45. CYCLE.
They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with her into a pathless oak-grove;—she looked upon him so contentedly and open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears. Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,—but like an angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!
They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,—into that resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have gone round freely, without sleep. Chariton—from her earnestness much more busy—had, after a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the blooming veil, which retired as they approached;—and Albano beheld now the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the higher terrace,—everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs, from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold globe beside the sun,—the last mirror of his dying evening-glance. "Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually repeating.
Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height, behind a statue of a Muse,—for the Nine Muses beamed from the green Tempe,—seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile with the knitting-work which she had taken from her friend, "wishes very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your Charles like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.
All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and out of the bowers,—more and more continually joined them,—they quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,—at last flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared toward heaven;—they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps, and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue spring,—and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of May,—and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.
Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid summer-night;—but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,—certainly not against sun and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated form, played—a sublime contrast to himself—with the ringlets of the little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.
At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.
A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,—by heaven, I must say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed from him.
O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou, this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err, so hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love in their hearts,—if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the other,—"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life, before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like thee!"—O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!
The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange! how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path, and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried along after them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the awakened strings as from an Æolian harp, and bore them onward with it; and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping. And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!
But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the loved objects only in, and not on, your bosoms, am I not, like the Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the Archimime, who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead of a past, has only given a future,—wilt thou not one day say to me, I should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies, for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it not been for these Phœnix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me than with the rest of you?
Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in memory, or beforehand in hope, you would, therefore, rather have the present day without either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the middle; but as to the past and the future,—neither of which can any man live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,—you will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.
By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso would fain translate poetic dreams into waking reality[91] is more foolish than the North American, who realizes his nightly ones: he proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch, bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our present ideals,—as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love here below, which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but then—no, for the Then of the life hereafter, this little Now, has no voice; but if, I say, here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral life, and every dream a day,—ah, even then would desire still remain enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;—in Arcadia we should pine after Utopia; and on every sun we should see an unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should—sigh as we do here!
