Half an hour after the earthquake, the heavens swathed themselves in
seas and dashed them down in masses and in torrents. The naked
_Campagna_ and heath were covered with the mantle of rain. Gaspard was
silent,--the heavens black,--the great thought stood alone in Albano,
that he was hastening on towards the bloody scaffold and the throne
scaffolding of humanity, the heart of a cold, dead, heathen-world, the
eternal Rome; and when he heard, on the _Ponte Molle_, that he was now
going across the Tiber, he felt as if the past had risen from the
dead,--as if the stream of time ran backward, and he were sailing on
it; under the streams of heaven he heard the seven old mountain-streams
rushing and roaring, which once came down from Rome's hills, and with
seven arms uphove the world from its foundations.
At length the constellation of the mountain city of God, that stood so
broad before him, opened out into nights; cities with scattered lights
lay up and down, and the bells (which to his ear were alarm-bells)
sounded out the fourth[75] hour, when the carriage rolled through the
triumphal gate of the city, the _Porta del Popolo_; then the moon rent
her black heavens, and poured down out of the cleft clouds the splendor
of a whole sky. There stood the Egyptian obelisk of the gateway, high
as the clouds in the night, and three streets ran gleaming apart. "So,"
said Albano to himself, as they passed through the long _corso_ to the
Tenth Ward, "thou art veritably in the camp of the god of war; here,
where he grasped the hilt of the monstrous war-sword, and with the
point made the three wounds in three quarters of the world." Rain and
splendor gushed through the vast, broad streets,--occasionally he
passed suddenly along by gardens and into broad city-deserts and
market-places of the past. The rolling of the chariot amidst the rush
and roar of the rain resembled the thunder, whose days were once holy
to this heroic city, like the thundering heaven to the thundering
earth; muffled-up forms, with little lights, stole through the dark
streets; often there stood a long palace with colonnades in the fire of
the moon, often a solitary gray column, often a single high fir-tree,
or a statue behind cypresses. Once, when there was neither rain nor
moonshine, the carriage went round the corner of a large house, on
whose roof a tall, blooming virgin, with an uplooking child on her arm,
herself directed a little hand-light, now toward a white statue, now
toward the child, and so alternately illuminated the whole group. The
friendly company made its way to the very centre of his exalted soul
and brought with it to him many a recollection; particularly was a
Roman child to him a wholly new and mighty idea.
They alighted at last at the Prince di Lauria's, Gaspard's
father-in-law, and old friend. Near his palace lay the _Campo Vaccino_
(the ancient Forum), and the radiant moon shone on the broad steps and
the three wondrous edifices of the Capitol; in the distance stood the
Colosseum. Albano ascended hesitatingly into the lighted house, before
which the carriage of the Princess stood, reluctantly turning his eye
from those heights of the world, from which once a light word like a
snow-flake rolled far and wide, and grew and grew, till at last in a
strange land it crushed a city with the weight of an avalanche.
The Princess, with her company, saw with pleasure the new-comers. The
old Prince Lauria welcomed his grandson courteously and with reserve.
His innumerable servants spoke among them almost all the languages of
Europe. Albano immediately asked the Knight after his teacher Dian,
that graft of a Greek upon a Roman; but the most human thing was
precisely that which Gaspard, as is always the case with great men, had
not thought of. They sent to his residence, which was near; he was not
at home.
They sat down to dine. The Prince immediately entertained them with his
favorite show-dish, the political progress of the world, and gave the
latest news of the French Revolution. Gazettes of the times were to him
Eternities, news was his antiques; he took all the newspapers of
Europe, and therefore kept for each a German, Russian, English, Polish
servant, to translate it for him. By the side of his satirical coldness
toward all men and things, the political and Italian zeal appeared the
stronger, with which he defended the French against the Knight, who
composedly despised them; and, indulging himself after his manner, even
in bad puns, conceded to the old Romans the _Forum_ and to the modern
the _Campo Vaccino_, and even to the ancient Gauls the field of Mars,
and to the modern French a field of March.
