team and bridle; to fly before that goddess; to float round her in narrower and narrower circles,—all this was not one thing, but three things. I had first to grow and paint myself up into a bird of Paradise, in order to fly into a Paradise; that is to say, I had to learn painting, in order to be permitted her presence.

"When at length I had the portrait-pencil and profile-scissors in my power, and one morning appeared with both before the Princess and the old Prince, I had to paint and cut the Prince himself; his daughter had already been married and secretly travelled off; for thy grandfather (unlike others who prophesy their movements beforehand), prophesies his only afterward, and opens his mouth merely to hear.

"I soon cut out the man,—packed up,—went out into all the world. After nearly three years I stood again on the tenth terrace of Isola Bella, quite unexpectedly, before the Countess Cesara. Heaven and hell! what a woman was thy mother! She threw everybody into both of those places at once; I know not whether she did thy father, too. The writer of this stood in his last ornithological transformation before her, as silent pearl-cock (guinea-peacock), (tears must be the pearls), and got a likeness of her after a few weeks.

"She had two children, thee—I clearly remember thy then already sharpened contour—and thy sister, the so-called Severina. Thy father was not there, but his wax image was, by which I instantly recognized him eighteen years later in Rome. Thy sister, too, was repeated in wax; only thou not. A wax figure, like thee at a distance, which illusively prefigured thee as a man always held up before thee, the brother of thy father, who was there, too, as a file-leader of thy future, saying, 'Here thou art, cubed beforehand, and already forced up into full size, filled out from flask into cask,'—seeking thus to enkindle thee, so that thou mightest grow up and be a man. They had a uniform put on thee, like that which the wax man wore,—I know not of what sort. Then didst thou, striding around thine own micromegas, boldly call him out, out of the future into the present. Now thou knowest what thou hast become, and mayst well, and with more right, look down in thy turn as proudly upon the little one, as the little one formerly looked up to the great one. I could never approve in thy uncle this machine for spiritual ductility; besides, I have for all wax puppets such an abominating, shuddering dread.

"My only object on the beautiful island was to get away from it, and from the fair islander, so soon as I had painted her. 'Stupid century,' said I, 'do I then want anything more of thee?' She sat to me gladly, as upon a throne. I, half in tempest, half in rainbow, sketched her, and naturally had to leave the picture uncopied. But, young man, some letters, which formed my name at that time, and which I wrote and concealed on the picture in the region of the heart under the water-colors, may serve thee as a Tetragrammaton, eleven Dominical letters and mothers of the reading (matres lectionis) of thy existence, in case I reach Spain safely, and in Valencia wash away on the likeness the coloring from my letters, and can now read in its heart, Löwenskiold. So was I then called in Danish.

"Then is the Countess Linda de Romeiro, without mercy, thy sister Severina. God grant only that thou mayst not haply have seen and married her before the receipt of this letter. She must, according to what I heard yesterday, have set out for Italy.

"For when I saw the Countess Linda here for the first time, it was to me, in the market square of Pestitz, as if I were standing up on the terrace of Isola Bella, and beholding the Alps, thy mother, my youth, hardly three paces distant from me! By Heaven, just as if in the pier-mirror of time the white rosy image of thy buried mother had been snatched at once out of the depths of distance, and brought close to the glass, and now hung before it in blooming redness, so stood Linda before me! For the divine resemblance of the two is so great! No Arian Homoiousion^[118a] whatever, but a complete Orthodox Homoousion^[118b] is to be believed here. Thus would I write to thee, hadst thou the necessary church-history at hand for the understanding of such an allusion.

"I painted Linda, too, this winter. What she related to me of the character of her mother was entirely the same, as I had been able to report to her of the character of the Princess di Lauria.

"Linda's father, or Herr von Romeiro, would never appear, and still, I hear, has not yet disappeared.

"Linda's mother called herself a Roman and a relative of the Prince di Lauria.

"In Spain, where I have twice been and inquired, I never could find a residence of a lady by the name of Cesara.

"Trillion spiders'-strands of probability spin themselves into an Ariadne's thread in the Labyrinth.

"A new, unknown sister is introduced to thee in the Gothic house with veils and in mirrors.

"And indeed the illusion is produced upon thee through real mirrors by the honest Baldhead,—who wants something more to be a Christ's-head than the locks, and whom I in autumn called a dog.

