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Titan: A Romance. v. 1 (of 2)

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Title: Titan: A Romance. v. 1 (of 2)

Author: Jean Paul

Translator: Charles Timothy Brooks


        
Release date: March 23, 2011 [eBook #35664]
                Most recently updated: November 22, 2021

Language: English

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Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci and the
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[Illustration]


TITAN:

A ROMANCE.

FROM THE GERMAN OF

_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER._

TRANSLATED BY

CHARLES T. BROOKS.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

[Illustration]

BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1864.


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, by

TICKNOR AND FIELDS,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

THIRD EDITION.


_UNIVERSITY PRESS:_
WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,
_CAMBRIDGE._




TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.


The "Titan" is Jean Paul's longest--and the author meant it, and held
it, to be his greatest and best--romance; and his public (including Mr.
Carlyle) seems, on the whole, to have sustained his opinion. He was ten
years about it, and his other works, written in the interval, were
preparatory and tributary to this.

As to the _general_ meaning of the title there can hardly, on the whole,
be any doubt. It does _not_ refer, as the division into Jubilees and
Cycles might, to be sure, suggest to one on first approaching it, to the
titanic scale and scope of the work, but to the titanic violence against
which it is aimed.

It seems, indeed, from a letter of the author's, that he thought at
first of calling it "Anti-Titan." The only question in regard to the
_application_ of the title seems to be, whether the champion of truth
and justice against the moral Titans in this case was meant to be
understood as represented by the hero of the story, with his friends,
resisting the iniquity which moved earth and hell to ruin him, or
whether the book itself is the Anti-Titan, and an age of extravagance
the Titan.

A French critic says of the "Titan":--

"It is a poem, a romance; a psychological _résumé_, a satire, an elegy,
a drama, a fantasy; having for theme and text the enigma of civilization
in the eighteenth century.

"How is it to end, this civilization which exaggerates alike
intellectual and industrial power at the expense of the life of the
soul,--wholly factitious, theatrical,--intoxicating, consuming itself
with pleasure, seeking everywhere new enjoyments,--exploring all the
secrets of nature, without being able to penetrate the first causes, the
secrets of God,--what will be the fate of these generations
supersaturated with romances, dramas, journals, with science, ambition,
with vehement aspirations after the unknown and impossible?...

"In augmenting the sum of its desires, will it augment the sum of its
happiness? Is it not going to increase immensely its capacity of
suffering?

"Will it not be the giant that scales heaven--

"And that falls crushed to death?

"TITAN!"

In giving his romance the title of "Titan," says the same writer, "it is
not Albano de Cesara the author has in view, but his antipode, Captain
Roquairol,--that romantic being, that insatiable lover of pleasure, that
anticipated Byron, that scaler of heaven,--who, after having piled
mountain upon mountain to attain his object, ends in finding himself
buried under the ruins....

"Even while at work upon 'Hesperus,' he had formed the resolution of
placing a pure man, great and noble, by the side of a reprobate, and of
surrounding them both with a multitude of beings corresponding to them.
He wished to concentrate in a single work all the ideas of high
philosophy which he had disseminated in his other creations, and to show
them followed by their natural consequences. So strong a mind could not
stop there: he resolved to show the absurdity of exaggeration, whether
in good or in evil, in virtue or in vice.

"Hence those reproductions of the same types, those satellites
gravitating around their respective planets; in fine, those parodies of
the principal personages of the drama.

"By the side of the coldness and the vast plans of Don Gaspard de
Cesara, we have the no less dangerous intrigues, though upon a less
elevated scale, of the Minister von Froulay; by the side of the
ventriloquist Uncle, the lying Roquairol; the Princess Isabelle is
opposed to Linda de Romeiro, the aerial Liana to her physical
counterpart, the Princess Idoine; the comic vulgarity of Dr. Sphex
contrasts with the more elevated buffoonery of Schoppe; and if we have
Bouverot, we have also Dion, that Greek so elegant and so noble, happy
mixture of the antique and the modern, that artist so sensible and so
true....

"The history of Albano, opposed to Roquairol, is the history, taken from
his tenderest childhood to the epoch of his greatest development, of a
being who, as the strictest consequence of a quite special education,
goes through life, wounding himself with all its griefs, drinking at the
source of all its lawful pleasures; suffering with nobleness, tasting of
happiness, but only the purest kind; exposed every instant to see
himself drawn away by fallacious principles, and nevertheless moving on
with a steady step towards the end which his reason has marked out for
him; sacrificing to the fulfilment of his duties all the delights that a
debauched court can offer a young man entering into the world. While all
the personages who gravitate around him, and who represent each a
different aberration from the fundamental principle of the work, fall
successively at his side, victims of the natural consequences of their
passions, he, strengthening himself by every fall of which he is
witness, ends by attaining the loftiest position which the ambition of
man can desire,--a position which he could not have expected, and for
which, consequently, he had not been able to make the sacrifices that,
in the course of the work, he does not cease to achieve."

The author whom we have thus copiously quoted alludes to Jean Paul's
having had the idea of "Titan" while writing "Hesperus." This reminds us
of a Philistine disparagement of the "Titan," that so many of the
characters of the other work reappear here under new names. There are
some critics who ought to object to the full moon, that she is only the
same old moon that we had, in her first quarter or half, several nights
ago. However, as we have not yet had "Hesperus" in English, nor are
likely to for some time, this kind of objection will not trouble English
readers of "Titan."

Jean Paul has been justly praised for his success in drawing and shading
female characters. Our French critic says: "Richter has the rare merit
of placing on the stage in the same work six female personages, who have
not a shadow of resemblance to each other, and who, from the moment of
their appearance on the scene to that of their quitting it, never
deviate a single minute from the character the author has given them."

The fate of his Titanide, Linda, created a loud remonstrance in Germany;
and one can hardly, indeed, help feeling as if poetic justice had been a
little caricatured, at least, in Richter's disposal of that half
strong-headed and half headstrong woman. Painful, however, as her end
is, the Translator could not listen an instant to the suggestion of
omitting a line of the scenes in which that terrible tragedy is brought
to a close.

When the "Titan" first appeared, complaint was made by some that there
was too much of drollery, by others that there was not enough; some
found too much sentimentality, others too much philosophy; the
Translator has found it full, if not of that brevity which is the soul
of _wit_ (not, however, of humor), yet of that variety which is the
spice of life.

The Translator (or Transplanter, for he aspires to the title) of this
huge production, in his solicitude to preserve the true German aroma of
its native earth, may have brought away some part of the soil, and even
stones, clinging to the roots (_stones of offence_ they may prove to
many, stones of stumbling to many more). He can only say, that if he had
made Jean Paul always talk in ordinary, conventional, straightforward,
instantly intelligible prose, the reader would not have had _Jean Paul
the Only_.

And yet it is confidently claimed that, under all the exuberance of
metaphor and simile, and learned technical illustrations and odd
digressions, and gorgeous episodes and witching interludes, that
characterizes Richter, every attentive and thoughtful reader will find a
broad and solid ground of real good sense and good feeling, and that in
this extraordinary man whom, at times, his best friends were almost
tempted to call a crazy giant, will be found one whose _heart_ (to use
the homely phrase) is ever _in the right place_.

It has seemed necessary to give a few notes, and only a few. Properly to
furnish such a work with annotations would require Jean Paul's own
voluminous un-commonplace-books of all out-of-the-way knowledge, and
that _Dictionary to Jean Paul_ which one of his countrymen began, but
unfortunately carried only through one of his works, the work on
Education, _Levana_.

The Translator desires emphatically to express his obligations to his
friend, Rev. Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and to _his_ friend, the
accomplished scholar, Mr. Knorr, to whose kind and patient care whatever
of accuracy or felicity there may be in his version of the first Jubilee
is largely due; also, to Rev. Dr. Hedge, and all the friends who have
helped him with suggestion and encouragement in this large and difficult
undertaking, he makes his warmest acknowledgments;--and he closes by
commending the Titan to all lovers of the humanities, confident (in the
words of Mrs. Lee, in her Life of Jean Paul) that "the more it is read,
the more it will be acknowledged a work of exalted genius, pure
morality, and perennial beauty."

                            C. T. B.
    NEWPORT, R. I.




TO

THE FOUR LOVELY AND NOBLE SISTERS ON THE THRONE.[1]

_THE DREAM OF TRUTH._


Aphrodite, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia once looked down into the
clear-obscure of earth, and, weary of the ever-bright but cold Olympus,
yearned to enter in beneath the clouds of our world, where the Soul
loves more because it suffers more, and where it is sadder but more
warm. They heard the holy tones ascend, with which Polyhymnia passes
invisibly up and down the low, anxious earth, to cheer and lift our
hearts; and they mourned that their throne stood so far from the sighs
of the helpless.

Then they determined to take the earthly veil, and to clothe themselves
in our mortal form. They came down from Olympus; Love and little loves
and genii flew playfully after them, and our nightingales fluttered to
meet them out of the bosom of May.

But, as they touched the first flowers of earth, and flung only rays of
light, and cast no shadows, then the earnest Queen of gods and men,
Fate, raised her eternal sceptre, and said: "The immortal becomes mortal
upon the earth, and every spirit becomes a human being!"

So they became human beings and sisters, and were called _Louisa_,
_Charlotte_, _Theresa_, _Frederica_; the little loves and genii
transformed themselves into their children, and flew into their maternal
arms, and the motherly and sisterly hearts throbbed full of new love in
a great embrace. And when the white banner of the blooming spring
fluttered abroad, and more human thrones stood before them,--and when,
blissfully softened by love, the harmonica of life, they looked upon
each other and their happy children, and were speechless for love and
bliss,--then did Polyhymnia, invisible, float by over them, and
recognize them, and gave them the tones wherewith the heart expresses
and awakens love and joy.

And the dream was ended and fulfilled; it had, as is always the case,
shaped itself after waking reality. Therefore, be it consecrated to the
four fair and noble sisters, and let all which is like it in _Titan_ be
so consecrated too!

                               JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Titan was published during the years 1800-1803. The four
sisters were the four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, viz.
the Duchess of Hildburghausen, the Princess von Solms, the
Princess of Thun and Taxis, and the Louisa who afterward became
Queen of Prussia, and was so in the Liberation War.--TR.




CONTENTS OF VOL. I.


FIRST JUBILEE.
                                                               PAGE

PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--THE
PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE
EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF
BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE
TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE
FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING
OF FANCY                                                          1


SECOND JUBILEE.

THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE
FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A
STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING
CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE TORTURE
SOUPÉ.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD, BUT
WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION                                 70


THIRD JUBILEE.

METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR
PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN
OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.                           110


FOURTH JUBILEE.

HIGH STYLE OF LOVE.--THE GOTHA POCKET-ALMANAC.--DREAMS ON
THE TOWER.--THE SACRAMENT AND THE THUNDER-STORM.--THE
NIGHT-JOURNEY INTO ELYSIUM.--NEW ACTORS AND STAGES, AND THE
ULTIMATUM OF THE SCHOOL-YEARS                                   128


FIFTH JUBILEE.

GRAND-ENTRY.--DR. SPHEX.--THE DRUMMING CORPSE.--THE LETTER
OF THE KNIGHT.--RETROGRADATION OF THE
DYING-DAY.--JULIENNE.--THE STILL GOOD-FRIDAY OF OLD
AGE.--THE HEALTHY AND BASHFUL HEREDITARY
PRINCE.--ROQUAIROL.--THE BLINDNESS.--SPHEX'S PREDILECTION
FOR TEARS.--THE FATAL BANQUET.--THE DOLOROSO OF LOVE            161


SIXTH JUBILEE.

THE TEN PERSECUTIONS OF THE READER.--LIANA'S EASTERN
ROOM.--DISPUTATION UPON PATIENCE.--THE PICTURESQUE CURE         197


SEVENTH JUBILEE.

ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF
POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL
"MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON
BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE                215


EIGHTH JUBILEE.

LE PETIT LEVER OF DR. SPHEX.--PATH TO
LILAR.--WOODLAND-BRIDGE.--THE MORNING IN
ARCADIA.--CHARITON.--LIANA'S LETTER AND PSALM OF
GRATITUDE.--SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH A GARDEN.--THE
FLUTE-DELL.--CONCERNING THE REALITY OF THE IDEAL                238


NINTH JUBILEE.

PLEASURE OF COURT-MOURNING.--THE BURIAL.--ROQUAIROL.--LETTER
TO HIM.--THE SEVEN LAST WORDS IN THE WATER.--THE SWEARING OF
ALLEGIANCE.--MASQUERADE.--PUPPET MASQUERADE.--THE HEAD IN
THE AIR, TARTARUS, THE SPIRIT-VOICE, THE FRIEND, THE
CATACOMB, AND THE TWO UNITED MEN                                268


TENTH JUBILEE.

ROQUAIROL'S ADVOCATUS DIABOLI.--THE FESTIVAL DAY OF
FRIENDSHIP                                                      310


ELEVENTH JUBILEE.

EMBROIDERY.--ANGLAISE.--CEREUS SERPENS.--MUSICAL FANTASIES      334


TWELFTH JUBILEE.

FROULAY'S BIRTHDAY AND PROJECTS.--EXTRA-LEAF.--RABETTE.--THE
HARMONICA.--NIGHT.--THE PIOUS FATHER.--THE WONDROUS
STAIRWAY.--THE APPARITION                                       351


THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.

ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE
PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TÊTE-À-TÊTE.--THE
RIDE TO BLUMENBÜHL                                              384


FOURTEENTH JUBILEE.

ALBANO AND LIANA                                                405


FIFTEENTH JUBILEE.

MAN AND WOMAN                                                   432


SIXTEENTH JUBILEE.

THE SORROWS OF A DAUGHTER                                       481




TITAN.

FIRST JUBILEE.

     PASSAGE TO ISOLA BELLA.--FIRST DAY OF JOY IN THE TITAN.--THE
     PASQUIN-IDOLATER.--INTEGRITY OF THE EMPIRE
     EULOGIZED.--EFFERVESCENCE OF YOUTH.--LUXURY OF
     BLEEDING.--RECOGNITION OF A FATHER.--GROTESQUE
     TESTAMENT.--GERMAN PREDILECTION FOR POEMS AND THE ARTS.--THE
     FATHER OF DEATH.--GHOST-SCENE.--THE BLOODY DREAM.--THE SWING
     OF FANCY.


1. CYCLE.

On a fine spring evening, the young Spanish Count Cesara came, with his
companions, Schoppe and Dian, to Sesto, in order the next morning to
cross over to the Borromæan island, Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore. The
proudly blooming youth glowed with the excitement of travelling, and
with thoughts of the coming morrow, when he should see the isle, that
gayly decorated throne of Spring, and on it a man who had been promised
him for twenty years. This twofold glow exalted my picturesque hero to
the form of an angry god of the Muses. His beauty made a more triumphal
entry into Italian eyes than into the narrow Northern ones from the
midst of which he had come; in Milan many had wished he were of marble,
and stood with elder gods of stone, either in the Farnese Palace or in
the Clementine Museum, or in the Villa of Albani; nay, had not the
Bishop of Novara, with his sword at his side, a few hours before, asked
Schoppe (riding behind) who he was? And had not the latter, with a droll
squaring of the wrinkle-circle round his lips, made this copious answer
(by way of enlightening his spiritual lordship): "It's my Telemachus,
and I am the Mentor. I am the milling-machine and the die which coins
him,--the wolf's tooth and flattening mill which polishes him down,--the
man, in short, that regulates him"?

The glowing form of the youthful Cesara was still more ennobled by the
earnestness of an eye always buried in the future, and of a firmly shut,
manly mouth, and by the daring decision of young, fresh faculties; he
seemed as yet to be a burning-glass in the moonlight, or a dark precious
stone of too much color, which the world, as in the case of other
jewels, can brighten and improve only by cutting _hollow_.

As he drew nearer and nearer, the island attracted him, as one world
does another, more and more intensely. His internal restlessness rose as
the outward tranquillity deepened. Beside all this, Dian, a Greek by
birth and an artist, who had often circumnavigated and sketched Isola
Bella and Isola Madre, brought these obelisks of Nature still nearer to
his soul in glowing pictures; and Schoppe often spoke of the great man
whom the youth was to see to-morrow for the first time. As the people
were carrying by, down below in the street, an old man fast asleep, into
whose strongly marked face the setting sun cast fire and life, and who
was, in short, a corpse borne uncovered, after the Italian custom,
suddenly, in a wild and hurried tone, he asked his friends, "Does my
father look thus?"

