Part 21

"Why does not man fall on his knees and adore the world, the mountains, the sea, the all? How it exalts the spirit to think that it is, and that it is conscious of the immense world and of itself! O Linda, I am still full of the morning; I still sojourn even on the sublime hell. Yesterday I rode in the morning with my _Bartolomeo_ through the rich, full garden avenue to the gay Portici, which links itself to the giant like Catana to Ætna. Ever the same great epic Greek feature running through this sublime land,--the same blending of the monstrous with the beautiful, of nature with men, of eternity with the moment; country-houses and a laughing plain opposite to the eternal death-torch; between old, holy temple-columns goes a merry dance, the common monk and the fisherman; the glowing blocks of the mountain tower up as a bulwark around vineyards, and beneath the living Portici dwells the hollow, dead Herculaneum; lava cliffs have grown out into the sea, and dark battering-rams lie cast among the flowers. The ascent was in the beginning refreshment to my soul; the long mountain was a conductor to the full cloud. Late at night, after an eternal ascent, without having enjoyed the evening sun, through whose red glow upon the ashes we were obliged to wade rapidly, we arrived here at the hermit's. The moon was not yet up; thy island was still invisible. Often it thundered under the floor of the apartment. Then was I all at once pleasantly reminded by the hermit of my old Schoppe, when he told me that a limping traveller with a wolf-dog had once said up here, 'In Vesuvius was the stall of the incessantly stamping thunder-steeds.' That could certainly after all have been no one but Schoppe.

"At midnight, my Linda, when the moon stood high over the Apennine, and looked from heaven with a long, enraptured, silvery look, and I thought of thee, I arose and went softly out, in order to see again where thou dwellest, my Linda. Out of doors it was all still everywhere; I seemed to hear the earth thunder along its path in the heavens; the shadows of the linden-trees around me lay fast asleep on the green turf; the smoke of Vesuvius streamed up into the pure air; the moon gleamed out wondrously over the smoking sea, and with difficulty I sought and found at last the solitary mountain of thy island soaring into the blue, blooming silvery among the surrounding stars,--a glimmering temple-pinnacle for my heart. 'Yonder she dwells, and slumbers upon her Tabor, a glorified one of Elysium!' I said to myself. Around me was the ashes of centuries, stillness as of a coffin, and only now and then a rattling, as if they were throwing upon it the earth of the grave-mound. I was neither in the land of death nor of immortality; the countries became clouds; Naples and Portici lay hidden; the broad blue of heaven encompassed me; a high night-wind bent the smoke-column of Vesuvius downward, and swept it on in long clouds, tinged with ever-varying hues, through the pure ether. Then I looked after Ischia, and looked toward heaven. O Linda, I am sincere, hear it; I prayed the holy Liana, who loved thee so infinitely, now to hover round thee and prepare for thee the fortune which she once so earnestly wished thee. All at once the thunders of the mountain became entirely still, the stars sparkled more brightly. Then did the silence and life send a shudder through me, and I went back into the hut; but long did I continue to weep for rapture at the mere thought that thou wast happy.

"The morning rose, and in the midst of its wintry darkness we entered upon our journey to the fire-flue and smoke-gate. As in a burnt-up, smoking city, I went along by hollows, around hollows, mountains around mountains, and over the trembling floor of an everlastingly active powder-mill up to the powder-house. At last I found the throat of this land of fire,--a great glowing smoke-valley, containing another mountain within it,--a landscape of craters, a workshop of the last day, full of fragments of worlds, of frozen, burst hell-floods,--an enormous potsherd of time, but inexhaustible, immortal as an evil spirit, and under the cold, pure heaven bringing forth to itself twelve thunder-months.