"The aforesaid Baldhead, or head of Anubis, stood, then, (Heaven and the Devil best know why, but I believe the fact,) as Father of Death on Isola Bella; he lay as travelling journeyman on the Prince's grave and in every sort of ambush, to give thee thy sister for wife—in case I suffered it; but so soon as ever I have sealed this, I sally forth to Spain, break into Linda's picture cabinet, look after a certain likeness of her mother, the place and chamber whereof I have taken pains clearly to ascertain; and if it is the picture by me, then all is right and the thunder may strike into the midst of the whole business.

"The Baldhead himself is a fifth quarter of a proof,—he is one of the few men who, when hardly of a spider's thickness, wickedly made water in their mothers' womb.

"Perhaps I may find thy uncle, who knew me again here, he said, and who has actually gone off to Valencia.^[119]

"O Heavens! if I should succeed (but why not, since my tongue remains of iron and this leaf comes, in iron, under charge of the honest Wehrfritz, whose heart is an old German, and does not Germany rightly represent the heart in the virgin Europa?)—if, I write, I should succeed in kindling a fire upon a cursed mystery of a straw-door, tearing all up and down and away, blind gates and sacrificial gates, and a strong light should fall in upon the brave Linda and the brave youth, illuminating the neighboring Baldhead (perhaps somebody else), who even in the darkness will fain make a slanting thrust with two grafting and slaughtering knives down into a brother and sister——

"If I should once succeed in this, that is to say, in the harvest month,—for then I should come back again to Pestitz and have the likeness in my pocket,—and I should have boldly avenged myself and two innocent beings upon guilty ones: then would I hold myself fully at liberty to seize hold of my head and say, 'À bas, gare, heads off!' To which, certainly, (since, indeed, the question is not of any stupid packing off of the body by a Werther-powder, but only of the purpose to lose, upon occasion, what competent judges call my understanding,) my friends must agree, because they would still have me (since in this case the body is still retained), although as the night-piece of a man, because I would then carry on a rational discourse upon any subject (only let no one attack the fixed idea!) as well as another man, and certainly should not forget to sprinkle over it, now and then, a good moral joke (verily the true spice), and because the state should find me day and night equipped and saddled to save it, after the example of the Berlin Bedlamites, who once, upon a fire breaking out in the house, extinguished it and saved the house in the best style, and I would come in at the gap and the breach, when the dark intervals of its other civil servants could not otherwise be filled up than with our lucid ones.

"Farewell! I break off. The world smiles upon me gayly. In Spain I shall find a bit of youth again—as in this writing.

"Schoppe.

"Apropos! Has the Baldhead nowhere run against thee? I cannot tell thee how I labor now daily to impress upon myself and appropriate beforehand a real horror and dread at the wish of running him down hereafter in my madness, in order that afterward the possible act may not, as a late fruit of my previous rational, moral state, be reckoned over against me into the other.

"Annihilate this letter!"

When Albano raised his fiery eyes from the letter, he stood before Lilar under a high triumphal arch, and the sun went down in splendor behind Elysium. "Dost thou not know me?" asked Linda, in a low tone, who stood beside him in travelling dress, weeping in bright love and bliss; and Julienne came flying out and making a sign of caution to both, from the entrance thicket of the flute-dell, and cried, as a cunning pretext: "Linda, Linda, hearest thou not the flutes, then?" And Albano had forgotten the painful letter.

123. CYCLE.

Like a concert that suddenly flutters up with a hundred wings did the swift presence of old love and joy break over the forsaken youth (so troubled about his friend) in beautiful waves; and smitten with delight, he saw Linda again as on Ischia; but she saw him again as in another Elysium; she was more soft, tender, ardent, remembering his past scenes in this garden. She would not relate nor hear anything at all about her own travelling adventures. Albano buried his mystery of Schoppe in his mighty but trembling breast; only to his father he burned to disclose it. He was incessantly representing to himself the possibility of a relationship, and the facility with which Schoppe might confound the pretended sister with the true one, Julienne; this very evening he meant to ask his father.

He imparted to her the paternal consent to their alliance with great joy, but not with the greatest, because Schoppe's letter echoed in his bosom. Julienne perceived that only a cascade instead of a cataract came out of him to-day, and sought with a sly pleasantry to draw him out, by making him answer, which she easily did, through the whole range of questions touching important personalities of his and her acquaintance. She had some inclination to weave and to paint on the theatre curtain, or even to pierce a prompter's-hole in it. She began the questions at Idoine,—who shortly after his arrival had taken her departure back again from the city,—and left off with them at Schoppe,—inquiring after the object of his journey; but Albano had not seen the former, and as to the latter, Schoppe, he said, had confided it to him alone. A beautiful, inflexible marble vein of firmness ran through his being. Linda's black eye was an open, true German one, and looked upon him only to love him.

