Part 14

He looked round, and seemed to stand in a strange world. In the blue of heaven an invisible storm without clouds swept along like a spirit; long rows of hills shifted and sparkled with red fruits and red leaves; out of the gay trees glowing apples were flung; and the storm flew from summit to summit, and down upon the earth, and roared along down the whole course of the disturbed stream. One could fancy spirits played around the earth, or would appear upon it, so singularly seemed the bright welkin stirred and illuminated. By this time, Albano had come unconsciously into a dark, wooded wilderness; therein leaped, unseen, unheard, a pure, light fountain out of the earth upon the earth; the storm without was still, only the fountain was heard. "The holy one is near me," said his heart. "Is not the fountain her image? Is it not the very image of her eternal tears? Does she not press upward out of the earth, where she dwells?" All at once he saw in his hand, as if another's hand had laid it therein, the sketch of Linda's head which Liana, with dying hands, had made and presented; but his fancy powerfully impressed upon the picture the resemblance to the artist, so clearly did he see Liana's soft face upon the paper.

He went forth again into the shining world. "How poor I am!" he cried. "I see her upon the golden cloud which sails from the evening sun toward morning; I see her in the cool fountain of the vale, and on the moon, and on the flower. I see her everywhere; and she rests only on one spot. O, how poor!" And he looked up to heaven, and a single long cloud was floating therein, swiftly and far away.

102. CYCLE.

Thus did the days, with their cities and landscapes, fly by, and the world mirrored itself in Albano's life as in a poem. One faculty after another, the whole bowed harvest of his inner being, gradually rose up again green and dripping; but, at the same time, the thorn of grief also grew strong. While his eye and spirit were filling themselves with the world and all spoils of knowledge, the evil spectre of pain still kept his abode in the ruins, and came forth when the heart was alone, and seized it.

He touched Vienna, where he must needs be pleased to be introduced to several distinguished friends of Gaspard, who here, for the first time, disclosed to him that he belonged not to the _Cavalleros del Turone_, but was an Austrian Knight of the Fleece. "It is so singularly familiar to me here," said Albano; "whence can this arise?" "From some resemblance to another city," said Gaspard; "whoever travels much comes out of like cities into like." Every day his father grew more dear and intelligible to him, and yet no more confidential or intimate. After a warm day and familiar conversation with Gaspard, one stood, at the next succeeding interview, again in the very antechamber of his acquaintance; as in the case of hard-natured maidens, after every May-month's day the melted May-frost begins to fall anew. Age respects love, but, unlike youth, it respects little the signs of love. However, Albano maintained the pride of letting his father see him wholly and with all his differences, without hiding his summer from the face of winter.

From day to day Gaspard found letters to himself at the post-offices,

## particularly from Pestitz, as Albano saw externally by the post-marks,

for not one was handed over to him. He desired more and more to overtake the Princess, who was now only one day's journey in advance of them. They saw already those giants of winter, the Swiss and Tyrolese Alps, in their encampment; those sons of the gods stood, armed with avalanches and cataracts and winters, sentinels around the divine land where gods and men reciprocally imitated each other. How often did Albano, when the sun at evening glowingly blended with the snow-clad Alpine heights, gaze with a pang of sadness at those thrones, which he had once beheld quite otherwise, much more golden, so hopefully and trustingly, from _Isola Bella_! The heights of thy past life, said he to himself, are also white, and no Alpine horns any longer sound up there, among serene, sunny days, and thou art deep in the valley!

They passed, even now, the popular festival of a belated vintage. The Knight informed himself about everything with the curiosity of a wine-dealer, and with the science of a vine-dresser. So did he botanize universally upon the earth after every spear and sprig of knowledge. Albano wondered at this, since he had heretofore believed that Gaspard sought and strove after nothing but the Paris--and Hesperides-apples of art, because, in his station, he could have no occasion for any other fruits, or need their meat and their kernel, either to enjoy or to plant them.

They sank into the depths of the mountains of Tyrol. The heights stood already wrapped in the close, white bier-cloth of winter, and through the valleys the cold storm went to and fro, the only living thing. Albano's longing after the mild land of youth grew, between the storms and the Alps, higher and higher; and Rome's image, the nearer it approached him, assumed more colossal dimensions. Gaspard made the journey go on wings, in order to anticipate the rain-clouds of autumn.

In a dark travelling night they worked their passage, as it were, away through the mountains, like their companion, the river Adige, which tears up a giant rock, and heaves it into the mild plain, and softly speeds on its level way. The sun appeared,--and Italy.

It had rained. A bland air fluttered from the cypress hills through the valley, and through the vine-festoons of the mulberry-trees, and had forced its way along between blossoms and the fruits of the Seville oranges. The Adige seemed to rest, like a curling giant-snake, upon the motley-colored landscape of country-houses and olive-groves, and to set rainbows upon one another. Life played in the ether; only summer birds floated in the light blue; only the Venus-chariot of pleasure rolled over the soft hills.

