At length the constellation of the mountain city of God, that stood so broad before him, opened out into nights; cities with scattered lights lay up and down, and the bells (which to his ear were alarm-bells) sounded out the fourth[[75]] hour, when the carriage rolled through the triumphal gate of the city, the Porta del Popolo; then the moon rent her black heavens, and poured down out of the cleft clouds the splendor of a whole sky. There stood the Egyptian obelisk of the gateway, high as the clouds in the night, and three streets ran gleaming apart. "So," said Albano to himself, as they passed through the long corso to the Tenth Ward, "thou art veritably in the camp of the god of war; here, where he grasped the hilt of the monstrous war-sword, and with the point made the three wounds in three quarters of the world." Rain and splendor gushed through the vast, broad streets,—occasionally he passed suddenly along by gardens and into broad city-deserts and market-places of the past. The rolling of the chariot amidst the rush and roar of the rain resembled the thunder, whose days were once holy to this heroic city, like the thundering heaven to the thundering earth; muffled-up forms, with little lights, stole through the dark streets; often there stood a long palace with colonnades in the fire of the moon, often a solitary gray column, often a single high fir-tree, or a statue behind cypresses. Once, when there was neither rain nor moonshine, the carriage went round the corner of a large house, on whose roof a tall, blooming virgin, with an uplooking child on her arm, herself directed a little hand-light, now toward a white statue, now toward the child, and so alternately illuminated the whole group. The friendly company made its way to the very centre of his exalted soul and brought with it to him many a recollection; particularly was a Roman child to him a wholly new and mighty idea.
They alighted at last at the Prince di Lauria's, Gaspard's father-in-law, and old friend. Near his palace lay the Campo Vaccino (the ancient Forum), and the radiant moon shone on the broad steps and the three wondrous edifices of the Capitol; in the distance stood the Colosseum. Albano ascended hesitatingly into the lighted house, before which the carriage of the Princess stood, reluctantly turning his eye from those heights of the world, from which once a light word like a snow-flake rolled far and wide, and grew and grew, till at last in a strange land it crushed a city with the weight of an avalanche.
The Princess, with her company, saw with pleasure the new-comers. The old Prince Lauria welcomed his grandson courteously and with reserve. His innumerable servants spoke among them almost all the languages of Europe. Albano immediately asked the Knight after his teacher Dian, that graft of a Greek upon a Roman; but the most human thing was precisely that which Gaspard, as is always the case with great men, had not thought of. They sent to his residence, which was near; he was not at home.
They sat down to dine. The Prince immediately entertained them with his favorite show-dish, the political progress of the world, and gave the latest news of the French Revolution. Gazettes of the times were to him Eternities, news was his antiques; he took all the newspapers of Europe, and therefore kept for each a German, Russian, English, Polish servant, to translate it for him. By the side of his satirical coldness toward all men and things, the political and Italian zeal appeared the stronger, with which he defended the French against the Knight, who composedly despised them; and, indulging himself after his manner, even in bad puns, conceded to the old Romans the Forum and to the modern the Campo Vaccino, and even to the ancient Gauls the field of Mars, and to the modern French a field of March.
Albano could not conceive of there being any joking so near the Forum, and thought every word must be great in this city. The cold Lauria spoke warmly for France, like a minister, regarding only nations, not individuals, and his sentiment pleased the youth.
Then the Princess led the stream of conversation to Rome's high art. Fraischdörfer dissected the Colossus into limbs, and weighed them in the narrowest scales. Bouverot engraved the giant in historical copperplate. The Princess spoke with much warmth, but without point. Gaspard melted all up together, as it were, into a Corinthian brass, and comprehended all without being comprehended. On his coldly but strongly up-shooting life-fountain he let the world play and dance like a ball.
Albano, dissatisfied with all, kept his inspiration, sacrificing to the unearthly gods of the past round about him, after the old fashion, namely, with silence. Well might and could he have discoursed also, but quite otherwise, in odes, with the whole man, with streams which mount and grow upwards. He looked more and more longingly out of the window at the moon in the pure rain-blue and at single columns of the Forum; out of doors there gleamed for him the greatest world. At last he rose up, indignant and impatient, and stole down into the glimmering glory and stepped before the Forum; but the moonlit night, that decorative painter, which works with irregular strokes, made almost the very stage of the scene irrecognizable to him.
What a broad, dreary plain, loftily encompassed with ruins, gardens and temples, covered with prostrate capitals of columns, and with single upright pillars, and with trees and a dumb wilderness! The heaped-up ashes out of the emptied urn of time, and the potshards of a great world flung around! He passed by three temple columns,[[76]] which the earth had drawn down into itself even to the breast, and along through the broad triumphal arch of Septimius Severus; on the right stood a chain of columns without their temple; on the left, attached to a Christian church, the colonnade of an ancient heathen temple deep sunk into the sediment of time; at last the triumphal arch of Titus, and before it, in the middle of the woody wilderness, a fountain gushing into a granite basin.
He went up to this fountain, in order to survey the plain out of which the thunder-months of the earth once arose; but he went along as over a burnt-out sun, hung round with dark, dead earths. "O man, O the dreams of man!" something within him unceasingly cried. He stood on the granite margin turning toward the Colosseum, whose mountain-ridges of wall stood high in the moonlight, with the deep gaps which had been hewn in them by the scythe of Time. Sharply stood the rent and jagged arches of Nero's golden house hard by, like murderous cutlasses. The palatine hill lay full of green gardens, and on crumbling temple-roofs the blooming death-garland of ivy was gnawing, and living Ranunculæ still glowed around sunken capitals. The fountain murmured babblingly and eternally, and the stars gazed steadfastly down with imperishable rays upon the still battle-field, over which the winter of time had passed without bringing after it a spring,—the fiery soul of the world had flown up, and the cold, crumbling giant lay around;—torn asunder were the gigantic spokes of the fly-wheel which once the very stream of ages drove. And in addition to all this, the moon shed down her light like eating silver-water upon the naked columns, and would fain dissolve the Colosseum and the temples and all into their own shadows!
Then Albano stretched out his arms into the air, as if he could therewith embrace and flow away, as with the arms of a stream, and exclaimed: "O ye mighty shades, you who once strove and lived here, ye are looking down from heaven, but scornfully, not sadly, for your great fatherland has died and gone after you! Ah, had I on the insignificant earth (full of old eternity), which you have made great, only done one action worthy of you! Then were it to me a sweet privilege to open my heart by a wound, and to mix earthly blood with the hallowed soil, and to hasten away out of the world of graves to you, eternal and immortal ones! But I am not worthy of it!"