Out of the flute-dell came the rest of the company, the Lector and others; Julienne constrained the lovers to a separation, saying: "Here is no Ischia; without me you cannot see each other here in the palace at all; I will announce it to thee always through thy father, when I am here."

When he stood alone in Lilar with the heavy thought of Schoppe and Linda, and surveyed the lovely regions and scenes of fair hours, then it seemed to him all at once as if, in the twilight, Elysium, like a charming face, distorted itself into an expression of scorn at him and at life. Little malicious fays sit on the little children's tables, as if they were tender children, and very much loved to see men and human pleasure; anon they start up as wild huntresses, and run through the blossoms; a thousand hands turn up the garden with its blossoming trees, and point its black, gloomy thicket of roots like summits up into heaven; Gorgon heads look out of the twigs, and up in the thunder-house there is an incessant weeping and laughing;—nothing is fair and soft but the great, daring Tartarus.

However, as it was the shortest way to his father, Albano went, stern and angry, through the garden, over the swan bridge, along by the Temple of Dream, by Chariton's little cottage, by the rose arbors, and over the woodland bridge, and soon was in the princely palace with his father, who had just come back from the sick Luigi. With ironical expression of countenance, his father related to him how the patient had begun to swell again, merely because he feared that his dead father, who had promised to appear to him a second time as a sign of death, would give the sign and immediately call him away. Then Albano related, without any introduction, and without mention of Schoppe and of his connections, the hypothesis of the most singular relationship, without putting, out of respect for his father, any long, searching questions, or even more than the short, swift one, "Is Linda my sister?" His father quietly heard him through. "Every man," said he, angrily, "has a rainy corner of his life, out of which foul weather proceeds, and follows after him. Mine is the carrying about of mysteries with me. From whom hast thou the latest?" "On that subject sacred duty bids me be silent," he replied. "In that case," said Gaspard, "thou wouldst better have been silent altogether: he who gives up the smallest part of a secret, has the rest no longer in his power. How much dost thou suppose that I know of the matter?" "Ah, what can I suppose?" said Albano. "Didst thou think upon my consent to thy union with the Countess?" said Gaspard, more angry. "Should I then keep silence? and did not sister Julienne in the end disentangle herself from all mysteries?" Here Gaspard looked at him sharply, and asked, "Canst thou rely upon the earnest word of a man, without wavering, swerving, however eloquently appearances may discourse to the contrary?" "I can," said Albano. "The Countess is not thy sister; rely upon my word!" said Gaspard. "Father, I do so!" said Albano, full of joy; "and now not a word further on the subject."

But the old man, now more composed, went on to say that this new error gave him an occasion now earnestly to insist upon Linda's consent to a speedy union, because her father, perhaps himself the mysterious wonder-worker who had hitherto baffled all attempts at detection, had absolutely fixed, as the time of his appearance, the wedding-day. He indicated yet once more to his son his desire to know the way in which he had arrived at that hypothesis; but to no purpose: holy friendship could not be desecrated or deserted, and his breast closed mightily around his open heart, as the dark rock closes about the bright crystal.

So he parted, warm and happy, from his silent father. In the hard hour of the letter-reading, he had only climbed an artificial, rocky region of life, and there lay the gay gardens again, stretching away even to the horizon; yet, after all, the vain, painful error of his Schoppe, and the thought of that spirit so desolated by love and hatred, which, even in the tone of the letter, seemed to bow itself down, and the prospect of his madness, passed like a distant funeral chime dolefully through his fair landscape, and the happy heart grew full and still.

124. CYCLE.

Soon after this, Albano's kind sister again let a Hesperian hour strike and play on the musical clock of his happiness, whose keeper she was,—an hour with which his whole life, up and down, sounded in unison, and cleared away, and in which, as in Switzerland, when a cloud opens, all at once heights, glaciers, mountain-peaks, now look out from the sky. He saw his Linda again, but in new light, glowing, but like a rose before the blushing evening red. Her love was a soft, still flame, not a leaping of eccentric, stinging sparks. He concluded that his father, who was a man of his word, had already made his request to her for a priestly union, and even got her consent. Julienne told him she wished to speak with him the next evening, at six o'clock, in his father's chamber; that made him still more sure and glad. With new and still more tenderly adoring emotions, he parted with Linda: the goddess had become a saint.

