"My only object on the beautiful island was to get away from it, and from the fair islander, so soon as I had painted her. 'Stupid century,' said I, 'do I then want anything more of thee?' She sat to me gladly, as upon a throne. I, half in tempest, half in rainbow, sketched her, and naturally had to leave the picture uncopied. But, young man, some letters, which formed my name at that time, and which I wrote and concealed on the picture in the region of the heart under the water-colors, may serve thee as a Tetragrammaton, eleven Dominical letters and mothers of the reading (matres lectionis) of thy existence, in case I reach Spain safely, and in Valencia wash away on the likeness the coloring from my letters, and can now read in its heart, Löwenskiold. So was I then called in Danish.
"Then is the Countess Linda de Romeiro, without mercy, thy sister Severina. God grant only that thou mayst not haply have seen and married her before the receipt of this letter. She must, according to what I heard yesterday, have set out for Italy.
"For when I saw the Countess Linda here for the first time, it was to me, in the market square of Pestitz, as if I were standing up on the terrace of Isola Bella, and beholding the Alps, thy mother, my youth, hardly three paces distant from me! By Heaven, just as if in the pier-mirror of time the white rosy image of thy buried mother had been snatched at once out of the depths of distance, and brought close to the glass, and now hung before it in blooming redness, so stood Linda before me! For the divine resemblance of the two is so great! No Arian Homoiousion[[118a]] whatever, but a complete Orthodox Homoousion[[118b]] is to be believed here. Thus would I write to thee, hadst thou the necessary church-history at hand for the understanding of such an allusion.
"I painted Linda, too, this winter. What she related to me of the character of her mother was entirely the same, as I had been able to report to her of the character of the Princess di Lauria.
"Linda's father, or Herr von Romeiro, would never appear, and still, I hear, has not yet disappeared.
"Linda's mother called herself a Roman and a relative of the Prince di Lauria.
"In Spain, where I have twice been and inquired, I never could find a residence of a lady by the name of Cesara.
"Trillion spiders'-strands of probability spin themselves into an Ariadne's thread in the Labyrinth.
"A new, unknown sister is introduced to thee in the Gothic house with veils and in mirrors.
"And indeed the illusion is produced upon thee through real mirrors by the honest Baldhead,—who wants something more to be a Christ's-head than the locks, and whom I in autumn called a dog.