"All at once the broad smoke ascends more darkly red, the thunders roll more wildly into one another, the heavy hell-cloud smokes more hotly. Suddenly morning air rushes in, and drags the flaming curtain down the mountain. There stood the clear, benignant sun on the Apennine, and Somma and Ottayano and Vesuvius bloomed in peaceful splendor, and the world came slowly up after the sun with its mountains, islands, and coasts. The ring of creation lay gilded upon the sea before me, and as the magic wands of the rays touched the lands, they started up into life. And the old royal brother of Vesuvius, Ætna, sat on his golden throne, and looked out over his land and sea. And the light day rolled like snow from the mountains down into the sea, melting away in splendors, and flowed over the broad, happy Campania[102] and into the dark chestnut-vales. And the earth became boundless, and the sun drew, in the wide net of rays, the sweetly imprisoned world onward in the fairest ether.

"O Linda, there sparkled thy outspread island, proudly encamped in the sea, with the morning redness streaming down over it, a high-masted war-ship; and an eagle, the bird of the thunder-god, flew into the blessed distance, as if he bore my heart in his breast away to thy Epomeo. 'O that I could follow him,' said my spirit. The hot earth gave claps of thunder, and the smoke enveloped me. I could have died, that so I might follow the eagle in his flight and be at this moment in Ischia."

Here the intensely excited soul held itself in. He went or glided down the declivity towards Portici. In a house which had been mutually fixed upon beforehand he thought to find again his friend. But he found neither Dian nor the expected letter from Linda. Enervated by walking, watching, and glowing, he fell, in the cool, still chamber into a dreamy sleep. When he awoke, the midnight of the Italian day, the siesta, embosomed him. All rested under the hot, still light; there was not a lark in heaven; the green parasols near his window, the pines, stood unmoved in the earth, and only the poplars rocked gently the new-born blossoms of the vine which lay in their arms; and the ivy, which hung from summits, swayed a little. Such shadowy twigs played once in Lilar in Chariton's chamber, when he was expecting Liana, and then thought of Italy. The great, level, simple garden from Portici to Naples--a garden web of villages, groves, and country-houses, washed by waves--carried his eye over blossoms to his paradise in the sea. This lonely, still time, full of longing, softened infinitely his fair heart. He ended the interrupted letter thus:--

"In Portici.

"O my Linda! I am nearer to thee again, but the distance between us seems to me here in the stillness so vast! O Linda, I love thee with pangs, both when near and when far,--O with what yet unfelt pangs should I lose thee? Why am I, then, so certain of thy love? Or so uncertain? Softly does thy heart speak to me. _Soft_ music or love is like a _distant_,--and the distant again is like the soft. Has the sublime pedestal of the thunder-god beside me agitated me so much, or do I think too vividly of the hollow, dead Herculaneum under me, where one city is one coffin? Weeping and oppressed, I look over the sea to the still island whereon thou dwellest. O that it is so long before we see each other again; that thou dost not draw every thought immediately out of my heart and I out of thine! Why does the delay of thy letter prefigure at once greater pains, ah, the greatest, before my soul? Why do I think; the deepest lines of pain upon our brow, the wrinkles of life, are only little lines out of the monstrous building-plan which the world-spirit draws, unconcerned what brows and joys his line of bliss painfully cuts through? If this line should one day go through our love--O forgive this premature pang! in this life, this alternation of transient showers and sunbeams, it may well be permitted."

Here he was interrupted by joy and Dian, attended by an Ischian, who brought a letter from Linda, and came to take his back with him. He read it passionately, and added to his own these few more words as a tear of joy: "Day after to-morrow I come upon the island. What is the earth in comparison with a heart? Thou art mighty; thou holdest my whole blooming existence high into the heavens, and it falls upon thee, if it falls. Farewell! I fear verily neither the hot oil nor the flame of Psyche."

Here is Linda's letter:--

"We have both been living very quietly since our agreeable runaway has been revelling about on mountains and in palaces. We have talked almost too much about him, besides sending for the prattling Agata to tell us something about his journey. Your Julia is full of blessings and helps for Linda. Never did I see before such a clear, determined, sharply discerning and yet cold nature, which only loves in giving, rather than gives in loving. She will never, it is true, feel the pangs which Venus Urania sends her chosen ones; but she is a born mother, and a born sister; and I ask her sometimes, why hast thou not all brothers and all orphans?

