Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 25

[167] It is well known that spring flowers, on account of dampness and shade, are for the most part suspicious; as also the autumnal ones.

[168] Museum of Nymphae or Chrysalides.--TR.

[169] In the artistic technical sense.--TR.

[170] A black resin, used for violin-strings.--TR.

[171] Alluding to the case where by this change of the town-clock the Basle people outwitted an enemy--TR.

FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.

ALBANO AND LIANA.

64. CYCLE.

So many tender and holy sensibilities flutter round in our inner world, which, like angels, can never a.s.sume the bodily form of outward action, so many rich, full flowers stand therein which bear no seed, that it is lucky poetry has been invented, which easily treasures up all these inborn spirits and the flower-fragrance in its limbo. With this I catch, dear Albano, thy glorious perfume-breathing Sunday, and hold fast the invisible incense for the Schneider's-skin of the world!

On Sunday he moved to the thunder-house in Lilar. The Lector kept himself up with the hope that the Count would very soon tread down the flower-parterre of the new enjoyment as flat and dead as a cross-way. It was a fine morning, all sprinkled with dew; a fresh wind blew from Lilar over the blooming grain; and the sun burned alone in a cool heaven. Over the Blumenbuhl road a swarm of people were plodding onward, and no one went long alone; on the Eastern heights he saw his friend Charles, with bowed crest, dashing to meet the sun.

The breezes of Lilar came flying to welcome him with a breath of orange-fragrance, and blew away the ashes which rested on the glowing altar-coals of that first magnificent Sunday. He went down the bridge, and Pollux, early in his finery, came driving a ruffled turkey-c.o.c.k to meet him. A _Soeur Servante_ of old Spener had been already for an hour cooking at Chariton's, merely to see him go by. The latter ran, festally decked, out of the house, which opened itself gayly with all its windows to the whole heavens, to meet him, and, in the confusion of her joy, broke out with the main matter first, namely, that everything was ready and beautiful up there in the little house, and whether he would have his dinner up there. She would fain, in the midst of the conversation, pull Pollux out of the Count's fingers, but he let him swing up for a kiss, and won thereby every heart, even the old one behind the kitchen fire.

While he marched off toward his little house through the western triumphal arch, he felt, with indescribable strength and sweetness, that the lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of G.o.ds, temples, and bliss,--and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals stalk through and strip with their talons.

His blooming path ran at length into the descending and ascending stairway, which he had pa.s.sed with Spener; single streaks of day burned themselves into the moist ground and painted the scattered twigs fiery and golden. In the mystic bower, where the dead Prince had stalked along before him in the by-cavern, he found no such cavern, but only an empty niche. He stepped out above, as out of the haunch of the earth. His little house lay on the crooked back of the mountain ridge. Down below reposed around him those elephants of the earth, the hills, and Lilar gloriously swelling in blossoms, and he looked from his windows into the camp of the giants of Nature.

Meanwhile he could not now stay on the window-sill, nor near the inspiring aeolian harp, nor in the eye-prison of books; through streams and woods and over mountains fresh nature longed to sweep. That he did.

There are sometimes between the every-day days of life--when the rainbow of Nature appears to us only broken up, and as a misshapen, motley ma.s.s on the horizon--certain creation-days, when she rounds and contracts herself into a fair form, nay, when she becomes alive, and speaks to us like a soul. To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years often pa.s.s away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow fuller and fuller to meet him;--without wind, a landscape was to him a stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;--and now the wind rolled the solid land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances.

Majestically swam through the blue the silvery islands, the clouds, and on the earth shadows stalked like giants over streams and mountains; in the valley sparkled the Rosana, and rolled into the oak grove. He went down into the warm vale; the flowery pastures foamed and their seed played in its cloud-fleece ere the earth caught it; the swan spread voluptuously his long wing; pairs of doves were pecking each other for love; and everywhere lay beds and twigs full of hot maternal bosoms and eggs. Like a glorious blue bouquet, the neck of the reposing peac.o.c.k played off its dissolving colors in the high gra.s.ses. He stepped under the oaks, which with knotty arms seized hold upon heaven, and with knotty roots the earth. The Rosana talked alone with the murmuring wood, and ate away, foaming, at the rocky crags and at the decaying sh.o.r.e;--night and evening and day chased each other in the mystic grove.

