In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful
prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the
full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cluster and the olive often
ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan
(Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all
things which belong to May--in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May
butter--he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood
itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a
princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of
counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that
mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent
clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and
fencing-schools, all anticipation of the coming riddles and conflicts of
his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with his heart full of the
glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms
no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double
conquest.
The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke
around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in
full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he
revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook
their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;--the
Librarian sought a _physical_ solution of the acoustic and optical
illusion; the Lector sought a _political_ one: he could not at all
comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially
meant by it all.
This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was
directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he
could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar.
"Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I
should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I
would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit
and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during
the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too
few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve
in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls
curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain
beats gladly a free heart.
At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and
nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they
approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and
now the Principality of _Hohenfliess_ lay only one principality distant
from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the
first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been
merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is
known to geographical readers, _Haarhaar_. The Lector told the
Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the
two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much
because they were _diplomatic_ relatives--although it is true that,
among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than
brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old
folks among the Brandenburghers--as because they were really relatives,
and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were
disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two
courts,--which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,--with all their
heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him,
namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the
principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last
hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to
wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the
land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned
advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political
mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told
for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so
generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial
estate of Hohenfliess--its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and
breed of horses--in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the
highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great
intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to
population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of
Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not
even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the
shepherd's-flute; not of the _energies_ and _matrimonial prospects_ of
others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must
ruin!"
As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an
excursion to Blumenbühl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a
look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his
cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the
city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which
besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the
conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness
of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at
his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short,
that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of
Blumenbühl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the
world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high
life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy
and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.
It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee,
because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go
to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however,
to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates
against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they
stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the
church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned
round, the tower of Blumenbühl below them to the east; from the one and
from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his
future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village,
and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which
gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days.
He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life,
and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the
Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.
But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red
shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy
day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood,
when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod,
over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with
him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and
become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so
sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.