"Since the earthquake I have been somewhat ill. I have, perhaps, not been accustomed to love, and so to die. I take a philosophical book,--for poets just now take too violent a hold of me,--and fancy I am still following it, when I have been long since flown away over the sea. I am reading at this moment the life of the glorious Guyon. She knows what love is,--that godlike affection for the godlike, that losing of self in God, that eternal living and abiding steadfast in one great idea,--that growing sanctification through love, and that growing love through sanctification! The book falls out of my hands, I close my eyes, I dream and weep and love thee. O Albano, come earlier. What wilt thou now seek on mountains and ruins? Shall we not come hither again? But you roving men! Only women love, whether it be God, or yourselves, alas! Guyon, the holy Thérèse, the somewhat prosaic Bourignon, loved God as no man ever did (except the holy Fénelon); man deals with the highest being not much better than with the fairest. Albano, if thou hast any other longing than I, if thou desirest more on earth than me, more in Paradise than me, then say so, that I may leave off and die. Truly, when thou embracest thy sister, then I am jealous and long to be thy sister, and thy friend Schoppe, and thy father, and everything that thou lovest, and thy very self, if thou lovest it, and thy whole heaven and thy whole thou in me, thy I in thee.

"I will tell you something of my history. I went for a long time in silence over the earth; I saw courts, nations, and lands, and found that most _men_ are only _people_. What did it concern me? One must never say of anything, that is bad, but only, that is stupid, and think no more of it. What I do not love has for me no existence, and instead of hating or despising it long, I have forgotten it. I was scolded at as proud and fantastic, and could not satisfy any one. But I kept and cherished my inner being, for no ideal must be given up, else the holy fire of life goes out, and God dies without resurrection. I saw men, and found always the simple distinction among them, that some were fine, intelligent, and delicate, without spirit or enthusiasm, and the rest very hearty and enthusiastic with shallow rudeness, but all selfish; although when their heart is full, and not on the wane, they, even like the full moon, show the fewest spots. Beside the teachings of my great mother, beside your great father, no one of them could hold up his head. Your Roquairol one could neither love nor hate, nor respect nor fear, although one could come very near to all these at once.

"It had a great effect, too, that I was always travelling: travelling often keeps one colder. When I look toward the coast, and think that a great Roman was now in Baja, now in Germany, now in Gaul, now in Rome, and that to him the earth was a great city, then I easily comprehend how to him men became masses. Travelling is an employment that we women always miss. Men have always something to do, and send the soul outward; women must stay all day at home with their hearts. In Switzerland I (as the Princess Idoine does) imposed upon myself a little economy, and I know how by means of little objects which one daily attains one consoles one's self for the high one which lies, like a god's throne, on an eminence.

"So I came just in this still week of life to the mer-de-glace in _Montanvert_. Of picturesque mountains, plains, dells, I had seen my fill in Spain, and of ice-mountains in Switzerland. But a sea of ice at that height, a solitary, primeval, blue-green sea surrounded with red rocks, a broad waste full of restless, upheaving, tempestuous billows, which a sudden death, a Medusa's head, had so, in the midst of life, frozen stiff and fast! At that time a storm, which at any other time would have been frightful to me, swept up the mountain with flames; I hardly noticed it, my soul hung musingly on the stillness of a petrified storm, on the repose of--ice! I shuddered, wept unusually all the way down the mountain, and the same week laid my economical play-work aside and continued my travels.

"I made, however, no storm-prayers, but dwelt down below there without complaint in the rainy hollow of a dark, cold existence. Then fate brought me to Epomeo, and there the gods willed that the scene should be changed.

