Part 5

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

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

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

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

8. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

9. CYCLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Scale.--TR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[12] _Tirare di primavere_, the people call it; and Peter Schoppe translated it grandly enough, _Electrical pistol-firing of spring_.

[13] Quotation-marks.--TR.

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

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

[16] The Ipecacuanha belongs to the Violet species.

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

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

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

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

_INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMME_

TO TITAN.

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

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

But he wrote me back on the spot:--

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

"VON HAFENREFFER."

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