When he came the next day into the paternal apartment, he found no one there but Julienne. She gave him a slight and almost imperceptible kiss, in order to be speedily ready with her intelligence, since her absence was limited to so many minutes as the Princess needed to go from the sick-bed of her husband to the apartment of the Princesse. "She will not marry thee," she began, softly, "notwithstanding that thy father expressed himself so strongly and finely to her, at the first reception after the journey, upon the new good fortune of his son, for which he had now nothing more to desire, he said, than the seal of perpetuity. It was still more finely silvered and gilded; I have forgotten the precise words. Thereupon she replied in her speech, which I never can retain, that her will and thine were the real seal; every other seal of policy imposed chains and slavery upon the fairest life."

Deeply was Albano hurt by an open refusal, which hitherto, coming upon him as a silent one and as philosophy, had floated about untouched, as a mere unsubstantial shadow. "That was not right; she might say a good while hence, but not never," said he, sensitively. "Moderation, friend!" said Julienne; "thereupon thy father reminded her, in a friendly manner, of the conditional appearance of her own, by saying that he could not but wish very much to transfer her fortunes out of his own hands into nearer ones. No arbitrary condition could compel or annihilate a will, she said. Thy father went on calmly, and added, he had sketched, in that case, the fairest plan of life for you two; but, in the other case, his approval of their love stood open only as long as his stay here, which would end at his friend's death. Then he went coolly and composedly out, as men are wont to do when they have provoked us to a real rage."

"Hesperia, Hesperia!" cried Albano, angrily. "But did Linda really repeat her no?" "O, too true! But, brother?" asked Julienne, with astonishment. "Suffer me," he replied; "for is it not unrighteous, this meddling of parents with the fairest, tenderest strings, whose vibration and melody they at once kill, in order to call forth from them a new tune? Is it not, then, sinful to degrade divine gifts into state-revenues and match-moneys,—yes, match^[120]-moneys indeed? Good Linda, now we stand again on the ground, where they set up the flowers of love for sale as hay, and where there are no other trees in paradise than boundary-trees. No, thou free being! never through me shalt thou cease to be so!"

Julienne stepped back some paces, and said, "I will only laugh at thee," which she did, and then added, in earnest, "She, then,—is that thy will?—shall appoint thee the day when the old father is to become visible?" "That does not follow by any means," said he. She calmly remarked, that an excited person always complained of the heat of another, and that Albano, in his very calmness, insisted too sternly upon his own and others' rights; that such people went on to demand, in passion, something beyond the right, as a pin, which fits too nicely into the clock, when warmed stops it by its size. Then she begged him affectionately just to leave the disentangling of the "whole snarl" to her fingers, and to remain mild and still, lest yet more people—perhaps, in fact, her belle-sœur—might interfere with their union. Albano took it in friendship, but begged her earnestly only not to make any plans, because he should be too honorable toward Linda for that, and should immediately tell her the whole word of the charade.

She disclosed to him that she had made no other plan whatever than a plan for a happy day to-morrow, namely, to visit with Linda the Princess Idoine in Arcadia, to whom she owed still greater things beside a visit, particularly half of her heart. "Thou wilt ride accidentally after us, and find us in the midst of pastoral life," she added, "and surprise thy Linda." He said very decidedly, "No," both out of a shrinking from Idoine's resemblance to Liana,—although he only knew that Liana had personated her in the Dream Temple, and not, also, that Idoine had counterfeited her before his sick-bed,—and because he disliked to come into the presence of the Minister's lady, from a dread as well of bitter as of sweet recollections, of both which, in such a case, Roquairol would have brought up the rear. Julienne mischievously objected: "Only have no fear for the Princesse; she was obliged, in order only to rid herself of the detested bridegroom, to engage with an oath to all her friends never to choose one below her rank,—and that she will keep, even with thee." He answered the joke merely with the serious repetition of his no. Well, then she should insist upon it, she replied, that he should at least come to meet them half-way, and await them in the "Prince's Garden,"—a park which had been laid out by Luigi as hereditary prince, and forgotten when he came into the princely chair. He assented to this proposition very joyfully.

She still asked, jocosely, as they parted, "Who has been presenting thee with a new sister, lately?" He said, "That is what my father could not draw from me." "Brother," said she, softly, "it was a gentleman who easily takes princesses for countesses, and who, in the next place, thinks to be still more crazy than he already is,—thy Schoppe," and flew off.