He stepped into the stream, and went out with it before a warm, busy plain full of villages, and out from them came the Sabbath sounds, and out of the grain-fields larks arose, and on the mountains human foot-paths crept upward,--the trees lifted themselves up as living things, and the distant men seemed to be fast-rooted, and became only little shoots on the low bark of the enormous tree of life.

The soul of the youth was cast into the holy fire; like asbestos-paper, he drew it out quenched and blank; it was to him as if he knew nothing, as if he were _one_ thought; and here the feeling came upon him in a wonderfully new manner, that is the world, thou art on the world;--he was _one_ being with it,--all was _one_ life, clouds and men and trees.

He felt himself grasped by innumerable polypus-arms, and swallowed up at the same time with them, and yet running on in the infinite heart.

In a blissful bewilderment he arrived at his dwelling, from which little Pollux came rolling down the mountain to meet him, and call him to dinner. In the little house the very thought of his heart was expressed by the aeolian harp at the open window. While the child was thundering away with his little fist on the harpsichord, and the birds joyfully screamed in out of the trees, the soul of the world swept exulting and sighing through the aeolian strings, now lawlessly and now regularly, playing with the storms and they with it; and Albano seemed to hear the streams of life rushing between their sh.o.r.es, the countries of the earth,--and through flower-veins and oak-veins, and through hearts,--around the earth, bearing clouds on their bosom,--and the stream, which thunders through eternity, a Divine hand was pouring out under the veil.

Albano came, with the innocent boy dancing before him, to the still smiling mother. Even here, between the four walls, the sails continued to propel him which the great morning had swelled. Nothing surprised him, nothing seemed to him common, nothing remote; the wave and the drop in the endless sea of life flowed away in indivisible union with the streams and whirlpools which it bore onward. Before Chariton he stood like a shining G.o.d, and she would gladly have veiled either him or herself. Never was humanity individualized in purer forms, crippled by no alloy of provincialism or nationality, than in this circle of joy, wherein childhood, womanhood, and manhood, twined with flowers, met and softly clasped each other.

Chariton spoke constantly of Liana, out of love, not merely for the absent one, but also for the one who stood near; for, although she looked with those open eyes, which seem more to image quietly than to behold, more to let in than to draw in, still she was, like children, virgins, country people, and savages, at once open-heartedly true and keen. She had easily detected Albano's love, because everything is easier to disguise from women,--even hatred, than its opposite. She praised Liana infinitely, particularly her incomparable kindness; and "her lord had said, few men had so much heart as she, for she had often been, without any fear, whole nights with her in Tartarus." Certainly, neither was this explicable to the Count. The marvellous is the aureole of a beloved head; a sun, softened down to a human countenance, takes less powerful hold than a beloved countenance glorified into a sun-image.

More and more heartily delighted at his delight, she offered to lead him into Liana's chamber. A simple little chamber,--under a green twilight of glimmering vine foliage, some books of Fenelon and Herder, old flowers still in their water-gla.s.ses, little Chinese dishes, Julienne's portrait, and another of a deceased youthful friend, whose name was Caroline, an unstained writing-stand, with English-pressed paper,--was what he found. The holy spring hours of the virgin pa.s.sed by before him, dropping dew like sunny clouds.

He happened to touch a penknife, when Chariton brought quills to be cut, "because," she said, "they had so much trouble on this score since her master had gone away." For a woman can more easily drive any pen--even the epic and Kantian--than make one; and here, as in several other cases, the stronger s.e.x must lend the weaker a hand.

Albano wished to see, also, the working-chamber of his teacher; but this she decidedly--although an hour's eating together had not given her any new courage--refused, because her master had forbidden it. He begged once more; but she smiled more and more painfully, and adhered to her gentle no.

