Albano

“ And when it grew dusky on the earth, and a glow lighted up the heavens, and Albano leaned across and drew his friend over to his burning heart, then rose the evening-chime in Blumenbühl. "And down below there," said Charles, with soft voice, and turned thither, "lies thy peaceful Blumenbühl, like a still churchyard of thy childhood's days. How happy are children, Albano,—ah, how happy are children!" "Are not we so?" answered he, with tears of joy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like his class, he desired of Albano a right strong backing word to his speech; but Albano said: "This is the very greatness in war, that one can and dare do without exasperated passion, without personal enmity, all that which the weakling can do only by such means; verily it were nobler," said he, "to kill in battle a loved than a hated one." "Silly chimeras!" said the Corsican, angrily; "what? Thou wilt kill the French and yet love them?" Albano's magnanimity threw off at once every timid mask, and he said: "In one word, I shall some time fight for the French and with them." ”

“ Albano bore a new world of love and bliss in his bosom; and the youth,—not yet a debtor to the past, but a guest of the present,—sweetly unbent by the long Jubilee of the day, sank into clear-obscure dreams, like a towering bird of prey hanging silent on pinions open with ecstasy. ”

“ The lightnings reveal swans, sleeping on the waves under clouds drunk with light, and their flaming trains blaze like gold after them in among the thick trees, [44] as goldfishes turn their burning backs out of the water,—and even around thy summit, Albano, the great eyes of the sunflowers turn on thee their fiery looks, as if kindled by the sparks of the glowworms.
"And in this kingdom of light," thought Albano, trembling, "the still angel of my future hides himself and glorifies it, when he appears. O where dwellest thou, good Liana? In that white temple? ”

“ On a fresh, blue morning Albano stood, before the resurrection of the sun in heaven, on the high, bloom-encircled pyramid of terraces, where he had once, on awaking, seen his dear father flee without farewell; and he gazed with emotion down into the vacant, broad lake, and around on the summits of the glaciers, which already bloomed in the reflection of Aurora riding down from on high,—and no one was with him but the past. He looked upon himself and into his breast, and thought: "What a long, heavy time has already passed through this bosom since that day! ”

“ No eye looked over to the heights of Blumenbühl, from which, at this very moment, a black train of coaches was passing slowly down, with upright-burning funeral torches, like a moving shadow-realm, to convey the still, good heart, wherein Albano and God lived, with its dead wounds, to the soft place of rest. Flaming rolled the torch-carriage up the mountain-road towards Italy.
Tearless and far-gazing, Albano's eye rested on the glimmering, ceaselessly moving fountain-wheel of time, eternally drawing up constellations in the east, and pouring them out in the west ”

“ Albano felt, at the expression of this new female love, that woman was the human heart in the fairest form. Within him rang a glad melody,—"What a day lies before thee, and what years!" Sweetly entwined and overspun with a canopy of double love-blossoms, he saw life and earth full of fragrance and light; over the morning dew of youth a sun had now been ushered up, and the dark drops glistened up and down through all gardens. ”

“ To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years often pass away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow fuller and fuller to meet him;—without wind, a landscape was to him a stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;—and now the wind rolled the solid land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances. ”

“ Albano, with his too loud, vehement voice,—with his respectful but sharply-moving eyes,—with his rooted posture,—expressed an agreeable mixture of inward culture and ascendency with external rustic modesty and mildness, like a tulip-tree not as yet cut up for a tulip-bed,—a rural hermitage and log-house with golden furniture. ”

“ Albano sank away into musing,—the autumnal wind of the past swept over the stubble,—on this holy eminence he saw the constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid of Cestius; but all became past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as upon graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age as if they were still its kings and judges.
"This in remembrance of the place and the time!" said the Princess, returning and handing him the laurel and the flower. "Thou mighty one, a colosseum is thy flower-pot; for thee nothing is too great, and nothing too small!" ”

“ O thou all too [Pg 15] 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! ”

“ And, besides all that, blessed Albano, thou knowest who hears thee. The morning air of hope flutters around thee in tones,—the wild life of youth stalks with vigorous limbs and loud strides up and down before thee,—the moonlight, undesecrated by any gross earthly light, hallows the sounding apartment. Liana's last songs lie open before thee, and the advancing moonshine will let thee read them soon,—and the nightingale in the mother's neighboring chamber contends with thy tones, as if summoned by the Tuba to the field. ”

“ Albano took his journey, happy through remembrance, still happier through hope. He had now courage to imagine to himself the day when Linda, a queen, should entwine with the shining crown of her spirit the soft bridal-wreath,—when this sun should rise as a Luna,—when a father, whom his own father loved, should interrupt the high festival by one of the highest,—and when for once two beings might say to each other: Now we love each other forever. So blest, and with an infinite love and sunny-warm soul, he arrived at the Prince's garden. ”

