The two continued up, and refreshed themselves by a stroll through the
dewy island; and the sight of the alto-rilievo of day, as it came out in
glistening colors from the fading crayon-drawings of the moonlight, woke
them to full life. Augusti joined them, and proposed to them to take the
half-hour's sail over to Isola Madre. Albano heartily besought the two
to sail over alone, and leave him here to his solitary walks. The Lector
now detected, with a sharper look, the traces of the young man's nightly
adventures,--how beautifully had the dream, the monk, the sleeplessness,
the bleeding, subdued the bold, defiant form, and softened every tone,
and that mighty energy was now only a magic waterfall by moonlight!
Augusti took it for caprice, and went alone with Schoppe; but the fewest
persons possible comprehend, that it is only with the fewest persons
possible, (and not with an army of visitors,) properly only with
two,--the most intimate and like-minded friend and the beloved
object,--one can bear to take a walk. Verily, I had as lief kneel down
to make a declaration of love openly, in the face of a whole court, on
the birthday of a princess,--for show me, I pray, the difference,--as to
gaze on thee, Nature, my beloved, through a long vanguard and rear-guard
of witnesses to my enraptured attitude!
How happy did solitude make Albano, whose heart and eyes were full of
tears, which he concealed for shame, and which yet so justified and
exalted him in his own mind! For he labored under the singular mistake
of fiery and vigorous youths,--the idea that he had not a tender heart,
had too little feeling, and was hard to be moved. But now his enervation
gave him a soft, poetical forenoon, such as he had never before known,
and in which he would fain have embraced tearfully all that he had ever
loved,--his good, dear, far-off foster parents in Blumenbühl; his poor
father, ill just in spring, when death always builds his flower-decked
gate of sacrifice; and his sister, buried in the veil of the past, whose
likeness he had gotten, whose after-voice he had heard this night, and
whose last hour the nightly liar had brought so near to him in his
fiction. Even the nocturnal magic-lantern show, still going on in his
heart, troubled him by its mysteriousness, since he could not ascribe it
to any known person, and by the prediction that at his birth-hour, which
was so near,--the next Ascension-day,--he should learn the name of his
bride. The laughing day took away, indeed, from the ghost-scenes their
deathly hue, but gave to the crown and the water-goddess fresh
radiance.
He roamed dreamily through all holy places in this promised land. He
went into the dark Arcade where he had found his childhood's relics and
his father, and took up, with a sad feeling, the crushed mask which had
fallen on the ground. He ascended the gallery, checkered with
lemon-shadows and sunbeams, and looked toward the tall cypresses and the
chestnut summits in the far blue, where the moon had appeared to him
like an opening mother's eye. He approached a cascade, behind the
laurel-grove, which was broken into twenty landing-places, as his life
was into twenty years, and he felt not its thin rain upon his hot
cheeks.
He then went back again to the top of the high terrace to look for his
returning friends. How brokenly and magically did the sunshine of the
outward world steal into the dark, holy labyrinth of the inner! Nature,
which yesterday had been a flaming sun-ball, was to-day an evening star,
full of twilight: the world and the future lay around him so vast, and
yet so near and tangible, as glaciers before a rain appear nearer in the
deepening blue. He stationed himself on the balcony, and held on by the
colossal statue; and his eye glanced down to the lake, and up to the
Alps and to the heavens, and down again; and, under the friendly air of
Hesperia, all the waves and all the leaves fluttered beneath their light
veil. White towers glistened from the green of the shore, and bells and
birds crossed their music in the wind: a painful yearning seized him, as
he looked along the track of his father; and, ah! toward the _warmer_
Spain, full of voluptuous spring-times, full of soft orange-nights, full
of the scattered limbs of dismembered giant mountain-ridges, heaped
around in wild grandeur,--thither how gladly would he have flown through
the lovely sky! At length, joy and dreaming and parting were all melted
into that nameless melancholy, in which the excess of delight clothes
the pain of limitation,--because, indeed, it is easier to _overflow_
than to _fill_ our hearts.
All at once Albano was touched and smitten,--as if the Divinity of Love
had sent an earthquake into his inner temple, to consecrate him for her
approaching apparition,--as he read on a young Indian-tree near him the
little sign bearing its name,--the "Liana." He gazed upon it tenderly,
and said again and again, "Dear Liana!" He would fain have broken off a
twig for himself; but when he reflected, that if he did water would run
out of it, he said, "No, Liana, I will not cause thee to weep!" and so
forbore, because in his memory the plant stood in some sort of
relationship to an unknown dear being. With inexpressible longings to be
away, he now looked toward the temple-gates of Germany,--the Alps. The
snow-white angel of his dream seemed to veil herself deep in a
spring-cloud, and to glide along in it speechless,--and it was to him as
if he heard from afar harmonica-tones. He drew forth, just for the sake
of having something German, a letter-case, whereon his foster-sister
Rabette had embroidered the words, "Gedenke unserer" (Think of us): he
felt himself alone, and was now glad to see his friends, who were gayly
rowing back from Isola Madre.
Ah, Albano, what a morning would this have been for a spirit like thine
ten years later, when the compact bud of young vigor had unfolded its
leaves more widely and tenderly and freely! To a soul like thine would
have arisen at such a period, when the present was pale before it, two
worlds at once,--the two rings around the Saturn of time,--that of the
past and that of the future: then wouldst thou not merely have glanced
over a short interval of race-ground to the pure, white goal, but turned
thyself round, and surveyed the long, winding track already run. Thou
wouldst have reckoned up the thousand mistakes of the will, the missteps
of the soul, and the irreparable waste of heart and brain. Couldst thou
then have looked upon the ground without asking thyself: "Ah, have the
thousand and four earthquakes[20] which have passed through me, as
through the land behind me, enriched me as these have enriched the soil?
O, since all experiences are so dear,--since they cost us either our
days, or our energies, or our illusions,--O why must man every morning,
in the presence of Nature, who profits by every dew-drop that stands in
a flower-cup, blush with such a sense of impoverishment over the
thousand vainly dried tears which he has already shed and caused! From
springs this almighty mother draws summers; from winters, springs; from
volcanoes, woods and mountains; from hell, a heaven; from this, a
greater,--and we, foolish children, know not how from a given past to
prepare for ourselves a future, which shall satisfy us! We peck, like
the Alpine daw, at everything shiny, and carry the red-hot coals aside
as if they were gold-pieces, and set houses on fire with them. Ah! more
than one great and glorious world goes down in the heart, and leaves
nothing behind; and it is precisely the stream of the higher geniuses
which flies to spray and fertilizes nothing, even as high waterfalls
break and flutter in thin mist over the earth."
Albano welcomed his friends with atoning tenderness; but the youth
became, as the day waxed, as dull and heavy-hearted as one who has
stripped his chamber at the inn, settled his bill, and has only a few
moments left to walk up and down in the bare, rough stubble-field,
before the horses are brought. Like falling bodies, resolutions moved in
his impetuous soul with increasing velocity and force every new second:
with outward mildness, but inward vehemence, he begged his friends to
start with him this very day. And so in the afternoon he went away with
them from the still island of his childhood, speedily to enter, through
the chestnut avenues of Milan, on a new theatre of his life, and to come
upon the trap-door, which opens down into the subterranean passage of so
many mysteries.