Albano and Dian flew joyfully over the German fields to meet so many a
precious heart, and nothing was disappointed except their dread of the
length of the countries through which they had to travel. Instead of
the black lava-sand and the burnt soil behind them, a bright, fresh
green now decked the plains and cooled the dazzled eye. The waves of
green grain-fields swept and tossed about as merrily as the waves of
the blue-green sea. In thicker, longer, higher woods floated new
shadows, like lovely little evenings, creeping away from before the
light of day. The dark green of the Italian trees was replaced by the
bright, laughing green of the German gardens, and new feathered choirs
cradled themselves in clouds and in woods, and greeted the heart of
man, and sent down to him their light and guileless joy.
From spring to spring went the happy Albano, with his dreams of love;
as fast as a southern blossom fell behind him, a northern unfolded
itself before him; and his travelling-carriage stopped on the
variegated avenue among the blossom-shadows of a long garden.
At length he stood before the house to which the garden conducted him,
and before the linden-city; so stood he also in a former year on the
heights before it, looking up at the cloud-procession of the future,
without being able to divine to what the clouds were shaping
themselves, whether into an aurora or into an evening tempest. How many
old pangs darted now like shadows of clouds over the old landscape! He
was going now, such was his reflection, to meet his father with the
news of his fortune; to meet his apostate friend with the stolen
beloved; to meet with old and new love his returning Schoppe, whose
heart and fate were to him, now, at once so dark and so weighty; and to
meet the singular time and hour, when the subterranean waters, whose
rush and roar he had hitherto so often experienced, should lie at once
uncovered, and with all their windings and springs laid open to the
light of day; and to meet the sacred spot where he could take boldly to
his heart the beloved, who now, on the German road and in the
neighborhood of former trials, seemed to him still greater and more
unattainable than on Epomeo, in the neighborhood of all that is sublime
in heaven and on earth, and when he might enfold her in his arms
forever without asking again, "Wilt thou love me?" Then he went back in
thought to an image which Vesuvius[110] had furnished him, and said to
Dian: "Behind man there works and travels onward a slow, fiery stream,
which consumes and crushes if it overtakes him; but let man only stride
boldly forward, and often look backward, and he comes off unscathed. My
beloved teacher, so will I now do in my new and momentous relations; do
thou, however, make me turn round toward the lava, if in pleasant
scenes I should sometimes forget it!"
"Speak better and more propitious words," said Dian. "Hail to us; the
gods are already favorable! Yonder comes your father up the palace
hill, and looks more gay and happy than I ever before happened to find
him!"