But what impels him with such intense emotions towards the island is
this: He had, on Isola Bella, with his sister, who afterward went to
Spain, and by the side of his mother, who had since passed to the
shadowy land, sweetly toyed and dreamed away the first three years of
his life, lying in the bosom of the high flowers of Nature; the island
had been, to the morning slumber of life, to his childhood's hours, a
Raphael's painted sleeping-chamber. But he had retained nothing of it
all in his head and heart, save in the one a deep, sadly sweet emotion
at the name, and in the other the squirrel, which, as the family
scutcheon of the Borromæans, stands on the upper terrace of the island.

After the death of his mother his father transplanted him from the
garden-mould of Italy--some of which, however, still adhered to the
tap-roots--into the royal forest of Germany; namely, to Blumenbühl, in
the principality of Hohenfliess, which is as good as unknown to the
Germans; there he had him educated in the house of a worthy nobleman,
or, to speak more meaningly and allegorically, he caused the pedagogical
professional gardeners to run round him with their water-pots,
grafting-knives, and pruning-shears, till the tall, slender palm-tree,
full of sago-pith and protecting thorns, outgrew them, and could no
longer be reached by their pots and shears.

And now, when he shall have returned from the island, he is to pass from
the field-bed of the country to the tanvat and hot-bed of the city, and
to the trellises of the court garden; in a word, to Pestitz, the
university and chief city of Hohenfliess, even the sight of which, until
this time, his father had strictly forbidden him.

And to-morrow he sees that father for the first time! He must have
burned with desire, since his whole life had been one preparation for
this meeting, and his foster-parents and teachers had been a sort of
chalcographic company, who had engraved in copper a portrait of the
author of his life-book so magnificently opposite the title-page. His
father, Gaspard de Cesara, Knight of the Golden Fleece (whether Spanish
or Austrian I should be glad to be precisely informed myself), a spirit
naturally three-edged, sharp, and brightly polished, had in his youth
wild energies, for whose play only a battle-field or a kingdom would
have been roomy enough, and which in high life had as little power of
motion as a sea-monster in a harbor. He satisfied them by playing
star-parts with all ranks in comedies and tragedies, by the prosecution
of all sciences, and by an eternal tour: he was intimate and often
involved with great and small men and courts, yet always marched along
as a stream with its own waves through the sea of the world. And now,
after having completed his travels by land and sea round the whole
circumference of life, round its joys and capacities and systems, he
still continues (especially since the Present, that ape of the Past, is
always running after him) to pursue his studies and geographical
journeyings; but always for scientific purposes, just as he visits now
the European battle-fields. As for the rest, he is not at all gloomy,
still less gay, but composed and calm; he does not even hate and love,
blame and praise other men any more than he does himself, but values
every one in his kind, the dove in hers and the tiger in his. What often
seems vengeance is merely the determined, soldier-like tread wherewith a
man, who can never flee and fear, but only knows how to advance and
stand his ground, tramples down larks'-eggs and ears of corn.

I think that the corner which I have thus snipped off from the
Whistonian chart of this comet, for the benefit of mankind, is broad
enough. I will, before I discourse further, reserve the privilege to
myself, of sometimes calling Don Gaspard _the Knight_, without appending
to him the Golden Fleece; and, secondly, of not being obliged by
courtesy towards the short memory of readers to steal from his son
Cesara (under which designation the old man will never appear) his
Christian name, which, to be sure, is _Albano_.

As Don Gaspard was about leaving Italy for Spain, he had, through
Schoppe, caused our Albano, or Cesara, to be brought hither without any
one's knowing why he did it at so late a period. Was it his pleasure,
perhaps, to gaze into the full spring-time of the young twigs? Did he
wish to unfold to the youth some rules for rustics in the
century-almanac of court life? Would he imitate the old Gauls, or the
modern inhabitants of the Cape, who never suffered their sons in their
presence till they were grown up and capable of bearing arms? Was
nothing less than that his idea? This much only I comprehend, that I
should be a very good-natured fool if I were, in the very fore-court of
the work, to suffer myself to be burdened with the task of drawing and
dotting out from the few data that I now have, in the case of a man so
remarkable, and whose magnetic needle declines so many degrees,--a
Wilkes's magnetic table of inclinations;--he, not I, is the father of
his son, to be sure, and he knows of course why he did not send for him
till his beard was grown.

When it struck twenty-three o'clock (the hour before sundown), and
Albano would have counted up the tedious strokes, he was so excited that
he was not in a condition to ascend the long tone-ladder;[2] he must
away to the shore of the Lago, in which the up-towering islands rise
like sceptred sea-gods. Here stood the noble youth, his inspired
countenance full of the evening glow, with exalted emotions of heart,
sighing for his veiled father, who, hitherto, with an influence like
that of the sun behind a bank of clouds, had made the day of his life
warm and light. This longing was not filial love,--_that_ belonged to
his foster-parents, for childlike love can only spring up toward a heart
whereon we have long reposed, and which has protected us, as it were,
with the first heart's-leaves against cold nights and hot days,--his
love was higher or rarer. Across his soul had been cast a gigantic
shadow of his father's image, which lost nothing by Gaspard's coldness.
Dian compared it to the repose on the sublime countenance of the Juno
Ludovici; and the enthusiastic son likened it to another sudden chill
which often comes into the heart in company with too great warmth from
another's heart, as burning-glasses burn feeblest precisely in the
hottest days. He even hoped he might perchance melt off by his love this
father's heart, so painfully frozen to the glaciers of life: the youth
comprehended not how possible it was to resist a true, warm heart, at
least his.

Our hero, reared in the Carthusian monastery of rural life, and more in
past ages than his own, applied to every subject antediluvian gigantic
standards of measurement; the invisibility of the Knight constituted a
part of his greatness, and the Moses'-veil doubled the glory which it
concealed. Our youth had, in general, a singular leaning toward
extraordinary men, of whom others stand in dread. He read the eulogies
of every great man with as much delight as if they were meant for him;
and if the mass of people consider uncommon spirits as, for that very
reason, bad,--just as they take all strange petrifactions to be Devil's
bones,--in him the reverse was the case: in him _love_ dwelt a neighbor
to _wonder_, and his breast was always at the same time wide and warm.
To be sure, every young man and every great man who looks upon another
as great, considers him for that very reason as too great. But in every
noble heart burns a perpetual thirst for a nobler, in the fair, for a
fairer; it wishes to behold its ideal out of itself, in bodily presence,
with glorified or adopted form, in order the more easily to attain to
it, because the lofty man can ripen only by a lofty one, as diamond can
be polished only by diamond. On the other hand, does a litterateur, a
cit, a newspaper carrier or contributor wish to get a glimpse of a great
head,--and is he as greedy for a great head as for an abortion with
three heads,--or a Pope with as many caps,--or a stuffed shark,--or a
speaking-machine or a butter-machine,--it is not because his inner man
is burdened and beset by the soul-inspiring ideal of a great man, pope,
shark, three-headed monster, or butter-model, but it is because he
thinks, in the morning, "I can't help wondering how the creature looks,"
and because, in the evening, he means to tell how he looks, over a glass
of beer.

Albano looked from the shore with increasing restlessness across the
shining water toward the holy dwelling-place of his past childhood, his
departed mother, his absent sister. The songs of gladness thrilled
through him as they came floating along on the distant boats; every
running wave--the foaming surge--raised a higher in his bosom; the giant
statue of St. Borromæus,[3] looking away over the cities, embodied the
exalted one (his father) who stood erect in his heart, and the blooming
pyramid, the island, was the paternal throne; the sparkling chain of the
mountains and glaciers wound itself fast around his spirit, and lifted
him up to lofty beings and lofty thoughts.

The first journey, especially when Nature casts over the long road
nothing but white radiance and orange-blossoms and chestnut-shadows,
imparts to the youth what the last journey often takes away from the
man,--a dreaming heart, wings for the ice-chasms of life, and wide-open
arms for every human breast.

He went back, and with his commanding eye begged his friends to set sail
this very evening, although Don Gaspard was not to come to the island
till to-morrow morning. Often, what he wanted to do in a week, he
proposed to himself for the next day, and at last did it at once. Dian
tapped the impetuous Boreas on the head lovingly, and said: "Impatient
being, thou hast here the wings of a Mercury, and down there too
(pointing to his feet)! But just cool off! In the pleasant
after-midnight we embark, and when the dawn reddens in the sky we land."
Dian had not merely an artistic eye to his well-formed darling, but also
a tender interest in him, because he had often, in Blumenbühl, where he
had business as public architect, been the friend and guide of his
childhood and youth, and because now on the island he must tear himself
from his arms for some time and be absent at Rome. Since he (the public
architect) considered the same extravagance which he would rebuke in an
old man to be no extravagance in a youth,--an inundation to be no
inundation in Egypt, though it would be in Holland,--and since he
assumed a different average temperature for every individual, age, and
people, and in holy human nature found no string to be cut off, but only
at most to be tuned, surely Cesara must have cherished toward the
cheerful and indulgent teacher, on whose two tables of laws stood only,
Joy and moderation! a right hearty attachment, even more hearty than for
the laws themselves.

The images of the present and of the near future and of his father had
so filled the breast of the Count with greatness and immortality, that
he could not comprehend how any one could let himself be buried without
having achieved both, and that as often as the landlord brought in
anything, he pitied the man, particularly as he was always singing, and,
like the Neapolitans and Russians, in the minor key, because he was
never to be anything, certainly not immortal. The latter is a mistake;
for he gets his immortality here, and I take pleasure in giving place
and life to his name, _Pippo_ (abbreviated from Philippo). When, at
last, they paid and were about to go, and Pippo kissed a Kremnitz ducat,
saying, "Praised be the holy Virgin with the child on her _right_ arm,"
Albano was pleased that the father took after his pious little daughter,
who had been all the evening rocking and feeding an image of the child
Jesus. To be sure, Schoppe remarked, she would carry the child more
_lightly_ on her left arm;[4] but the error of the good youth is a merit
in him as well as the truth.

Beneath the splendor of a full moon they went on board the bark, and
glided away over the gleaming waters. Schoppe shipped some wines with
them, "not so much," said he, "that there is nothing to be had on the
island, as for this reason, that if the vessel should leak, then there
would be no need of pumping out anything but the flagons,[5] and she
would float again."

Cesara sank, silently, deeper and deeper into the glimmering beauties of
the shore and of the night. The nightingales warbled as if inspired on
the triumphal gate of spring. His heart grew in his breast like a melon
under its glass-bell, and his breast heaved higher and higher over the
swelling fruit. All at once he reflected that he should in this way see
the tulip-tree of the sparkling morn and the garlands of the island put
together only like an artificial, Italian silk-flower, stamen by stamen,
leaf by leaf; then was he seized with his old thirst for one single
draining draught from Nature's horn of plenty; he shut his eyes, not to
open them again, till he should stand upon the highest terrace of the
island before the morning sun. Schoppe thought he was asleep; but the
Greek smilingly guessed the epicurism of this artificial blindness, and
bound, himself, before those great insatiable eyes the broad, black
taffeta-ribbon, which, like a woman's ribbon or lace mask, contrasted
singularly and sweetly with his blooming but manly face.

Now the two began to tease and tantalize him in a friendly way with oral
night-pictures of the magnificent adornments of the shores between which
they passed. "How proudly," said Dian to Schoppe, "rises yonder the
castle of Lizanza, and its mountain, like a Hercules, with twelvefold
girdles of vine-clusters!" "The Count," said Schoppe in a lower tone to
Dian, "loses a vast deal by this bandaging of his eyes. See you not,
architect, to speak poetically, the glimmer of the city of Arona? How
beautifully she lays on Luna's blanc d'Espagne, and seems to be setting
herself out and prinking up for to-morrow in the powder-mantle of
moonshine which is flung around her! But that is nothing; still better
looks St. Borromæus yonder, who has the moon on his head like a
freshly-washed night-cap; stands not the giant there like the Micromegas
of the German body politic, just as high, just as stiff and stark?"

The happy youth was silent, and returned for answer a hand-pressure of
love;--he only dreamed of the present, and signified he could wait and
deny himself. With the heart of a child from whom the curtains and the
after-midnight hide the approaching Christmas present of the morrow, he
was borne along in the pleasure-boat, with tightly bandaged eyes, toward
the approaching, heavenly kingdom. Dian drew, as well as the double
light of the moonshine and the aurora permitted, a sketch of the veiled
dreamer in his scrap-book. I wish I had it here, and could see in it how
my darling, with the optic nerves tied up, strains at once the eye of
dream directed toward the inner world, and the ear of attention so
sharply set toward the outer. How beautiful is such a thing,
painted,--how much more beautiful realized in life!

The mantle of night grew thinner and cooler,--the morning air fanned
livingly against the breast,--the larks mingled with the nightingales
and with the singing boatmen,--and he heard, beneath his bandage, which
was growing lighter and lighter, the joyful discoveries of his friends,
who saw in the open cities along the shore the reviving stir of human
life, and on the waterfalls of the mountains the alternate reflections
of clouds and ruddy sky. At last the breaking splendors of morn hung
like a festoon of Hesperides-apples around the distant tops of the
chestnut-trees; and now they disembarked upon Isola Bella.

The veiled dreamer heard, as they ascended with him the ten terraces of
the garden, the deep-drawn sigh and shudder of joy close beside him, and
all the quick entreaties of astonishment; but he held the bandage fast,
and went blindfold from terrace to terrace, thrilled with
orange-fragrance, refreshed by higher, freer breezes, fanned by
laurel-foliage,--and when they had gained at last the highest terrace,
and looked down upon the lake, heaving its green waters sixty ells
below, then Schoppe cried, "Now! now!" But Cesara said, "No! the sun
first!" and at that moment the morning wind flung up the sunlight
gleaming through the dark twigs, and it flamed free on the summits,--and
Dian snatched off the bandage, and said, "Look round!" "O God!" cried he
with a shriek of ecstasy, as all the gates of the new heaven flew open,
and the Olympus of nature, with its thousand reposing gods, stood around
him. What a world! There stood the Alps, like brother giants of the Old
World, linked together, far away in the past, holding high up over
against the sun the shining shields of the glaciers. The giants wore
blue girdles of forest, and at their feet lay hills and vineyards, and
through the aisles and arches of grape-clusters the morning winds played
with cascades as with watered-silk ribbons, and the liquid brimming
mirror of the lake hung down by the ribbons from the mountains, and
they fluttered down into the mirror, and a carved work of chestnut woods
formed its frame.... Albano turned slowly round and round, looked into
the heights, into the depths, into the sun, into the blossoms; and on
all summits burned the alarm-fires of mighty Nature, and in all depths
their reflections,--a creative earthquake beat like a heart under the
earth and sent forth mountains and seas.... O then, when he saw on the
bosom of the infinite mother the little swarming children, as they
darted by under every wave and under every cloud,--and when the morning
breeze drove distant ships in between the Alps,--and when _Isola Madre_
towered up opposite to him, with her seven gardens, and tempted him to
lean upon the air and be wafted over on level sweep from his summit to
her own,--and when he saw the pheasants darting down from the _Madre_
into the waves,--then did he seem to stand like a storm-bird with
ruffled plumage on his blooming nest, his arms were lifted like wings by
the morning wind, and he longed to cast himself over the terrace after
the pheasants, and cool his heart in the tide of Nature.

Ashamed, he took, without looking round him, the hands of his friends
and pressed them in mute fervor, that he might not be obliged to speak.
The magnificent universe had painfully expanded, and then blissfully
overflowed his great breast; and now, when he opened his eyes, like an
eagle, wide and full upon the sun, and when the blinding brightness hid
the earth, and he began to be lonely, and the earth became smoke and the
sun a soft, white world, which gleamed only around the margin,--then did
his whole, full soul, like a thunder-cloud, burst asunder and burn and
weep, and from the pure, white sun his mother looked upon him, and in
the fire and smoke of the earth his father and his life stood veiled.

Silently he went down the terraces, often passing his hand across his
moist eyes to wipe away the dazzling shadow which danced on all the
summits and all the steps.

Exalted Nature! when we see and love thee, we love our fellow-men more
warmly; and when we must pity or forget them, thou still remainest with
us, reposing before the moist eye like a verdant chain of mountains in
the evening red. Ah, before the soul in whose sight the morning dew of
its ideals has faded to a cold, gray drizzle,--and before the heart,
which, in the subterranean passages of this life, meets no longer men,
but only dry, crooked-up mummies on crutches in catacombs,--and before
the eye which is impoverished and forsaken, and which no human creature
will any longer gladden,--and before the proud son of the gods whom his
unbelief and his lonely bosom, emptied of humanity, rivet down to an
eternal, unchangeable anguish,--before all these thou remainest,
quickening Nature, with thy flowers and mountains and cataracts, a
faithful comforter; and the bleeding son of the gods, cold and
speechless, dashes the drop of anguish from his eyes, that they may
rest, far and clear, on thy volcanoes, and on thy Springs, and on thy
suns!