Albano's full soul gushed out, as it were, into the broad bed which led him from the mild plain to the magnificent Rome! "When we journey back," said Gaspard, "then remember thy approach." They stopped at a village with great stone houses. Albano was looking upon the warm out-o'-door life around him, the uncovered head, the naked breast, and the sparkling eyes of the men, the great sheep with silken wool, the little, black, lively pigs, and the black turkey-cocks, when he suddenly heard his name and a German greeting from a balcony overhead.

It was the Princess; her carriages stood just aside; Bouverot and Fraischdöfer were with her. How like balsam it steals through the heart, in a strange land, and though it were the loveliest, to meet again a brother or a sister inhabitant of a rougher land, as if one were meeting in the second world a kindred son of earth! The Adige, too, that had previously in the wild mountains accompanied him under the name of the Etsch, followed him with its fairer designation into the plain. The Princess seemed to him, he knew not why, to have become milder, more maidenly in form and look, and he reproached himself with his earlier error. But he only committed a later one. Beyond Vienna her strongly drawn physiognomy was surpassed by sharper southern ones, and the striking[72] colors in which she loved to array herself were outshone by the Italian. A strange soil is a masquerade ball-room or a watering-place hall, where only human relations, and no political ones, prevail, and in a strange land men are least strangers. All touched each other in friendliness, as strange hands feel after and grasp each other during the ascent of mountains. With what veneration did Albano look upon the Princess! For he thought, "She would fain have taken the departed one with her into the healing Eden. O, the saint would indeed be happy this morning, and her blue eye would weep for bliss." Then his did so, but not for bliss; and thus are the fire-works of life, like others, built always by and upon water. Then was the oath solemnly sworn within him before the beautiful face of the dead Liana: "I will be truly the friend of this her friend!" Man plays a new part in the drama of life most warmly and best; over our introductory sermons the Holy Spirit floats, brooding with the wings of a dove; only by and by do the eggs lie cold. Albano, never yet initiated into any friendship but a man's, worshipped that of woman as a rising star, and for this, as for the former, he found far more capacities of sacrifice treasured up in his warm soul than for love. Man is in friendship what woman is in love, and the reverse; namely, more covetous of the object than of the feeling for it.

With new swelling sails and flying streamers, in gayly decorated singing-vessels, with propitious side winds, did the gay passage fly through cities and pastures.

Nothing hangs out over the _corso_ of a long journey a finer festoon of fruits and flowers, for a carriage which goes before, than a couple of carriages coming after. What fellowship of joy and danger in night quarters! What bespeaking of lines of march! What joy over the adventures past and to come, namely, over the reports of the same! And how each loves the others!

Only toward Bouverot Albano showed a steady coldness; but the Knight was friendly. Albano, brought up more among books than among men, often wondered within himself, that in the former the same difference of sentiments passed by him so lightly, which among the latter assailed him so sharply. At last his father asked him upon one occasion, "Why dost thou demean thyself so strangely toward Herr von Bouverot? Nothing exasperates more than a considerate, quiet hatred; a passionate hatred does so far less." "Because it is my law," he answered, "to flee and to hate the everlasting untruthfulness of men in their connections with each other. Out of mere humanity to place one's self on a par with unlike persons, designedly to make a friendly face to any one, to have such a feeling towards a man, that one is not at liberty to speak it out to him on the spot, that may well be deemed complete slavery, and confounds the purest." "Whoso will love nothing but his likeness," replied Gaspard, "has nothing but himself to love. Von Bouverot," he added, laughing, "is, after all, a brave host and travelling _compagnon_." Albano, who could withstand even people whom he respected, made no inquisition upon his father, but thought the German gentleman only the more despicable.

That gentleman, born a pettifogger and pedler, had, it must be observed, cleared a pathway of deep footprints for himself in the snow of the Knight and the Princess,--both of whom, like all long travellers,[73] were uncommonly avaricious,--by overseeing and overreaching all hosts and Italians in settling up the _Patto_,[74] and even by his understanding the art of being profoundly coarse just at the right time, whereas upon turning from the host to the Princess he would become as much a man of the world again as Fontenelle or any Frenchman, who in such cases always counts up and curses longer than he eats. The Knight of the Fleece, who, as he confessed, had never travelled so cheaply, covered him, therefore, with the laurel which grew all about here, and looked as gay as he had never looked before. Only to his son was the cold, wrathful, coarse man a volcano, ejecting slime and water. Ride a mile ahead of a crowned head or a classic author, who is also one, and in general before people who have money, but not to spare, and only save them a few gold pieces a day,--never shall you have seen the said heads more glad or grateful than in such a case!

