But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor of the next life.
A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana, and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked down, and Albano started back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face, upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink, tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling tones of the brother and of the nightingale,—the eyelids quivered oftener over the gleaming eyes,—and at last the gleam became a quiet tear,—it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs, though unwounded, weep.
There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment, in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir itself,—that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,—kneel before her,—tell her thy whole heart;—what though thou then art lost forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!—and then cool and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah! before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."
Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall, and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As he passed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a shining lily[69] from the next world, which, to herself, is a sign that she is soon to pass thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe them.
Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now shines to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O, at some future time after yet many years, when this glowing rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it, glimmer after thee as a white rose-parterre of memory!
FOOTNOTES:
[63] The title of a man, among the Romans, who walked behind the corpse and acted out the looks and character which the deceased had when living.—Pers., Sat. 3.
[64] As Solomon says, "Desire shall fail."—Tr.
[65] It had formerly refused to give the Spanish knight the hand of the Princess; but I have had the promise of satisfactory documents on this weighty article.