"But now it must remain as it is. When a singular being has said to a singular being, 'Thou art the one!' then do they exist only through and for each other. The Psyche with her lamp will not feel it, if the lamp catches and consumes her locks and her hand and her heart, while she blissfully gazes upon the slumbering Cupid; but when the hot drop of oil escapes from the lamp and touches the god, and he awakes and angrily flies away from her forever--forever--Ah, thou poor Psyche! Of what avail to thee is death in the dissolved ice-sea? Has, then, no man ever yet experienced the pain of lost love, that he may know what a thousand times harder desolation it inflicts upon a woman? Who of them has fidelity, the genuine, which is neither a virtue nor a sensation, but the very fire which eternally animates and sustains the kernel of existence?

"I am sick, Albano, else I know not how I come by these gloomy ideas. I am so tranquil in my innermost heart; I have shown only the chords, not the tune. We must work and look, not upon the future, but upon the next coming present. If the time should ever, ever appear--I have neither remorse nor patience--the time when thou lovedst me no more, heartily--ah! I should be stiller, stronger, briefer than now: and what could there be beyond, except to die either _for_ the loved one or--_by_ him?

"Come soon, sweet one! It is very beautiful around us; it has rained, all the world is in jubilee, and sees the sun-drops, and has gathered itself a heavenly drink. I, too, have set out in haste for thee dishes and vases. Come; I will bring thee the olive-leaf and the myrtle-twig, and wind around thy head roses and violets. Come. Once I little thought that I should look so often toward Posilippo. L."

"P. S.--The rival also looks toward Posilippo, and rejoices in the thought of thy return. Yet do not hurry anything. _Adio, caro_. J."

Albano found in this character a silent justification and satisfaction of all demands which at an earlier period, when Liana was still living, he had always felt compelled to make upon a loved being. He did not, however, perceive, in the innocence of his love, that this was the very being whom the longing after war and exploits that reigned in his letter could not please.

He visited now the subterranean city in its churchyard, near the Cestius' pyramid, as it were, of the volcano. Dian went through Herculaneum with him as an antiquarian lexicon, in order to unroll before him the whole domestic economy of the ancients, up to their very painting; but Albano was more moved than his friend by this picture of the past dwelling in the midst of the present,--by the still houses, and night-like streets, and by the frequent traces of flying despair. "Would not all these people, then, have been dead now, after all, if it had not been for Vesuvius?" asked Dian, gayly, in this gay region. "I ask you, rather," he continued, "whether an architect who comes out of this chamber or city of art can take any longer much pleasure in sketching in your Germany, after seeing these ruins of the earth, the petty, pitiful ones for your princely gardens?" They saw in a dark vestibule one of those earthern masks which they used to put into graves, with lamps like eyes behind. Then Albano looked at him staringly, and said, "Are we not gleaming earth-masks on graves?" "Fie! what an odious idea!" said Dian.

Yet a long time, out there in the living sunshine, did gloomy forms follow him. Near the shining Portici stood Vesuvius, like a funeral pile, and on it the death-angel. He thought of Hamilton's prediction, that the lovely Ischia would one day perish over the mine of an earthquake. Even Linda's letter troubled him, with the bare imagination of the possibility of losing her.

In Naples he examined a few more curiosities; then on the next morning he embarked for the Eden of the waves.

115. CYCLE.

And when they saw and embraced each other again, they were even more enraptured and devoted to each other than any happy heart could have foreseen. Linda sat still and soft, looked upon the fair youth, and let him and his sister tell their stories, the latter often interrupting herself to kiss both. He spoke with great joy about Linda's letter. Men always make more out of what is written than women. Linda spoke indifferently: "Ah, well, once written and read, let it be forgotten. In yours, too, there is occasionally a northern _faux brillant_." "The Countess," said Julienne, "never praises any one to the face, but herself." Linda bore the joke with characteristic good-nature. Albano, often pleasing and often offending her when he was not conscious of it, forgave love ever so easily. Friendship finds it harder to get forgiveness from offended vanity.