2. CYCLE.

I could wish nothing finer for one whom I held dear, than a mother,--a
sister,--three years of living together on Isola Bella,--and then in the
twentieth, a morning hour when he should land on the Eden-island, and,
enjoying all this with the eye and memory at once, clasp and strain it
to his open soul. O thou all too happy Albano, on the rose-parterre of
childhood,--under the deep, blue sky of Italy,--in the midst of
luxuriant, blossom-laden citron-foliage,--in the bosom of _beautiful_
nature, who caresses and holds thee like a mother, and in the presence
of _sublime_ nature, which stands like a father in the distance, and
with a heart which expects its own father to-day!

The three now roamed with slow, unsteady steps through the swimming
paradise. Although both of the others had often trodden it before, still
their silver age became a golden age, by sympathy with Albano's ecstasy;
the sight of another's rapture wakes the old impression of our own. As
people who live near breakers and cataracts speak louder than others, so
did the majestic sounding of the swollen sea of life impart to them all,
even Schoppe, a stronger language; only he never could hit upon such
imposing words, at least gestures, as another man.

Schoppe, who must needs fling a farewell kiss back to dear Italy, would
gladly still have conserved the last scattered drops that hung around
the cup of joy, which were sweet as Italian wines, full of German fire
without the German acid. By acid he meant leave-taking and emotion. "If
fate," said he, "fires a single retreating shot, by Heaven, I quietly
turn my nag and ride whistling back. The deuce must be in the beast (or
on him) if a clever jockey could not so break his mourning steed that
the creature should carry himself very well as a companion-horse to the
festive steed.[6] I school my sun-horse as well as my sumpter-horse far
otherwise."

First of all, now, they took possession of this Otaheite-island by
marches, and every one of its provinces must pay them, as a Persian
province does its emperor, a different pleasure. "The lower terraces,"
said Schoppe, "must deliver to us squatter-sovereigns the tithe of fruit
and sack, in citron and orange fragrance,--the upper pays off the
imperial tax in _prospects_,--the Grotto down below there will pay, I
hope, Jews-scot in the _murmur_ of waters, and the cypress-wood up
yonder its princess's tribute in _coolness_,--the ships will not defraud
us of their Rhine and Neckar toll, but pay that down by showing
themselves in the distance."

It is not difficult for me to perceive that Schoppe, by these quizzical
sallies, aimed to allay the violent commotions of Cesara's brain and
heart; for the splendor of the morning enchantment, although the youth
spoke composedly of lesser things, had not yet gone from his sight. In
him every excitement vibrated long after (one in the morning lasted the
whole day), for the same reason that an alarm-bell keeps on humming
longer than a sheep-bell; although such a continuing echo could neither
distract his attention nor disturb his actions or his words.

The Knight was to come at noon. Meanwhile they roamed and revelled and
went humming about in stiller enjoyment with bees-wings and
bees-probosces through the richly-honeyed Flora of the island; and they
had that serene naturalness of children, artists, and Southern people,
which sips only from the honey-cup of the moment; and, accordingly, they
found in every dashing wave, in every citron-frame, in every statue
among blossoms, in every dancing reflection, in every darting ship, more
than one flower which opened its full cup wider under the warm sky,
whereas, with us, under our cold one, it fares as with the bees, against
whom the frosts of May shut the flowers up. O, the islanders are right!
Our greatest and most lasting error is, that we look for life, that is,
its happiness, as the materialists look for the soul, in the combination
of parts, as if the whole or the relation of its component parts could
give us anything which each individual part had not already. Does then
the heaven of our existence, like the blue one over our heads, consist
of mere empty air, which, when near to, and in little, is only a
transparent nothing, and which only in the distance and in gross becomes
blue ether? The century casts the flower-seeds of thy joy only from the
porous sowing-machine of minutes, or rather, to the blest eternity
itself there is no other handle than the instant. It is not that life
consists of seventy years, but the seventy years consist of a continuous
life, and one has lived, at all events, and lived enough, die when one
may.


3. CYCLE.

When, at length, the three sons of joy were about to seat themselves in
the dining-hall of a laurel grove before their meat-and-drink offering,
which Schoppe had stored away in the provision ship at Sesto, at that
moment, a genteel stranger, elegantly dressed in one color, came through
the twigs, with slow, stately steps, up to the reclining company, and
addressed himself, forthwith, without inquiry, to Cesara, in slow, soft,
and precisely pronounced German: "I am intrusted with an apology to Sir
Count Cesara."--"From my father?" asked he quickly. "Beg pardon,--from
my prince," replied the stranger; "he forbade your noble father, who
arose ill, to travel in the cool of the morning, but towards evening he
will meet you. In the mean time," he added, with a gracious smile and a
slight bow, "I sacrifice something on the noble Knight's account, in
commencing the pleasure of being longer with you hereafter, Sir Count,
by bringing you disappointment." Schoppe, who was neater at guessing
than at speaking, immediately broke out,--for he never let himself be
imposed upon by any man: "We are then pedagogic copartners and
confederates. Welcome, dear Gray-leaguesman!"[7] "It gives me pleasure,"
said the stranger, coldly, who was dressed in gray.

But Schoppe had hit it; the stranger was hereafter to occupy the place
of chief tutor to Cesara, and Schoppe was collaborator. To me this seems
judicious; the electric-sparkling Schoppe could serve as the cat's-skin,
the fox-tail, the glass cylinder, which should completely charge our
youth, composed as he was of conductors and non-conductors; the chief
tutor, as principal, being the operator and spark-taker, who should
discharge him with his Franklin's-points.

The man was named Von Augusti, was Lector to the prince, and had lived
much in the great world; he seemed, as is the case with all of this
court-stamp, ten years older than he really was, for he was in fact only
just thirty-seven.

One would have to suffer for it from the inverted ink-pots of the
reviewing Xanthippes, if one should leave the reviewers or Xanthippes in
any uncertainty as to who the prince really was of whom we have all made
mention above. It was the hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess, in whose
village of Blumenbühl the Count had been brought up, and into whose
chief city he was next to remove. The Hohenfliess Infante was hurrying
back, in a great dust and all out of breath, from Italy, wherein he had
left much spare coin and land-scrip, to Germany, in order there to coin,
upon his own account, allegiance-medals, because his reigning father was
going down the steps into the hereditary sepulchre, and was even now
within a few paces of his coffin.

During dinner the Lector Augusti spoke of the lovely scenery with true
taste, but with little warmth and impulse, preferring it by far to some
Tempestas[8] in the Borromæan palace. Thence he passed on, in order to
have occasion of mentioning the Knight as often as possible, to the
personalities of the Court, and confessed that the German gentleman, M.
de Bouverot, stood in especial favor,--for with courtiers and saints
everything goes by grace,--and that the Prince was uncommonly afflicted
in his nerves, &c. Courtiers, who, for the most part, cut their very
souls according to the pattern of another's, do, however, draw up their
ministerial reports of court so copiously and seriously for the
uninitiated, that the reader of their gazettes must needs either laugh
or go to sleep; a court-man and the book _Des Erreurs et de la Verité_
call the general of the Jesuits God, the Jesuits men, and the
non-Jesuits beasts. Schoppe listened with a dreadful pucker and twist of
feature; he hated courts bitterly. Young Albano thought not much better
of them; nay, as he was fond of venture, and liked much better to work
and fight with the arm than with the fingers of the inner man, and
delighted in tackling to the snow-plough and harrow and sowing-machine
of life war-horses and thunder-steeds, instead of a team of clever
home-and field-horses, of course people who went carefully and
considerately to work, and would rather do light, lacquered work, and
delicate ladies' work, than Hercules'-labors, he did not particularly
fancy. However he could not but feel a respect for the modesty of
Augusti, (based as it was upon a noble self-reliance,) which never let
him say a word about himself, as well as for the knowledge he had gained
by travel.

Cesara,--by the way I shall continue through this Cycle to write it with
a C, agreeably to the Spanish orthography; but in and after the 4th,
since I am not used to that letter in my orthography, and cannot be
forever misrepresenting myself through a long book, it will be written
with a Z,--Cesara could not hear enough from the Lector about his
father. He related to him the last act of the Knight in Rome, but with
an irreligious coldness which produced in the youth a chill of a
different kind. Don Gaspard, namely, had laid a wager with a German
Nuncius, picture against picture, that he would take a certain German
(Augusti would not name him), whose life was only one prolonged, moral
filth-month in the princely stable of Epicurus, and in two days, without
seeing him, would convert him for as long a time as the Nuncio should
desire. The latter accepted the wager, but caused the German to be
secretly watched. After two days the German locked himself up, became
devout, pale, still, bed-ridden, and in conduct came near to a true
Christian. The Nuncio watched the mischief for a week, then demanded the
sudden retransformation, or the Circe's wand, which should bring back
again the beastly shape. The Knight touched the German with the wand,
and the Epicurean swine stood there perfectly sound and well. I know not
which is the more inexplicable, the miracle, or the cold-bloodedness of
the thing. But the Lector could not say with what menstrua Gaspard
forced these rapid solutions and evaporations and precipitations.

At length the Lector, who had long been _frappé_ with the vocation and
the collaboratorship of the singular Schoppe, came, by polite
circumlocutions, upon the question, how the Knight had become acquainted
with him. "Through the Pasquino," he replied. "He was just stepping
round the corner of the Palazzo degli Ursini, when he saw some Romans
and our hereditary prince standing round a man who was on his knees
(they were my knees) before the statues of Pasquino and Marforio, and
offering to them the following prayer: Dear Castor and Pollux! why do ye
not secularize yourselves out of the ecclesiastical estate, and travel
through my Germany _in partibus infidelium_, or as two diligent vicars?
Could you not go round among the cities of the empire as missionary
preachers and referendaries, or post yourselves as _chevaliers
d'honneur_ and armorial bearers on either side of a throne? Would to God
they might at least vote thee, Pasquino, royal high-chaplain and master
of ceremonies in the court chapels, or let thee down from the roof by a
rope at the christening as baptismal angel! Say, could not you twins,
now, once come forward and speak as petition-masters-general in the
halls of the Diet, or, as _magistri sententiarum_, oppugn one another
within the walls of the universities on Commencement days? Pasquino, can
no Delia Porta[9] restore thee, were it only so far that thou mightest,
at least, at Congresses and treaty-makings of the diplomatic corps, play
the _silhouetteur_ as the figure-head of the stove, or must you serve at
the highest only in university libraries, as the busts of critical
editors? Ah, gay pair, would that Chigi, who stands here beside me,
might only model you into a portable pocket edition for ladies, I would
put you by, and not take you out of my pocket till I reached Germany! I
can, however, do it even here on the island," said Schoppe; whereupon he
drew forth the satirical work of art; for the renowned architect and
modeller, Chigi, who heard him, had really cast a copy of it. Schoppe
went on to tell how Don Gaspard then seriously stepped up to him, and
asked him, in Spanish, who he was. "I am (he answered also in Spanish)
actual Titular librarian to the Grand Master at Malta, and a descendant
of the so-called grammatical dog, the toothed humanist, Scioppius
(German Schoppe); my baptismal name is Pero, Piero, Pietro (Peter). But
many here call me, by mistake, Sciupio or Sciopio (extravagance)."

Gaspard had an impartial, deep-reaching eye for every spirit, even
though it were most unlike his own; and, least of all, did he seek a
repetition of himself. He therefore took the librarian home with him.
Since, now, the latter seemed to live solely by portrait-painting, and
was besides just meaning to go back to Germany, he accordingly proposed
to this rich, many-eyed, rough spirit, Albano's society, which only the
present fellow-laborer, Augusti, was to share with him. But there were
four things which the librarian demanded beforehand, as
preliminaries,--a sitting from the Count, his profile, and--when both
these had been granted--yet a third and a fourth, in the following
terms: "Must I suffer myself to be _calendered_[10] by the
three estates, and forced to take on gloss and smoothness by
polishing-presses? I will not; whithersoever else, be it to
heaven or hell, I will accompany your son, but not into the
stamping-washing-roasting-melting-and-forcing-works of great houses."
This was granted easiest of all; besides, the second Imperial vicegerent
of the paternal supremacy, Augusti, was appointed to the business in
question. But upon the fourth point they came near falling out. Schoppe,
who would rather be an outlaw than a slave or a freedman, and whose
ground, no less imperially free than fruitful, would not endure a hedge,
could accommodate himself only to accidental, undetermined services, and
felt obliged to decline the _fixum_ of a salary. "I will," said he,
"deliver occasional sermons, but none of your weekly sermons; nay, it
may be, oftentimes, I shall not enter the desk for a half-year
together." The Knight considered it beneath him to be under obligations,
and drew back, till Schoppe hit upon the diagonal road, and said he
would give his society as a _don gratuit_, and should expect of the
Knight, from time to time, a considerable _don gratuit_ in return. As
for the rest, Schoppe was now full as dear to the Knight as the
first-best Turk of the Court who had ever helped him up his
carriage-steps; his trial of a man was like a post-mortem examination,
and after the trial he neither loved nor hated more cordially; to him,
as he looked into the show-piece of blustering life, the manager and the
first and second mistresses, and the Lears and Iphigenias and heroes
were no friends, nor were the Kasperls and the tyrants and
supernumeraries foes, but they were simply different actors in different
parts. Ah, Gaspard, standest thou, then, in the front box, and not also
on the stage of life itself? And dost thou not in the great drama
recognize, like Hamlet, a lesser one? Ay, does not every stage imply,
after all, a twofold life,--a copying and a copied?

Either the glass or two (or more) of wine, or else his annoying contrast
to the elegant, sedate Lector, set Schoppe's winnowing-mill with all its
wheels in motion, though this humor of his found small scope on the
enchanting island; and when Augusti expressed a wish that Schoppe might
go to Germany under happier auspices than other painters, the latter
drew forth a pack of gilded pictures of German patron saints, and said,
shuffling them: "Many a one would here lay a papal miserere on the desk
and sing it off, particularly if, like me, he had to go into winter
quarters among the German ice and fog-banks in the middle of
spring;--and it is with reluctance, I am free to confess, I leave the
Harlequin and Pulzinella and Scapin, and the whole _comedia dell' arte_
behind. But the gentlemen saints whom I here shuffle have brought the
lands under their charge into high and dry condition, and one passes
through them with comfort. Mr. Architect, you laugh, but you know
altogether too little of what these painted heavenly advowees hourly
undertake in behalf of the German circles. Mr. Architect, show me, after
all, a country anywhere, in which so many cudgels, programmes,
professors, _Perukes-allongées_, learned advertisements, imperial
notices, cits and surburbans, ceremonies, coronations, and Heidelberg
tubs, but without indwelling Diogeneses, are to be mustered together as
in the aforementioned? Or I appeal to you, Mr. Von Augusti! Point out to
me, I pray, one single territory which is provided with such a _Long
Parliament_, namely, a most lengthy Diet of the Empire, as it were, an
extraordinarily wholesome _pillula perpetua_[11] which the patient is
incessantly swallowing, and which as incessantly purges him; and who is
not reminded, as well as myself, in this connection, of the _capitulatio
perpetua_, and in general of the body politic of the Empire, that
_perpetuum immobile_,--and on good grounds?" Here Schoppe drank. "The
body of the Empire becomes thereby, like the first principle of morals,
or like virgin earth, altogether insoluble; nay, supposing one of us
were to take an electoral sword, and cut it in two therewith, as if it
were an earwig, still the half with the teeth would, like the cloven
earwig, turn round and eat the latter half clean up,--and then there
would be the whole continuous earwig rejoined and well fed into the
bargain. It is not by any means to be regretted as a consequence of this
close _nexus_ of the Empire, that the corpus can devour and digest its
own limbs, as the brook-crab does its stomach, without any real harm to
itself, so that the corpus, like a Homeric god, can only be wounded, but
not killed. Take this bunchy polypus-stalk, I often say, mash it to a
pulp with Rösel,--turn it wrong side outward like a glove,--like
Lichtenberg, cut the polypus in two dexterously with a hair,--like
Trembley, stick and incorporate several severed limbs into one another,
as other naturalists do imperial cities, abbeys, small provinces into
greater, or the reverse,--and then examine after some days; verily,
magnificent and whole and well, thy polypus will be found sitting there
again, or my name is not Schoppe."