Albano could not conceive of there being any joking so near the
_Forum_, and thought every word must be great in this city. The cold
Lauria spoke warmly for France, like a minister, regarding only
nations, not individuals, and his sentiment pleased the youth.
Then the Princess led the stream of conversation to Rome's high art.
Fraischdörfer dissected the Colossus into limbs, and weighed them in
the narrowest scales. Bouverot engraved the giant in historical
copperplate. The Princess spoke with much warmth, but without point.
Gaspard melted all up together, as it were, into a Corinthian brass,
and comprehended all without being comprehended. On his coldly but
strongly up-shooting life-fountain he let the world play and dance like
a ball.
Albano, dissatisfied with all, kept his inspiration, sacrificing to the
unearthly gods of the past round about him, after the old fashion,
namely, with silence. Well might and could _he_ have discoursed also,
but quite otherwise, in odes, with the whole man, with streams which
mount and grow upwards. He looked more and more longingly out of the
window at the moon in the pure rain-blue and at single columns of the
Forum; out of doors there gleamed for him the greatest world. At last
he rose up, indignant and impatient, and stole down into the glimmering
glory and stepped before the Forum; but the moonlit night, that
decorative painter, which works with irregular strokes, made almost the
very stage of the scene irrecognizable to him.
What a broad, dreary plain, loftily encompassed with ruins, gardens and
temples, covered with prostrate capitals of columns, and with single
upright pillars, and with trees and a dumb wilderness! The heaped-up
ashes out of the emptied urn of time, and the potshards of a great
world flung around! He passed by three temple columns,[76] which the
earth had drawn down into itself even to the breast, and along through
the broad triumphal arch of Septimius Severus; on the right stood a
chain of columns without their temple; on the left, attached to a
Christian church, the colonnade of an ancient heathen temple deep sunk
into the sediment of time; at last the triumphal arch of Titus, and
before it, in the middle of the woody wilderness, a fountain gushing
into a granite basin.
He went up to this fountain, in order to survey the plain out of which
the thunder-months of the earth once arose; but he went along as over a
burnt-out sun, hung round with dark, dead earths. "O man, O the dreams
of man!" something within him unceasingly cried. He stood on the
granite margin turning toward the Colosseum, whose mountain-ridges of
wall stood high in the moonlight, with the deep gaps which had been
hewn in them by the scythe of Time. Sharply stood the rent and jagged
arches of Nero's golden house hard by, like murderous cutlasses. The
palatine hill lay full of green gardens, and on crumbling temple-roofs
the blooming death-garland of ivy was gnawing, and living Ranunculæ
still glowed around sunken capitals. The fountain murmured babblingly
and eternally, and the stars gazed steadfastly down with imperishable
rays upon the still battle-field, over which the winter of time had
passed without bringing after it a spring,--the fiery soul of the world
had flown up, and the cold, crumbling giant lay around;--torn asunder
were the gigantic spokes of the fly-wheel which once the very stream of
ages drove. And in addition to all this, the moon shed down her light
like eating silver-water upon the naked columns, and would fain
dissolve the Colosseum and the temples and all into their own shadows!
Then Albano stretched out his arms into the air, as if he could
therewith embrace and flow away, as with the arms of a stream, and
exclaimed: "O ye mighty shades, you who once strove and lived here, ye
are looking down from heaven, but scornfully, not sadly, for your great
fatherland has died and gone after you! Ah, had I on the insignificant
earth (full of old eternity), which you have made great, only done one
action worthy of you! Then were it to me a sweet privilege to open my
heart by a wound, and to mix earthly blood with the hallowed soil, and
to hasten away out of the world of graves to you, eternal and immortal
ones! But I am not worthy of it!"
At this moment there came suddenly along up the _Via Sacra_ a tall man,
deeply enveloped in his mantle, who drew near to the fountain; without
looking round threw down his hat, and held a coal-black, curly, almost
perpendicular hindhead under the stream of water. But hardly had he,
turning upward, caught a glimpse of the profile of Albano absorbed in
his fancies, when he started up all dripping, stared at the Count, fell
into amazement, threw his arms high into the air, and said, "_Amico?_"
Albano looked at him. The stranger said, "_Albano!_" "My Dian!" cried
Albano. They clasped each other passionately, and wept for love.