Everywhere Albano would fain have alighted, and stepped in among great ruins and into the splendor of the scattered insignia, which had been lost by the conquerors of the world out of their triumphal chariots on the way to Rome. But the Knight advised him to spare and save his eyes and inspiration for Rome itself. How his heart beat, when at last in the waste _Campagna_, which lay full of lava-eruptions around the nest of the Roman eagles, those world-driven storm-birds, they rolled along over the Flaminian road! But he and Gaspard felt themselves wonderfully oppressed. One seemed to be wading through the stagnant lake of a sultry sulphurous atmosphere, which his father ascribed to the brimstone huts at Baccano,--he thirsted for the snow on the distant mountains,--the heavens were dark-blue and still,--single lofty clouds flew arrow-swift through the silent wilderness. A man in the distance set down again an urn which he had dug up, and prayed, anxiously looking to heaven, and telling his beads. Albano turned toward the mountains, to which the evening sun was sinking, as if dissolved in piercing splendor. All at once the Knight ordered the postilion to stop, who passionately threw up his arms toward heaven, while it went on rumbling under the carriage, and exclaimed, "Holy mother of God, an earthquake!" But Gaspard touched his son, who seemed intoxicated with the splendors of sunset, and said, pointing, "_Ecco Roma!_" Albano looked, and saw in the depths of the distance the dome of St. Peter's gleaming in the sun. The sun went down, the earth quaked once more, but in his spirit nothing was save Rome.

103. CYCLE.

Half an hour after the earthquake, the heavens swathed themselves in seas and dashed them down in masses and in torrents. The naked _Campagna_ and heath were covered with the mantle of rain. Gaspard was silent,--the heavens black,--the great thought stood alone in Albano, that he was hastening on towards the bloody scaffold and the throne scaffolding of humanity, the heart of a cold, dead, heathen-world, the eternal Rome; and when he heard, on the _Ponte Molle_, that he was now going across the Tiber, he felt as if the past had risen from the dead,--as if the stream of time ran backward, and he were sailing on it; under the streams of heaven he heard the seven old mountain-streams rushing and roaring, which once came down from Rome's hills, and with seven arms uphove the world from its foundations.

At length the constellation of the mountain city of God, that stood so broad before him, opened out into nights; cities with scattered lights lay up and down, and the bells (which to his ear were alarm-bells) sounded out the fourth[75] hour, when the carriage rolled through the triumphal gate of the city, the _Porta del Popolo_; then the moon rent her black heavens, and poured down out of the cleft clouds the splendor of a whole sky. There stood the Egyptian obelisk of the gateway, high as the clouds in the night, and three streets ran gleaming apart. "So," said Albano to himself, as they passed through the long _corso_ to the Tenth Ward, "thou art veritably in the camp of the god of war; here, where he grasped the hilt of the monstrous war-sword, and with the point made the three wounds in three quarters of the world." Rain and splendor gushed through the vast, broad streets,--occasionally he passed suddenly along by gardens and into broad city-deserts and market-places of the past. The rolling of the chariot amidst the rush and roar of the rain resembled the thunder, whose days were once holy to this heroic city, like the thundering heaven to the thundering earth; muffled-up forms, with little lights, stole through the dark streets; often there stood a long palace with colonnades in the fire of the moon, often a solitary gray column, often a single high fir-tree, or a statue behind cypresses. Once, when there was neither rain nor moonshine, the carriage went round the corner of a large house, on whose roof a tall, blooming virgin, with an uplooking child on her arm, herself directed a little hand-light, now toward a white statue, now toward the child, and so alternately illuminated the whole group. The friendly company made its way to the very centre of his exalted soul and brought with it to him many a recollection; particularly was a Roman child to him a wholly new and mighty idea.

They alighted at last at the Prince di Lauria's, Gaspard's father-in-law, and old friend. Near his palace lay the _Campo Vaccino_ (the ancient Forum), and the radiant moon shone on the broad steps and the three wondrous edifices of the Capitol; in the distance stood the Colosseum. Albano ascended hesitatingly into the lighted house, before which the carriage of the Princess stood, reluctantly turning his eye from those heights of the world, from which once a light word like a snow-flake rolled far and wide, and grew and grew, till at last in a strange land it crushed a city with the weight of an avalanche.

The Princess, with her company, saw with pleasure the new-comers. The old Prince Lauria welcomed his grandson courteously and with reserve. His innumerable servants spoke among them almost all the languages of Europe. Albano immediately asked the Knight after his teacher Dian, that graft of a Greek upon a Roman; but the most human thing was precisely that which Gaspard, as is always the case with great men, had not thought of. They sent to his residence, which was near; he was not at home.

