They saw, already, some moist lights, of the high fountains that leaped
from above down into the flute-dell, flickering aloft before them, when
Liana, contrary to Chariton's expectation, begged them both to go with
her into a pathless oak-grove;--she looked upon him so contentedly and
open-heartedly as she said it, and without that womanly suspicion of
being misunderstood! In the dusky grove rose a wild rock, with the
words, "To my friend Zesara." The late Princess had caused this memorial
Alp to be erected to Albano's father. Struck, agitated, with smarting
eyes the son stood before it, and leaned upon it, as on Gaspard's
breast, and pressed his arm up against the sharp stone, and cried, with
the deepest emotion, "O thou good father!" His whole youth, and Isola
Bella, and the future, fell at once upon a heart which the whole morning
had wrought upon, and it could not longer restrain the pressing tears.
Chariton was serious, Liana continued faintly to smile,--but like an
angel in prayer. How often, ye fair souls! have I, in this chapter, been
compelled to constrain my deeply-impressed heart, which would fain
address and disturb you: but I will constrain it again!
They stepped silently back into daylight. But Albano's waves of emotion
never fell suddenly; they expanded themselves into broad rings. His eye
was not yet dry when he came into the heavenly vale,--into that
resting-place of the wishes, where dreams might have gone round freely,
without sleep. Chariton--from her earnestness much more busy--had, after
a questioning glance at Liana to know whether she might, (namely, let
certain machines play,) hastened on before them. They passed through the
blooming veil, which retired as they approached;--and Albano beheld now
the youthful dream of an enchanted valley in Spain, that entangled one
in a net of scents and shadows, set out livingly on the earth before
him. On the mountains bloomed orange-walks, the stands hidden in the
higher terrace,--everything which bears great blossoms on its twigs,
from the Linden even to the grape-vine and the apple-tree, drank down
below at the brook, or climbed or crowned the two long mountains, which
wound, with their blossoms, around the flowers of the low ground, and
mutually inclined themselves, to promise an endless valley; fountains
placed on the slopes of the mountains threw behind one another silver
rainbows over the trees into the brook; in the east burned the gold
globe beside the sun,--the last mirror of his dying evening-glance.
"Receive my thanks, thou noble old man!" Albano was continually
repeating.
Liana went with him along the western ridge as far as a bank covered
with blossoms, under the arch that fluttered above, where one may survey
the first and second windings of the vale, and, over in the north, high
pines, and behind them, the spire of a church-tower, and below, an
auricula meadow, while Chariton, opposite them on the eastern height,
behind a statue of a Muse,--for the Nine Muses beamed from the green
Tempe,--seemed to be winding up weights and pressing springs. "My
brother," Liana, in a low tone, broke the silence, going on meanwhile
with the knitting-work which she had taken from her friend, "wishes
very much to see you." The soul of Albano, now awakened with all its
holy faculties, felt itself wholly like her, and free from
embarrassment, and he said, "Even in my childhood I loved your _Charles_
like a brother; I have as yet no friend." The tenderly-moved souls did
not remark that the word Charles came from the letter.
All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and
out of the bowers,--more and more continually joined them,--they
quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,--at last
flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared
toward heaven;--they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps,
and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue
spring,--and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted
on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of
May,--and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering
rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers.
Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar
to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her
eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as
the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid
summer-night;--but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the
sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,--certainly not against sun
and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated
form, played--a sublime contrast to himself--with the ringlets of the
little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big
tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not.
At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and
asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other
ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the
dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more
strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him.
A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the
vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of
raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of
his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,--by heaven, I must
say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with
trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been
in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it
all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder
history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept
saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said
Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with
heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the
agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely
to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read
anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up
soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed
from him.
O thou holy soul, love my youth! Art thou not the first love of this
heart of fire, the morning-star in the early dawn of his life, thou,
this good, pure, and tender one? O, the first love of man, the Philomel
among the spring-tones of life, is always indeed, because we so err, so
hardly treated by Fate, and always killed and buried, but now, if for
once, two good souls, in the white-blossomed May of life, bearing the
sweet tears of spring in their bosoms, with the glistening buds and
hopes of a whole youth, and with the first, unprofaned longing, and with
the firstling of life as well as of the year, the forget-me-not of love
in their hearts,--if such kindred beings could meet each other and trust
each other, and in the blissful month swear a union for all the wintry
months of this earthly time; and if each heart could say to the
other,--"Hail to me, that I found thee in the holiest season of life,
before I had erred; and that I can die and not have loved anyone like
thee!"--O Liana! O Zesara! how fortunate must your beautiful souls be!