The Count had heard him again and again on this subject, and could
therefore more easily and properly smile; the Lector, however, was
learning all this for the first time, and even the comic actor is not
such to his new hearers. But amidst all these diversions there still
sounded on in Albano's soul a confused tumult, like the murmuring of
the waterfall of the coming times. He peered longingly through the
wavering seams of the laurel-foliage, out toward the shining hills, when
Dian said, in his painter's-language: "Is it not as if all the gods
stood, with thousands of cornucopias, on the mountains around Lago
Maggiore, and poured down wine and cascades, till the lake, like a
goblet of joy, foams over and gushes down with the brimming juice?"
Schoppe replied: "Pleasures of exceeding flavor, like pineapples, have
the misfortune, that, like pineapples, they make the gums bleed." "I
think," said Augusti, "that one ought not to reflect much upon the
pleasures of life, any more than upon the beauties of a good poem; one
enjoys both better without counting or dissecting them." "And I," said
Cesara, "would calculate and dissect from very pride; whatever came of
it I would abide, and I should be ashamed to be unhappy about it. If
life, like the olive, is a bitter fruit, then grasp both with the press,
and they will afford the sweetest oil." Here he rose to remain alone on
the island till evening; he asked indulgence, but gave no excuse. His
lofty, ambitious soul was incapable of descending to the smallest lie,
even towards an animal. In Blumenbühl he used daily to entice the tame
pigeons near him by holding out food; and his foster-sister often begged
him to catch one; but he always said, "No," for he would not betray the
confidence even of a brute creature.

While they followed him with their eyes, as he slowly retired through
the laurel shades, with the shadows dancing after him and stray sunbeams
gliding down over him, and, as in a dream, gently bent the branches
apart with his hands extended before him, Dian broke forth: "What a
statue of Jupiter!" "And the ancients," said Schoppe, joining in,
"believed, moreover, that every god dwelt in his own statue." "A
magnificent, threefold breadth of brow, nasal bridge, and breast!"
continued Dian. "A Hercules planting olive-trees on Olympus!" "It struck
me very much," said the Lector, "that, after considerable study, I could
read in his countenance what I wished and what was mutually
contradictory,--coldness, warmth, innocence and gentleness, most readily
defiance and force." Schoppe added: "It may be still harder for himself
to compel such a congress of warring powers within him to become a
peace-congress." "How beautifully," said the humanly feeling Dian, "must
love sit upon so mighty a form, and how sublimely must anger!" "Those
are two poetic beauties," replied Schoppe, "out of which two
Pedagogiarchs and Zenophons, like us, can make little with their Cyrus
in their Cyropædia."


4. CYCLE.

Zesara had tasted only three glasses of wine; but the must of his thick,
hot blood fermented under it mightily. The day grew more and more into a
Daphnian and Delphic grove, in whose whispering and steamy thicket he
lost himself deeper and deeper,--the sun hung in the blue like a white
glistening snow-ball,--the glaciers cast their silvery glances down into
the green,--from distant clouds it thundered occasionally,[12] as if
spring were rolling along in his triumphal chariot far away towards us
at the north,--the living glow of the climate and the hour, and the holy
fire of two raptures, the remembered and the expected, warmed to life
all his powers. And now that fever of young health seized upon him, in
which it always seemed to him as if a particular heart beat in every
limb,--the lungs and the heart are heavy and full of blood,--the breath
is hot as a Harmattan wind,--and the eye dark in its own blaze,--and the
limbs are weary with energy. In this overcharge of the electrical cloud
he had a peculiar passion for destroying. When younger, he often
relieved himself by rolling fragments of rock to a summit and letting
them roll down, or by running on the full gallop till his breath grew
_longer_, or most surely by hurting himself with a penknife (as he had
heard of Cardan's doing), and even bleeding himself a little
occasionally. Seldom do ordinary, and still seldomer extraordinary, men
attain full-blooming youth of body and spirit, but when it does happen,
so much the more luxuriantly does one root bear a whole flower-garden.

With such emotions Albano now stood alone behind the palace towards the
south, when a sport of his boyish years occurred to him.

He had, namely, often in May, during a heavy wind, climbed up into a
thick-limbed apple-tree, which supported a whole green hanging cabinet,
and had laid himself down in the arms of its branches. And when, in this
situation, the wavering pleasure-grove swung him about amidst the
juggling play of the lily-butterflies and the hum of bees and insects
and the clouds of blossoms, and when the flaunting top now buried him in
rich green, now launched him into deep blue, and now into the sunshine,
then did his fancy stretch the tree to gigantic dimensions: it grew
alone in the Universe, as if it were the tree of endless life, its root
pierced far down into the abyss, the white-red clouds hung upon it as
blossoms, the moon as a fruit, the little stars glistened like dew, and
Albano reposed in its infinite summit, and a storm swayed the summit
from day into night and from night into day.

And now he stood looking up to a tall cypress. A southeast breeze had
arisen from its siesta in Rome, and flying along had cooled itself by
the way in the tops of the lemon-trees and in a thousand brooks and
shadows, and now lay cradled in the arms of the cypress. Then he climbed
up the tree, in order at least to tire himself. But how did the world
stretch out before him, with its woods, its islands, and its mountains,
when he saw the thunder-cloud lying over Rome's seven hills, just as if
that old spirit were speaking from the gloom which once wrought in the
seven hills as in seven Vesuviuses, that had stood before the face of
the earth so many centuries with fiery columns, with erect tempests, and
had overspread it with clouds and ashes and fertility, till they at last
burst themselves asunder! The mirror-wall of the glaciers stood, like
his father, unmelted before the warm rays of heaven, and only glistened
and remained cold and hard,--from the broad expanse of the lake the
sunny hills seemed on every hand to rise as from their bath, and the
little ships of men seemed to lie fast stranded in the distance,--and,
floating far and wide around him, the great spirits of the past went by,
and under their invisible tread only the woods bowed themselves, the
flower-beds scarcely at all. Then did the outward past become in Albano
his own future,--no melancholy, but a thirst after all greatness that
inhabits and uplifts the spirit, and a shrinking from the unclean baits
of the future painfully compressed his eyelids, and heavy drops fell
from them. He came down, because his internal dizziness grew at last to
a physical. His rural education and the influence of Dian, who
reverenced the modest course of nature, had preserved the budding garden
of his faculties from the untimely morning sun and hasty growth; but the
expectation of the evening and the journey he had taken had conspired
to make the day of his life now too warm and stimulating.

Roaming and dreaming, he lost himself among orange-blossoms. Suddenly it
was to him as if a sweet stirring in his inmost heart made it enlarge
painfully, and grow void, and then full again. Ah, he knew not that it
was the fragrances which he had here in childhood so often drunk into
his bosom, and which now darkly but powerfully called back every fantasy
and remembrance of the past, for the very reason that fragrances, unlike
the worn-out objects of the eye and ear, seldomer present themselves,
and therefore the more easily and intensely renew the faded sensations.
But when he happened into an arcade of the palace, which was colored
mosaically with variegated stones and shells, and when he saw the waves
playing and dancing on the threshold of the grotto, then did a
moss-grown past all at once reveal itself: he sounded his
recollections,--the colored stones of the grotto lay as it were full of
inscriptions of a former time before his memory. Ah, here had he been a
thousand times with his mother! She had showed him the shells and
forbidden him to approach the waves; and once, as the sun was rising and
the rippled lake and all the pebbles glistened, he had waked up on her
bosom, in the midst of the blaze of lights.

O, was not, then, the place sacred, and was not here the overpowering
desire pardonable, which he had so long felt to-day, to open a wound in
his arm for the relief of the restless and tormenting blood?

He scratched himself, but accidentally too deep, and with a cool and
pleasant exaltation of his more lightly-breathing nature he watched the
red fountain of his arm in the setting sun, and became, as if a burden
had fallen off from him, calm, sober, still, and tender. He thought of
his departed mother, whose love remained now forever unrequited. Ah,
gladly would he have poured out this blood for her,--and now, too, love
for his sickly father gushed up more warmly than ever in his bosom. O
come soon, said his heart, I will love thee so inexpressibly, thou dear
Father!

The sun grew cold on the damp earth,--and now only the indented mural
crown formed by the gold wedges of the glacier-peaks glowed above the
spent clouds,--and the magic-lantern of nature threw its images longer
and fainter every moment, when a tall form, in an open red mantle, came
slowly along towards him round the cedar-trees, pressed with the right
hand the region of its heart, where little sparks glimmered, and with
the half-raised left crushed a waxen mask into a lump, and looked down
into its own breast. Suddenly it stiffened against the wall of the
palace in a petrified posture. Albano placed his hand upon his light
wound, and drew near to the petrified one. What a form! From a dry,
haggard face projected between eyes which gleamed on, half hid beneath
their sockets, a contemptuous nose with a proud curl,--there stood a
cherub with the germ of the fall, a scornful, imperious spirit, who
could not love aught, not even his own heart, hardly a higher,--one of
those terrible beings who exalt themselves above men, above misfortune,
above the earth, and above conscience, and to whom it is all the same
whatever human blood they shed, whether another's or their own.

It was Don Gaspard.

The sparkling chain of his order, made of steel and precious stones,
betrayed him. He had been seized with the catalepsy, his old complaint.
"O father!" said Albano, with terror, and embraced the immovable form;
but it was as if he clasped cold death to his heart. He tasted the
bitterness of a hell,--he kissed the rigid lip, and cried more
loudly,--at last, letting fall his arm, he started back from him, and
the exposed wound bled again without his feeling it; and gnashing his
teeth with wild, youthful love and with anguish, and with great
ice-drops in his eyes, he gazed upon the mute form, and tore its hand
from its heart. At this Gaspard, awaking, opened his eyes, and said,
"Welcome, my dear son!" Then the child, with overmastering bliss and
love, sank on his father's heart, and wept, and was silent. "Thou
bleedest, Albano," said Gaspard, softly holding him off; "bandage
thyself!" "Let me bleed; I will die with thee, if thou diest! O, how
long have I pined for thee, my good father!" said Albano, yet more
deeply agitated by his father's sick heart, which he now felt beating
more heavily against his own. "Very good; but bandage thyself!" said he;
and as the son did it, and while hurrying on the bandage, gazed with
insatiable love into the eye of his father,--that eye which cast only
cold glances like his jewelled ring; just then, on the chestnut-tops
which had been to-day the throne of the morning sun, the soft moon
opened soothingly her holy eye, and it was to the inflamed Albano, in
this home of his childhood and his mother, as if the spirit of his
mother were looking from heaven, and calling down, "I shall weep if you
do not love each other." His swelling heart overflowed, and he said
softly to his father, who was growing paler in the moonlight, "Dost thou
not love me, then?" "Dear Alban," replied the father, "one cannot answer
thee enough: thou art very good,--it is very good." But with the pride
of a love which boldly measured itself with his father's, he seized
firmly the hand with the mask, and looked on the Knight with fiery eyes.
"My son," replied the weary one, "I have yet much to say to thee to-day,
and little time, because I travel to-morrow,--and I know not how long
the beating of my heart will let me speak." Ah, then, that previous sign
of a touched soul had been only the sign of a disordered pulse. Thou
poor son, how must thy swollen sea stiffen before this sharp air,--ah,
how must thy warm heart cleave to the ice-cold metal, and tear itself
away not without a skin-peeling wound!

But, good youth! who of us could blame thee that wounds should
attach thee as it were by a tie of _blood_ to thy true or false
demigod,--although a demigod is oftener joined to a demi-beast than a
demi-man,--and that thou shouldst so painfully love! Ah, what ardent
soul has not once uttered the prayer of love in vain, and then, lamed by
the chilling poison, like other poisoned victims, not been able any
longer to move its heavy tongue and heavy heart! But love on, thou warm
soul! like spring-flowers, like night-butterflies, tender love at last
breaks through the hard-frozen soil, and every heart, which desires
nothing else than a heart, finds at last its bosom!


5. CYCLE.

The Knight took him up to a gallery supported by a row of stone pillars,
which lemon-trees strewed all over with perfumes and with little, lively
shadows, silver-edged by the moon. He drew two medallions from his
pocket-book,--one represented a remarkably youthful-looking female face,
with the circumscription, "Nous ne nous verrons jamais, mon fils."
"Here is thy mother," said Gaspard, giving it to him, "and here thy
sister"; and handed him the second, whose lines ran into an indistinct,
antiquated shape, with the circumscription, "Nous nous verrons un jour,
mon frère." He now began his discourse, which he delivered in such a low
tone and in so many loose sheets (one comma often coming at one end of
the gallery and the next at the other), and with such an alternation of
quick and slow paces, that the ear of any eavesdropping inquisitor
keeping step with them, under the gallery, had there been one down
there, could not have caught three drops of connected sound. "Thy
attention, dear Alban," he continued, "not thy fancy, must now be put on
the stretch. Thou art, unhappily, to-day too romantic for one who is to
hear so many romantic things. The Countess of Cesara ever loved the
mysterious; thou wilt perceive it in the commission which she gave me a
few days before her death, and which I was obliged to promise I would
execute this very Good-Friday."

He said further, before beginning, that, as his catalepsy and
palpitation of the heart increased critically, he must hasten to Spain
to arrange his affairs, and, still more, those of his ward, the Countess
of Romeiro. Alban made one brotherly inquiry about his dear sister, so
long separated from him; his father gave him to hope he should soon see
her, as she intended to visit Switzerland with the Countess.

As I do not perceive what people will gain by it, if I insert those (to
me) annoying geese-feet[13] with the everlasting "said he," I will
relate the commission in person. There would, at a certain time (the
Knight said), come to him three unknown persons,--one in the morning,
one at noon, and one in the evening,--and each one would present him a
card, in a sealed envelope, containing merely the name of the city and
the house wherein the picture-cabinet, which Albano must visit the very
same night, was to be found. In this cabinet he must touch and press all
the nails of the pictures till he comes to one behind which the pressure
makes a repeating-clock, built into the wall, strike twelve. Here he
finds behind the picture a secret arras-door, behind which sits a female
form with an open souvenir and three rings on her left hand, and a
crayon in her right. When he presses the ring of the middle finger, the
form will rise amidst the rolling of the internal wheel-work, step out
into the chamber, and the wheel-work, which is running down, will stop
with her at a wall whereon she indicates, by the crayon, a hidden
compartment, in which lie a pocket-perspective glass and the waxen
impression of a coffin-key. The eye-glass of the perspective arranges by
an optical anamorphosis the snarl of withering lines on the medallion of
his sister, which he had to-day received, into a sweet, young form, and
the object-glass gives back to the immature image of his mother the
lineaments of mature life. Then he is to press the ring-finger, and
immediately the dumb, cold figure will begin to write with the crayon in
the souvenir, and designate to him, in a few words, the place of the
coffin, of whose key he has the waxen impression. In the coffin lies a
black marble slab, in the form of a black Bible; and when he has broken
it he will find a kernel therein, from which is to grow the
Christmas-tree of his whole life. If the slab is not in the coffin, then
he is to give the last ring of the little finger a pressure,--but what
this wooden Guerike's weather-prophet of his destiny would do, the
Knight himself could not predict.

I am fully of opinion that from this bizarre testament the
repeating-work and half of the wheel-work might easily be broken out,
(just as clocks are now made in London with only two wheels,) without
doing the dial-work or the movement of the hands the least injury.

Upon Albano all this testamentary whirl and whiz had, contrary to my
expectation, almost no effect; excepting to produce a more tender love
for the good mother who, when she already beheld, in the stream of life
below, the swift image of the pouncing hawk of death, thought only of
her son. Upon the fixed, iron countenance of his father he so gazed
during this narrative with tender gratitude for the pains he had taken
to remember and relate, as almost to lose the thread of the discourse,
and in the moonshine and to the eye of his fancy the Knight grew to a
Colossus of Rhodes, hiding half the horizon of the present, a being for
whom this testamentary memory-work seemed almost too trivial.

Thus far Don Gaspard had spoken merely as a genuine man of the world,
who always excludes from his speech (into which no special, intimate
relations enter) all mention or flattery of a person, of others as well
as of himself, and regards even historical persons merely as conditions
of things, so that two such impersonalities with their grim coldness
seemed to be only two speaking logics or sciences, not living beings
with beating hearts. O, how softly did it flow, like a tender melody,
into Albano's lovesick heart, which the pure and mild moon, and the
glimmering island-garden of his early days, and the voice of his mother
sounding on and echoing in his soul, all conspired to melt, when at
length the _father_ said: "So much have I to tell of the Countess. Of
myself I have nothing to say to thee but to express my constant
satisfaction hitherto with thy life." "O, give me, dearest father,
instruction and counsel for my future government," said the enraptured
man, and as Gaspard's right hand twitched convulsively toward his more
hurriedly beating heart, he followed it with his left to the sick spot
and pressed intensely the hysterical heart as if he could arrest by
grasping at the spokes this down-hill-rolling wheel of life. The Knight
replied: "I have nothing more to say to thee. The _Linden City_
(Pestitz) is now open to thee; thy mother had shut it against thee. The
hereditary Prince, who will soon be Prince, and the minister, Von
Froulay, who is my friend, will be thine. I believe it will be of
service to thee to cultivate their acquaintance."