"Yes, indeed!" cried Julienne, suddenly starting under the veil of mirthfulness for a serious discourse; "thy project of emigrating to France is a _faux brillant_. Canst thou then believe that they will allow a princess-sister of Hohenfliess to sign a pass to her brother for a democratic campaign? Never! And nobody at all will do it who loves thee!" Albano smiled, but at last grew serious. Linda was silent, and cast down her eyes. "Can you show me," said he, softly, as half in earnest and half in jest, "a purer field of spurs on the whole map?" "A poorer field of spurge!"[103] said she, playing on the words. "Hardly, I should think!" Now she began to shadow forth, with aristocratic, feminine, and princely colors at once, with tri-colored paints, all the flames, smoke-clouds, and waves with which the _Monte Nuovo_ of the Revolution had come up from the ground, and added, "Better an idle count than that!" He grew red. Always had this womanly fettering of man's energy, this affectionate fastening of one down to flowers, this unrighteous forging over of the love-ring into a galley-ring, been to him a crying and odious thing. "In a world which is only a fair-week and mask-ball, not to be able to maintain even the freedom of fair and masquerade, is tough," Schoppe had once said; and he had never forgotten it, because it came right out of his own soul back into it again. "Sister, either thou art not my brother, or I am not thy sister," said he, "else we should understand each other more easily." Linda's hand quivered in his, and her eye rose slowly towards him, and quickly sank again. Julienne seemed to be touched with the reproach cast upon her sex. Albano thought of the time when he had crushed a heart of wax with one of iron, and said, more brightly and coldly, "Julienne, I should be very willing not to say no to thee, if thou wouldst not take the absence of a negative for an affirmative." He could, it occurred to him, easily hide his contradiction behind the future, since in fact no war was as yet decided upon in Europe; but he did not deem that honorable and dignified enough. "Do not torment!" said Linda to her. "Certainly," said Julienne, with quickness, "I can, indeed, only think of this and that; what do I know?" and looked very serious. "Two days longer," she added, and sought to escape from the serious mood, "can we spend like gods, yes, like goddesses, upon the island,--although, at all events, I should answer for a god, only not for a goddess; that requires a taller person. I am only a foil to the Countess out of infinite good-nature." For Julienne's stature lost by the neighborhood of the majestic Linda.

The war of the loving beings had, however, not concluded with a peace, and therefore remained an armistice. As Vesuvius throws glowing stones, so does man throw his objections up in himself, alternately flinging them aloft and swallowing them again, till at last a more lucky direction sends them out over the brink.

In Albano, as may well be supposed, the question was working, what Linda's silence in the little war imported respecting and against the great one; but he did not propose it. Conscious of the unchangeableness of his purpose, he was milder toward his sister, whom he, as he believed, should surely one day exceedingly wound by it. Thus had he become soft by the cold and warm alternation of life, as a precious stone, by rapid heating and cooling, is transformed into medicine.

Swiftly and sweetly glided the last days of joy over the island, which after the rain glistened in greenness like a German garden. The soft, cool air, the fragrance of myrtles and oranges, single clouds of brightness in the warm sky, the magic-smoke of the coasts, the golden sun at morning and evening, and love and youth decked and crowned the rare season. High burned on the blooming earth the sacrificial flame of love into the still, blue heavens. As two mirrors stand before one another, and one pictures the other and itself and the world, and the other represents all this and also the pictures and the painter, so tranquilly stood Albano and Linda before each other, attracting and imaging soul within soul. As Mont Blanc majestically mirrors himself down in the still lake of Chede in a paler heaven, so stood Albano's whole, sound, light spirit in Linda's. She said he was an honest and an honorable man at once, and had, what was so rare, a _whole_ will; only, as is often the case with men, he wanted to love still more than he did love, and therefore did not sufficiently recognize his quiet, original sin, from egotism. There was nothing against which he bristled up more indignantly and excitedly than against this latter charge, and he would not forgive it in any one save the Countess. He refuted her as strongly as he could; but her opinion became, under the best annihilation, only a mock corpse, and came back alive against him the very next hour.