125. CYCLE.

On the morning after the two friends took their journey to Arcadia, Julienne, although more troubled on account of the increased illness of her sick brother, cheered herself by her reliance upon a plan which, in spite of her assurance, she had sketched for the good fortune of the well one, and which she was to carry out in Arcadia. She, unlike others who hide their heads behind the dark, mourning-fan of sorrow and sensibility, oftener hid her head, with its designs, behind the gay dress-fan of smiles, which turned to the spectators the painted side; amidst laughing and weeping she pursued and pondered them. Thus she had made the request to Albano to join in the visit to Idoine only for show, and in the certainty that he would refuse, or in case he should not, that then Idoine would; for she knew, from Idoine's visits in the previous winter, that she had frequently thought in conversations of the fair fever-patient who had been restored by her, and that she had just fled before his arrival, in order not to overshadow his bright, loving present, which had become known to her in the easiest manner through the Princess, by coming upon him like a cloud out of the past full of melancholy resemblances. Julienne had even ascertained that the Princess had vainly wished to keep and reserve the Princesse longer, in order, perhaps, by means of her, to remind, terrify, change, or punish the youth. Julienne's love for the Princesse would perhaps have been made as warm by that tender flight from Albano, as her love towards Linda was, had not this very love stood between; at least, this beautiful flight had given her an unlimited confidence—which is exactly the true and only kind—in the Princesse.

The day of the journey was a beautiful harvest morning, full of thickly-peopled cornfields, full of coolness and dew and zest. Linda expressed a childlike joy in Idoine, and gave the reasons in a glad tone. "First, because she saved thy brother's life,—and because she knew, after all, what she wanted, and insisted upon it with spirit, and did not, like other Princesses, transform herself into a victim to the Throne,—and because she is the most German Frenchwoman that I know except Madame Necker. Yes, in my eyes she belongs strictly, with all her fair youth, among old ladies, and these I have always sought out, for there is at least something to be learned from them. She loves thee exceedingly, me, I believe, less. To one who is such a charming medium between the nun and the married woman, I seem too worldly, though it is not the case."

The two companions arrived early in the beautiful, enchanted village in the afternoon before dinner, just as the neat children were already banding together to go to gleaning, and the wagons were already going out to meet the gatherers of the sheaves. Idoine's brother, the future hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess,—the Dwarf of Tivoli,—looked out of the window, and Julienne almost regretted the journey. Idoine flew to meet her, and clasped her heartily to her breast. When Julienne had before and upon her face that great blue eye and every transfigured feature of the form which once her brother had so blissfully and painfully loved, she fancied herself, now that she had become his sister, to receive, as his representative, the love of the representative of Liana; and she must needs, as she had done every time since that death at the first reception, weep heartily.

Linda was received by the Princess with such a deep tenderness that Julienne wondered, since the two generally lived in an alternation of coldness and love. There stood the Minister's lady, Froulay, so old with mourning, so cold, still, and courteous, so cold towards the occasion and the company (except the fac-simile of her daughter), particularly towards Linda, whose bold, decided, philosophical tone seemed to her unwomanly, and like a trumpet on two female lips.

The future hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess fortunately withdrew himself soon from so inconvenient a place, where he navigated a shipwreck plank instead of a gondola. After inquiring of Julienne with interest about the state of her brother, his present predecessor, and reminding her and Linda of her and his Italian tour, he became so fretful and out of tune at Julienne's frigidity, and at the moral discourses of the women, and at a certain oppressiveness premonitory of a moral tempest,—which sensualists experience in the presence of women, where everything rude, selfishness, arrogance, screams like discord,—and at the general, plaguy hypocrisy,—which he could not but immediately take it all to be,—that he was glad to break away, and relieve this pastoral life of the only wolf who had crept into it. Voluptuaries can never hold out long among many noble women, tormented as they are by their many-sided, sharp observations, although they can more easily with one, because they hope to ensnare her. What made him feel worst of all was, that he was compelled to pronounce them all hypocrites. He found no good women, because he had faith in none; since we must believe in them in order to see them where they are, just as one must exercise virtue in order to be acquainted with it, though not the reverse.

With him a black cloud seemed to draw off out of this Eden and ether. The Minister's lady received a card from her son Roquairol, who had just arrived, and she went too, to the joy of Julienne, who found in her a little obstacle to her plan of conversion for Linda, because the latter looked upon the Minister's lady as a one-sided, narrow, anxious, unyielding nature. Idoine begged the two maidens to travel over her little kingdom with her. They went down into the clean, wide village. On the steps they were met by cheerful, obliging faces. From the distant apartments of the palace was heard now singing, now blowing of wind instruments. As on the bird the shining feathers slide swiftly and smoothly under each other and out again, so did all occupations move around Idoine; her economical machine was no clumsy, jarring steeple-clock, but a musical picture-watch, which conceals the hours behind tones, the wheels behind images.