The sharp-sighted Gaspard saw at this moment suddenly flit across the
pure, open countenance of the youth strange emotions and hot blushes,
which nothing immediate could explain, and which instantly passed away,
as if annihilated, when he thus continued: "To a man of rank, sciences
and polite learning, which to others are final ends, are only means and
recreations; and great as thy inclination for them may be, thou wilt,
however, surely, in the end give actions the preference over enjoyments;
thou wilt not feel thyself born to instruct or amuse men merely, but to
manage and to rule them. It were well if thou couldst gain the minister,
and thereby the knowledge of government and political economy which he
can give thee; for in the sketch of one country as well as of one court
thou hast the grand outlines of every greater one to which thou mayest
be called, and for which thou wilt have to educate thyself. It is my
wish that thou shouldst be even a favorite of the Prince and the Court,
less because thou hast need of connections than because thou needest
experience. Only through men are men to be subdued and surpassed, not
by books and superior qualities. One must not display his worth in order
to gain men, but gain them first, and then, and not until then, show his
worth. There is no calamity like ignorance; and not so much by virtue as
by understanding is man made formidable and fortunate. Thou hast at most
to shun men who are too like thee, particularly the noble." The
corrosive sublimate of his irony consisted here, not in his pronouncing
"noble" with an accented, ironical tone, but in his pronouncing it,
contrary to what might have been expected, coldly and without any tone
at all. Albano's hand, still on his, had for some time slipped down from
his father's heart along the sharp-edged steel chain of his order to the
golden, metal-cold lamb that hung from it. The youth, like all young men
and hermits, had too severe notions of courtiers and men of the world:
he held them to be decided basilisks and dragons,--although I can still
excuse that, if he means by basilisks only what the naturalists
mean,--wingless lizards,--and by dragons, nothing but winged ones, and
thus regards them only as amphibia, hardly less cold and odious than
Linnæus defines such to be. Besides, he cherished (so easily does
Plutarch become the seducer of youth whose biographer he might have
been, like me) more contempt than reverence for the _artolatry_ (loaf
and fish service) of our age, always transubstantiating (inversely) its
_god_ into _bread_,--for the best bread-studies or bread-carts,--for the
making of a _carrière_,--for every one, in short, who was not a
dare-devil, and who, instead of catapultas and war machines, operated
with some sort of invisible magnetic wands, suction-works, and
cupping-glasses, and took anything in that way. Every young man has a
fine season in his life when he will accept no office, and every young
woman has the same in hers, when she will accept no husband; by and by
they both change, and often take one another into the bargain.

As the Knight advanced the above propositions, certainly not offensive
to any man of the world, there swelled in his son a holy, generous
pride,--it seemed to him as if his heart and even his body, like that of
a praying saint, were lifted by a soaring genius far above the
race-courses of a greedy, creeping age,--the great men of a greater time
passed before him under their triumphal arches, and beckoned him to come
nearer to them: in the east lay Rome and the moon, and before him the
Circus of the Alps,--a mighty Past by the side of a mighty Present. With
the proud and generous consciousness that there is something more
godlike in us than prudence and understanding, he laid hold of his
father, and said: "This whole day, dear father, has been one increasing
agitation in my heart. I cannot speak nor think rightly for emotion.
Father, I will visit them all; I will soar away above men; but I despise
the dirty road to the object. I will in the sea of the world rise like a
living man by _swimming_, and not like a drowned man by _corruption_.
Yes, father, let Fate cast a gravestone upon this breast, and crush it,
when it has lost virtue and the divinity and its own heart."

What made Albano speak so warmly was that he could not avoid an
irrepressible veneration for the great soul of the Knight; he
continually represented to himself the pangs and the lingering death of
so strong a life, the sharp smoke of so great a coldly quenched fire,
and inferred from the emotions of his own living soul what must be those
of his father, who in his opinion had only gradually thus crumbled upon
a broad bed of black, cold worldlings, as the diamond cannot be
volatilized except on a bed of dead, burnt-out, blacksmith's coals. Don
Gaspard, who seldom, and then only mildly, found fault with men,--not
from love, but from indifference,--patiently replied to the youth: "Thy
warmth is to be praised. All will come right in good time. Now let us
eat."


6. CYCLE.

The banquet-hall of our Islanders was in the rich palace of the absent
Borromæan family. They conceded to the lovely island the prize-apple of
Paris and the laurel-wreath. Augusti and Gaspard wrote their eulogies
upon it in a clear, easy style, only Gaspard used the more antitheses.
Albano's breast was filled with a new world, his eye with radiance, his
cheeks with joyous blood. The Architect extolled as well the taste as
the purse of the hereditary Prince, who by means of both had brought
with him to his country, not artistic masters indeed, but still
masterpieces, and at whose instance this very Dian was going to Italy to
take casts for him there of the antiques. Schoppe replied: "I hope the
German is as well supplied with painters' academies and painters' colics
as any other people; our pictures on goods, our illuminated Theses in
Augsburg, our margins of newspapers, and our vignettes in every dramatic
work, (whereby we had an earlier _Shakespeare Gallery_ than London,) our
gallows-birds hung in effigy,--are well known to every one, and show at
first sight how far we carry the thing. But I will even allow that
Greeks and Italians paint as well as we; still we tower far above them
in this, that we, like nature and noble suitors, never seek isolated
beauty, without connected advantage. A beauty which we cannot also
roast, sell at auction, wear, or marry, passes with us only for just
what it is worth; beauty is with us (I hope) never anything else but
selvage and trimming to utility, just as, also, at the Diet of the
Empire, it is not the side-tables of confectionery, but the
session-tables, that are the proper work-tables of the body politic.
Genuine Beauty and Art are therefore with us set, painted, stamped only
on things which at the same time bring in something; e. g. fine Madonnas
only in the journals of fashion,--etched leaves only on packages of
tobacco-leaves,--cameos on pipe-bowls,--gems on seals, and wood-cuts on
tallies; flower-pieces are sought, but on bandboxes,--faithful
Wouwermanns, but in horses' stalls before the stallions,[14]--bas-reliefs
of princes' heads, either on dollars or on Bavarian beer-pitcher covers,
but both must be of unalloyed pewter,--rose-pieces and lily-pieces, but
on tattooed women. On a similar principle, in Basedow's system of
education, beautiful painting and the Latin vocabulary were always
linked together, because the Institute more easily retains the latter by
the help of the former. So, too, Van der Kabel never painted a hare to
order, without requiring for himself one freshly-shot model after
another to eat and copy. So again, the artist Calear painted beautiful
hose, but painted them immediately on to his own legs."

The Knight heard such talk with pleasure, though he neither laughed at
nor imitated it; to him all colors in the prism of genius were
agreeable. Only to the Architect it was not enough in Greek taste, and
not courtly enough for the Lector. The latter turned round to the
departing Dian, with a somewhat flattering air, while Schoppe was
recovering breath for renewed detraction of us Germans, and said:
"Formerly Rome took away from other lands only works of art, but now
artists themselves."

Schoppe continued: "So also our statues are no idle, dawdling citizens,
but they all drive a trade;--such as are caryates hold up houses; such
as are angels bear baptismal vessels; and heathen water-gods labor at
the public fountains, and pour out water into the pitchers of the
maidens."

The Count spoke warmly for us, the Lector brilliantly: the Knight
remarked, that the German taste and the German talent for poetic
beauties made good and explained their want of both for other beauties
(on the ground of climate, form of government, poverty, &c.). The Knight
resembled a celestial telescope, through which the planets appear larger
and the suns smaller; like that instrument, he took away from suns their
borrowed lustre, without restoring to them their true and greater glory;
he cut in twain, indeed, the noose of a Judas, but he extinguished the
halo on a Christ's head, and in general he sought to make out
ingeniously a parity and equality between darkness and light.

Schoppe was never silenced (I am sorry that in his toleration-mandate
for Europe the German Circles should have been left out). He began
again: "The little which I just brought forward in praise of the
serviceable Germans has, it seems, provoked contradiction. But the
slight laurel-crown which I place upon the holy body of the Empire shall
never blind my eyes to the bald spots. I have often thought it
commendable in Socrates and Christ, that they did not teach in Hamburg,
in Vienna, or in any Brandenburg city, and go through the streets with
their disciples; they would have been questioned, in the name of the
magistrates, whether they could not work; and had both been with
families in Wetzlar, they would have extorted from the latter the
_negligence-money_.[15] Touching the poetic art, Sir Knight, I have
known many a citizen of the Empire who could make but little out of an
ode unless it were upon himself: he fancied he could tell when poetic
liberties infringed upon the liberty of the Empire: such a man, who
certainly always marched to his work regularly, composedly, and
considerately in Saxon term-times, was exceedingly pained and perplexed
by poetic flights. And is it, then, so unaccountable and bad? The worthy
inhabitant of an imperial city binds on in front a napkin when he wishes
to weep, in order that he may not stain his satin vest, and the tears
which fall from his eyes upon a letter of condolence he marks as he
would any darker punctuation: what wonder, if, like the ranger, he
should know no fairer flower than that on the posteriors of the stag,
and if the poetical violets, like the botanical,[16] should operate upon
him as a mild emetic. Such were, according to my notion, one way at
least of warding off the reproach which is flung at us Germans."


7. CYCLE.

What a singular night followed upon this singular day! Sleepy with
travelling, all went to rest; only Albano, in whom the hot eventful day
still burned on, said to the Knight that he could not now, with his
breast full of fire, find coolness and rest anywhere but under the cold
stars and the blossoms of the Italian spring. He leaned against a statue
on the upper terrace, near a blooming balustrade of citrons, that he
might sweetly shut his eyes beneath the starry heaven, and still more
sweetly open them in the morning. Even in his earlier youth had he, as
well as myself, wished himself upon the Italian roofs of warm lands, in
order, not as a night-walker, but as a regular sleeper, to wake up
thereon.

How magnificently there does the eye open upon the radiant hanging
gardens full of eternal blossoms above thee, whereas on thy German
sweltry feather-pillow thou hast nothing before thee, when thou lookest
up, but the bed-tail!

While Zesara was thus traversing waves, mountains, and stars with a
stiller and stiller soul, and when at last garden and sky and lake ran
together into one dark Colossus, and he sadly thought of his pale
mother, and of his sister, and of the announced wonders of his future
life, a figure dressed all in black, with the image of a death's-head on
its breast, came slowly and painfully, and with trembling breath, up the
terraces behind him. "Remember death!" it said. "Thou art Albano de
Zesara?" "Yes," said Zesara, "who art thou?" "I am," it said, "a father
of death.[17] It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so."

The limbs of the man continued to quake all over, in a frightful and
almost audible manner. Zesara had often wished an adventure for his idle
bravery; now he had it before him. Meantime, however, he kept a sharp
watch with his eye, and when the monk said, "Look up to the evening star
and tell me when it goes down, for my sight is weak," he threw only a
hasty glance upwards. "Three stars," said he, "are still between it and
the Alps." "When it sets," the father continued, "then thy sister in
Spain gives up the ghost, and thereupon she will speak with thee here
from Heaven." Zesara was hardly touched by a finger of the cold hand of
horror, simply because he was not in a room, but in the midst of young
Nature, who stations her mountains and stars as watchmen around the
trembling spirit; or it may have been because the vast and substantial
bodily world, so near before us, crowds out and hides with its
building-work the world of spirits. He asked, with indignation: "Who art
thou? What knowest thou? What wilt thou?" and grasped at the folded
hands of the monk, and held both imprisoned in one of his. "Thou dost
not know me, my son," said the father of death, calmly. "I am a
Zahouri,[18] and come from Spain from thy sister; I see the dead down in
the earth, and know beforehand when they will appear and discourse. But
their apparition above ground I do not see, and their discourse I cannot
hear."

Here he looked sharply at the youth, whose features suddenly grew rigid
and lengthened, for a voice like a female and familiar one began slowly
over his head: "Take the crown,--take the crown,--I will help thee." The
monk asked: "Is the evening-star already gone down? Is _it_ talking with
thee?" Zesara looked upward, and could not answer; the voice from Heaven
spake again, and said the same thing. The monk guessed as much, and
said: "Thus did thy father hear thy mother from on high, when he was in
Germany; but he had me thrown into prison for a long time, because he
thought I deceived him." At the mention of his "father," whose disbelief
of the spiritual Zesara knew, he hurried the monk, by his two hands
held fast in his own single and strong one, down the terraces, in order
to hear where the voice might now be. The old man smiled softly; the
voice again spake above him, but in these words: "Love the beautiful
one,--love the beautiful one,--I will help thee." A skiff was moored to
the shore, which he had already seen during the day. The monk, who
apparently wished to do away the suspicion of a voice being concealed
anywhere, stepped into the gondola, and beckoned him to follow. The
youth, relying on his bodily and mental strength and his skill in
swimming, boldly pushed off with the monk from the island; but what a
shudder seized upon his innermost fibres, when not only the voice above
him called again, "Love the beautiful one whom I will show thee,--I will
help thee," but when he even saw, off toward the terrace, a female form,
with long, chestnut-brown hair, and dark eyes, and a shining, swan-like
neck, and with the complexion and vigor of the richest climate, rise,
like a nobler Aphrodite, revealed down to her bosom, from out the
deepest waves. But in a few seconds the Goddess sank back again beneath
the surface, and the spirit-voice continued to whisper overhead, "Love
the beautiful one whom I showed thee." The monk coldly and silently
prayed during the scene, of which he heard and saw nothing. At length he
said: "On the next Ascension-day, at the hour of thy birth, thou wilt
stand beside a heart which is not within a breast, and thy sister will
announce to thee from Heaven the name of thy bride."

When before us feeble, rheumy creatures, who, like Polypuses and
flowers, only _feel_ and _seek_, but cannot _see_ the light of a higher
element, a flash darts, in the total eclipse of our life, through the
earthly mass which hangs before our higher sun,[19] that ray cuts in
pieces the nerve of vision, which can bear only _forms_, not _light_; no
burning terror wings the heart and the blood, but a cold shudder at our
own thoughts, and in the presence of a new, incomprehensible world,
chains the warm stream, and life becomes ice.

Albano, from whose teeming fancy a chaos might spring as easily as a
universe, grew pale; but it was with him as if he lost not so much his
spirit as his understanding. He rowed impetuously, almost unconsciously,
to the shore,--he could not look the father of death in the face,
because his wild fancy, tearing everything to pieces, distorted and
distended all forms, like clouds, into horrid shapes,--he hardly heard
the monk when he said, by way of farewell, "Next Good Friday, perhaps, I
may come again." The monk stepped on board a skiff which came along of
itself (propelled, probably, by a wheel under the water), and soon
disappeared behind, or in, the little Fisher's island (Isola peschiere).

For the space of a minute Alban reeled, and it appeared to him as if the
garden and the sky and all were a floating and fleeting fog-bank,--as if
nothing _were_, as if he had not lived. This arsenical qualm was at once
blown away from his stifled breast by the breath of the Librarian,
Schoppe, who was piping merrily at the chamber window; all at once his
life grew warm again, the earth came back, and existence _was_. Schoppe,
who could not sleep for warmth, now came down to make his own bed also
on the tenth terrace. He saw in Zesara an intense inward agitation, but
he had long been accustomed to such, and made no inquiries.


8. CYCLE.

Not by reasonings, but by pleasantries, is the ice most easily melted in
our choked-up wheel-work. After a chatty hour, not much more was left of
all that had passed in the youth's mind than a vexatious feeling and a
happy one; the former, to think that he had not taken the monk by the
cowl and carried him before the Knight; and the latter, at the
remembrance of the noble female form, and at the very prospect of a life
full of adventures. Still, when he closed his eyes, monsters full of
wings, worlds full of flames, and a deep-weltering chaos, swept around
his soul.