The youth lingered a few minutes longer in the magic world that was
working around him, whose tones and fountains murmured like the waters
and machines in the solitary mine; but at last there was something
violent in the solitary monotone and glimmer of the valley, wherein he
had been left so alone. He hurried on by the nearest way, sprinkled
occasionally with veins of water, through the curtain of foliage, and
stepped out once more into the free morning earth of Lilar. How strange!
how distant! how changed was all! Into his wide open inner world the
outer world poured in with full streams. He himself was changed; he
could not go into the night of the oak-grove, to the rocky emblem of his
father. When he was over the bridge that stands in the twigs, he saw the
gentle company slowly walking over the broad silver-white garden-path,
and he blessed Liana, who could now press to her agitated heart the
heart of a mother. The little one often whirled round dancing, and
perhaps saw him, but no one turned back. The harp, carried along after
them, was swept by the eastern breeze, and it snatched tones from the
awakened strings as from an Æolian harp, and bore them onward with it;
and the youth listened with melancholy to the receding murmur, as of
swans that hasten away over the lands, while behind him the empty vale
continued to speak lonesomely in the fluting pastoral-songs of love, and
hovering tones, gliding along after him, came faintly and dimly to his
ear. But he went back up the mountain of the altar; and as he looked
over the bright region, and saw still the white forms moving in the
distance, he let his whole, beautiful soul dissolve itself in weeping.
And here close we the richest day of his youthful life!
But, ye good beings, who have a heart, and find none, or who have the
loved objects only _in_, and not _on_, your bosoms, am I not, like the
Greeks, drawing all these pictures of bliss, as it were, on the marble
sarcophagi of your changed, slumbering past? Am I not the _Archimime_,
who, following after, mimics before you the mouldering forms which your
soul has buried? And thou, younger or poorer man, to whom time, instead
of a past, has only given a future,--wilt thou not one day say to me, I
should have concealed from thee many blessed forms, like holy bodies,
for fear thou wouldst worship them? and wilt thou not add, that, had it
not been for these Phœnix-portraits, thou mightst have cherished
lighter wishes, and had many fulfilled? And how much pain have I then
caused you all! But myself, too; for how could it fare better with me
than with the rest of you?
Your conclusion would, accordingly, be this: since you can never really
live pleasant days so pleasantly as they shine afterward in _memory_, or
beforehand in _hope_, you would, therefore, rather have the present day
without either; and since only at the two poles of the elliptic arch of
time one can catch the low music of the spheres, and in the centre of
the present nothing, you would, therefore, rather stay and listen in the
middle; but as to the past and the future,--neither of which can any man
live to see, because they are only two different poesy-gardens of our
heart, an Iliad and Odyssey, a Milton's Paradise Lost and Regained,--you
will not listen to them at all, or have anything to do with them, in
order that you may nestle down, deaf and blind, in an animal present.
By Heaven! sooner give me the finest, strongest poison of ideals, so
that I may at least not snore away my moment, but dream it away, and
then die on it! But the very dying would be my own fault; for whoso
would fain translate _poetic_ dreams into waking reality[91] is more
foolish than the North American, who realizes his _nightly_ ones: he
proposes, like a Cleopatra, to pervert the splendor of the pearls of dew
into a refreshing drink, and the rainbow of fancy to a permanent arch,
bridging over the rain-waters. Yes, O God, Thou wilt and canst give us
one day a reality, which shall embody and redouble and satisfy our
present ideals,--as thou hast, indeed, already proved to us, in our love
here below, which intoxicates us with moments in which the inner
becomes the outer, and the Ideal, Reality; but _then_--no, for the Then
of the life hereafter, this little _Now_, has no voice; but if, I say,
here below fiction could become fact, and our pastoral poetry pastoral
life, and every dream a day,--ah, even then would desire still remain
enhanced only, not fulfilled: the higher reality would only beget a
higher poetry, and higher remembrances and hopes;--in _Arcadia_ we
should pine after _Utopia_; and on every sun we should see an
unfathomable starry heaven retiring before us, and we should--sigh as we
do here!