64. CYCLE.
So many tender and holy sensibilities flutter round in our inner world, which, like angels, can never assume the bodily form of outward action, so many rich, full flowers stand therein which bear no seed, that it is lucky poetry has been invented, which easily treasures up all these inborn spirits and the flower-fragrance in its limbo. With this I catch, dear Albano, thy glorious perfume-breathing Sunday, and hold fast the invisible incense for the Schneider's-skin of the world!
On Sunday he moved to the thunder-house in Lilar. The Lector kept himself up with the hope that the Count would very soon tread down the flower-parterre of the new enjoyment as flat and dead as a cross-way. It was a fine morning, all sprinkled with dew; a fresh wind blew from Lilar over the blooming grain; and the sun burned alone in a cool heaven. Over the Blumenbühl road a swarm of people were plodding onward, and no one went long alone; on the Eastern heights he saw his friend Charles, with bowed crest, dashing to meet the sun.
The breezes of Lilar came flying to welcome him with a breath of orange-fragrance, and blew away the ashes which rested on the glowing altar-coals of that first magnificent Sunday. He went down the bridge, and Pollux, early in his finery, came driving a ruffled turkey-cock to meet him. A Sœur Servante of old Spener had been already for an hour cooking at Chariton's, merely to see him go by. The latter ran, festally decked, out of the house, which opened itself gayly with all its windows to the whole heavens, to meet him, and, in the confusion of her joy, broke out with the main matter first, namely, that everything was ready and beautiful up there in the little house, and whether he would have his dinner up there. She would fain, in the midst of the conversation, pull Pollux out of the Count's fingers, but he let him swing up for a kiss, and won thereby every heart, even the old one behind the kitchen fire.
While he marched off toward his little house through the western triumphal arch, he felt, with indescribable strength and sweetness, that the lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of gods, temples, and bliss,—and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals stalk through and strip with their talons.
His blooming path ran at length into the descending and ascending stairway, which he had passed with Spener; single streaks of day burned themselves into the moist ground and painted the scattered twigs fiery and golden. In the mystic bower, where the dead Prince had stalked along before him in the by-cavern, he found no such cavern, but only an empty niche. He stepped out above, as out of the haunch of the earth. His little house lay on the crooked back of the mountain ridge. Down below reposed around him those elephants of the earth, the hills, and Lilar gloriously swelling in blossoms, and he looked from his windows into the camp of the giants of Nature.
Meanwhile he could not now stay on the window-sill, nor near the inspiring Æolian harp, nor in the eye-prison of books; through streams and woods and over mountains fresh nature longed to sweep. That he did.
There are sometimes between the every-day days of life—when the rainbow of Nature appears to us only broken up, and as a misshapen, motley mass on the horizon—certain creation-days, when she rounds and contracts herself into a fair form, nay, when she becomes alive, and speaks to us like a soul. To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years often pass away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow fuller and fuller to meet him;—without wind, a landscape was to him a stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;—and now the wind rolled the solid land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances. Majestically swam through the blue the silvery islands, the clouds, and on the earth shadows stalked like giants over streams and mountains; in the valley sparkled the Rosana, and rolled into the oak grove. He went down into the warm vale; the flowery pastures foamed and their seed played in its cloud-fleece ere the earth caught it; the swan spread voluptuously his long wing; pairs of doves were pecking each other for love; and everywhere lay beds and twigs full of hot maternal bosoms and eggs. Like a glorious blue bouquet, the neck of the reposing peacock played off its dissolving colors in the high grasses. He stepped under the oaks, which with knotty arms seized hold upon heaven, and with knotty roots the earth. The Rosana talked alone with the murmuring wood, and ate away, foaming, at the rocky crags and at the decaying shore;—night and evening and day chased each other in the mystic grove. He stepped into the stream, and went out with it before a warm, busy plain full of villages, and out from them came the Sabbath sounds, and out of the grain-fields larks arose, and on the mountains human foot-paths crept upward,—the trees lifted themselves up as living things, and the distant men seemed to be fast-rooted, and became only little shoots on the low bark of the enormous tree of life.