Dian could not comprehend it at all. He said, in Italian, "But it
surely cannot be you; you look old." He thought he was speaking German
all the time, till he heard Albano answer in Italian. Both gave and got
only questions. Albano found the Architect merely browner, but there
was the lightning of the eyes and every faculty in its old glory. With
three words he described to him the journey and the company. "How does
Rome strike you?" asked Dian, pleasantly. "As life does," replied
Albano, very seriously; "it makes one too tender and too hard. I
recognize here absolutely nothing at all," he continued; "do those
columns belong to the magnificent Temple of Peace?" "No," said Dian,
"to the Temple of Concord; of the other there stands yonder nothing but
the vault." "Where is Saturn's Temple?" asked Albano. "Buried in St.
Adrian's Church," said Dian, and added, hastily, "close by stand the
ten columns of Antonine's Temple; over beyond there, the Baths of
Titus; behind us, the Palatine Hill, and so on. Now tell me--"
They walked up and down the Forum, between the arches of Titus and
Severus. Albano--especially beside the teacher who in the days of
childhood had so often conducted him hitherward--was yet full of the
stream which had swept over the world, and the all-covering water sank
but slowly. He went on to say, "To-day, when he beheld the obelisk, the
soft, tender brightness of the moon had seemed to him eminently
unbecoming the giant city; he would rather have seen a sun blazing on
its broad banner; but now the moon was the proper funeral torch beside
the dead Alexander, who at a touch collapses into a handful of dust."
"The artist does not get far with feelings of this kind," said Dian;
"he must look upon everlasting beauties on the right hand and on the
left." "Where," Albano went on asking, "is the old Lake of Curtius, the
Rostrum, the _pila Horatia_, the Temple of Vesta, of Venus, and of all
those solitary columns?" "And where is the marble Forum itself?" said
Dian; "it lies thirty span deep under our feet." "Where is the great,
free people, the senate of kings, the voice of the orators, the
procession to the Capitol? Buried under the mountain of potshards. O
Dian, how can a man, who loses a father, a beloved in Rome, shed a
single tear, or look round him with consternation, when he comes out
here before this battle-field of time, and looks into the charnel-house
of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for fate has
an iron hand!"
Dian, who nowhere stayed more reluctantly than upon such tragic cliffs,
hanging over, as it were, into the sea of eternity, always leaped off
from them with a jest. Like the Greeks, he blended dances with tragedy.
"Many a thing is conserved here, friend," said he; "in Adrian's church
yonder they will still show you the bones of the three men that walked
in the fire." "That is just the frightful play of destiny," replied
Albano, "to occupy the heights of the mighty ancients with monks shorn
down into slaves."
"The stream of time drives new wheels," said Dian; "yonder lies Raphael
twice buried.[77] How are Chariton and the children doing?" "They are
blooming on," said Albano, but in a sombre tone. "Heavens!" cried Dian,
with all a father's terror, "is it really so?"[78] "Verily, Dian!" said
Albano, softly. "Does Liana," said Dian, "still come often to
Chariton's? And how fares the sweet one?" Albano answered, in a low
tone, "She is dead." "What! dead? Impossible! Froulay's daughter,
Albano? The gold-rose? O speak!" he cried. Albano nodded affirmatively.
"Ah! thou good maiden!" said he, piteously, with tears in his black
eyes, "so friendly, so enchantingly lovely, so fine an artist! But how
did it come to pass? Have you, then, not been acquainted at all with
the lovely child?" "One spring only," said Albano, hurriedly. "My good
Dian, I will now go back to my father, and I can answer no more
questions." "O certainly! But I must learn more," Dian concluded. And
so they climbed silently and speedily over rubbish and torsos of
columns, and neither gave heed to the mighty emotion of the other.