"We have both been living very quietly since our agreeable runaway has
been revelling about on mountains and in palaces. We have talked almost
too much about him, besides sending for the prattling Agata to tell us
something about his journey. Your Julia is full of blessings and helps
for Linda. Never did I see before such a clear, determined, sharply
discerning and yet cold nature, which only loves in giving, rather than
gives in loving. She will never, it is true, feel the pangs which Venus
Urania sends her chosen ones; but she is a born mother, and a born
sister; and I ask her sometimes, why hast thou not all brothers and all
orphans?
"Since the earthquake I have been somewhat ill. I have, perhaps,
not been accustomed to love, and so to die. I take a philosophical
book,--for poets just now take too violent a hold of me,--and fancy I
am still following it, when I have been long since flown away over the
sea. I am reading at this moment the life of the glorious Guyon. She
knows what love is,--that godlike affection for the godlike, that
losing of self in God, that eternal living and abiding steadfast in one
great idea,--that growing sanctification through love, and that growing
love through sanctification! The book falls out of my hands, I close my
eyes, I dream and weep and love thee. O Albano, come earlier. What wilt
thou now seek on mountains and ruins? Shall we not come hither again?
But you roving men! Only women love, whether it be God, or yourselves,
alas! Guyon, the holy Thérèse, the somewhat prosaic Bourignon, loved
God as no man ever did (except the holy Fénelon); man deals with the
highest being not much better than with the fairest. Albano, if thou
hast any other longing than I, if thou desirest more on earth than me,
more in Paradise than me, then say so, that I may leave off and die.
Truly, when thou embracest thy sister, then I am jealous and long to be
thy sister, and thy friend Schoppe, and thy father, and everything that
thou lovest, and thy very self, if thou lovest it, and thy whole heaven
and thy whole thou in me, thy I in thee.
"I will tell you something of my history. I went for a long time in
silence over the earth; I saw courts, nations, and lands, and found
that most _men_ are only _people_. What did it concern me? One must
never say of anything, that is bad, but only, that is stupid, and think
no more of it. What I do not love has for me no existence, and instead
of hating or despising it long, I have forgotten it. I was scolded at
as proud and fantastic, and could not satisfy any one. But I kept and
cherished my inner being, for no ideal must be given up, else the holy
fire of life goes out, and God dies without resurrection. I saw men,
and found always the simple distinction among them, that some were
fine, intelligent, and delicate, without spirit or enthusiasm, and the
rest very hearty and enthusiastic with shallow rudeness, but all
selfish; although when their heart is full, and not on the wane, they,
even like the full moon, show the fewest spots. Beside the teachings of
my great mother, beside your great father, no one of them could hold up
his head. Your Roquairol one could neither love nor hate, nor respect
nor fear, although one could come very near to all these at once.
"It had a great effect, too, that I was always travelling: travelling
often keeps one colder. When I look toward the coast, and think that a
great Roman was now in Baja, now in Germany, now in Gaul, now in Rome,
and that to him the earth was a great city, then I easily comprehend
how to him men became masses. Travelling is an employment that we women
always miss. Men have always something to do, and send the soul
outward; women must stay all day at home with their hearts. In
Switzerland I (as the Princess Idoine does) imposed upon myself a
little economy, and I know how by means of little objects which one
daily attains one consoles one's self for the high one which lies, like
a god's throne, on an eminence.
"So I came just in this still week of life to the mer-de-glace in
_Montanvert_. Of picturesque mountains, plains, dells, I had seen my
fill in Spain, and of ice-mountains in Switzerland. But a sea of ice at
that height, a solitary, primeval, blue-green sea surrounded with red
rocks, a broad waste full of restless, upheaving, tempestuous billows,
which a sudden death, a Medusa's head, had so, in the midst of life,
frozen stiff and fast! At that time a storm, which at any other time
would have been frightful to me, swept up the mountain with flames; I
hardly noticed it, my soul hung musingly on the stillness of a
petrified storm, on the repose of--ice! I shuddered, wept unusually
all the way down the mountain, and the same week laid my economical
play-work aside and continued my travels.
"I made, however, no storm-prayers, but dwelt down below there without
complaint in the rainy hollow of a dark, cold existence. Then fate
brought me to Epomeo, and there the gods willed that the scene should
be changed.
"But now it must remain as it is. When a singular being has said to a
singular being, 'Thou art the one!' then do they exist only through and
for each other. The Psyche with her lamp will not feel it, if the lamp
catches and consumes her locks and her hand and her heart, while she
blissfully gazes upon the slumbering Cupid; but when the hot drop of
oil escapes from the lamp and touches the god, and he awakes and
angrily flies away from her forever--forever--Ah, thou poor Psyche! Of
what avail to thee is death in the dissolved ice-sea? Has, then, no man
ever yet experienced the pain of lost love, that he may know what a
thousand times harder desolation it inflicts upon a woman? Who of them
has fidelity, the genuine, which is neither a virtue nor a sensation,
but the very fire which eternally animates and sustains the kernel of
existence?
"I am sick, Albano, else I know not how I come by these gloomy ideas. I
am so tranquil in my innermost heart; I have shown only the chords, not
the tune. We must work and look, not upon the future, but upon the
next coming present. If the time should ever, ever appear--I have
neither remorse nor patience--the time when thou lovedst me no more,
heartily--ah! I should be stiller, stronger, briefer than now: and
what could there be beyond, except to die either _for_ the loved one
or--_by_ him?
"Come soon, sweet one! It is very beautiful around us; it has rained,
all the world is in jubilee, and sees the sun-drops, and has gathered
itself a heavenly drink. I, too, have set out in haste for thee dishes
and vases. Come; I will bring thee the olive-leaf and the myrtle-twig,
and wind around thy head roses and violets. Come. Once I little thought
that I should look so often toward Posilippo. L."
"P. S.--The rival also looks toward Posilippo, and rejoices in the
thought of thy return. Yet do not hurry anything. _Adio, caro_. J."
Albano found in this character a silent justification and satisfaction
of all demands which at an earlier period, when Liana was still living,
he had always felt compelled to make upon a loved being. He did not,
however, perceive, in the innocence of his love, that this was the very
being whom the longing after war and exploits that reigned in his
letter could not please.
He visited now the subterranean city in its churchyard, near the
Cestius' pyramid, as it were, of the volcano. Dian went through
Herculaneum with him as an antiquarian lexicon, in order to unroll
before him the whole domestic economy of the ancients, up to their very
painting; but Albano was more moved than his friend by this picture of
the past dwelling in the midst of the present,--by the still houses,
and night-like streets, and by the frequent traces of flying despair.
"Would not all these people, then, have been dead now, after all, if it
had not been for Vesuvius?" asked Dian, gayly, in this gay region. "I
ask you, rather," he continued, "whether an architect who comes out of
this chamber or city of art can take any longer much pleasure in
sketching in your Germany, after seeing these ruins of the earth, the
petty, pitiful ones for your princely gardens?" They saw in a dark
vestibule one of those earthern masks which they used to put into
graves, with lamps like eyes behind. Then Albano looked at him
staringly, and said, "Are we not gleaming earth-masks on graves?" "Fie!
what an odious idea!" said Dian.
Yet a long time, out there in the living sunshine, did gloomy forms
follow him. Near the shining Portici stood Vesuvius, like a funeral
pile, and on it the death-angel. He thought of Hamilton's prediction,
that the lovely Ischia would one day perish over the mine of an
earthquake. Even Linda's letter troubled him, with the bare imagination
of the possibility of losing her.
In Naples he examined a few more curiosities; then on the next morning
he embarked for the Eden of the waves.