Albano's wound, which cut through his whole inner man, you can best measure by the bandage which he sought to bind around it. Our grief may be guessed from the solace and self-deception we resort to. The next morning he let his griefs discourse across one another, and lay still, before their funeral wail, as a corpse; then he rose up, and spoke thus to himself: "Only one of two things is possible,—either she is still true to me, and only her parents now constrain her,—then they again must be constrained, and there is nothing at all to be lamented,—or else, from some weakness or other, perhaps towards her tyrannical and beloved parents, she is no longer true to me, or it may be out of coldness toward me, or from religious scruples, error, and so on; in that case I see," he continued, and tried to tread his two feet deeper and firmer into the ground, without, however, having any purchase, "nothing else to be done than to do nothing; not to be a crying suckling, a groaning sickling, but an iron man; not to weep blood over a past heart, over the ashes of death lying deep upon all fields and plantations of my youth, and over my monstrous grief." Thus did he delude himself, and mistake the necessity of consolation for its actual presence.
Every evening he visited the star-tower out of the city, on the Blumenbühl heights. He found the old, solitary, meagre, eternally-reckoning, wifeless, and childless keeper, always friendly and unembarrassed as a child, making no inquiries after war-news, journals of fashion, and poesies, and never paying money for his pleasure, except on the coach to Bode and Zach. But the old eye sparkled when it looked from under the sparse eyebrows into heaven, and his heart and tongue rose to poetry when he spoke of the highest mundane spot, the light heaven over the dark, low earth,—of the immense, universal sea without shore, wherein the spirit, which in vain seeks to fly across it, sinks exhausted, and whose ebb and flow only the Infinite One sees at the foot of his throne,—and of the hope of a starry heaven after death, which then no earthly disk, as now, shall intersect, but which shall arch itself around itself, without beginning and without end.
If Socrates humbled the proud Alcibiades with a map of the world, so, when this in turn is annihilated by a chart of the heavens, must our pride and sorrow on the earth be still more put to the blush. Albano was ashamed to think of himself, when he looked up into the immense ascending night above him, wherein days and morning twilights abide and move. He edified himself and his teacher when he spoke of this: how even now overhead, in the immensity, spring-times and paradises of new-born worlds and thundering[[15]] suns and earths burning up are flying across each other's paths, and we stand here below like deaf men under the sublime hurricane, and the roaring tempest and torrent shows itself to us, so far off, only as a still, stationary, white rainbow on the brow of night.
As often as Albano's great eye came back from heaven, it found the earth brighter and lighter. But at length the night came, which the hostile spirit had already so long lived in anticipation. It was already very late, and the heavens quite serene; the nebulæ crowded down nearer, as higher market-towns;[[16]] the sky seemed more white than blue. Albano thought of the hidden loved one, who, were she by his side, would still more consecrate the heavens and himself with her heartful of unceasing prayers; when suddenly, through his lowered telescope, he espied light in the Blumenbühl church,—the princely vault open,—Liana kneeling at the altar, with uplifted hands,—and an old man near her, as if blessing her. Fearfully stood the torch-flames and Liana's face and arms upside down; for the telescope caused everything to appear inverted.
Albano, shuddering, begged the astronomer to look that way. He too saw the apparitions, to him, however, nameless. "There are probably people in the church," said he, indifferently. But Albano rushed down,—hardly allowing the astonished astronomer time to call out after him with an invitation to the total eclipse of the sun tomorrow,—and ran toward Blumenbühl. How his heart wore itself out in the race, and most of all in the hollows, where he lost sight of the illuminated church, must remain a secret, because it was hidden even from himself in the tempest of his feelings. At last he saw the white church before him, but the church-windows were without any light. He knocked hard at the iron church-door, and cried, "Open!" he heard only the echo in the empty church, and nothing more.
So he went back, with a stormy past in his bosom, through the sleeping night: the earth was to him a spirit-island, the spirit-islands were to him earths; his being, his city of God was burning up, he felt.
It lay on the morrow still in full glow, when the Lector came to him, and brought him the incomprehensible message from Liana, that she wished, about noon, to speak with him alone in Lilar. He was not this time enraged against the suspected messenger, and said, full of wonder, "Yes." With what bold, adventurous forms does our life-cloud rise to heaven, ere it disappears!
80. CYCLE.
Let us go to Liana, with whom the riddles dwell! On the morning after the illuminated night she felt, upon reflection, for the first time, the horrible effort with which she had kept the promise of silence made to her parents; she sank down with unstrung energies, but also with renewed and ardent fidelity. "What," she kept continually saying to herself,—"what then had this noble man done to deserve that I should cause him a whole evening full of pangs? How often he looked at me imploringly and judgingly! O that I might have been permitted to hold up thy beautiful head, when thou leanedst it heavily against the rough pine-bark!" What had made her most melancholy in the heavy midnight had been his silent disappearance; how often had she looked up at his thunder-house outwardly illuminated with lamps, while within only darkness lay at the window! Now she felt how near he dwelt to her soul; and she wept the whole morning over the night, and the ray of love stung her more and more hotly, just as burning-glasses bring the sun before us more potently when it looks down just after rain. The mother showed her gratitude to her to-day for her yesterday's sacrifice in keeping her word by returning love and confidence; though the father did not by any means, since with him one was as little saved by good works as with the elder Lutherans, but only damned for the want of them; even now, however, when the parents had drawn from the previous night the newest hopes of renunciation, the daughter could not humor a single one of them.
How often she thought of Gaspard's letter! Is it a shot-off arrow, which, with a wound on its poisonous point, is on its slow way from Spain to Germany, or the friendly light of a never yet seen fixed star, just entered upon its distant track towards our lower world?