28. CYCLE.
When he came to the fork of the road, of which the right prong points to Lilar, Albano, with a somewhat heavy heart, spurred his horse across, and flew up the hill, till the bright city, like an illuminated St. Peter's dome, blazed far and wide in this spring night of his fancies. It lay, like a giant, with its shoulders (the upper city) resting on the heights, and stretched its other half (the lower city) down into the valley. It was noon, and not a cloud in heaven; at noonday a city stands before you in full, white disk, whereas a village does not, until evening, come out of its first quarter into full light. It was well fortified, not by Rimpler or Vauban, but by a blooming palisade of lindens. The long wall of the palaces of the mountain-city gleamed from above a welcome to our Albano, and the statues, on their Italian roofs, directed themselves towards him as way-guides and criers of joy; over all the palaces ran the iron framework of the lightning-rods, like a throne-scaffolding of the thunder, with golden sceptre-points; down along the side of the mountain lay camped the lower city, by the side of the stream between shady avenues, with its gay façades towards the streets, and its white back turned toward Nature; carpenters were hammering away like a forge on the green-sward among the peeled trunks of trees, and the children were clattering round with the birch-bark; cloth-makers were stretching out green cloths like bird-nets in the sun; from the distance came white-covered carriers'-wagons jogging along the country-road, and by the sides of the way shorn sheep were grazing under the warm shadow of the rich, bright linden-blossoms,—and over all these groups the noonday chime of bells from the dear, familiar towers (those relics and light-houses that gleamed out of the dusk of his earlier days), floated like one all-embracing and animating soul, and called together the friendly throngs of people.
Contemplate the heated face of my hero, who at last is riding into the open streets, built up in his fancy of temples of the sun, where, who knows but that at every long window, on every balcony, Liana may be standing? where the lying or prophetic riddles of Isola Bella must be unravelled,—where all household gods and household fates of his nearest future lie hid,—where now the Mont Blanc of the Court and the Alps of Parnassus, both of which he has to climb, lie with their feet stretching close before him. All this would have oppressed me not a little; but in the young man, especially before the chandelier of the sun, a shower of light gushed down. O, when the morning-wind of youth blows, the inner mercury-column stands high, even though the external weather be not of the best.
Few of us, when we have gone on horseback to the academy, may have happened into such a refreshing stir as met my hero: chimney-sweeps were singing away overhead out of their pulpits and black holes to the passers below, and a building-orator,[45] on the ridgepole of a new house, was exorcising the future conflagration, and quenching one in his own breast, and slinging the glass fire-bucket far over the scaffolding; yes, when we have ridden with our hero through the laughing congregation of the roof-preacher, and through the ranks of blooming sons of the Muses,[46] who stand arm in arm, among whom Alban sent round his fiery eye to find his Roquairol,—after all this, when we reach his future residence, a new clamor salutes our ears.
It came from the Land-physicus[47] Sphex, his future landlord, who is to resign to him half his palace (for the Doctor is made wealthy by his cures), because the house lies exactly in the highest part of the upper city, or the Westminster of the Court; while in the lower town are domiciled the students and the city. The short, thick-set Dr. Sphex was standing, as our trio rode up, by the side of a tall man, who sat upon a stone bench, and held in readiness two drum-sticks upon a child's drum. At a signal from Sphex, the tall man beat a faint roll upon his drum, and the Doctor said to him, calmly, "Vagabond!" Although Sphex had turned round a little toward the loud, approaching horsemen, still he soon made him go on with his tattooing, and said, "Scoundrel!" but during the last beat he just hastily slipped in, "Scamp!"
The horsemen dismounted; the Doctor led them, without ceremony, into the house, after he had given the drummer a hint, with his hand, not to stir. He opened them their four (or twelve) walls, and said, coldly, "Step into your three cavities." Albano marched out of the warm splendor of day into the cool, purple Erebus of the red-hung chamber, as into a picture-hall of painting dreams, into a silver-hut, as it were, for the dark mine-work of his life. He recognized therein the open hand of his rich father, from the pictures of the carpet to the alabaster statues on the wall; and in the cabinet he found, among the gifts of his foster-parents, all his poetical and philosophical text-books, which had been sent after him,—fair reflections from the still land of youth, left far behind him by his journey, in whose flower-vases only concordias had hitherto bloomed, whereas now wild rockets must be planted in them. Then (not the goddess of night her mantle, but) the goddess of twilight threw her veil over his eye, and, in the clare-obscure, made the forms of youth—many of them armed, many crowned, a troop of fates and graces—beset his heart, which had hitherto been so calm, with their arms and levers, until it became soft and languid for three minutes; verily, to a youth, especially this one, the sea-storms, those favorites of the painter, the laboring volcanoes of the natural philosopher, and the comets of the astronomer, are full as precious, in the moral world, as they are to them in the physical.