He now dreamed away the murmur of the morning in the magic garden, on whose waters and paths the moonshine and reflection of memory played.

Out of the nine million square miles of common earth, how do certain poetical lands stand out to a poetical heart! On the mountain with the altar, where he once saw her disappear down below, the afternoon chime of Blumenbuhl came wafted to him with the fanning of a freer ether; and his childhood's life, and the present scenes yonder, and Liana, gave him a tender heart, and he surveyed, with dimmer eyes, the transfigured land.

At evening came happy church-goers from Blumenbuhl, and praised the consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all, overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,--the constellations over Blumenbuhl shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.

65. CYCLE.

Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and shepherd-boys had not, like the gra.s.s, shot up taller during his absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much prolonged to his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.

In the castle how profusely was his heart covered with hearts, and the youngest love drowned by the old, from the easily weeping mother, Albina, even to the hand-extending old servants, who, on his account, stirred more briskly their petrified limbs! He found all his loves--Liana excepted--in Wehrfritz's study,[172] because he loved "young folk" and discourse, and always insisted that they should set out the breakfast on his table of papers, which, he said, was as good as a breakfast-table with varnished sc.r.a.p-pictures that n.o.body saw. Albano tormented himself with the fear that the Minister's lady had been the church-robber of a very G.o.ddess, and carried Liana back yesterday,--till the Captain hastily explained the non-appearance. The good soul had had yesterday to atone for the commotion of her sympathizing heart with sick-headache. Her loved teacher, Spener, with his sublime soul-stillness,--those eyes, which wept no more over the earth, buried with the princely pair,--standing with his head under the cold polar star of eternity, so that now, like the pole, it no longer saw any stars rise or set,--calmly, and with hands apostolically folded in one another, speaking so all-persuasively upon the sorrow and the great end of this pale life, pressing, with his inspired speech, men's hearts to the verge of tearful emotion, and yet with exalted tenderness drawing them back from extreme grief, that so only the heart may weep without the eye,--and then the consecration of the coupled coffins and of the church,--O, in the delicate Liana these emotions could not surely fail to grow into sorrows, and all that her teacher buried in silence was in her spoken aloud. In addition to this, she had not taken the usual medicine of keeping still, but had disguised all her pangs behind active joy, so as to give her departing mother no pains, although herself far too great ones.

Into the midst of this explanation she herself entered pleasantly, in a white morning-dress, with a nosegay of Chinese roses,--a little pale and tired,--looking up with a dreamy softness,--her voice somewhat low,--the roses on her cheeks closed into buds,--and, like a child, smiling upon every heart;--thou angel of heaven! who may dare to love and reward thee? She beheld the lofty youth;--all the lilies of her still face were, contrary to her wont, baptized into a heavenly morning-red of joy, and a tender purple lingered upon them.

She asked him, with an open manner, why he had not come yesterday to the festivities, and disclosed, as a matter of moment, that they would all to-day visit the pious father, for whom she had been tying her dwarf-roses. He took gladly the fourth voice in the concert of the pleasure-party. What a magnificent hanging garden, with its loveliest flowers and prospects, is built out into the evening-hours! How many happy ones a single roof covers!

The ingenuous Rabette, more brisk and busy for her still gladness, was, unweariedly, Liana's sick-nurse and Roquairol's lion-keeper and _maitresse de plaisirs_, who made every one of the mother's ground-plans of pleasure broader by a half, and her whole being was so happy! Ah, her poor innocent heart had not yet, indeed, been loved by any one, and therefore it glows, with the fresh energies of the first love, so brightly and truly before a mighty one which seems to come down to it with a blessing, like a loving G.o.d, drawing after it a whole heaven!