They sat down to dine. The Prince immediately entertained them with his favorite show-dish, the political progress of the world, and gave the latest news of the French Revolution. Gazettes of the times were to him Eternities, news was his antiques; he took all the newspapers of Europe, and therefore kept for each a German, Russian, English, Polish servant, to translate it for him. By the side of his satirical coldness toward all men and things, the political and Italian zeal appeared the stronger, with which he defended the French against the Knight, who composedly despised them; and, indulging himself after his manner, even in bad puns, conceded to the old Romans the _Forum_ and to the modern the _Campo Vaccino_, and even to the ancient Gauls the field of Mars, and to the modern French a field of March.

Albano could not conceive of there being any joking so near the _Forum_, and thought every word must be great in this city. The cold Lauria spoke warmly for France, like a minister, regarding only nations, not individuals, and his sentiment pleased the youth.

Then the Princess led the stream of conversation to Rome's high art. Fraischdörfer dissected the Colossus into limbs, and weighed them in the narrowest scales. Bouverot engraved the giant in historical copperplate. The Princess spoke with much warmth, but without point. Gaspard melted all up together, as it were, into a Corinthian brass, and comprehended all without being comprehended. On his coldly but strongly up-shooting life-fountain he let the world play and dance like a ball.

Albano, dissatisfied with all, kept his inspiration, sacrificing to the unearthly gods of the past round about him, after the old fashion, namely, with silence. Well might and could _he_ have discoursed also, but quite otherwise, in odes, with the whole man, with streams which mount and grow upwards. He looked more and more longingly out of the window at the moon in the pure rain-blue and at single columns of the Forum; out of doors there gleamed for him the greatest world. At last he rose up, indignant and impatient, and stole down into the glimmering glory and stepped before the Forum; but the moonlit night, that decorative painter, which works with irregular strokes, made almost the very stage of the scene irrecognizable to him.

What a broad, dreary plain, loftily encompassed with ruins, gardens and temples, covered with prostrate capitals of columns, and with single upright pillars, and with trees and a dumb wilderness! The heaped-up ashes out of the emptied urn of time, and the potshards of a great world flung around! He passed by three temple columns,[76] which the earth had drawn down into itself even to the breast, and along through the broad triumphal arch of Septimius Severus; on the right stood a chain of columns without their temple; on the left, attached to a Christian church, the colonnade of an ancient heathen temple deep sunk into the sediment of time; at last the triumphal arch of Titus, and before it, in the middle of the woody wilderness, a fountain gushing into a granite basin.

He went up to this fountain, in order to survey the plain out of which the thunder-months of the earth once arose; but he went along as over a burnt-out sun, hung round with dark, dead earths. "O man, O the dreams of man!" something within him unceasingly cried. He stood on the granite margin turning toward the Colosseum, whose mountain-ridges of wall stood high in the moonlight, with the deep gaps which had been hewn in them by the scythe of Time. Sharply stood the rent and jagged arches of Nero's golden house hard by, like murderous cutlasses. The palatine hill lay full of green gardens, and on crumbling temple-roofs the blooming death-garland of ivy was gnawing, and living Ranunculæ still glowed around sunken capitals. The fountain murmured babblingly and eternally, and the stars gazed steadfastly down with imperishable rays upon the still battle-field, over which the winter of time had passed without bringing after it a spring,--the fiery soul of the world had flown up, and the cold, crumbling giant lay around;--torn asunder were the gigantic spokes of the fly-wheel which once the very stream of ages drove. And in addition to all this, the moon shed down her light like eating silver-water upon the naked columns, and would fain dissolve the Colosseum and the temples and all into their own shadows!

Then Albano stretched out his arms into the air, as if he could therewith embrace and flow away, as with the arms of a stream, and exclaimed: "O ye mighty shades, you who once strove and lived here, ye are looking down from heaven, but scornfully, not sadly, for your great fatherland has died and gone after you! Ah, had I on the insignificant earth (full of old eternity), which you have made great, only done one

## action worthy of you! Then were it to me a sweet privilege to open my

heart by a wound, and to mix earthly blood with the hallowed soil, and to hasten away out of the world of graves to you, eternal and immortal ones! But I am not worthy of it!"

At this moment there came suddenly along up the _Via Sacra_ a tall man, deeply enveloped in his mantle, who drew near to the fountain; without looking round threw down his hat, and held a coal-black, curly, almost perpendicular hindhead under the stream of water. But hardly had he, turning upward, caught a glimpse of the profile of Albano absorbed in his fancies, when he started up all dripping, stared at the Count, fell into amazement, threw his arms high into the air, and said, "_Amico?_" Albano looked at him. The stranger said, "_Albano!_" "My Dian!" cried Albano. They clasped each other passionately, and wept for love.