Albano, now separated from Liana only by streets and days, almost feared his dreamy raptures might betray their object. "Any letters?" inquired the Lector, in his short manner, abbreviated for the sake of adaptation to citizens. "Bring it up, Van Swieten!" said Sphex, to a little son, who, with two others, named Boerhave and Galen, had hitherto been acting as a corresponding deciphering-chancery to the new guests behind a curtain. "Our old Lord," added Sphex, at once, as if it had some connection with the letter, "has done lording it at last; for five days he has been dead as a mouse, as I long ago predicted." "The old Prince?" asked Augusti, with astonishment. "But why have I not yet remarked anything of funeral bells, knockers hung with black, bottles of tears, and lamentation in the city?" inquired Schoppe.
The Physicus explained. Namely, he had, as physician in ordinary, prophesied, with sufficient boldness, the third day's dying of the old prince, and happily hit it. Only as, exactly one day after the mournful event, his successor, Luigi, proposed to make his entrance into Pestitz, and, as the announcement of the high death would have extinguished, with lachrymal-vessels, the whole oil-fed illumination in honor of the son, and hung the flowery triumphal arches with mourning-weeds, the people had not been willing, although to the greatest disadvantage of the prophetic Sphex, to let matters get wind before the new prince had had his reception, just as that Greek, at the news of his son's death, postponed mourning till after the completion of his thanksgiving sacrifice. Sphex protested that he had many years before fixed, in the case of the illustrious deceased, the nativity of his consumption by his white teeth,[48] and never had he hit a death-hour better than at that time; he would, however, leave it to any and every man to decide whether a physician, who has made his prophecy everywhere known, can spin much silk in a period of such political embezzlement. "But," replied Schoppe, "if people continue to carry along their deceased monarchs, like their dead soldiers, as if they were alive, in the ranks; still they can hardly do otherwise; for as in the case of great men it is generally so plaguy hard to prove that they are living, so is it also no easy thing to make out when they are dead; coldness and stiffness and corruption prove too little. To be sure, one may, perhaps, conceal royal death-beds for the same reason which led the Persians to hide royal graves, in order to abridge as much as possible for the poor children, the people, the bitter interval between the death and the new inauguration. Yes, as according to a legal fiction the king never dies, we have to thank God that we ever learn the fact at all, and that it does not fare with his death as with the death of the quite as immortal Voltaire, which the Paris journalists were not permitted, by any means, to announce."
Van Swieten and Boerhave and Galen, after staying out a long while, brought in a letter for Albano, with Gaspard's seal; he tore it open, with the unsuspecting eagerness of youth, without a glance at the cover; but the Lector took that into his hand and turned it over and over like a Post-Office Clerk, Doctor of Heraldry, and Keeper of the Seal, as was his custom at the inquest of sphragistic wounds, and gently shook his head over the badly renewed and patched patent of nobility, namely, the impression of the arms on the wax. "Have the youngsters done any injury to the seal?" said Sphex. "My father, also," said Albano, reading to conceal an agitation which reached even to the outer man, and which a flight of heavy thoughts had suddenly occasioned among all his inner twigs, "has already heard of the Prince's death." At that Augusti shook his head still more; for as Sphex had previously jumped at once from the subject of the letter to that of the Prince's death, this leap almost presupposed the reading of the same. Let my reader deduce from this the rule, to take the distance of two tones, from one to the other of which people jump in his presence, and to infer from that the intermediate and connecting tone between the two, which they wish to conceal.
At present it was very well for the Count that the Doctor showed the tutors their apartments; ah, his soul, already staggering with the events of the past day, was now so intensely tossed by the contents of the letter!