But I must never accompany him into the Whitsuntide church before ascending with him the church-tower. Could anything be conceived more delicious, than when, at this period, on fair Sundays, so soon as there was nothing but the heavy sun swimming through the wide heavens, he climbed to the belfry of the tower, and, covered with the murmuring waves of the chime, looked out all alone over the earth below, and upon the western boundary hills of the beloved city? When presently the storm of sound swept and confounded all together, and when the jewel-sparkling of the ponds, and the flowery pleasure-tent of the frolicking spring, and the red castles on the white roads, and the scattered trains of church-going people slowly winding along between the dark-green corn-fields, and the stream girdling round the rich pastures and the blue mountains, those smoking altars of morning sacrifices, and the whole extended splendor of the visible creation poured into his soul with a glimmering overflow, and all appeared to him as a dim dream-landscape—O then arose his inner colosseum full of silent, godlike forms of spiritual antiques, and the torch-gleam of Fancy[39] glanced round upon them like the play of a moving magic life,—and there he saw among the gods a friend and a loved one reposing, and he glowed and trembled.... Then the bells died away with a heavy groan, and became dumb,—he stepped back from the bright spring into the dark tower,—he fastened his eye only on the empty, blue night before him, into which the distant earth sent up nothing save sometimes a butterfly blown out of its course, a swallow cruising by, or a pigeon hovering overhead,—the blue veil of Ether[40] fluttered in a thousand folds over veiled gods in the distance,—O then, then the cheated heart could not but exclaim, in its loneliness, Ah! where shall I find—where, in the wide regions of space, in this short life—the souls which I love eternally and so profoundly? Ah, thou dear one! what is more painfully and longer sought, then, than a heart? When man stands before the sea and on mountains, and before pyramids and ruins, and in the presence of misfortune, and feels himself exalted, then does he stretch out his arms after the great Friendship. And when music, and moonlight, and spring and spring tears softly move him, then his heart dissolves, and he wants Love. And he who has never sought either is a thousand times poorer than he who has lost both.
Let us now step into the Whitsuntide church, where the deep stream of his fancy, for the first time in his life, overflowed, and carried his heart far away, and sounded on with it in a new channel: a physical storm had swollen this stream. Early in the forenoon, the dark powder-house of a storm-cloud stood mute near the hot sun, and was glowing with his beams; and only occasionally, during divine service, some distant, strange cloud let fall a clap on the fire-drum: but when Albano stepped before the altar with exalted, glorified emotions, and when he ventured only to mask his love for Liana in an inward prayer for her, and in a picture of her to-day's devotion, and of her pale form in the dark bride-attire of piety, and when he softly felt as if his purified, sanctified soul were now more worthy of that lovely one,—just then, the tempest, with all its playing war-machines and revolving cannons,[41] marched over from the Linden-city, and passed, armed and hot, right over the church. Albano, however, in the consciousness of a holy inspiration, felt no fear; but so soon as he heard the distant rumbling of the falling avalanche, he thought only of Liana, and of its striking the Linden-city church; and now, when over his head the sun kindled with his hot looks the powder-tower of the storm-cloud, and made it fly into a thousand flashes and claps, then did that partiality for the death by lightning which had been nourished in him by the ancients drive the terrible supposition into his heart, that Liana was now dead and lost to him in the glory of transfigured holiness. O then, must he indeed also believe that now the wing of the lightning snatches him above the clouds. And when long flashes blazed about the saint and the angels of the altar, and when the trembling voices of the singers, growing louder, and the tolling of the familiar bells, mingled with the crashing thunder, and he caught, amid the deafening din, a high, fine organ-tone, which he took for one of the tones of that unheard harmonica,—then did he mount, deified, upon the triumphal and thunder-car by the side of his Liana; the theatre-curtain of life and the stage burned away from under him; and they soared away, linked together and radiant, far through the cool, pure ether!...