“ Then the silent Albano seized the strings, buried his eye in the gleaming of the mountains, and blushing, began: "Linger awhile, O singer, among the lofty spirits who marched, killing, dying, over the battle-field, and who built up the everlasting temples of humanity; linger among the pure diamonds that remained firm and bright under the hammer of destiny; linger in the olden time, in the sea of Rome, which bore upon its bosom one quarter of the world, and undermined the others; but flee before the time which sank its summit in its own crater. ”

“ But Albano understood by that Charles's sister, and hurled one sword after the other, and fiery drops stood in his eye, and hideously distorted the face of the foe before him. "Albano!" said Roquairol, his wrath exhausted, relying on the tear-built rainbow of peace,—"Albano?" he asked, and gave him his hand. "Farewell; live happily, but go; I am still innocent,—go!" replied Albano, who felt bitterly the tempest of the first wrath overhead, which having settled down, between his mountains, continued to beat upon him. ”

“ Then the tree with its frozen blossoms stands there in autumn high, broad, green, and fresh, and dark with foliage, but with empty, fruitless twigs.
At last they came out of the sweltry dining-halls into the fresh evening of Lilar, into the open air and freedom. Half indignant, half bewildered with love, Albano went to meet a veiled hour, in which so many a riddle and his dearest one were to be solved. What does man see before him, when with the thread in his hand he steps out of the subterranean labyrinth? ”

“ Albano, while listening, felt himself singularly changed, which he could ascribe only to the punch,—it was less intoxication than glow; a flying blaze roared over his inner world, and the red lustre hovered about on its farthest borders; now did it seem to him as if he stood entirely on the same ground with the Baldhead, and could wrestle with this evil genius. "I had a sister, too," said Albano; "can one call up the dead?" "No, but the dying," said the Baldhead. "Ugh!" said Albano, shuddering. "Whom would you see?" asked the Baldhead. ”

“ Albano's heart rested upon the season as a head rests upon the executioner's block. Naught did he see in the wide blue of heaven but Liana soaring therein; nothing, nothing on the earth, but her prostrate, empty form.
He felt a sharp pang when suddenly, on the heights of Blumenbühl, the white mountain-palace flashed upon his sight. He ran down wildly along by the abhorred, the transformed, and deformed Blumenbühl, and hurried away up into the deep hollow pass which leads to the mountain-castle. ”

“ Albano stood by when the strange being came up and spake to the mortally sick man, and turned two stiff, glassy eyes, which looked as if they had been set in, quite away from him with whom he spake,—so fantastic, and yet full of the cold world toward his dying brother,—with loosely hanging face-skin upon significant face-bones,—a gray were-wolf on his hind legs, just charmed out of the beastly hide into the human skin,—like the destroying angel, a destroying man, and yet without passion. ”

“ On one occasion the glow of the Corsican grew into a flame, which showed up the whole character of his life to his friend in a bright illumination, and his peculiar aim and thirst, namely, for Frenchmen's blood, "which," he said, "he hoped to quench in the approaching war." Had Albano been like him, then would they, like fighting stags, have mortally entangled themselves in each other's antlers; for the obstinate, inflexible courage of the Corsican—more a sensual courage as Albano's was more a spiritual—could not endure a contradiction. ”

“ Albano went out into the garden back of the house, into which the exposed mill-wheels threw their silver sparks, and which was as if swallowed up in the splendor and uproar of the open water. While he looked into the glimmering, flying whirlpools, the citrons which the corpse as well as the bride got hovered before his excited mind. Emotion is full of similes. ”

“ The shock which his father's ideas gave his own, and the relationship of the potshard mountain to the strangers' churchyard, caused Albano to answer rather himself than his father, with a melted ice-drop of displeasure in his eye: "Such a nameless mountain of pots is, upon the whole, also the history of nations. But one would much rather kill one's self on the spot than, after a long life, to bury one's self so namelessly and ingloriously in the mass at last." ”

“ Albano would not see anything more.
"Evil being! who set thee on to this?" asked Albano. "My strong brother," said the uncle, for so he usually called the Knight. "He gave me my living, and he would fain shoot me dead; for he laughs very much when men are very finely cheated." "O, not a syllable of that!" cried Albano, painfully, whose anger against the Knight made all his veins spirt out fiery tears and poison. "Wretch! how didst thou become what thou art?" "So! a wretch am I?" he asked, with icy coldness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the rainy season;—hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained, was a stream with waterfalls. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Never can that voice and form pass away out of Albano's heart; the soul of the old man peered, like the sun in an annular eclipse, shining, full circle, out over the dark body, which strove to hide it with its earth-mould. ”

“ They saw already those giants of winter, the Swiss and Tyrolese Alps, in their encampment; those sons of the gods stood, armed with avalanches and cataracts and winters, sentinels around the divine land where gods and men reciprocally imitated each other. How often did Albano, when the sun at evening glowingly blended with the snow-clad Alpine heights, gaze with a pang of sadness at those thrones, which he had once beheld quite otherwise, much more golden, so hopefully and trustingly, from Isola Bella! ”