In a meadow-garden the youngest children were playing wildly with each other. Moravian and Dutch neatness had scoured and painted the village to a sleek, bright fancy-shop. New and shiny hung the bucket over the well; under the linden-rotunda of the village the earth-floor was swept clean; everywhere were seen clean, whole, fair clothes, and happy eyes; and Idoine showed, under the unusual gayety, an earnest meaning in the looks with which she inspected her Arcadia, flower after flower.

She led her friends over the various Sunday dancing-places of the different ages, along before the house of the steward,—wherein the Minister's lady resided, and now, to Julienne's fear, her son was,—to the bright, plain church. Soon came the parson and steward, for whom her passing by had been a hint, following her into the church, and received commissions from her. Both were fair young men, with open brow and a little youthful pride. When the party were out of the church, she said through these young men she ruled over the place, and them she guided gently; that only young people were furnished with hatred and spirit against conventionalism, and with enthusiasm and faith. She added, jocosely, she governed nothing but a school of girls, upon which she laid more stress than upon the other, because education was the formation of habits and manners, and these a girl needed more than a boy, whom the world, after all, would not allow to have any; and she had, she said, some inclination to be a la Bonne, because she had, even when a girl, often been obliged to be one with her sisters.

Thereupon she introduced the two to several houses; everywhere they found well-whitened, neatly-ordered apartments, flowers and vine-clusters over the windows, fair women and children, and now a flute, now a violin, and nowhere a spinning child. In all she had charges to give, and what seemed a mere walk was also business. She showed a sharp insight through people, and their perverted, crooked ways, and a talent for business, which possessed and united at once the universal and the particular. "I should be glad, of course," said she, "to have only pleasures and amusements about me; but without labor and seriousness the best good of the world dies: not so much as a real play is possible without real earnestness." Linda commended her for training all to music,—that real moonlight in every gloomy night of life. "Without poesy and art," she added, "the spirit grows mossy and wooden in this earthly clime." "O what were mine without tones!" said Idoine, glowingly.

Linda inquired about the right of citizenship in this pleasant state. "It is mostly possessed by Swiss families," said Idoine, "with whom I became acquainted at hearth and home on my travels. Immediately after the French women I rank my Swiss." Julienne replied, "You repeat to me riddles." She solved them for her; and Linda, who had been in France shortly after her, confirmed it, that there, among the women of a certain higher tone, to whom no Crebillon had ever come up, a development prevailed, unusual in Germany, of the most delicate morality, almost holiness. "Only," added Linda, "they had in morality, as in art, prejudices of fine taste, and more delicacy than genius."

They went out through the village, toward the loveliest evening sun; Alpine horns responded to each other on the mountains, and in the vale gay old men went to light employments. These Idoine greeted with peculiar love. "Because," she said, "there was nothing more beautiful than cheerfulness on an old face; and among country people it was always the sign of a well-regulated and pious life."

Linda opened her heart to the golden scene before her, and said: "How must all this delight in a poem! But I know not what I have to object to the fact that it now exists so in the real reality."

"What has this same reality," said Idoine, playfully, "taken away from you or done to you? I love it; where then are you to be found for us except in reality?" "I," said Julienne, "am thinking of something quite different; one is ashamed here, that one has yet done so little with all one's willing. From willing to doing is, however, to be sure, a long step here," she subjoined, while she placed her little finger on her heart, and stretched the fore-finger as if vainly attempting to span from there to her head. "Idoine, tell me, how then can one think of what is great and what is little at once?" "By thinking of the greatest first," said she; "when one looks into the sun, the dust and the midges become most visible. God is, surely, the sun of us all."

The earthly sun stood now looking toward them far down on an immeasurable plain amid mild roses of Heaven. A distant windmill flung its arms broadly through the fair purple glow; on the mountain declivities children sang near the pastured herds, and their smaller brothers and sisters were playing under their eye; the evening bell, which in Arcadia was always tolled at the farewell of the sun, rocked sun and earth to slumber with its vibrations; not only in youthful, but even in childlike beauty lay the soft little village and its world round about them. No storm, one said to one's self, can intrude into this soft land, no winter stalk in in heavy panoply of ice: here, one thought, only spring winds and rosy clouds come and go: no rains fall, except early rains, and no leaves, except those of the blossoms: only dust from the flowers rises here; and the rainbow,—only forget-me-nots and May-flowers hold it upon their little blue and white leaves; the landscape and life and all seemed here to be only a continuous morning twilight, so fresh and new, full of presentiment and contentment, without glow or glitter, and with a few stars over the morning red.

