A Whitsuntide, such as I am now about to describe, Albano, excepting in
the Acts of the Apostles, one can hardly find anywhere else than in
thine!
He had, hitherto, often listened to Liana's invalid-history with the
deafness of a vigorous, fire-proof youth, when, on one occasion, the
Director brought word home, that the pious lady of the Minister would
let her daughter partake the sacrament on the first Whitsuntide holiday,
because she was apprehensive death regarded such a creature as a
strawberry, which must be plucked before the sun had shone upon it. Ah,
Albano saw death at this moment groping about, and with his stony heel
treading on the pale red berry and crushing it. And then this Philomela
without a tongue, because she had hitherto been compelled to be dumb,
had, like a Procne, sent him only the pictured history of her heavy
existence, and only the leaves of parchment! All loving emotions, like
plants, shoot up the most rapidly in the tempestuous atmosphere of life.
Albano felt at once a wide, deep woe, and a tormenting fever-warmth in
his heart, eaten hollow as it was by death. In his musical and poetic
phantasyings on his Oesterlein's-harpsichord, the dreamed tones of
Liana's voice and the weeping music of the harmonica, which she could
play, and which he had never heard, strangely mingled, like her
swan-song, with his harmonies. But this was not enough; he even wrote,
secretly, a Tragedy, (thou good soul!) wherein he, with wet eyes,
intrusted all his tenderest and bitterest feelings to _another's_
lips,--but he only kindled them fearfully, while he expressed them.
Every one can remark that he proposed in this way to escape that babbler
and spy, accident; but not every one observes--something quite original
in the case; in _another's_ name, he might, he thought, venture to give
his deep pain a more passionate expression, for which, in his own name,
before so many stoic classical heroes, he could not for shame muster up
the courage. But in this way the classics could not touch him.
The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass
bell much greater yet; namely, to such a degree, that he touchingly
begged his foster-parents to let him on the first Whitsuntide holiday go
to the--Holy Sacrament. The dilapidated state of the village church,
wherein it could hardly be partaken a year longer, must needs speak as
strongly in his favor, as the dilapidated state of Liana's health did in
hers. Always will there remain in our poor human souls, separated from
each other by bodies and wildernesses, the longing to be at least doing
the same thing at the same time with one another, at one and the same
hour to look up at the moon, or (as Addison relates) to send our prayers
above it; and thus is thy wish, Albano, a human, a tender one, to kneel
at the same hour with thy invisible Liana, at the steps of the altar,
and then to rise fiery and commanding after the coronation of the inner
man! He had in the still country built up the altar of religion high and
firm in his soul, as all men of lofty fancy do: on mountains are always
seen temples and chapels.
But I must never accompany him into the Whitsuntide church before
ascending with him the church-tower. Could anything be conceived more
delicious, than when, at this period, on fair Sundays, so soon as there
was nothing but the heavy sun swimming through the wide heavens, he
climbed to the belfry of the tower, and, covered with the murmuring
waves of the chime, looked out all alone over the earth below, and upon
the western boundary hills of the beloved city? When presently the storm
of sound swept and confounded all together, and when the jewel-sparkling
of the ponds, and the flowery pleasure-tent of the frolicking spring,
and the red castles on the white roads, and the scattered trains of
church-going people slowly winding along between the dark-green
corn-fields, and the stream girdling round the rich pastures and the
blue mountains, those smoking altars of morning sacrifices, and the
whole extended splendor of the visible creation poured into his soul
with a glimmering overflow, and all appeared to him as a dim
dream-landscape--O then arose his inner colosseum full of silent,
godlike forms of spiritual antiques, and the torch-gleam of Fancy[39]
glanced round upon them like the play of a moving magic life,--and there
he saw among the gods a _friend_ and a _loved_ one reposing, and he
glowed and trembled.... Then the bells died away with a heavy groan, and
became dumb,--he stepped back from the bright spring into the dark
tower,--he fastened his eye only on the empty, blue night before him,
into which the distant earth sent up nothing save sometimes a butterfly
blown out of its course, a swallow cruising by, or a pigeon hovering
overhead,--the blue veil of Ether[40] fluttered in a thousand folds over
veiled gods in the distance,--O then, then the cheated heart could not
but exclaim, in its loneliness, Ah! where shall I find--where, in the
wide regions of space, in this short life--the souls which I love
eternally and so profoundly? Ah, thou dear one! what is more painfully
and longer sought, then, than a heart? When man stands before the sea
and on mountains, and before pyramids and ruins, and in the presence of
misfortune, and feels himself exalted, then does he stretch out his arms
after the great _Friendship_. And when music, and moonlight, and spring
and spring tears softly move him, then his heart dissolves, and he wants
_Love_. And he who has never sought either is a thousand times poorer
than he who has lost both.
Let us now step into the Whitsuntide church, where the deep stream of
his fancy, for the first time in his life, overflowed, and carried his
heart far away, and sounded on with it in a new channel: a physical
storm had swollen this stream. Early in the forenoon, the dark
powder-house of a storm-cloud stood mute near the hot sun, and was
glowing with his beams; and only occasionally, during divine service,
some distant, strange cloud let fall a clap on the fire-drum: but when
Albano stepped before the altar with exalted, glorified emotions, and
when he ventured only to mask his love for Liana in an inward prayer for
her, and in a picture of her to-day's devotion, and of her pale form in
the dark bride-attire of piety, and when he softly felt as if his
purified, sanctified soul were now more worthy of that lovely one,--just
then, the tempest, with all its playing war-machines and revolving
cannons,[41] marched over from the Linden-city, and passed, armed and
hot, right over the church. Albano, however, in the consciousness of a
holy inspiration, felt no fear; but so soon as he heard the distant
rumbling of the falling avalanche, he thought only of Liana, and of its
striking the Linden-city church; and now, when over his head the sun
kindled with his hot looks the powder-tower of the storm-cloud, and made
it fly into a thousand flashes and claps, then did that partiality for
the death by lightning which had been nourished in him by the ancients
drive the terrible supposition into his heart, that Liana was now dead
and lost to him in the glory of transfigured holiness. O then, must he
indeed also believe that now the wing of the lightning snatches him
above the clouds. And when long flashes blazed about the saint and the
angels of the altar, and when the trembling voices of the singers,
growing louder, and the tolling of the familiar bells, mingled with the
crashing thunder, and he caught, amid the deafening din, a high, fine
organ-tone, which he took for one of the tones of that unheard
harmonica,--then did he mount, deified, upon the triumphal and
thunder-car by the side of his Liana; the theatre-curtain of life and
the stage burned away from under him; and they soared away, linked
together and radiant, far through the cool, pure ether!...
But the twelfth hour banished these spiritual apparitions and the
tempest; Albano stepped out into a bluer, cooler, breezier sky,--and the
glistening sun looked down with a friendly smile on the affrighted
earth, whose bright tears still quivered in all her flower-eyes. And
now when in the afternoon Albano heard of the peaceful march of the
thunder through Liana's city, then by his faith in her newly-assured
life, and by the soft dead-gold of resting fancy, and by the holy
stillness of the regenerated bosom, and by the increased fervor of his
love, there grew up out of all regions of his soul an evening-red, magic
Arcadia,--and never did a man enter upon a fairer one.