While Dian was causing a nobler temple to go up in the heavens than the
stone one in the village, the Princess, whose _castrum doloris_ this was
to be, died; they had, therefore, to deposit her remains for a time in
the accommodations of a Pestitz church. This changed one or two thousand
things. The Crown-prince of Hohenfliess, Luigi, must now, will he nill
he, come back from Italy, to the princely chair, in which the old man,
bent up with years, had, for a long time, diminutive and speechless,
been rather lying than sitting,--although the Minister standing behind
the princely arm-chair took off his figure and voice in a sufficiently
lively manner. Don Gaspard, who had not listened to any of the previous
letters of Albano, now despatched to him the following orders, which
rushed like fiery wine through his veins: "On my way back from Italy we
meet, in thy birthplace, _Isola Bella_. Thou wilt be sent for." Even
readers who have not had a week's practice in folding and sealing
letters of a diplomatic corps, will easily observe that the Knight of
the Fleece is thinking to bring his son acquainted with the young
prince, and to establish and insure their first Pestitz connections.
But I beg the world now to measure the Paradise of a man, who after so
long seafaring at last sees the long shores of the new world stretch out
into the ocean. Was not life at this moment open to him in a hundred
directions? Laurel-wreaths, ivy-wreaths, flower-wreaths, myrtle-wreaths,
wheat-garlands,--all these crowns overhung the great gate of Pestitz and
its house-doors. Thou brother, thou sister, (I mean Roquairol and
Liana,) what a full, yearning soul was marching to meet you! and what a
dreaming and innocent one! Homer and Sophocles, and the ancient history
and Dian, and Rousseau, that magus of youth,--and Shakespeare and the
British weeklies (wherein a higher and more human poesy speaks than in
their abstract poems),--all these had left behind in the happy youth an
everlasting light, an unparalleled purity, wings for every Mount Tabor,
and the fairest but most difficult wishes. He resembled, not the urbane
French, who, like ponds, reflect the hue of the nearest bank, but those
loftier men, who, like the sea, wear the color of the boundless heavens.
In fact, now was the ripest, best point of time for his change. Through
Dian and his journeys, even Albano's _exterior_ man had been trained to
grace in fashionable saloons. Men, like bullets, go farthest when they
are smoothest; besides, there remained sticking on Zesara diamond-points
enough at which mediocrity stumbles and is wounded, and even uncommon
worth is an uncommon fault,--as _high_ towers, for that very reason,
appear _bent over_. Zesara learned, even outside the circle of country
youngsters, a readiness of ideas and words, which formerly stood at his
service only in a state of enthusiasm; for wit, generally a foe of the
latter, was with him merely a servant and child thereof. He did not,
like witty sucklings, coquette with all ideas, but he was either beset
by them or not touched at all; hence came that silent, slow,
unostentatious ripening of his power; he resembled mountains of a
gradual ascent, which always yield more booty than those which rise
abruptly. With great trees, the seed is smaller and in spring the
blossoms later than in the case of small bushes.
The time ere Gaspard's messenger came to take him away was to the
detained youth an eternity, and the village a prison; it shrivelled up
to the household-buildings of a convent. The hidden plan of his life,
written, however, by encaustic into his brain, was, as with all such
young men, this, to be and do nothing more than--everything; that is to
say, to bless, to glorify, and to enlighten at once himself and a
country,--to be a Frederick II. upon the throne; in other words, a
storm-cloud, which should contain thunders of excommunication for the
sinner, electrical light for the deaf, blind, and lame, showers for the
insects, and warm drops for thirsty flowers, hail for enemies, an
attraction for everything, for leaves and dust, and a rainbow for the
end. Now, as he could not succeed Frederick II., he proposes to be
hereafter minister at least,--especially as Wehrfritz made so much out
of this by-sceptre,--this offshoot and chip of the mother sceptre,--and
in his spare hours a great poet and philosopher withal.
I shall be delighted, Count, if thou shouldst become a second Frederick,
the second and only; my book will profit by it and I myself mould my
future thereby as a rare historiographer, compounded of Zenophon,
Curtius, and Voltaire!