"What is that? Am I on or under the earth?" said Albano, astounded; and his wandering eye fled for refuge to the face of a living man,—"I saw a dead man." Much more affectionately than before, the old man answered, "This is Lilar; behind us is my little house!" He explained the mechanical illusion[161] of the descent. "Here, now, have I stood so many thousand times, and feasted myself with so fervent a heart on the works of God. How looked the form, my son?" "Like the dead Prince," said Alban. In a startled, but almost commanding tone, Spener said, with a low voice, "Be silent, like me, until his time,—it was not he. Thy salvation and the salvation of many hangs thereon. Go no more to-day through the passage."
Albano, half-angered by all the experience of this singular day, said, "Well, then, I go back through Tartarus. But what means the ghostly creation that everywhere pursues me?" "Thou hast," said the old man, lovingly and refreshingly, laying a finger on the youth's brow, "nothing but invisible friends about thee,—and cast thyself everywhere upon God. There are a great many Christians who say, God is near or far off, that his wisdom and his goodness appear quite specially in one age or another,—truly that is idle deception; is he not the unchangeable, eternal Love, and does he not love and bless us at one hour just as much as at another?" As we ought, properly, to call the eclipse of the sun an eclipse of the earth, so it is man who is obscured, never the Infinite; but we are like the people who look at the obscuration of the sun in the water, and then, when the water trembles, cry out, "See how the glorious sun struggles!"
Albano stepped into the solitude of the old man's neatly ordered dwelling, only with heaviness, because, in the hot ashes of his volcano, every feeling put forth and throve the more luxuriantly. Spener pointed over from his mountain-ridge to the little so-called "Thunderhouse,"[162] and advised him to occupy it this summer. Albano took his leave at length, but his agitated heart was a sea, in which the morning sun is glowingly still half reflected, and into which, at evening, a lead-colored storm dips, and which swells glistening under the storm. He looked up from below at the old man, who was looking after him; but he would hardly have wondered to-day if he had either sunk or ascended. With indignant and spirited resolutions, to stake and sacrifice his life for his love, at which cold hands were grasping, he strode without any fear through Tartarus, which, by the magnifying mirror of night, was distorted into a black giant armament: thus is the spirit-world only a region of our inner world, and I fear only myself. When he stood before the altar of the heart in the dumb night, where nothing was audible but the thoughts, then did the bold spirit advise him repeatedly to call upon the dead old man, and swear aloud by his heart, full of dust; but when he looked up to the fair heavens, his heart was consecrated, and only prayed, "O good God, give me Liana!"
It grew dark; the clouds, which he had taken for the shining mountains of a new earth, stretching away into the heavens, had reached the moon, and overshadowed it with darkness.
FOOTNOTES:
[138] Tempestiarii, or Storm-makers, was a name given, in the Middle Ages, to the master-wizards who could conjure up foul weather. Weather-prayers were used in the churches against them, and other wizard-masters called in to counteract the former.
[139] The Polish dancer always carries a rod under the fur-dress, wherewith his partner is excused by a blow or two, when she makes a misstep.—Upper Siles. Monthly Mag., July, 1788.
[140] Dread of spirits.
[141] The German for this is sauer-stoff (sour-stuff).—Tr.
[142] A noted review in Richter's day, published at Erlangen near Nuremberg.—Tr.