"Here I stand on the divine heights of the cloister-garden, and look down into a green, heavenly realm which knows no equal. The sun is already away over the gulf, and flings his rose-fire among the ships, and a whole shore full of palaces and full of men burns red. Through the long, wide-extending streets below me rolls up already the din of the festival, and the roofs are full of decorated men and women, and full of music. Balconies and gondolas wait to welcome the divine night with songs. And here am I alone, and am nevertheless so happy, and yearn without pain. But had I been standing here four days ago, Linda, when, as yet, I knew thee not and had thee not, and had I been looking upon such an evening as this,—upon the golden sea,—the gay Portici, upon which sun and sea are rippling with flames,—the majestic Vesuvius, wound round with gold-green myrtles, and with his gray, ashen head full of the glow of the sun,—and, behind me, the green plain full of clouds of flower-dust, which rise out of gardens and rain down in gardens again,—and the whole busy, magic circle of glad energies,—a world swimming in light and life,—then, Linda, without thee, would a cold pang have darted through the warm bliss, and remembrances with mourning masks would have gone about in the golden light of evening.
"O Linda, how hast thou cleansed and widened my world, and I am now happy everywhere! Thou hast transformed the heavy, sharp ploughshare of life, which painfully toils at the harvest, into a light brush and pencil, which plays about till it has wrought out a god's form. Have I not seen to-day every temple and every hill more glad, as if gilded by thee, and every beauty, whether it bloomed on a statue, on canvas, on the singing lip, or on the summits, wear a richer lustre, and felt it breathe a richer fragrance? and then did I not fly up from the little flower to the blooming Linda?
"How the dark Power holds sway behind the cloud! It gives us sealed orders, that we may break them open at a later time, upon a distant spot. O God! upon Ischia's Epomeo it was for me first to open mine. Then rose a moment over life, and bore eternity; the butterfly brought the goddess!
"Evening goes down, and I must be silent. Might I only know how thy evening is! My life consists now of two hours, thine and mine, and I can no longer live with myself alone. May this day have stolen away from thee richly and mildly, and thy evening have been like mine! Only Vesuvius now reddens in the lingering sun. The islands slowly fade away in the dark sea. I behold now, without speaking to thee, the great evening, but, O God, so otherwise than in Rome! Blissfully shall I fix my eye only on thy island as it is about to be extinguished in the glittering din of the evening twilight, and yet long shall I look thitherward, when already the summit of Epomeo is dissolved in night; and then shall I look cheerfully down into the grave of colors encircled with lights below me. Happy songs will steal through the twilight; the stars will glimmer affectionately; and I shall say, 'I am alone and still, but inexpressibly happy, for Linda has my heart, and I weep only out of love, because I think of her heart'; and then I shall go down in blissful rapture through the blossom-smoke of the mountain."
He came slowly back to Naples to his friend Dian; all the festive merriment which met him, the whole odeum of joy, in which the ringing wheel of the hurdy-gurdy dizzily rolled round, seemed to him to be merely his echo; whereas, in general, not till the external, sensitive chords of man are struck, do the inner ones sound after them. All he wanted was to be ever hurrying onward, and—if it might be—to proceed this very night on his way to Vesuvius. For him there was now only one season of the day. The warmer climate, together with love and May, seemed to awaken all the spring winds of his powers; they blew with an impetuosity which made him conscious of them himself. Only before his beloved was he—still sore from the wounds of the past—merely a zephyr, which spares the dusting blossoms.
On the next day he proposed to ascend Vesuvius, and on the morning after await his Dian in Portici, when he had first seen from the top of the volcano the spectacle of sunrise.
114. CYCLE.
He describes his journey to his beloved.
"In the Hermit's Hut on Vesuvius.
"Why does not man fall on his knees and adore the world, the mountains, the sea, the all? How it exalts the spirit to think that it is, and that it is conscious of the immense world and of itself! O Linda, I am still full of the morning; I still sojourn even on the sublime hell. Yesterday I rode in the morning with my Bartolomeo through the rich, full garden avenue to the gay Portici, which links itself to the giant like Catana to Ætna. Ever the same great epic Greek feature running through this sublime land,—the same blending of the monstrous with the beautiful, of nature with men, of eternity with the moment; country-houses and a laughing plain opposite to the eternal death-torch; between old, holy temple-columns goes a merry dance, the common monk and the fisherman; the glowing blocks of the mountain tower up as a bulwark around vineyards, and beneath the living Portici dwells the hollow, dead Herculaneum; lava cliffs have grown out into the sea, and dark battering-rams lie cast among the flowers. The ascent was in the beginning refreshment to my soul; the long mountain was a conductor to the full cloud. Late at night, after an eternal ascent, without having enjoyed the evening sun, through whose red glow upon the ashes we were obliged to wade rapidly, we arrived here at the hermit's. The moon was not yet up; thy island was still invisible. Often it thundered under the floor of the apartment. Then was I all at once pleasantly reminded by the hermit of my old Schoppe, when he told me that a limping traveller with a wolf-dog had once said up here, 'In Vesuvius was the stall of the incessantly stamping thunder-steeds.' That could certainly after all have been no one but Schoppe.