The soul of the youth was cast into the holy fire; like asbestos-paper, he drew it out quenched and blank; it was to him as if he knew nothing, as if he were one thought; and here the feeling came upon him in a wonderfully new manner, that is the world, thou art on the world;—he was one being with it,—all was one life, clouds and men and trees. He felt himself grasped by innumerable polypus-arms, and swallowed up at the same time with them, and yet running on in the infinite heart.
In a blissful bewilderment he arrived at his dwelling, from which little Pollux came rolling down the mountain to meet him, and call him to dinner. In the little house the very thought of his heart was expressed by the Æolian harp at the open window. While the child was thundering away with his little fist on the harpsichord, and the birds joyfully screamed in out of the trees, the soul of the world swept exulting and sighing through the Æolian strings, now lawlessly and now regularly, playing with the storms and they with it; and Albano seemed to hear the streams of life rushing between their shores, the countries of the earth,—and through flower-veins and oak-veins, and through hearts,—around the earth, bearing clouds on their bosom,—and the stream, which thunders through eternity, a Divine hand was pouring out under the veil.
Albano came, with the innocent boy dancing before him, to the still smiling mother. Even here, between the four walls, the sails continued to propel him which the great morning had swelled. Nothing surprised him, nothing seemed to him common, nothing remote; the wave and the drop in the endless sea of life flowed away in indivisible union with the streams and whirlpools which it bore onward. Before Chariton he stood like a shining god, and she would gladly have veiled either him or herself. Never was humanity individualized in purer forms, crippled by no alloy of provincialism or nationality, than in this circle of joy, wherein childhood, womanhood, and manhood, twined with flowers, met and softly clasped each other.
Chariton spoke constantly of Liana, out of love, not merely for the absent one, but also for the one who stood near; for, although she looked with those open eyes, which seem more to image quietly than to behold, more to let in than to draw in, still she was, like children, virgins, country people, and savages, at once open-heartedly true and keen. She had easily detected Albano's love, because everything is easier to disguise from women,—even hatred, than its opposite. She praised Liana infinitely, particularly her incomparable kindness; and "her lord had said, few men had so much heart as she, for she had often been, without any fear, whole nights with her in Tartarus." Certainly, neither was this explicable to the Count. The marvellous is the aureole of a beloved head; a sun, softened down to a human countenance, takes less powerful hold than a beloved countenance glorified into a sun-image.
More and more heartily delighted at his delight, she offered to lead him into Liana's chamber. A simple little chamber,—under a green twilight of glimmering vine foliage, some books of Fénelon and Herder, old flowers still in their water-glasses, little Chinese dishes, Julienne's portrait, and another of a deceased youthful friend, whose name was Caroline, an unstained writing-stand, with English-pressed paper,—was what he found. The holy spring hours of the virgin passed by before him, dropping dew like sunny clouds.
He happened to touch a penknife, when Chariton brought quills to be cut, "because," she said, "they had so much trouble on this score since her master had gone away." For a woman can more easily drive any pen—even the epic and Kantian—than make one; and here, as in several other cases, the stronger sex must lend the weaker a hand.
Albano wished to see, also, the working-chamber of his teacher; but this she decidedly—although an hour's eating together had not given her any new courage—refused, because her master had forbidden it. He begged once more; but she smiled more and more painfully, and adhered to her gentle no.
He now dreamed away the murmur of the morning in the magic garden, on whose waters and paths the moonshine and reflection of memory played. Out of the nine million square miles of common earth, how do certain poetical lands stand out to a poetical heart! On the mountain with the altar, where he once saw her disappear down below, the afternoon chime of Blumenbühl came wafted to him with the fanning of a freer ether; and his childhood's life, and the present scenes yonder, and Liana, gave him a tender heart, and he surveyed, with dimmer eyes, the transfigured land.
At evening came happy church-goers from Blumenbühl, and praised the consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all, overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,—the constellations over Blumenbühl shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.