Roquairol saw how bewitchingly a busy activity shook aside in the play-room of her character and her occupations the heavily hanging foliage, which in the visiting parlor darkly overspread her real worth; she was even made more lovely by the darker, neat house-dress, since he by his preaching had sent back every white drapery of her brunette person into the wardrobe. She would not obey her mother in this matter, till he had demanded it. Nay, he had yesterday brought her to the point of really wearing about with her the watch which the proud Minister's lady had presented her, though she blushed like fire at the unwonted ornament. Meanwhile he proposed to take with her, as it were, a true serpentine flowery way to the altar of his love's _loud_ Yes,--the _silent_ one he was saying all the time;--he knew she would get in at once so soon as he rode forth with the conch-chariot of Venus, to which he had tackled a dove and a hawk.

How gloriously the forenoon flew away on golden wing-sh.e.l.ls and on transparent wings! The beloved Albano was introduced into all the changes of the house; the finest was in his study-chamber, which Rabette had transformed into her toilet-chamber, sewing-room, and study, and which again, since yesterday, had become guest-chamber and library to Liana. How gladly did he step to the western window, where he had so often caused his invisible father and the beloved one to appear, in an unearthly manner, in the crystal mirror of his fancy! On the panes were many L's and R's drawn by his boyish hand. Liana asked what the R's meant; "Roquairol," said he, for she did not inquire after the L. With infinite sweetness did the thought flow around his heart, that his beloved was indeed to live through some blooming days in the dreamy cell of his first fresh life. Liana showed him with childlike joy how she shared everything, that is, the chamber, fairly with Rabette, in her double housekeeping and chum-ship, and how she made her very hostess her guest.

I have often admired with envy the fine, light, nomadic life of maidens in their Arcadian life-segments; easily do these _doves of pa.s.sage_ flutter into a strange family, and sew and laugh and visit there, with the daughter of the house, one or two months, and one takes the ingrafted shoot for a family twig; on the other hand, we _house-pigeons_ are inhabitive and hard to transplant, and generally, after a few days, journey back again. Since we, as more brittle material, less easily melt in with the family ore; since we do not weave our work into that of others so easily as maidens do theirs,--because carriages full of working-tools must follow after us,--and since we need much and contrive much;--from all this our claim to a pa.s.sport is very well deduced, without the least detriment to our characters.

After a half-eternity of dressing,--since, in the neighborhood of the loved one, an hour of absence lasts longer than a month when she is far off,--the maidens entered, equipped for travelling, in the black dress of brides. How charmingly the roses become Rabette, in her dark hair, and the lace edging on the white neck, and the timid flames of her pure eye, and the flitting blushes! And Liana--I speak not of this saint.

Even the good old Director, when the innocent face looked upon him so childlike from beneath the white veil of India muslin, sprinkled with gold wire, which was simply thrown over her head after the manner of the nuns, could not but give his satisfaction words: "Like a nun, like an angel!" She answered: "I wanted once really to be one with a friend; but now I take the veil later than she," she added, with a wondrous tone.

She hung to-day with tender enthusiasm upon Rabette, perhaps from the weakness of ill health, perhaps from love for Albano and the parents, and perhaps because Rabette, in her love, was so good and beautiful, and because she herself was nothing but heart. She had, besides, the sacred fault of forming too enthusiastic conceptions of her female friends,--into which the n.o.bler maidens easily fall, and which belongs less to married women,--carried to an unusual height; thus, for instance, her friend Caroline, who had met her like a heroine of romance only on the romantic playground of friendship and beautiful nature, she could not, in the beginning, without a rending away of the saintly halo, at all conceive of as having hands, which drove the needle and flat-iron, and other implements of the female field of labor.

Whoso will feel the tenderest partic.i.p.ation in joy, let him look not at happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina--across whose face time had struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no step-motherly discord appeared--look oftener to and fro, and more benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and perturbations of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the "hypocrisy and spiritlessness[173] of the young people now-a-days,"

compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day a.s.signed himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had he--(others have the devil, the deuse)--the journeyman's greeting of genius, _Rascal_, together with the derivatives, _rascality_, &c. But how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits.

The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly.

The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art, by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom!

