How many blessed Adams of sixteen and a half years will be at this
moment enjoying their siesta in the grass of Paradise, and seeing their
future bosom-companion created out of the materials of their own hearts!
But they seek her not, like the first Adam, close beside them on the
building-spot, but at a good distance from their own couch, because
distance of space lends as much enchantment to the view as distance of
time. Accordingly, every youth seats himself in the mail-coach with the
full persuasion that in the cities for which he is booked quite
different and more divine Madonnas stand at the doors of the houses than
in his cursèd one; and the young men of those cities, again, on their
part, take passage in the arriving stage-coach, and go riding hopefully
into his.
Ah, this sounds far too rude and harsh for all that I have in my mind,
and it is to me as if I were offering the reader, instead of the living,
floating rose-fragrance, only the stiff, hard, thick, porcelain-rose!
Albano, I will uncover and unclose thy silent, thickly-curtained heart,
so that we all may see therein the saintly image of Liana, the ascending
Raphael's-Mary, but, like the pictures of the saints in Passion-week,
hanging behind the veil, which thou liftest with trembling to adore it,
when thou openest thy books of devotion,--the Romances,--and when thou
findest therein the prayers which belong to thy saint. Even _I_ find it
hard not to do like thee and the ancients, and make a mystery of the
name of thy guardian goddess,--concerning inner spiritual apparitions
(for outer ones are bodily apparitions) the seer is glad to be silent
nine days long;--and with thy blind belief in Liana's virtuous character
being a thousand times higher than thine is, and with thy holy sense of
honor, which watches over another's, it is, of course, a riddle to thee
how others, for instance the Vienna master or Wehrfritz, without the
least blushing, can talk so loudly and fondly of her, when thou thyself
hardly darest before others to--dream of her much. Truly, Albano is a
good creature! Further, how such a light Psyche as Liana, so
crystallized into solid ether, somewhat like the risen Christ, can at
all eat carps and pick the bones out,--or stir the stack of salad in the
blue dish with the long, wooden, miniature pitch-forks,--or how it can
be that she weighs half a pound more in the sedan than a blue
butterfly,--or how she can laugh loud (but that, however, she never did,
my friend);--all this, and in general the whole petty service of this
incarnate earthly life, was, to the winged youth, a riddle and a real
impossibility, or at least the reality thereof was a sort of _fixed-star
occultation_; why shall I suppress that he would have been far less
astonished at a pair of angel's footsteps stamped into Italian rocks,
than at a pair of Liana's in the ground, and that he would have given
for any one single trace or relic of her--I mention only a thread-spool
or a tambour-flower--nothing less than whole cords of the wood of the
holy cross, together with casks of the holy nails, and several apostolic
wardrobes, together with the holy duplicate-bodies into the bargain.
So have I often longingly wished I could have only a pound of earth from
the moon, or as much as a horn of sun-dust from the sun, before me on my
table and in my hands. So do most of us authors of consequence hover
before a reader out of our own country in like manner as fine, ethereal
images, of whom it is hard to comprehend how they can eat a slice of
bacon, or drink a glass of March beer, or wear a pair of boots; it seems
as if people would collapse when they read anything about Lessing's
razor, Shakespeare's English saddle, Rousseau's bear-skin cap, Psalmist
David's navel, Homer's sleeve, Gellert's queue-tie, Ramler's night-cap,
and the bald-pate under mine, though that is not of much more
consequence.
The old Provincial Director, seeing that a maiden in no way gains so
much with a youth as by praises which his parents bestow upon her, made
some considerable contributions toward the canonization of Liana, by
frequently weighing against her the rustic Rabette, who laughed just as
he did, and insinuating a contrast between his indulgent wife and the
strict Minister's lady: he then took occasion to set forth in detail
after what strict rules of pure composition this counterpointist (the
Minister's lady) harmoniously arranged the melodious tones of Liana, and
particularly how she discountenanced all rudeness and laughter. Female
souls are peacocks, whose jewelled plumage must be sheltered in nice and
whitened apartments, whereas ours remain clean in duck-coops. Albano
pictured to himself mother and daughter in the double forms in which the
painters give us angels, namely, the intelligent, strict mother, as one
who hides in a long cloud, with only her _head_ visible, and Liana as a
glorified child that, with its tender wings, flutters about a white
cloud.
How he longed for something, though it were only a fallen, faded rose
of--silk from Pestitz; and yet he could not for shame ask the Vienna
teacher for anything except at the very last, after long thinking,
though with a betraying glow, for one--lesson-mark; "for he had never
yet seen one," he said. Falterle had one at this moment in his
pocket,--the number 15, Liana's former age, was written upon it;--she
might have written the number possibly;--still it was something. Ah,
could he not more willingly have beset the Director for some romances
out of the portable-library of the Minister's lady, in which the
daughter must certainly have read, yes, and might well even have
forgotten some notes of her reading? He actually did it; but Wehrfritz
condemned and cursed in the beginning all romances as poisoned letters;
then he forgot over five times to ask for any;--and finally he brought
with him a novel of Madam Genlis, together with a Gotha pocket-almanac.
These books of the blest--in comparison with which my own works and the
Alexandrine Library and the blue library are only miserable
_remittenda_--had all the stamps of women's books; for they all
contained some ornament or other of female heads, namely, a thimbleful
of hair-powder as they do, fag-ends of silk-ribbon as they do, for
demarcation-lines and memoranda of readings,--and just the same
fragrance (which Semler also praises in the books of alchemy), and which
they seemed to have borrowed from the blossoms of Paradise. Ah, happy
reader of the fairest book (I mean the Count), canst thou ask more?
By all means; and he found more, too, namely, in the latter end of the
Gotha pocket-almanac, on the two blank parchment-leaves, the words,
"Concert for the Poor, the 21st February," and "Play for the Poor, the
1st Nov." I have often, in my chase after mysteries, beaten out, on
these leaves, the weightiest ones from the bush. "Yes, that is my
pupil's hand," said Falterle; "she and her mother seldom let such an
opportunity slip, because the Minister does not allow them otherwise to
give much to the poor." Do not detain me here about the beauty of her
handwriting,--besides one writes better on parchment and slate than on
paper, and a literary lady, exactly unlike a literary man in this, has
more calligraphy than illiterate ones,--but let me hasten on to the
working of these _incunabula_ of Liana, whose Dominical characters
diffuse over a loving man nothing but bright, inner Sundays of the soul,
and whose leaves resemble in sanctity the Epistles which, in the Middle
Ages, fell from heaven upon the earth. Now, for the first time, was it
to him as if the flying angel, whose shadow hitherto had only glided
over the earth, folded up his pinions, and held his downward course in
the track of the shadow, not far from the spot where Albano stands. He
learned the Gotha pocket-almanac by heart.
As he believed Liana to be much tenderer and better than he, and as she
appeared to his fancy like Hesper, who, among all the planets, moves
around the sun with the least eccentricity, and he to himself like the
distant Uranus, who does so with the greatest; and since he could not,
without a blaze of shame on his cheek, think of falling behind the
daughter and mother in moral polish, he became at once (no man knew why)
more gentle, mild, compliant, attentive to his person, obedient to the
Vienna teacher,--for Liana had been so too,--and his whole Vesuvius[38]
was kept under by the veil of a saint. The North American adores the
form which appears to him in dreams, as his guardian spirit. O, does not
even thus, to the youth, a fair dream often become his genius?