At last, in the cool of the after-midnight, his tired senses, under a
slow and dissolving influence, approached the magnetic mountain of
slumber; but what a dream came to him on that still mountain! He lay (so
he dreamed) on the crater of Hecla. An upheaved column of water lifted
him with it, and held him balanced on its hot waves in mid-heaven. High
in the ethereal night above him stretched a gloomy tempest, like a long
dragon, swollen with devoured constellations; near below hung a bright
little cloud, attracted by the tempest,--through the light gauze of the
little cloud flowed a dark red, either of two rose-buds or of two lips,
and a green stripe of a veil or of an olive-twig, and a ring of
milk-blue pearls or of forget-me-not,--at length a little vapor diffused
itself over the red, and nothing was there but an open, blue eye, which
looked up to Albano infinitely mild and imploring; and he stretched out
his hands towards the enveloped form, but the water-column was too low.
Then the black tempest flung hailstones, but in their fall they became
snow, and then dew-drops, and at last, in the little cloud, silvery
light; and the green veil swept illuminated in the vapor. Then Albano
exclaimed, "I will shed all my tears and swell the column, that I may
reach thee, fair eye!" And the blue eye grew moist with longing, and
closed with love. The column grew with a loud roaring, the tempest
lowered itself, and pressed down the little cloud before it, but he
could not touch it. Then he tore open his veins and cried, "I have no
more tears, but all my blood will I pour out for thee, that I may reach
thy heart." Under the bleeding the column rose higher and faster,--the
broad, blue ether began to swim, and the tempest was dissipated like
spray, and all the stars that it had swallowed came forth with living
looks,--the little cloud, hovering freely, floated gleaming down to the
column,--the blue eye, as it approached, opened slowly, and suddenly
closed and buried itself deeper in its light; but a soft sigh whispered
in the cloud, "Draw me to thy heart!" O, then he flung his arms through
the flashing light and swept away the mist, and snatched a white form,
that seemed to be made of moonlight, to his glowing breast. But ah! the
melting snow of the light escaped from his hot arms,--the beloved one
melted away and became a tear, and the warm tear found its way through
his breast, and sank into his heart, and burned therein; and his heart
began to dissolve, and seemed as if it would die.... Then he opened his
eyes.

But what an unearthly waking! The little, white, spent cloud, stained
with storm-drops, still hung bending down over him, in Heaven,--it was
the bright, lovingly near moon, that had come in above him. He had bled
in his sleep, the bandage of his wounded arm having been pushed off by
its violent movement. His raptures had melted the night-frost of
ghostly terror. In a transfiguring euthanasia, his firm being fluttered
loosely around like an uncertain dream,--he had been wafted and rocked
upward into the starry heaven as on a mother's breast, and all the stars
had flowed into the moon and enlarged her glory,--his heart, flung into
a warm tear, gently dissolved therein,--out of him was only shadow,
within him dazzling light,--the wind of the flying earth swept by before
the upright flame of his soul, and it bent not. Ah, his Psyche glided
with keen, unruffled, inaudible falcon-pinions, in silent ecstasy
through the thin air of life....

It appeared to him as if he were dying, for it was some time before he
became aware of the increasing warmth of his bleeding left arm, which
had lifted him into the long Elysium that reached over from his dreaming
into his waking state. He refastened the bandage more tightly.

All at once he heard, during the operation, a louder plashing below him
than mere waters could make. He looked over the balcony, and saw his
father and Dian, without a farewell,--which, with Gaspard, was
only the poisonous meadow-saffron in the autumnal moment of
leave-taking,--fleeing, like blossom-leaves dropped out of the
flower-wreath of his life, away across the waves amid the swan-song of
the nightingales!... O, thou good young man, how often has this night
befooled and robbed thee! He spread out his arms after them,--the pain
of the dream still continued, and inspired him,--his flying father
seemed to him a loving father again,--in anguish he called down,
"Father, look round upon me! Ah, how canst thou thus forsake me without
a syllable? And thou too, Dian! O comfort me, if you hear me!" Dian
threw kisses to him, and Gaspard laid his hand upon his sick heart.
Albano thought of that copyist of death, the palsy, and would gladly
have held out his wounded arm over the waves, and poured out his warm
life as a libation for his father, and he called after them, "Farewell!
farewell!" Languishing, he pressed the cold, stony limbs of a colossal
statue to his burning veins, and tears of vain longing gushed down his
fair face, while the warm tones of the Italian nightingales, trilling in
response to each other from bank and island, sucked his heart till it
was sore with soft vampyre-tongues.----Ah, when thou shalt be loved,
glowing youth, how thou wilt love!--In his thirst for a warm,
communicative soul, he woke up his Schoppe, and pointed out to him the
fugitives. But while the latter was saying something or other
consolatory, Albano gazed fixedly at the gray speck of the skiff, and
heard not a word.


9. CYCLE.

The two continued up, and refreshed themselves by a stroll through the
dewy island; and the sight of the alto-rilievo of day, as it came out in
glistening colors from the fading crayon-drawings of the moonlight, woke
them to full life. Augusti joined them, and proposed to them to take the
half-hour's sail over to Isola Madre. Albano heartily besought the two
to sail over alone, and leave him here to his solitary walks. The Lector
now detected, with a sharper look, the traces of the young man's nightly
adventures,--how beautifully had the dream, the monk, the sleeplessness,
the bleeding, subdued the bold, defiant form, and softened every tone,
and that mighty energy was now only a magic waterfall by moonlight!
Augusti took it for caprice, and went alone with Schoppe; but the fewest
persons possible comprehend, that it is only with the fewest persons
possible, (and not with an army of visitors,) properly only with
two,--the most intimate and like-minded friend and the beloved
object,--one can bear to take a walk. Verily, I had as lief kneel down
to make a declaration of love openly, in the face of a whole court, on
the birthday of a princess,--for show me, I pray, the difference,--as to
gaze on thee, Nature, my beloved, through a long vanguard and rear-guard
of witnesses to my enraptured attitude!

How happy did solitude make Albano, whose heart and eyes were full of
tears, which he concealed for shame, and which yet so justified and
exalted him in his own mind! For he labored under the singular mistake
of fiery and vigorous youths,--the idea that he had not a tender heart,
had too little feeling, and was hard to be moved. But now his enervation
gave him a soft, poetical forenoon, such as he had never before known,
and in which he would fain have embraced tearfully all that he had ever
loved,--his good, dear, far-off foster parents in Blumenbühl; his poor
father, ill just in spring, when death always builds his flower-decked
gate of sacrifice; and his sister, buried in the veil of the past, whose
likeness he had gotten, whose after-voice he had heard this night, and
whose last hour the nightly liar had brought so near to him in his
fiction. Even the nocturnal magic-lantern show, still going on in his
heart, troubled him by its mysteriousness, since he could not ascribe it
to any known person, and by the prediction that at his birth-hour, which
was so near,--the next Ascension-day,--he should learn the name of his
bride. The laughing day took away, indeed, from the ghost-scenes their
deathly hue, but gave to the crown and the water-goddess fresh
radiance.

He roamed dreamily through all holy places in this promised land. He
went into the dark Arcade where he had found his childhood's relics and
his father, and took up, with a sad feeling, the crushed mask which had
fallen on the ground. He ascended the gallery, checkered with
lemon-shadows and sunbeams, and looked toward the tall cypresses and the
chestnut summits in the far blue, where the moon had appeared to him
like an opening mother's eye. He approached a cascade, behind the
laurel-grove, which was broken into twenty landing-places, as his life
was into twenty years, and he felt not its thin rain upon his hot
cheeks.

He then went back again to the top of the high terrace to look for his
returning friends. How brokenly and magically did the sunshine of the
outward world steal into the dark, holy labyrinth of the inner! Nature,
which yesterday had been a flaming sun-ball, was to-day an evening star,
full of twilight: the world and the future lay around him so vast, and
yet so near and tangible, as glaciers before a rain appear nearer in the
deepening blue. He stationed himself on the balcony, and held on by the
colossal statue; and his eye glanced down to the lake, and up to the
Alps and to the heavens, and down again; and, under the friendly air of
Hesperia, all the waves and all the leaves fluttered beneath their light
veil. White towers glistened from the green of the shore, and bells and
birds crossed their music in the wind: a painful yearning seized him, as
he looked along the track of his father; and, ah! toward the _warmer_
Spain, full of voluptuous spring-times, full of soft orange-nights, full
of the scattered limbs of dismembered giant mountain-ridges, heaped
around in wild grandeur,--thither how gladly would he have flown through
the lovely sky! At length, joy and dreaming and parting were all melted
into that nameless melancholy, in which the excess of delight clothes
the pain of limitation,--because, indeed, it is easier to _overflow_
than to _fill_ our hearts.

All at once Albano was touched and smitten,--as if the Divinity of Love
had sent an earthquake into his inner temple, to consecrate him for her
approaching apparition,--as he read on a young Indian-tree near him the
little sign bearing its name,--the "Liana." He gazed upon it tenderly,
and said again and again, "Dear Liana!" He would fain have broken off a
twig for himself; but when he reflected, that if he did water would run
out of it, he said, "No, Liana, I will not cause thee to weep!" and so
forbore, because in his memory the plant stood in some sort of
relationship to an unknown dear being. With inexpressible longings to be
away, he now looked toward the temple-gates of Germany,--the Alps. The
snow-white angel of his dream seemed to veil herself deep in a
spring-cloud, and to glide along in it speechless,--and it was to him as
if he heard from afar harmonica-tones. He drew forth, just for the sake
of having something German, a letter-case, whereon his foster-sister
Rabette had embroidered the words, "Gedenke unserer" (Think of us): he
felt himself alone, and was now glad to see his friends, who were gayly
rowing back from Isola Madre.

Ah, Albano, what a morning would this have been for a spirit like thine
ten years later, when the compact bud of young vigor had unfolded its
leaves more widely and tenderly and freely! To a soul like thine would
have arisen at such a period, when the present was pale before it, two
worlds at once,--the two rings around the Saturn of time,--that of the
past and that of the future: then wouldst thou not merely have glanced
over a short interval of race-ground to the pure, white goal, but turned
thyself round, and surveyed the long, winding track already run. Thou
wouldst have reckoned up the thousand mistakes of the will, the missteps
of the soul, and the irreparable waste of heart and brain. Couldst thou
then have looked upon the ground without asking thyself: "Ah, have the
thousand and four earthquakes[20] which have passed through me, as
through the land behind me, enriched me as these have enriched the soil?
O, since all experiences are so dear,--since they cost us either our
days, or our energies, or our illusions,--O why must man every morning,
in the presence of Nature, who profits by every dew-drop that stands in
a flower-cup, blush with such a sense of impoverishment over the
thousand vainly dried tears which he has already shed and caused! From
springs this almighty mother draws summers; from winters, springs; from
volcanoes, woods and mountains; from hell, a heaven; from this, a
greater,--and we, foolish children, know not how from a given past to
prepare for ourselves a future, which shall satisfy us! We peck, like
the Alpine daw, at everything shiny, and carry the red-hot coals aside
as if they were gold-pieces, and set houses on fire with them. Ah! more
than one great and glorious world goes down in the heart, and leaves
nothing behind; and it is precisely the stream of the higher geniuses
which flies to spray and fertilizes nothing, even as high waterfalls
break and flutter in thin mist over the earth."

Albano welcomed his friends with atoning tenderness; but the youth
became, as the day waxed, as dull and heavy-hearted as one who has
stripped his chamber at the inn, settled his bill, and has only a few
moments left to walk up and down in the bare, rough stubble-field,
before the horses are brought. Like falling bodies, resolutions moved in
his impetuous soul with increasing velocity and force every new second:
with outward mildness, but inward vehemence, he begged his friends to
start with him this very day. And so in the afternoon he went away with
them from the still island of his childhood, speedily to enter, through
the chestnut avenues of Milan, on a new theatre of his life, and to come
upon the trap-door, which opens down into the subterranean passage of so
many mysteries.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Scale.--TR.

[3] This statue, thirty-five ells high, on a pedestal of
twenty-five ells, in whose head twelve men can find room, stands
near Arona, and is exactly of a height with Isola Bella, which
stands over against it, and which rises on ten gardens or
terraces built one upon another.--_Keysler's Travels, &c._, Vol.
I.

[4] The old Kremnitz ducats have the infant Jesus on the right
arm; but the new and _lighter_ ones on the left.

[5] Franklin advised the preserving and corking up of vessels
from which all the liquor had been drunk, in order thereby to
keep the ship afloat.

[6] The horse, in the funeral procession of a prince, that comes
last, and is decked out gayly for the successor of the
deceased.--TR.

[7] Gray-league (Grau-bünden), the Swiss Canton of the
Grisons.--TR.

[8] Pictures by Peter Molyn, who, on account of his fine storms,
was called only Tempesta.

[9] The Pasquino is notoriously mutilated.--Delia Porta was a
great restorer of old statues.

[10] I. e. to be pressed between two wooden cylinders and a
metallic one.

[11] This pill consists of Antimonia Regia, and by reason of its
hardness may be swallowed over and over again with the same
effect each time; only a little wine is sprinkled on it before
each repetition of the experiment.

[12] _Tirare di primavere_, the people call it; and Peter Schoppe
translated it grandly enough, _Electrical pistol-firing of
spring_.

[13] Quotation-marks.--TR.

[14] A good Wouwermann means, in painters' language, a
well-executed horse, the sight of which has an influence on the
beauty of the future colt.

[15] This name is given to the quantum which is withheld from the
associate judges of the Supreme Court when they have not worked
enough.

[16] The Ipecacuanha belongs to the Violet species.

[17] Of the order of St. Paul, or _memento mori_, which died in
France in the seventeenth century. The above address is its usual
greeting.

[18] The Zahouris in Spain are, as is well known, gifted with the
power of discerning corpses, veins of metal, &c. far under the
earth.

[19] According to the account of some astronomers, that the sun,
when eclipsed, has sometimes shone through an opening of the
moon, Ulloa, e. g., assures us that he once witnessed.

[20] In Calabria (1785) a thousand and four earthquakes happened
in the space of three fourths of a year.--_Münter's Travels, &c._




_INTRODUCTORY PROGRAMME_

TO TITAN.


Before I dedicated Titan to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor and Feudal
Provost of Flachsenfingen, Mr. Von Hafenreffer, I first requested
permission from him in the following terms:--

"Since you have assisted far more in this history than the Russian Court
did in Voltaire's Genesis-History of Peter the Great, you cannot confer
any handsomer favor upon a heart longing to thank you, than the
permission to offer and dedicate to you, as to a Jew's God, what you
have created."

But he wrote me back on the spot:--

     "For the same reason, you might still better, in imitation
     of Sonnenfels, dedicate the work to yourself, and, in a more
     just sense than others, combine in one person author and
     patron. I beg you then (were it only on Mr. Von **'s and
     Mrs. Von **'s account) to leave me out of the play, and
     confine yourself to the most indispensable notices, which
     you may be pleased to give the public, of the very
     mechanical interest which I have in your beautiful work; but
     for the gods' sake, hic hæc hoc hujus huic hunc hanc hoc hoc
     hac hoc.

                                        "VON HAFENREFFER."


The Latin line is a cipher, and shall remain dark to the public.
What the same public has to demand in the way of Introductory
Programme consists of four explanations of title, and one of
fact.

The first nominal explanation, which relates to the _Jubilee Period_, I
get from the founder of the Period, the Rector Franke, who explains it
to be an Era or space of time, invented by him, of one hundred and
fifty-two Cycles, each of which contains in itself its good forty-nine
tropical Lunar-Solar years. The word _Jubilee_ is prefixed by the Rector
for this reason, that in every seventh year a lesser, and in every seven
times seventh, or forty-ninth, a greater, Jubilee-, Intercalary-,
Indulgence-, Sabbath-, or Trumpet-year occurred, in which one lived
without debts, without sowing and laboring, and without slavery. I make
a sufficiently happy application, as it seems to me, of this title,
Jubilee, to my historical chapters, which conduct the business-man and
the business-woman round and round in an easy cycle or circle full of
free Sabbath-, Indulgence-, Trumpet-, and Jubilee-hours, in which both
have neither to sow nor to pay, but only to reap and to rest; for I am
the only one who, like the bowed and crooked-up drudge of a ploughman,
stand at my writing-table, and see sowing-machines, and debts of honor,
and manacles, before and on me. The seven thousand four hundred and
forty-eight tropical Lunar-Solar years which one of Franke's Jubilee
periods includes are also found with me, but only dramatically, because
in every chapter just that number of ideas--and ideas are, indeed, the
long and cubic measure of time--will be presented by me to the reader,
till the short time has become as long to him as the chapter required.

A Cycle, which is the subject of my second nominal definition, needs by
this time no definition at all.

The third nominal definition has to describe the _obligato-leaves_,
which I edit in loose sheets in every Jubilee period. The
obligato-leaves admit absolutely none but pure contemporaneous facts,
less immediately connected with my hero, concerning persons, however,
the more immediately connected with him; in the obligato-leaves,
moreover, not the smallest satirical extravasate of digression, no, not
of the size of a blister, is perceptible; but the happy reader journeys
on with his dear ones, free and wide awake, right through the ample
court-residence and riding-ground and landscape of a whole, long volume,
amidst purely historical figures, surrounded on all sides by busy
mining-companies and Jews'-congregations, advancing columns on the
march, mounted hordes, and companies of strolling players,--and his eye
cannot be satisfied with seeing.

