Jean Paul

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

“ Albano stepped, for the first time, into the inverted puppet-world of a masquerade, as into a dancing realm of the dead. The black forms, the slit masks, the strange eyes, gleaming as out of night behind them, which, as in that mouldering Sultan in the coffin, alone remained alive,—the mingling and mimicking of all ranks, the flying and ring-running of the clinking dance, and his own solitude under the mask,—all this translated him, with his Shakespearian frame of spirit, into an enchanted and ghostly island full of juggleries, chimeras, and metamorphoses. ”

“ Albano held her hand. All the mountain-ridges of his life stood in a glowing dawn. "Liana," said he, "what innumerable springs are there at this moment up yonder on the worlds which hang in the heavens; but this is the fairest!" "Ah, life is lovely, and to-day it is too dear to me! Albano," she added, in a low voice, and her whole face became an exalted, tearless love, and the stars wove and embroidered its bridal dress, "if God calls me, then may he let me always appear to thee as Caroline does to me. ”

“ Albano interrupted her, for his feelings were striking against each other like swords, "I revere, but I hate her dangerous phantom. Fancy and sickness are the parents of the air-born, destroying angel, who flies scorching, like a dumb heat-lightning, over all the blossoms of youth!"
She answered, with emotion, "O thou good, pure spirit! thou hast never distressed me, thou hast ever comforted, guided, made me happy and holy,—a phantom is it, Albano? It even preserves me against all phantoms of terror, against all ghostly fear, because it is always about me. ”

“ O how one loves, Albano, when all around us crumbles and sinks and melts away in smoke, and when, still, the bond and splendor of love stand firm and inviolate on the fleeting ground of life, as I have often seen with emotion, when standing by waterfalls, a rainbow hover, undisturbed and unchanged, over the bursting, impetuous floods! O, would that the nightingales were [Pg 462] yet singing; now I could sing with them! Thy Æolian-harp, my harmonica, how gladly would I have it in my hand! My father was with us, and more cheerful and friendly toward all than ever. ”

“ Unfortunate is the female soul which loses its way, and is caught in one of these great webs stretched out in mid-heaven; and happy is she, when she tears through them, unpoisoned, and merely soils her bees'-wings. But this all-powerful fancy, this streaming love, this softness and strength, this all-mastering coolness and collectedness, will overspread every female Psyche with webs, if she neglects to brush away the first threads. O that I could warn you, poor maidens, against such condors, which fly up with you in their claws! The heaven of our days hangs full of these eagles. ”

“ Only the innocent white brow, with festive roses in its little ringlets; the childishly bright looking-up of the pure blue pair of eyes, and the soft face, which even at a musical fortissimo, and at every vehemence in movement or laughter on the part of another, caught a sickly redness from the beating heart; and his indignant shame at the levity with which a man can abuse his omnipotence and his sex, to the terror of the tenderer, restrained him, like guardian spirits; and he said merely, in that noble anger which sounded like a tender emotion, "O Liana, thou art hard to-day!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ O thou hast more to save, thy warm, thy whole and living heart! Her mother now, from old habit, half believing her, found fault with nothing more than the whole affair, its impropriety, impossibility, folly. "O good mother," said Liana, simply remaining tender under the harsh picturing of the future Albano; "O he is not such, assuredly not!" Quite as tenderly did she far overlook the darkly-sketched future refusal of Don Gaspard, because to her faith the earth was only a blooming grave-mound hanging in the ether. ”

“ Like two streams will we mingle and grow, and bear our burdens, and dry up together. Like silver in the furnace, we will run together with glowing light, and all slags shall lie cast out around the pure shimmering metal. Laugh not, then, any longer so grimly, to think what ignes-fatui men are; like ignes-fatui we burn and fly away in the rainy storm of time. And then, when time is gone by, we find each other again, and it will be again in the spring.
"Albano de Cesara." ”

“ Now could I right blissfully return to my garden; I bore, however, a morning-greeting to the ever-cheerful Chariton, and told her that I might be found on the broad way to the altar, [87] if I should be wanted for anything. Ah, Elisa, what feelings then were mine! And why had I not thee by the hand, and why could not my distressed Charles see that his sister was so happy? As, after a warm rain, the evening-red and the liquid sunlight run from all the gold-green hills, so stood a quivering splendor over my whole inner being and over my past, and everywhere lay bright tears of joy. ”

