10. CYCLE.
In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cluster and the olive often ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan (Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all things which belong to May—in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May butter—he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and fencing-schools, all anticipation of the coming riddles and conflicts of his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with his heart full of the glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double conquest.
The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;—the Librarian sought a physical solution of the acoustic and optical illusion; the Lector sought a political one: he could not at all comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially meant by it all.
This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar. "Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain beats gladly a free heart.
At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and now the Principality of Hohenfliess lay only one principality distant from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is known to geographical readers, Haarhaar. The Lector told the Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much because they were diplomatic relatives—although it is true that, among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old folks among the Brandenburghers—as because they were really relatives, and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two courts,—which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,—with all their heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him, namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial estate of Hohenfliess—its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and breed of horses—in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the shepherd's-flute; not of the energies and matrimonial prospects of others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must ruin!"
As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an excursion to Blumenbühl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short, that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of Blumenbühl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.
It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee, because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however, to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned round, the tower of Blumenbühl below them to the east; from the one and from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village, and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days. He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life, and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.
But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood, when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod, over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.