22. CYCLE.
A Whitsuntide, such as I am now about to describe, Albano, excepting in the Acts of the Apostles, one can hardly find anywhere else than in thine!
He had, hitherto, often listened to Liana's invalid-history with the deafness of a vigorous, fire-proof youth, when, on one occasion, the Director brought word home, that the pious lady of the Minister would let her daughter partake the sacrament on the first Whitsuntide holiday, because she was apprehensive death regarded such a creature as a strawberry, which must be plucked before the sun had shone upon it. Ah, Albano saw death at this moment groping about, and with his stony heel treading on the pale red berry and crushing it. And then this Philomela without a tongue, because she had hitherto been compelled to be dumb, had, like a Procne, sent him only the pictured history of her heavy existence, and only the leaves of parchment! All loving emotions, like plants, shoot up the most rapidly in the tempestuous atmosphere of life. Albano felt at once a wide, deep woe, and a tormenting fever-warmth in his heart, eaten hollow as it was by death. In his musical and poetic phantasyings on his Oesterlein's-harpsichord, the dreamed tones of Liana's voice and the weeping music of the harmonica, which she could play, and which he had never heard, strangely mingled, like her swan-song, with his harmonies. But this was not enough; he even wrote, secretly, a Tragedy, (thou good soul!) wherein he, with wet eyes, intrusted all his tenderest and bitterest feelings to another's lips,—but he only kindled them fearfully, while he expressed them. Every one can remark that he proposed in this way to escape that babbler and spy, accident; but not every one observes—something quite original in the case; in another's name, he might, he thought, venture to give his deep pain a more passionate expression, for which, in his own name, before so many stoic classical heroes, he could not for shame muster up the courage. But in this way the classics could not touch him.
The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass bell much greater yet; namely, to such a degree, that he touchingly begged his foster-parents to let him on the first Whitsuntide holiday go to the—Holy Sacrament. The dilapidated state of the village church, wherein it could hardly be partaken a year longer, must needs speak as strongly in his favor, as the dilapidated state of Liana's health did in hers. Always will there remain in our poor human souls, separated from each other by bodies and wildernesses, the longing to be at least doing the same thing at the same time with one another, at one and the same hour to look up at the moon, or (as Addison relates) to send our prayers above it; and thus is thy wish, Albano, a human, a tender one, to kneel at the same hour with thy invisible Liana, at the steps of the altar, and then to rise fiery and commanding after the coronation of the inner man! He had in the still country built up the altar of religion high and firm in his soul, as all men of lofty fancy do: on mountains are always seen temples and chapels.
But I must never accompany him into the Whitsuntide church before ascending with him the church-tower. Could anything be conceived more delicious, than when, at this period, on fair Sundays, so soon as there was nothing but the heavy sun swimming through the wide heavens, he climbed to the belfry of the tower, and, covered with the murmuring waves of the chime, looked out all alone over the earth below, and upon the western boundary hills of the beloved city? When presently the storm of sound swept and confounded all together, and when the jewel-sparkling of the ponds, and the flowery pleasure-tent of the frolicking spring, and the red castles on the white roads, and the scattered trains of church-going people slowly winding along between the dark-green corn-fields, and the stream girdling round the rich pastures and the blue mountains, those smoking altars of morning sacrifices, and the whole extended splendor of the visible creation poured into his soul with a glimmering overflow, and all appeared to him as a dim dream-landscape—O then arose his inner colosseum full of silent, godlike forms of spiritual antiques, and the torch-gleam of Fancy[39] glanced round upon them like the play of a moving magic life,—and there he saw among the gods a friend and a loved one reposing, and he glowed and trembled.... Then the bells died away with a heavy groan, and became dumb,—he stepped back from the bright spring into the dark tower,—he fastened his eye only on the empty, blue night before him, into which the distant earth sent up nothing save sometimes a butterfly blown out of its course, a swallow cruising by, or a pigeon hovering overhead,—the blue veil of Ether[40] fluttered in a thousand folds over veiled gods in the distance,—O then, then the cheated heart could not but exclaim, in its loneliness, Ah! where shall I find—where, in the wide regions of space, in this short life—the souls which I love eternally and so profoundly? Ah, thou dear one! what is more painfully and longer sought, then, than a heart? When man stands before the sea and on mountains, and before pyramids and ruins, and in the presence of misfortune, and feels himself exalted, then does he stretch out his arms after the great Friendship. And when music, and moonlight, and spring and spring tears softly move him, then his heart dissolves, and he wants Love. And he who has never sought either is a thousand times poorer than he who has lost both.
Let us now step into the Whitsuntide church, where the deep stream of his fancy, for the first time in his life, overflowed, and carried his heart far away, and sounded on with it in a new channel: a physical storm had swollen this stream. Early in the forenoon, the dark powder-house of a storm-cloud stood mute near the hot sun, and was glowing with his beams; and only occasionally, during divine service, some distant, strange cloud let fall a clap on the fire-drum: but when Albano stepped before the altar with exalted, glorified emotions, and when he ventured only to mask his love for Liana in an inward prayer for her, and in a picture of her to-day's devotion, and of her pale form in the dark bride-attire of piety, and when he softly felt as if his purified, sanctified soul were now more worthy of that lovely one,—just then, the tempest, with all its playing war-machines and revolving cannons,[41] marched over from the Linden-city, and passed, armed and hot, right over the church. Albano, however, in the consciousness of a holy inspiration, felt no fear; but so soon as he heard the distant rumbling of the falling avalanche, he thought only of Liana, and of its striking the Linden-city church; and now, when over his head the sun kindled with his hot looks the powder-tower of the storm-cloud, and made it fly into a thousand flashes and claps, then did that partiality for the death by lightning which had been nourished in him by the ancients drive the terrible supposition into his heart, that Liana was now dead and lost to him in the glory of transfigured holiness. O then, must he indeed also believe that now the wing of the lightning snatches him above the clouds. And when long flashes blazed about the saint and the angels of the altar, and when the trembling voices of the singers, growing louder, and the tolling of the familiar bells, mingled with the crashing thunder, and he caught, amid the deafening din, a high, fine organ-tone, which he took for one of the tones of that unheard harmonica,—then did he mount, deified, upon the triumphal and thunder-car by the side of his Liana; the theatre-curtain of life and the stage burned away from under him; and they soared away, linked together and radiant, far through the cool, pure ether!...
But the twelfth hour banished these spiritual apparitions and the tempest; Albano stepped out into a bluer, cooler, breezier sky,—and the glistening sun looked down with a friendly smile on the affrighted earth, whose bright tears still quivered in all her flower-eyes. And now when in the afternoon Albano heard of the peaceful march of the thunder through Liana's city, then by his faith in her newly-assured life, and by the soft dead-gold of resting fancy, and by the holy stillness of the regenerated bosom, and by the increased fervor of his love, there grew up out of all regions of his soul an evening-red, magic Arcadia,—and never did a man enter upon a fairer one.