66. CYCLE.

The carriage flew through the village with the four young people. How grateful to our youth was the expanse of heaven and of earth! The portal of life--youth--was hung with flowers and lights. They rolled along at the foot of the mountain by the bird-pole, the sign-post of a boyish Arcadia, by the cradle where, in the enraptured sleep of childhood, he had stretched out his boyish arm after the high heaven; and through the birch thicket, now dwindled in his eyes to a bush, which, on that golden morning, he had found so broad and long; and by the open triumphal arch of the east, behind which the sea of the many-shaped Lilar poured the tide of its charms; and when they arrived behind the mountain-wall of the flute-dell, they sent back the carriage.

They walked on a glorious earth, under a glorious heaven. Pure and white swam the sun like a swan through the blue flood,--meadows and villages crowded up close around the distant, low mountain-ridges; a soft wind swayed the green waves of the crop to and fro all over the plain; on the hills shadows lay fast asleep under the wings of white clouds; and behind the summits of the heights the mast-trees of the Rhine ships majestically sailed away.

As Albano went along so close by the side of his beloved, the purgatory burning under his Eden fell back deeper and deeper into the earth's core; full of uneasiness and hope, he cast his fiery eye now on the summer, now on the mild vesper-star, which glimmered so near to him out of the spring ether. The good maiden seemed to-day more still, serious, and restless than usual. As they went through a little wood, open on all sides, along the ridge of a hill that ran round the flute-dell, Liana suddenly said to the Count, she heard flutes. Scarcely could he say, he heard only far-off turtle-doves, when she at once collected herself as for something wonderful, fixed her eyes on heaven, smiled, and suddenly looked round toward Albano, and grew red. Then turning to him, she said: "I will be frank; I hear at this moment music within me.[174] Forgive me to-day my weakness and tenderness; it comes from yesterday." "I--you?"

said he, pa.s.sionately; for he, about whom in sicknesses only burning images stormed, was inspired with veneration for a being to whom, as if from her higher world, low tones like golden sunbeams reach down in her pains, and pa.s.s veiled through the rough deep.

But Liana, as if for the sake of turning aside his enthusiasm, came upon the subject of her friend Caroline, and told how she always hovered before her on such days, and especially on this walk. "In the beginning I sought her out," said Liana, "because she resembled my Linda. She was my instructress, although she was only a few weeks older than I. Her pure, severe, unflinching character, and her readiness to sacrifice herself cheerfully and in silence, made her even, if I may say so, worthy of veneration in the eyes of her mother. She was never seen to weep, tender as she was, for she wished to keep her mother always cheerful. We were going to take the veil in company, for the sake of being always together; I should not live to become old, she said, and I must spend my short life happily and without anxiety; but also in preparation for the next. Ah, she herself went up before me!

Night-watching by the sick-bed of her mother, and sorrow for her death, took her away. She received the holy supper, for which we were preparing ourselves together, only on her death-bed. Then did the angel give me this veil, in which I am some time to follow her. O good, good Caroline!" She wept unconcealedly, and pressed, with emotion, Albano's hand. "O, I should not have begun about this! There comes already our friend; we will be right cheerful!"

They had now pa.s.sed through a high wood of under-brush, which teasingly disclosed and hid by turns the landscapes that glided around them, and had come near to the spire which looks in upon the flute-dell, and near which lay a solitary church and Spener's dwelling, and in the plain below the open village. Spener came to meet his pupil--after the manner of old men--unconcerned about the others; and a young roe ran after him.

A beautiful spot! Little white peac.o.c.ks; turtle-doves at large; a city of bees in the midst of their bee-flora,--all bespoke the tranquil old man, whom the earth serves and honors, and who, indifferent towards it, lives only in G.o.d. He came--disappointing one's expectation of an ecclesiastical gravity--with a light playfulness upon the gay train, and laid his finger in benediction on the forehead of Liana, who seemed to be his granddaughter, as it were, a second tree-blossom in the late autumn of life. In a daughterly way, she placed the bunch of dwarf-roses in his bosom, and took very careful notice whether it pleased him. She smiled quite serenely, and all her tears seemed fanned away; but she resembled the rain-sprinkled tree, when the sun laughs out again,--the least agitation flings the old rain from the still leaves.