Children with wreaths of grain in their hands sat on other people's wagons full of sheaves, and rode proudly in.

Idoine hung with hearty love, as if this evening made it all new, upon the double groups. "Only the countryman is so fortunate," said she, "as to live on in all the Arcadian relations of his childhood. The old man sees nothing around him but implements and labors which as a child he also saw and plied. At last he goes up into that garden over yonder, and sleeps it out." She pointed to the churchyard on the hill, which was a veritable garden, with flower-beds and a wall of fruit-trees. Julienne looked thither with agitation,—she saw the dark curtain tremble behind which her sick brother was soon to be borne.

Transparent evening gold-dust was wafted over the garden; the loud day was muffled, and life peaceful; olive-branches and their blossoms sank slowly down out of the quiet heavens. "There is the only place," said Idoine, "where man concludes an eternal peace with himself and others, as a French clergyman so beautifully said to me." "Such Christian-catholic night-thoughts," replied Linda, "are as disagreeable to me as the clergymen themselves. We can as little experience an immortality as an annihilation." "I do not understand that," said Julienne. "Ah, Idoine, if now there were no immortality, what would you do?" "J'aimerais," said she to her, in a low voice.

Suddenly they heard some one singing before them, as at a great distance: "Taste"—then after some time—"of life's"—at last—"pleasure."^[121] "That is the echo from the churchyard," said Idoine, and endeavored to persuade the party to return. "Echo and moonshine and churchyard together," she continued playfully, "may well be too strong for female hearts." At the same time she touched her eye, with a hint to Julienne, as much as to say how sorry she was that the eyes of the Countess could only see through a mist the beautiful evening coming on afar off. "The singing voice sounds so familiar to me," said Linda. "It's Roquairol, that's all; shall we go on?" said Julienne. But Linda begged to stay, and Idoine courteously agreed.

Now did the echo—the moonlight of sound—give back tones like dirges from the funeral choir; and it was as if the united shades of the departed sang them over in their holy-week under the ground,—as if the corpse-veil stirred on the white lip, and out of the last hollows sounded again a hollow life. The singing ceased; Alpine horns began on the mountains; then the echo of the concert came over again in enchanting tones, as if the departed still played behind the breastwork of the grave-mound, and rehabilitated themselves in echoed tones,^[122] All men bear dead or dying ones in their breast; so did the three maidens. Tones are the garments of the past fluttering back with a glimmer, and they excite the heart too much thereby.

They wept, and neither could say whether for sadness or joy. The hitherto so moderate Idoine grasped Linda's hand, and laid it softly on her heart, and let it sink again. They turned round silently and with one accord. Idoine held Linda by the hand. The subterranean waters of the echoes of the dead and the Alpine horns murmured after them, though more distantly. It did not escape Julienne how Idoine continually turned her face, merely in order to withdraw it from her, with the great drops in her large eyes, towards the thickly-veiled Linda; and she inferred therefrom that Idoine knew and was acquainted with much, and respected the bride of the youth to whom she had by her fair resemblance given back a happy life.

"What now do we get from all this?" said Idoine, by and by, and near the village. "We foresee that we should be too tender, and yet we give ourselves up. For that very reason men call us weak. They prepare themselves for their future by mere hardenings, and only we do it with mere softening processes." "What shall one do, then," said Julienne,—"leap into rivers, up mountains, on horseback, and so on?" "No," said Idoine. "For I see it by my peasant-women: they suffer in their nerves, with all their muscular labor, as well as others. With the mind, I imagine, we must all do and seek more; but we always let only the fingers and eyes exercise and stir themselves. The heart itself knows nothing thereof, and does what it pleases the while: it dreams, weeps, bleeds, dances. A little philosophizing would be of service to us; but, as it is, we give ourselves up, bound, to all feelings, and if we think, it is merely to give them additional aid."

They came back into the village; it was full of busy evening noise. Children came dancing to meet Idoine; alp-horns sounded in from the heights, and from the houses flutes and songs. Idoine gave cheerfully evening commands. "How easily, after all," said she, "outward tranquillity breaks up the internal. A busied heart is like a vessel of water swung round; hold it still, and it runs over."