But when the Tome is ended, then begins--this is the last nominal
definition--a small one, in which I give just what I choose (only no
narrative), and in which I flit to and fro so joyously, with my long
bee's-sting, from one blossom-nectary and honey-cell to another, that I
name the little sub-volume, made up as it is merely for the private
gratification of my own extravagance, very fitly my _honey-moons_,
because I make less honey therein than I eat, busily employed, not as a
working-bee to supply the hive, but as a bee-master to take up the comb.
Until now I had surely supposed that every reader would readily
distinguish the transits of my satirical trailing-comets from the
undisturbed march of my historical planetary system, and I had asked
myself: "Is it, in a monthly journal, any sacrifice of historical unity
to break off one essay, and follow it up with a new one; and have the
readers complained at all, if e. g. in the annual sets of the 'Horen,'
Cellini's history, as is sometimes the case, breaks off abruptly, and a
wholly different paper is foisted in?" But what actually happened?

As in the year 1795 a medical society in Brussels made the
_contrat-social_ among themselves, that every one should pay a fine of a
crown, who, during a meeting, should give utterance to any other sound
than a medical one; so, as is well known, has a similar edict, under
date of July 9th, been issued to all biographers, that we shall always
stick to the subject-matter,--which is the history,--because otherwise
people will begin to talk with us. The intention of the mandate is this,
that when a biographer, in a Universal History of the World, of twenty
volumes, or even a longer one,--as in this, for instance,--thinks or
laughs once or twice, i. e. digresses, the culprit shall stand out in
the critical pillory as his own Pasquino and Marforio,--which sentence
has been already executed on me more than once.

Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in
the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and
digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as
the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present
reduced to a prescriptive right and confirmed into a servitude, the
reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of
Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but
honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in
former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and
begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,--as I
do here,--have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a
matter of course, not only the _tribute_ as _alms_, but also the _don
gratuit_ as _quarterly assessment_. So does not merely the cultivated
Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the
traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.

I come now to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor, Von Hafenreffer, who is
the subject of my promised _exposé of fact_.

It must have been formerly learned from the 45th Dog-Post-Day, who
governs Flachsenfingen, namely, my revered father. This striking
promotion of mine was, at the bottom, more a step than a spring; for I
was, previously, no less than a Jurist, consequently the germ or bud of
an embryo Doctor _utriusque_, and consequently a nobleman, since in the
Doctor the whole spawn and yolk of the Knight lies; therefore the
former, as well as the latter, when anything chances by, lives upon his
saddle or stirrup, although less in a robber's castle than in a robber's
chamber; I have, therefore, since the preferment, changed less myself
than my castle of residence;--the paternal seat in Flachsenfingen is at
present my own.

I care not now to eat my sugar-cake at court with sin,--although one
earns sugar-cake and manna more comfortably than ship-bread,--but I
represent, in order to make a profit upon my adventure, the whole
Flachsenfingen Department of Foreign Affairs at home here in the castle,
together with the requisite deciphering chancery. This, then, is what we
shall do: we have a Procurator in Vienna, two Residents in five Imperial
cities, a Secretary of the Comitia in Ratisbon under the
Cross-Bench,[21] three Chancery-clerks of the circle, and an
Envoyé-Plenipotentiary at a well-known and considerable court not far
from Hohenfliess, who is no other than the aforementioned Mr. Feudal
Provost Von Hafenreffer. To the latter my father has even advanced a
complete silver-service, which we lend him, till he shall have received
his recall, because it is for our own interest that a Flachsenfingen
ambassador should, while abroad, do extraordinary honor, by his
extravagance, to the princely hat or coronet of Flachsenfingen.

Now it is no joke to stand on such a post as this of mine; the whole
legation-writing-and-reading company write to me under frank, the
_chiffre banal_ and the _chiffre déchiffrant_ are in my hands, and I
understand, as it seems to me, the whole mess. It is unutterable, all
that I thus learn: it could not be read by men nor drawn by horses, if I
were disposed to hatch, biographically, and feed and reel off the whole
silk-worm seed of novels, which the corps of ambassadors send me every
post-day in closely-sealed packages. Yes (to use another metaphor), the
biographical timber which my float-inspection launches for me from up
above,--now into the Elbe, now into the Saale, now into the
Danube,--stands already so high before me in the ship-yard, that I could
not use it up, supposing I drove on the æsthetical building of my
biographical fools'-ships, masquerade-balls, and enchanted castles, day
and night, year out and year in, and never danced, nor rode, nor spoke,
nor sneezed again in my life....

Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against
many another spawn, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man
should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from
himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and
hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my
legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports,
would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean
cloister-passages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now,
for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent
women of the world, veimers[22] ministers of justice, as well as jesters
pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the
Pointeurs.[23]

I come back to my ambassador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned
distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies
me--without neglecting other duties--from month to month with as many
personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his
legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;--the smallest trifles
are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different
way of thinking from that of other ambassadors, who in their reports
make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance
into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every _cul de sac_,
servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his
opera-glass of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's
virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a
hand-and-horse service of good luck, no one of us can wonder,--that is,
I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,--with
such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,--with
such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,--in
short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, or
Montgolfiers,[24]--it cannot of course be anything but just what is
expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain
height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which
will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much)
on the Sun, on Uranus and Sirius, and for which even the lucky
quill-scraper who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints
the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself,
and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy _tooth_ of
time,--especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by
the tooth-saw of the critical file,--shall be able to make any
impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of
humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but
unhappily every nature holds itself,--as Dr. Crusius does the
world,--not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.

The present _Titan_ enjoys, besides, the further advantage that I at
this moment inhabit and grace the paternal court, and accordingly, as
draughtsman, have certain sins near and bright before my eyes in a
position most favorable for observation, of which at least Vanity,
Libertinism, and Idleness will stay and sit for their likeness; for fate
has sowed these mushrooms and mosses as high as possible among the upper
classes, because in the lower and broader they would have spread too
much, and sucked them dry,--which seems to be the pattern of that same
foresight by which ships always have their assafœtida which they
bring from Persia hanging overhead on the mast, in order that its stench
may not contaminate the freight on deck. Moreover, I have up here in the
court all the new fashions already around me for my observation and
contempt, before they have been, down below there, only traduced, not to
say commended,--e. g. the fine fashion of the Parisians, that women
shall by a slight tuck in their dress show their calves, which they do
in Paris, in order to let it be seen that they are not gentlemen, who,
as is well known, walk on wooden legs,--this fashion will to-morrow or
day after to-morrow (for it has arrived on an individual lady) be
certainly introduced. But the females of Flachsenfingen imitate this
fashion on quite another ground,--for gentlemen among us have no
defect,--and that is, as a way of proving that they are human beings,
and not apes (to say nothing less), since, according to Camper and
others, man alone has calves. The same proof was adduced ten years ago,
only on higher grounds. For since, according to Haller, man is
distinguished from monkey in no other respect than by the possession of
a posterior, the female officers of the crown, the dressing-maids,
sought as much as possible to magnify in the persons of their mistresses
this characteristic of their sex by art,--by the so-called _cul de
Paris_; and, with such a penultimate of the ultimate, it became then a
jest and an amusement to distinguish at a distance of two hundred paces
a woman of the world from her female ape,--a thing which now many who
know their Buffon by heart will venture to do, when they are no nearer
to her than too near.

Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I maintain in several
of the German cities;--my honored father pays for them;--in most places
one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as
many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much
like perspective-glasses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that
is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author,
from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household
operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles
distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that
a staid, quiet man, whom nobody knows but his barber, and whose course
of life is like a dark, unfrequented _cul de sac_, but whom one of my
envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror,
which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all,
into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,--the case may
occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up
to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there
smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair,
buttons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three
hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of _Indian_ plants
which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter.

People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the
people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no ambassadors
near me.

But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but
from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into
cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out.
No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery,
and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge, has seemed thus far
to avert the discovery of the _true_ names of my histories, and, indeed,
with such success, that of all the manuscripts which have hitherto been
despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject,
not one has smelt the mouse,--and truly fortunate for the world; for so
soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first
volumes of Titan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic
chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.

Nothing is to be inferred from the names which I use, for I press into
the service God-parents for my heroes in the most singular ways. Have I
not, e. g., often of an evening, during the marching and countermarching
of the German armies, who made their crusades to the holy sepulchre of
freedom, gone up and down through the lanes of the camp, with my
writing-tablets in my hands, and caught and entered the names of the
privates,--which, just before bedtime, were called out aloud, like the
names of saints,--just as they fell, in order to distribute them again
among my biographical people? And has not merit been promoted thereby,
and many a common soldier risen to be a nobleman fit for table and
tournament, and have not provost-marshals been raised to ministers of
justice, and red-cloaks to _patribus purpuratis_? And did ever a cock
crow in all the army after this corps of observation slinking round
mobilized on two legs?

For authors who wish at the same time to narrate and disguise true
anecdotes, I am, perhaps, on the whole, a model and file-leader. I have
studied and imitated longer than other historical inquirers those little
innocent stretching and wrenching processes which can make a history
unrecognizable to the very hero of the same, and I fancy I know how one
is to make good biographies of princes, protocols of high traitors,
legends of saints, and auto-biographies; no stronger touches decide the
matter than those slight ones, by which Peter of Cortona (or Beretino)
in the presence of Ferdinand of Tuscany transformed a weeping child into
a laughing one, and the reverse.

Voltaire demands more than once, as he always does,--for he gave
mankind, like an army, every order of march three times, and repeated
himself and everything else most indefatigably,--that the historian
shall arrange his history after the law-table of the drama, to a
dramatic focal point. It is, however, one of the first dramatic rules
which Lessing, Aristotle, and the Greek models give us, that the
dramatic poet must lend to every historical circumstance which he treats
all that is favorable to the poetic illusion, as well as keep clear of
everything opposite, and that he must never sacrifice beauty to truth,
but the reverse. Voltaire gave, as is well known, not only the easy
rule, but the hard model also; and this great theatre poet of the
world's theatre, in his _benefit_ dramas of Peter and Charles, never
stuck to the truth where he was sure he could attain sooner to illusion.
And that is properly the genuine romantic history corresponding to the
historical romance. It is not for me, but for others,--namely, the
Provost and the Secretaries of Legation,--to decide how far I have
treated a true history illusorily. It is a misfortune that the true
history of my hero can hardly ever see the light; otherwise the justice
might be done me that connoisseurs would confront my poetical deviations
with the truth, and thereafter give each of us more easily his own, as
well the truth as myself. But this reward is what all royal
historiographers and scandalous chroniclers must resign _nolens volens_,
because the true history never appears in conjunction with their works.

But in the composition of a history an author must also keep a sharp
look-out upon this point, that it shall not only hit and betray no real
persons, but also no false ones, and in fact nobody at all. Before I, e.
g., choose a name for a bad prince, I must look through the genealogical
index of all governing and governed families, in order not to use a name
which some person or other already bears; thus, in Otaheite, even the
words which sound like the name of the king are abolished after his
coronation, and supplied by others. Now, as I was formerly acquainted
with no living courts at all, I was not in a situation, when preparing
the battle-pieces and night-pieces which I painted of the Cabals, the
Egoism, and the Libertinism of biographical courts, to succeed in
skilfully avoiding every resemblance to real ones; yes, for such an
idiot as I, it was a miserable help, even, to be often laying
Machiavelli open before me, in order, with the assistance of the French
history, by painting from the two, to turn off the edge of the
application at least upon countries in which no Frenchman or Italian
ever had the influence that is generally attributed to both of them upon
other Germans; just as Herder, in opposition to those naturalists who
derive certain misshapen tribes of men from a half-parentage of apes,
makes the very good remark that most of the resemblances to apes--the
retreating skull of the Calmucks, the prominent ears of the Pevas, the
slender hands in Carolina--appear just in those countries where there
are no apes at all. Formerly, then, as was said, striking unlikenesses I
could not succeed in hitting; now, on the contrary, every court around
which my legation-flotilla coasts is well known to me, and therefore
secure from accidental resemblances, particularly every one which I
describe,--that of Flachsenfingen, that of Hohenfliess, &c. The
theatrical mask which I have on in my works is not the mask of the Greek
comedian, which was embossed after the face of the individual
satirized,[25] but the mask of Nero, which, when he acted a goddess on
the stage, looked like his mistress,[26] and when he acted a god, like
himself.

Enough! This digressive introductory programme has been somewhat long,
but the Jubilee-period was so, too: the longer the St. John's day of a
country, the longer its St. Thomas's night. And now let us dance along
together into the book,--into this free ball of the world,--I first as
leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me; so
that, amidst the sounding baptismal and funeral bells in the Chinese
house of this world-building,--welcomed by the singing-school of the
muses,--serenaded from on high by the guitar of Phœbus,--we may dance
gayly from Tome to Tome, from Cycle to Cycle, from one digression to
another, from one dash to another,--till either the work comes to an
end, or the workman, or everybody!

FOOTNOTES:

[21] _Querbank_,--Bench for Protestant Bishops in the Germanic
Diet.

[22] _Veimer_,--old Westphalian judges.

[23] Tellers in faro-banks.

[24] The inventor of the balloon.--TR.

[25] Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie, etc. de Dubois, Tom. I.
Sect. 42.

[26] Sueton. Nero.




SECOND JUBILEE.

     THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE
     FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A
     STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING
     CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE
     TORTURE-SOUPÉ.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD,
     BUT WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION.


10. CYCLE.

In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful
prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the
full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cluster and the olive often
ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan
(Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all
things which belong to May--in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May
butter--he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood
itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a
princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of
counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that
mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent
clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and
fencing-schools, all anticipation of the coming riddles and conflicts of
his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with his heart full of the
glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms
no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double
conquest.

The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke
around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in
full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he
revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook
their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;--the
Librarian sought a _physical_ solution of the acoustic and optical
illusion; the Lector sought a _political_ one: he could not at all
comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially
meant by it all.

This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was
directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he
could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar.
"Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I
should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I
would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit
and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during
the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too
few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve
in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls
curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain
beats gladly a free heart.

At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and
nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they
approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and
now the Principality of _Hohenfliess_ lay only one principality distant
from them. This second principality, which was next-door neighbor to the
first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been
merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is
known to geographical readers, _Haarhaar_. The Lector told the
Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the
two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much
because they were _diplomatic_ relatives--although it is true that,
among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than
brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old
folks among the Brandenburghers--as because they were really relatives,
and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were
disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two
courts,--which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,--with all their
heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him,
namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the
principality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last
hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to
wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the
land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned
advertisements and placards, and what knavish bands of political
mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told
for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so
generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial
estate of Hohenfliess--its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and
breed of horses--in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the
highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great
intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to
population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of
Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not
even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the
shepherd's-flute; not of the _energies_ and _matrimonial prospects_ of
others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must
ruin!"

As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an
excursion to Blumenbühl,[27] which lies aside from Pestitz, and taken a
look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his
cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the
city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which
besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the
conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness
of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at
his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short,
that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of
Blumenbühl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the
world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high
life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy
and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.

It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee,
because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go
to Pestitz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however,
to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates
against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they
stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the
church-towers of Pestitz before them in the west, and, if they turned
round, the tower of Blumenbühl below them to the east; from the one and
from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his
future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village,
and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which
gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days.
He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life,
and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the
Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.

But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red
shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy
day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood,
when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod,
over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with
him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and
become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so
sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.


11. CYCLE.

It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day--and likewise on the
birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not
received the title yet--that this same director--that was to be--had
his chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pestitz, and see the
Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the _flail_ of the
state, by way of experiment, into a _drill-plough_. He was a brisk,
bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill
to others, and to whom nothing made time pass heavily but pastime. "In
the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it,
for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist
in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an
Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,--little as there was in
it,--and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.

But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to
the reader?

Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had
chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to
mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted
with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has
generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only _inborn_ not _acquired_
sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not
to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclopædia of
all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say,
the rector of the place,--named Wehmeier, better known by the title of
Band-box-master,--after schooling the village youth for the usual number
of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest _Struve's spare hours_, his
_Otia_ and _Noctes Hagianæ_, in teaching Albano, and driving into the
mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy--impelled by internal
streams--alphabetic pins,--so as to make it the barrel of a
speech-organ. Of course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something
heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the
language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a
hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of
counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither
note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering
pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the
Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself
so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So,
also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it
were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary,
sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery
of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent
its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often
in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed
of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from
quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which
would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests,
only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating _aura
seminalis_ to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider,
you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the
thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the
flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups,
instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,--and who
grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the
dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the
vine-dressers, with your hoeing and your dunging and your clipping. O,
can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe
organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all,
alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt
ourselves to the perception of her beauty,--can you ever, in any way,
make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had
they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with
their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence
it is that your _élèves_ so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in
spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow
and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.

Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards
him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and
made the mark ["with care"] with which merchants commend valuable boxes
of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery
child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had
confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the
centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without
hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own
off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at
evening before the new teacher from the city.

Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all
that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark
and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the
creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those
king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in
reference to her companion, may be compared with Luke, and mine with
Matthew.[28] Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family
feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great
good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which
installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid
up against this day as a birthday christening present.

But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano
stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting
out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house;
for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him
than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to
Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at
least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will,
however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister,
Rabette, that annoying _foster_) said, without thinking, No, although
she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn
little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will
and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,--then
the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and
pleaded for him, without knowing why,--then Albina protested at least he
should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,--then he
marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the
female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition,
gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the
presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.


12. CYCLE.

Our hero had passed over from those childish years in which Hercules
strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed
them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years.
Exultingly did his new and old Adam--they flew side by side--flap their
wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring
ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a
journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the
butterfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned
herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a
shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a
shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the
upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party
and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted
and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their
dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for
the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and
although Wehrfritz every assize day forswore all state business and
earnings,--because an honest man like him finds always in the body
politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the
stone _drapery_ remains,--nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and
feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was
just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.

The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I
offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the
herdsman's mountain fortification, and received from the soldier's wife
the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all
eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the
wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry
chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the
windows and looked in beckoning,--when Albano beheld, under the window
toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on
which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun
shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,--when at the western window
he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the
Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,--when he
placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!"
then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must
needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.

The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat.
The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden
full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the
cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to
sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet
ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who,
blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she
dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano
stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley,
and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish
longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself
away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself free and
passive into the broad ether!--and so plashing up and down in the cool,
all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and
unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,--or to sweep
after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured
assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn
between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to
little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the
peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun,
and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into
his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at
last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter,
intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red
clouds!...

Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones?
Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the
slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,--just as
if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low
earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its
chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the
horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through
the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the
presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the
chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness,
and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it
must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the
body the body also can lift up the soul.

The least Albano could do was to fly on foot down the mountain, to wade
along with the brook, which was running away into the pale-green birch
thicket to cool itself. Often before had his Robinsonading mania blown
him to all points and leaves of the wind-rose,[29] and he loved to go
with an unknown road a pretty piece of way to see what way it would
itself take. He ran along on the silver Ariadne's thread of the brook,
deep into the green labyrinth, and proposed, in fact, to come out
through the back door of the long thicket upon a distant prospect. He
could not accomplish it,--the birches grew now lighter, now darker, the
brook broader,--the larks seemed to sing, out there, far and high
overhead;--but he was obstinate. Extremes had from of old a magnetic
polarity for him; as the medium had only points of indifference. Thus,
for example, except the highest degree of the barometer, no other was so
agreeable to him as the lowest, and the shortest day was as welcome as
the longest; but the day after either was fatal.[30]

At last, after the progress of some hours in time and space, he heard,
beyond the lightening birches, and through a noise louder than that of
the brook, his name uttered repeatedly, in low tones of commendation, by
two female voices. Instantly he galloped panting back again, indifferent
to the risk of lungs and life. He heard his name long after again called
out on all sides of him, but in a cry;--it was his private patron saint,
the castellain of the hut, who fired these shots of distress on his
account at the foot of the mountain.

He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with
a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch
of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of
passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant
lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the
landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white,
glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,--when
he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town--views of which hung in
the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the
mountains--distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates
for him were closed,--and when, indeed, everything seemed flying
westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the
grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away
over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the
oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned
Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great
fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero
the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the
subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood--ah yes, every
age--often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every
other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's.
Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of
consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye
turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than
they show or we imagine.

Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved
tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner,
and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the
bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,--and the thought that
this was the birthday of his foster-father,--and his inexpressible love
for his afflicted mother, upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when
he was alone,--and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to
weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the
Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his
seeking mother.

He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind
Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly
through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a
fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons
from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her
arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young
gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and
from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.

Albina von Wehrfritz was one of those women who, unlike states, keep
only their promises, but never a threat,--resembling the forest-officers
of Nuremberg, who, upon the smallest violation of the forest-laws,
impose a fine of one hundred florins, and in the same hour modify it to
one hundred kreutzers.[31] They, however, like Solon, who gave out his
laws for a hundred years in advance, give out theirs according to the
proportion of their smaller jurisdiction, to last one hundred seconds.


13. CYCLE.

I would make more out of Albano's commemoration-dinner, which he, like a
grown-up trencher-man, could carve in the little chamber, and distribute
among the family circle, and at which he could fill for himself, were I
not going to meet weightier incidents which befell during the carrying
back of the table dinner-service.

Albano went out, with the whole sea of his inner being sparkling and
phosphorescing under the influence of the wine and the forenoon, and the
blue heaven fluttering in stronger breezes around him. He felt as if the
morning had long since gone by; and he remembered it with a tender
emotion, as we all in youth remember childhood, in age youth,--even as
at evening we remember the morning,--and the forms of Nature drew nearer
to him and moved their eyes like Catholic images. Thus does the present
offer us only shapes for optical anamorphoses, and only our spirit is
the sublime mirror which transposes them into fair human forms. With
what a sweet dip into dreams did he, when he met the fanning of the
eastern wind, close his eyes, and draw the hum of the landscape, the
screaming of the cocks and birds, and a herdsman's flute, as if deeper
and deeper into his shaded soul! And then when he opened his eyes again
on the shore of the mountain, there lay peaceful down below in the
valley the pastured white lambs by the side of the flutist, and overhead
in heaven lay stretched out far away above them the shining, fleecy
lamb-clouds!

Meanwhile, he was fain for once to take the liberty of shutting his eyes
and groping too far into the garden,--besides, the blind girl did not
see,--holding his arms open before him so as not to run against
anything, when all at once his breast touched a second, and looking up,
he found the trembling maiden so near to him, who bent aside,
stammering, "Ah, no! ah, no!" "It is only I," said the innocent one,
holding her fast; "truly, I will not harm thee!"--and as she, with a
modest shyness, trusted him, he held her a little while, and gazed down
on her bowed head with sweet emotion.

Heartily glad would he have been to give the terrified one dole-money
and benefits in this comedy for the poor; he had, however, nothing by
him, till, luckily, his sister Rabette, that bandagist,--from whose
ribbon mania he erroneously concluded that many girls are diabolically
possessed for ribbons, and swallow them like jugglers, but never give
them back,--she, and his new hair-band, came into his mind. He wound
off, joyfully, the long, silken swathing-band from his head on hers. But
the lovely neighborhood, the tie-work of an _inner_, finer band, and the
blessedness of giving, and the vivacity of his inborn exuberance, so
overcame him, that he would gladly have emptied the Green Cellar of
Dresden into her apron, when a Jew pedler, with his smaller, silken one
on his stomach, and with a bagful of bought-up hair on his back, came
trudging up the Pestitz road. The Jew suffered himself, very willingly,
to be called, but nothing to be borrowed from him, despite all bills of
exchange proposed to be drawn upon parents and pocket money. Ah, a
magnificent red cap-ribbon would have been as becoming to Lea's blind
eyes as a red bandage to a wound! For a blind lady loves to prink
herself as much as one who can see, unless she is self-conceited, and
would rather please herself in the glass than others out of it. The
merchant was very glad to let her feel of the ribbon, and said he bought
up hair in the villages, and yesterday the children of the inn, with a
piece of burning punk, had crisped up his whole sackful of queues into
short wool, and if the young gentleman would let him trim his brown hair
down to the nape of the neck, he should, on the spot, have the ribbon,
and a very serviceable leather queue of Würzburg fabric into the
bargain. What was to be done? The ribbon was very red,--so was Lea with
hope,--the Jew said he must pack up,--besides, the hair-queue which he
had hitherto worn ran like a second backbone down over the whole of the
first, and became to Alban, by reason of the tedious swathing, every
morning, a check-rein and snaffle-bridle of his mettle. In brief, the
poor, plucked hare resigned to the Jew the royal French Insigné, and
buckled on the Würzburg sheath.

And now he shook her hand right soundly, and said, with a whole Paradise
of loving joyousness in his face: "The ribbon is, no doubt, very
pleasant to thee, thou poor, blind thing!" Then the everlasting rogue
actually climbed the cherry-tree in order, up there, as a living
scare-crow, to spoil the cherries for the sparrows, and, as a fruit-god,
to throw down several of them to her as rosaries and festoons.

By Heaven! up there among the heart-cherries, it seemed as if real
wolf-cherries must be working in the head of the boy: as the earth had
her dark, middle ages, so have children often dark, middle days, full of
pure _monkery_ and mischief. On the high boughs, the growing landscape,
and the sun declining towards the mountains, and particularly the spires
of Pestitz, gleamed upon him with such heavenly light, that he could not
now imagine to himself anything higher than the bird-pole near him, nor
any more blessedly enthroned crown-eagle than one on the pole....

But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the
shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's
wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious
lady,--for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the
male support of _Titan_, firmly planted by some farmers' boys--to whom,
moreover, Albina has intrusted the _remarche-règlement_ of hastening his
return--on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of
the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying
horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the
arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could
not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his
picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and
coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half
as much as the last bird.

I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff
dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous
Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green
Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine
figure!

The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at
the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the
Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned
bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.


14. CYCLE.

Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form
and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil
lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy
shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of
a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every
minute his _élève_ fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments,
like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus; "and this too,
now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far
along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore
scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the
sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a
lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of
the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the
master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a
real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God!
Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of
bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there
better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting--like
a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge--that
children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are,
and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of
village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet,
in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble
chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly
bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be
outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years
old,--supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.

When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and
the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor
had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the
locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps.
The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the
Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in
the way of his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a
forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The
soldier's wife wrung her hands,--the servants arranged themselves for
the taking down from the cross,--the poor little fellow, in a fever,
drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose
and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole."
He would have done it--and put an untimely end to his life and my
Titan--merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal
insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the
chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide
and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet
proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at
that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the
key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably
exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an
Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;--ah,
Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler,
end in a discord?--and, secondly, because he had there a
singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant
house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as
spectator of this _début_. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round
before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his
pockets;--the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated
Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard,
and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another
has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in
his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The Band-box master was best off;
for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of
agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his
consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.

Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with
him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its
finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and
the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and
highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes
from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and
from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides
turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and
sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and
energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to
behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the
ground below.

Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had
it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it,
from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as
if they could eat him,"--as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He
voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted
him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the
work-shop,--and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned,
controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's
harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's
mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his
staving through a window, and firing, from the port-hole, a few of the
most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.

By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and
boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came
slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth
of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down
along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line
of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of
a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the
Würzburg queue like a tail-feather.

Wehmeier stared at the _cauda prehensilis_ (the ring-tail), and by his
attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as
much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of
his--Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day
with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten,
home.


15. CYCLE.

The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of
her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous
spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might
transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,--yes, as a
sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had
packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the
cabinet of the dining-room,--and for Albano Albina had already contrived
an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the _vocation_ of
the Province. Ah, but what did the lady get from it all but flames,
which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in
his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the
sprinkling of the magister?

Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband
for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in
the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as
ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness,
because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,--then step by step she
took back the right,--but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as
nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their
mouths,--and at last said he should just give the child up to her.

But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the
Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in
reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast
in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened
evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own,
and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a
teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him--though he himself
dared and did too much--to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback,
or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not
just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose
educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter
condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner,
and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?

Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his
defiant way to the father's study, and therefore to the court-martial
punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from
behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him
down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning,
tied on the _vena cava_ of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up
to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited
him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical
mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and
hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and
impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally
she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"

He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated,
into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant.
Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice
of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its
unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the
table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad
habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation
with wine.

In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by
their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time
had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the
violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a
low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world
that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to
be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of
the dulcimer let his musical hammer fall on the stringed floor.
Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the
whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and
waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the
cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs,
ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their
leather aprons and _culs de Paris_, to take themselves off instantly.

Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her
sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew
he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she
represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present
child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in
which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the
absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying
and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his
waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person
before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he
had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle,
who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would
certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man
the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned
into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul
in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to
drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing,
convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones.
After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal
evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon himself by his rides and
his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on
every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely,
herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony
throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day
think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.

Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had
been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed
upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained
cold and hard,--for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point,
the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just
before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue,
which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in
the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Würzburg appendage off over his head.
Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment,
with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and
say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in
future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified
tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned
immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with
too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all
torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him,
"and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly
done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him,
but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she
had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair
as an act of obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children
in high life.

Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his
long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping
before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and
thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off,
the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing
more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay
thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and
while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes
himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with
his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly
and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then
will the old man read the _Decretum_ over again still more slowly, so as
almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with
indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it,
make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness
and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him
thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy
downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry
cheeks,--then will he look a pretty long time after his departing
darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over
the address of the diploma at his will.

Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?


16. CYCLE.

Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above
the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of
discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf
of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he
shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and
if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary
partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he
would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in
his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.

Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her
his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna,
he said not, as usual, _nolo episcopari_; he did not say he was hemmed
round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that
perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of
fortune,--instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more
common to brides,--he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told
Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked
what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the
Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and
Rabette, and all.

But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through
Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the
arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the
greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as
entertaining _acteur_ of the table, he had so much to do with
conversing, _savoir vivre_, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in
proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he
was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers,
chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting
them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard
fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's
pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the
feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague,
and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume
to himself the magnificent _winter crop_ in Alban's sowed field as his
own _summer crop_. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all
the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the
aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]

With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own
hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a
three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his
entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some
time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir,"
replied coldly and gravely the _paradeur_ of a Falterle by the side of
our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well
at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to
scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a
cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."

What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two
brothers-in-office!--the master of accomplishments with the motley
scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow
outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the
waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a
roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him,
and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of
candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle
had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and
every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were
the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master
wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former
in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,--the one flapping up like
a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with
the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial
root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his
green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A
magnificent set-off, I repeat!

The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led
forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But
now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his
napkin open first,--which became now, as it were, introductory programme
and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "_Posément,
Monsieur_," said he to the novice, "_il est messéant de déplier la
serviette avant que les autres aient déplié les leurs_." After some
minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one _à la
Brittanière_, with rings. "_Il est mésseant, Monsieur_," said
the master of accomplishments, "_de souffler sa soupe_." The
Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from
the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short,
frightened into a dead calm.

When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on
the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced
veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed
more inwardly than outwardly.

After the bomb, came in a pike _au four_, to which, as is well known,
the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly
give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher
what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "_Pardonnez,
Monsieur_," said his rival gourmand, "_c'est du brochet au four, mon
cher Compte; mais il est mésseant de demander le nom de quelque mets
qu'il soit,--on feint de le savoir_."

It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced
through the Magister's marrow and bone; the _instruments of passion_
which lay in the cut-off head of the pike _au four_, as in an armory,
continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he
thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them,
and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as
he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs
despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he
was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with
the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine,
and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed him most
lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him
the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official
brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and
the pike _au four_, and could not help laughing up there on his planet,
to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of
brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken
pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out
of him every day as that other fellow raked in.

We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this
lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably
delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a
diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all
diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and
more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,--at
which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the
little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,--until at least with one word he
had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's
concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company
how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for
any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry
soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer
punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but
quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he
had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son;
but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense
for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like
vines and bees. Besides, deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of
their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have
satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by _opera
supererogationis_ in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than
win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g.
Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest
achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a
geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried
on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith
they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not
this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself
a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being
children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin
bow?

But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very
friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the
magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but
with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble
Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard,
clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the
ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the
life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the _frère terrible_, wherewith they
kept him under,--but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his
crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling;
however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.

Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all
corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a
favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as
himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old,
speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano
has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of
Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not
yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which
made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes,
cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the
circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on
amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour
making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets
there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite
our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider,
ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle
said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody,
because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I,"
that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he
harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly,
not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only
honey (i. e. a little praise).

"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he
had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer
shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister
sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much
for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with
the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow;
and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat
cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went
slowly out.

The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his
Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom
he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement
was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the
last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high
things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the
close, drowsy cradle of childhood,--he had sprung at once out of the
warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,--he
saw the _toga virilis_ hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and
said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"

Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too
easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation,
resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of
the fig-tree seeming _fruits_ sprout forth, which are only the fleshy
rinds of the _blossoms_!

And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and
exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,--just now
must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his
bosom,--he determined to pass through the coming years as through a
white colonnade of monumental pillars,--already a mere Alumnus fr

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