But the twelfth hour banished these spiritual apparitions and the tempest; Albano stepped out into a bluer, cooler, breezier sky,—and the glistening sun looked down with a friendly smile on the affrighted earth, whose bright tears still quivered in all her flower-eyes. And now when in the afternoon Albano heard of the peaceful march of the thunder through Liana's city, then by his faith in her newly-assured life, and by the soft dead-gold of resting fancy, and by the holy stillness of the regenerated bosom, and by the increased fervor of his love, there grew up out of all regions of his soul an evening-red, magic Arcadia,—and never did a man enter upon a fairer one.
23. CYCLE.
IT arises not merely from my courtesy towards a reading posterity, my dear Zesara, but also from a real courtesy toward thee, that I so faithfully transcribe all acts in this pastoral of thy life; in thy later days these melodious ones shall echo in thy ears refreshingly out of my book, and in the evening, after thy labors, thou wilt read nothing more gladly than my labors here.
The following night deserves its Cycle. Soon after Whitsuntide he was tormented with weekly medical notes upon a new malady of poor Liana, which had begun, just as if he had guessed right, on Sacrament-day. He heard that she was living or suffering in Lilar, the pleasure- and residence-garden of the old Prince, in company with her brother, of whose silence the Vienna master had just got up to his thousand and first reason. Now, around Lilar, although not far from Pestitz, his father had drawn no chains of prohibition. Liana's night-lamp might, perhaps, glimmer a welcome, or at all events her harmonica sound one,—yes, her brother might haply be still walking round in the garden,—the June night was, besides, serene and magnificent. Ah, in short, he started.
It was late and still; far out of the sleeping village, of which all the lights were extinguished, he could still catch the flute-pieces of the clock in the castle upon the Pestitz mountain. It was a quickener to him, that his road lay for some distance along the Linden-city causeway. He fixed his eyes steadily on the western mountains, where the stars seemed to fall to her like white blossoms. Up on the distant height, the Hercules' cross-way, the right arm ran downward and wound along through groves and meadows to the blooming Lilar.
March on, drunk with joy, full of young, light images, through the Italian night, which glimmers and breathes its fragrance around thee, and which, as over Hesperia, not far from the warm moon, hangs out a golden evening-star[42] in the blue west, as if over the dwelling of the beloved soul! To thee and thy young eyes the stars as yet only shed down hopes, no remembrances; thou hast in thy hand a plucked, stiff apple-twig, full of red buds, which, like unhappy beings, become too pale when they bloom out; but thou makest not, as yet, any such applications thereof as we do.
Now he stood glowing and trembling in a dell before Lilar, which, however, a singular round wood, of walks lined with trees, still hid from his view. The wood grew up in the middle to a blooming mount, which was embosomed and encircled so curiously with broad sunflowers, festoons of cherries, and glancing silver-poplars and rose-trees, that it seemed, by the picturesque ignes-fatui of the moon, to be a single, enormous kettle-tree, full of fruits and blossoms. Albano was fain to ascend its summit, and be, as it were, on the observatory of the heaven, or Lilar, spread out below; he found at last in the wood an open alley.
The foliage, with its spiral alleys, wound him round into a deeper and deeper night, through which not the moon, but only the heat lightnings, could break, with which the warm, cloudless heavens were overcharged. The magic circles of the mount rose ever smaller and smaller out of the leaves into the blossoms,—two naked children, among myrtles, had twined their arms caressingly about each other's bent head,—they were statues of Cupid and Psyche,—rosy night-butterflies were licking, with their short tongues, the honey-dew from the leaves, and the glowworms, like sparks struck off from the glow of evening, went trailing like gold threads around the rose-bushes; he climbed amid summits and roots behind the aromatic balustrade toward heaven; but the little spiral alley running round with him hung before the stars purple night-violets, and hid the deep gardens with orange summits; at length he sprang from the highest round of his Jacob's-ladder, with all his senses, out into an uncovered, living heaven; a light hill-top, only fringed with variegated flower-cups, received and cradled him under the stars, and a white altar gleamed brightly beside him in the moonlight.