Ah, this sounds far too rude and harsh for all that I have in my mind, and it is to me as if I were offering the reader, instead of the living, floating rose-fragrance, only the stiff, hard, thick, porcelain-rose! Albano, I will uncover and unclose thy silent, thickly-curtained heart, so that we all may see therein the saintly image of Liana, the ascending Raphael's-Mary, but, like the pictures of the saints in Passion-week, hanging behind the veil, which thou liftest with trembling to adore it, when thou openest thy books of devotion,—the Romances,—and when thou findest therein the prayers which belong to thy saint. Even I find it hard not to do like thee and the ancients, and make a mystery of the name of thy guardian goddess,—concerning inner spiritual apparitions (for outer ones are bodily apparitions) the seer is glad to be silent nine days long;—and with thy blind belief in Liana's virtuous character being a thousand times higher than thine is, and with thy holy sense of honor, which watches over another's, it is, of course, a riddle to thee how others, for instance the Vienna master or Wehrfritz, without the least blushing, can talk so loudly and fondly of her, when thou thyself hardly darest before others to—dream of her much. Truly, Albano is a good creature! Further, how such a light Psyche as Liana, so crystallized into solid ether, somewhat like the risen Christ, can at all eat carps and pick the bones out,—or stir the stack of salad in the blue dish with the long, wooden, miniature pitch-forks,—or how it can be that she weighs half a pound more in the sedan than a blue butterfly,—or how she can laugh loud (but that, however, she never did, my friend);—all this, and in general the whole petty service of this incarnate earthly life, was, to the winged youth, a riddle and a real impossibility, or at least the reality thereof was a sort of fixed-star occultation; why shall I suppress that he would have been far less astonished at a pair of angel's footsteps stamped into Italian rocks, than at a pair of Liana's in the ground, and that he would have given for any one single trace or relic of her—I mention only a thread-spool or a tambour-flower—nothing less than whole cords of the wood of the holy cross, together with casks of the holy nails, and several apostolic wardrobes, together with the holy duplicate-bodies into the bargain.
So have I often longingly wished I could have only a pound of earth from the moon, or as much as a horn of sun-dust from the sun, before me on my table and in my hands. So do most of us authors of consequence hover before a reader out of our own country in like manner as fine, ethereal images, of whom it is hard to comprehend how they can eat a slice of bacon, or drink a glass of March beer, or wear a pair of boots; it seems as if people would collapse when they read anything about Lessing's razor, Shakespeare's English saddle, Rousseau's bear-skin cap, Psalmist David's navel, Homer's sleeve, Gellert's queue-tie, Ramler's night-cap, and the bald-pate under mine, though that is not of much more consequence.
The old Provincial Director, seeing that a maiden in no way gains so much with a youth as by praises which his parents bestow upon her, made some considerable contributions toward the canonization of Liana, by frequently weighing against her the rustic Rabette, who laughed just as he did, and insinuating a contrast between his indulgent wife and the strict Minister's lady: he then took occasion to set forth in detail after what strict rules of pure composition this counterpointist (the Minister's lady) harmoniously arranged the melodious tones of Liana, and particularly how she discountenanced all rudeness and laughter. Female souls are peacocks, whose jewelled plumage must be sheltered in nice and whitened apartments, whereas ours remain clean in duck-coops. Albano pictured to himself mother and daughter in the double forms in which the painters give us angels, namely, the intelligent, strict mother, as one who hides in a long cloud, with only her head visible, and Liana as a glorified child that, with its tender wings, flutters about a white cloud.
How he longed for something, though it were only a fallen, faded rose of—silk from Pestitz; and yet he could not for shame ask the Vienna teacher for anything except at the very last, after long thinking, though with a betraying glow, for one—lesson-mark; "for he had never yet seen one," he said. Falterle had one at this moment in his pocket,—the number 15, Liana's former age, was written upon it;—she might have written the number possibly;—still it was something. Ah, could he not more willingly have beset the Director for some romances out of the portable-library of the Minister's lady, in which the daughter must certainly have read, yes, and might well even have forgotten some notes of her reading? He actually did it; but Wehrfritz condemned and cursed in the beginning all romances as poisoned letters; then he forgot over five times to ask for any;—and finally he brought with him a novel of Madam Genlis, together with a Gotha pocket-almanac. These books of the blest—in comparison with which my own works and the Alexandrine Library and the blue library are only miserable remittenda—had all the stamps of women's books; for they all contained some ornament or other of female heads, namely, a thimbleful of hair-powder as they do, fag-ends of silk-ribbon as they do, for demarcation-lines and memoranda of readings,—and just the same fragrance (which Semler also praises in the books of alchemy), and which they seemed to have borrowed from the blossoms of Paradise. Ah, happy reader of the fairest book (I mean the Count), canst thou ask more?
By all means; and he found more, too, namely, in the latter end of the Gotha pocket-almanac, on the two blank parchment-leaves, the words, "Concert for the Poor, the 21st February," and "Play for the Poor, the 1st Nov." I have often, in my chase after mysteries, beaten out, on these leaves, the weightiest ones from the bush. "Yes, that is my pupil's hand," said Falterle; "she and her mother seldom let such an opportunity slip, because the Minister does not allow them otherwise to give much to the poor." Do not detain me here about the beauty of her handwriting,—besides one writes better on parchment and slate than on paper, and a literary lady, exactly unlike a literary man in this, has more calligraphy than illiterate ones,—but let me hasten on to the working of these incunabula of Liana, whose Dominical characters diffuse over a loving man nothing but bright, inner Sundays of the soul, and whose leaves resemble in sanctity the Epistles which, in the Middle Ages, fell from heaven upon the earth. Now, for the first time, was it to him as if the flying angel, whose shadow hitherto had only glided over the earth, folded up his pinions, and held his downward course in the track of the shadow, not far from the spot where Albano stands. He learned the Gotha pocket-almanac by heart.
As he believed Liana to be much tenderer and better than he, and as she appeared to his fancy like Hesper, who, among all the planets, moves around the sun with the least eccentricity, and he to himself like the distant Uranus, who does so with the greatest; and since he could not, without a blaze of shame on his cheek, think of falling behind the daughter and mother in moral polish, he became at once (no man knew why) more gentle, mild, compliant, attentive to his person, obedient to the Vienna teacher,—for Liana had been so too,—and his whole Vesuvius[38] was kept under by the veil of a saint. The North American adores the form which appears to him in dreams, as his guardian spirit. O, does not even thus, to the youth, a fair dream often become his genius?
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.