Julienne had already several times, but in vain, snatched at the helm of the hour and the conversation, to carry out her plan; now, when she observed Linda's silence, emotion, and dreaminess, she fancied she had hit upon the long-expected, favorable moment when some words which Idoine let drop on the subject of marriage would find in Linda a softened soil for their roots. By the easy turn of a eulogy which she pronounced upon Idoine for her spirited opposition against launching into a hated princely marriage, and her gain of a perpetual young life, she brought the Countess to the point of expressing her heretical hatred of marriage, and saying that it laid the flower painfully fastened with a sharp iron ring to its frame; that love without freedom, and from duty, was nothing but hypocrisy and hatred; and that acting according to morality, so called, was as much as if one should choose to think or poetize according to a system of logic which he had before him, and that the energy, the will, the heart of love, was something higher than morals and logic.

At this moment came a note from the Minister's lady, wherein she excused her to-day's absence on the score of the too sad farewell which her son had this evening so strangely and as if forever bid her. However many silent thoughts this intelligence left behind in Julienne and Linda, Idoine was not drawn by it out of the lively emotion into which the previous discourse had thrown her; but, with a noble indignation, which made out of the beautiful maiden a beautiful youth, and put Minerva's helmet on her head, she made to her lofty adversary, who was less to be roused by others' passions than by opposing sentiments, this declaration of war: Certainly her aversion to marriage was chargeable only upon her other aversion to "priests"; for was the marriage bond anything else than eternal love, and did not every real love hold itself for an eternal one? A love which thinks to die at some time or other was already dead, and that which feared to live forever, feared in vain. If even friends were joined at the altar, as is said to be somewhere or other the case,^[123] they would at most only be more sacredly attached to each other in love. One might count quite as many if not more unhappy intrigues than unhappy marriages. One might, indeed, be a mother, but not a father, without marriage, and the latter must honor the former and himself by a decent respect for morality. "I am a German," she concluded, "and respect the old knightly ladies, my ancestors, highly. Blessed is a woman like Elizabeth and a man like Götz von Berlichingen, in their holy wedlock." All at once she found herself surprised by her warmth and her fluency. "I have really," she added, smiling, "become a pedantic parson's widow. This comes of my being the highest authority in the village, and from the fact that, as in almost every cottage a happy refutation of single blessedness dwells, I do not love to let other sentiments come up here."

"O," said Julienne, pleasantly, because she saw Linda serious, "girls always talk together about love and marriage a little; they love to draw flowers for themselves out of a bride's bouquet."

"That, as you know, I could not well do," said Idoine, alluding to the sworn promise which she had been obliged to give her parents, who were suspicious of her enthusiastic boldness, never to marry below her princely rank, which, to her, according to her sharp propensities and parts, amounted to as much as celibacy. "You were right, however," pursued Julienne, and would fain continue in her mirthful mood; "love without marriage is like a bird of passage, who seats himself upon a mast, which itself moves along. I praise, for my part, a fine, green-rooted tree, which stays there and admits a nest."

Contrary to her custom, Linda did not laugh at this, but went alone, without saying a word, down into the garden and the moonlight.

"The Countess," said Idoine to her friend, troubled about the meaning of that silent seriousness, "has not, I hope, misunderstood us." "No," said Julienne, with glad looks at the thought of having gained her point so far that the discourse had made an impression on Linda; "she has the rarest gift to understand, and the most common misfortune not to be understood." "The two things always go together," said she, remained a moment in thought, looked at Julienne, and at last said, "I must be entirely true. I knew the Countess's relation through my sister. Friend, is he entirely worthy of her?"—a question whose source the Princesse could seek only in the supposition of revengeful insinuations on the part of the Princess.

"Entirely!" answered she, strongly. "I gladly believe you," replied Idoine, with rapidity in her tones, but tranquillity in her looks. She looked longer and longer upon the sister of Albano; her great, blue eyes gleamed more and more strongly; Minerva's helmet was removed from the maidenly head; the soft countenance appeared lovely, tranquil, clear, not more strongly moved than a prayer to God permits it to be, and with as little of passionate desire as a glorified saint has, and yet shining more and more celestially. Julienne's fair heart leaped up; she saw Liana again, as if she had come from heaven to press the beloved man with a blessing to a new heart; she said, with tears, "Thou, thou didst once give him peace." Idoine was surprised; two tears gushed from her bright eyes; with emphasis she answered, "Gave!" in an agitated and passionate manner pressed herself to her friend, saying, "I loved you long ago," and they said nothing further.

Quickly she collected herself, reminded Julienne of Linda's night-blindness, and begged her to go directly after her as her friend, although she herself would gladly steal this service from her if she dared. Julienne hastened into the garden, but remembered with emotion that Idoine had not reciprocated her thou; Idoine avoided the female thou. Unlike the Oriental women, who leave off the veil before relations, she, like her fair French neighbors, transferred the delicate laws of politesse into matters of the heart.