“ There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment, in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir itself,—that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,—kneel before her,—tell her thy whole heart;—what though thou then art lost forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!—and then cool and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." ”

“ Albano would fain lead along more beautifully the fleeting, divine season, when the heart is our god; he would have it rather fly upward than fly away. He was angry the next day with nobody but himself. He tore his way through such petty and yet closely entangling troubles, through a condition like that of men during an earthquake, when an invisible vapor holds the heavy foot as a snare. "I would rather let myself be rained on upon mountains," said he, "than in valleys." Men of quick fancy more easily reconcile themselves to the loved one when she is absent, than when she is present. ”

“ Liana stood, far from the latter, with face turned half aside, and a little discolored by the moon, near a white statue of the holy Virgin, and looking out into the night. All at once [Pg 346] she looked upon him and smiled, just as if a living being had appeared to her in the abyss of ether, and her lip would speak. Earthly form more exalted and touching had never before met his eyes; the balustrade by which he held swayed to and fro (but it was he himself who shook it) , and his whole soul cried, "To-day, now, I love the heavenly one with the highest, the deepest love I have felt." ”

“ Albano went forth, holding Liana's holy hand. "O how beautiful is all!" said he. "How the fluttering world-map rustles and murmurs with long streams and woods,—how the eastern mountains bask in steadfast repose,—how the groves climb the hills, with glowing stems! One could plunge [Pg 424] down into the smoking vales and into the cold, glistening waves. Ah, Liana, how beautiful is all!" "And God is on the earth," said she. "And in thee!" said he, and thought of the word of the old man, that love seeks God, and that he dwells in the heart which we esteem. ”

“ Rabette thought Charles the gentler, and Liana, Albano; both, according to inferences from their mutual reports.
So long as a woman loves, she loves right on, steadily. A man has to do something between whiles. Liana transformed everything into his image and his name: this mountain, this little chamber, this, to him once dangerous, bird-pole, became the crayon pencils for his stereotype image. She always came back upon this, that he deserved something better than her; for love is lowliness, on the wedding-ring sparkles no jewel. ”

“ If even you, ye friends, who have never seen her, are yet won and touched by the patient, pure form, which can resignedly rejoice that the storm-cloud has, after all, only sent down rain-drops upon it, and no hailstones, how must she then have agitated the deeply-moved heart of her friend! He felt a consecration of his whole being, just as if Virtue came down incarnate in this shape from heaven, to hallow him with her smile, and then flew back in a shining path, and he followed, inspired and exalted, in her track. ”

“ Just then the night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the wood-caterpillar, and Albano [Pg 330] pointed silently to the crashing tree. Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.
This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears; a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild self, and every selfish thought. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not toward the years of childhood, but toward the season of youth, should we revert the most longingly, if we came forth out of the latter as innocent as out of the former. It is the festival day of our life, when all avenues are full of music and finery, and all houses are hung round with golden tapestries, and when Existence, Art, and Virtue, like gentle goddesses, still woo us with caresses; whereas, in after years, they summon us, like stern gods, with commands! And at this period Friendship dwells as yet in a serenely open Grecian temple, not, as later, in a narrow Gothic chapel. ”

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

“ Liana, I am happier than thou, for I alone believe in our long life here," said he, all at once changed.
Whatever, now, may have been the reason,—whether that man is not at all accustomed to be happy in a pure present, severed from all future and past, because his inner heaven, like the natural one, directly over his head and close to him, always looks dark-blue, and only round about the distant horizon radiant; or that there is a bliss so tender and unearthly as, like the moonshine, to be made too dark by every passing cloud, whereas a sturdy one, like daylight, can bear the broadest ”

“ The good old Prince had low moss-benches, little garden-chairs, little table- and pot-orangeries, and the like, placed everywhere, for the children, about the resting-places of their elders; for he loved to draw these refreshing open flowers of humanity near to his heart! "One wishes so often," said Liana, "to live in the patriarchal time, or in Arcadia, or in Otaheite; children are, indeed,—do you not believe so?—everywhere the same, and one has already in them what only the most remote time and the most remote region can insure." ”