Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 17

How gloriously,--before all the beating veins of the inner man, like those of the outer in old age, have stiffened into gristle, and all the vessels have become inflexible and earthy, and the moral pulse, like the physical, hardly makes sixty strokes in a minute, and before the shy old fool, at every emotion, reserves a piece of his nature which he keeps cold and dry, and which is to wait for another occasion, as sprinkled raspberry leaves always remain dry on the rough side,--how gloriously, I say, before this period of espionage, does a youth, especially an Albano, step along his path, how freely, boldly, and exultingly! and seeks with equal confidence the friend and the foe, and closes with him, to fight either for him or against him!

Let this excuse Albano's fiery letter! The next day he received from Roquairol this answer:--

"I am as thou. On ascension-evening I will seek thee among the masks.

"CHARLES."

The redness of mortification rushed over the Count's face at this artificial postponement of the acquaintance; he felt that, after such a tone from the heart, _he_ would have immediately, without a dead interim of five days, and without an _homage-day masquerade_ in a double sense, gone to his friend and become his. But now he swore no longer to run to meet him, but only to wait for him. However, the roused indignation soon subsided, and he began to invent fairer and fairer mitigations for the first leaf of the so-long-sought favorite. Charles might certainly, e.

g. not wish to mix up the holy time of the first recognition with this bustle of taking the allegiance-oath,--or that first suicidal masquerade might have made every succeeding one an inspiring era of a new second life,--or he knew, perhaps, in fact, about Albano's birthday,--or, finally, this glowing spirit chose to run or fly on his own track.

Meanwhile, his note made the Count reproach himself for his own letter, as if it had been a sin against his Schoppe; he held it to be a sin, in one friends.h.i.+p, to yearn after another; but thou mistakest, fair soul!

Friends.h.i.+p has steps which lead up on the throne of G.o.d, through all spirits, even to the Infinite: only love is satiable, and, like truth, admits no three degrees of comparison; and a single being fills its heart. Moreover, Albano and Schoppe, in such a mutual metempsychosis of their ideas, and such a near relations.h.i.+p of their pride and n.o.bility, held each other far more dear than they showed to each other. For, as Schoppe, in fact, showed nothing, one could love him in return only with the finger on the lip, but, perhaps, so much the more strongly. Albano was a burning-hot concave mirror, which has its object near, and represents it erect behind itself; Schoppe one which holds the object far off, and throws an inverted image of it into the air.

On the evening before his birthday, and the day of allegiance, Albano stood alone at his window, and pondered his past,--for a last day is more solemn than a first: on the 31st of December I reckon up three hundred and sixty-five days and their fates; on the first of January I think of nothing, because, in fact, the whole future is transparent, or may be all out in five minutes;--while the vesper-bell pealed over the fast-closing twentieth year of his life, and the vesper-hour rose within him, he measured the _abside-line_[101] of his moral being, and looked up at the towering pile of the approaching morrow, which hung full either of spring-showers or hailstones. Never yet had he so tenderly surveyed the circle of his beloved beings, or glanced through the open doors of futurity, as at this time.

But the fair hour was spoiled by Malt, who burst in with the information that the limping gentleman had leaped overboard. From the dormer-window might be seen a returning village funeral-procession, conglomerated around the spot on the bank where Schoppe had plunged in. With frightful wildness--for in Albano indignation was next-door neighbor to terror and pain--he dragged along with him, as he flew to the rescue, the lazy provincial physician, and even threatened him with hard words; for Sphex was going to wait for a carriage, and meanwhile represent to himself the possible cases of too late preparations for a rescue, and besides, perhaps, cherished a hope of serving up Schoppe, on the anatomical table, as Doctor's-feast of science.

The youth ran out with him,--through corn-fields, amidst tears and amidst curses,--with alternate clenched fist and outspread palm, and his eye grew more and more dim and dizzy, and his heart hotter and hotter, the nearer they approached the dark circle. At last they could not only see the Librarian, but also hear him; in good case he turned towards them his curly head from among the reeds, and, occasionally, as he was haranguing the mourning-retinue, he flung up, in a fiery manner, his hairy arm above the water-plants.

Of course the case stood thus:--

His sorites, as long as he lived, was the following: "He had come into the world, not feet foremost, but head foremost, and, accordingly, carried his head and nose high and lofty,[102] because he could not help it. Now he knew of no more genuine freedom than health;--every malady shuts up and warps the soul, and the earth is, merely for that reason, a universal block-house, _la salpetriere_ and house of bruises;[103]--whoso made use of an oyster-snail-viper medicine was himself a slimy, snaky, sticking viper, oyster, snail, and therefore the ever-free savages killed their invalids, and the vigorous Spartans gave no patient an office, least of all the crown;--and strength was especially necessary, in our degenerate days, in order to maul qualified subjects, because, to his certain knowledge, the fist with some substance in it was the best plaintiff's plea and _actio ex lege diffamari_ which a citizen could inst.i.tute."

Therefore he bathed summer and winter in ice-cold water, just as he, for the same reason, kept himself temperate in all things.

Now, then, in this odious May-weather, he had merely, in his gray hussar-cloak,--at home, his night-gown,--and with shoes down at the heel, gone to the water-side; he had previously stripped himself at the house so as to be ready as soon as he should arrive at the bank. The mourning-company, who saw him go at his swift pace down to the water, and at last throw off everything and leap in, could not but believe the man meant to drown himself, and ran in a body to his bathing-place, not to let him do it. "Do not drown himself!" cried the mourning-company of blacks, while yet afar off. He just let them come on till he could discourse the matter to them somewhat nearer, in the following wise:--"I am yet open to conviction; I can hear reason, good folk, though I am already standing up to my neck in the water; but suffer yourselves to be correctly informed in this case, dear _Cherstens_ generally, for so Christians were called in the time of Charles. I am a poor Sacramentarian, and can hardly recollect what I have hitherto lived on, it was so b.l.o.o.d.y-desperate little. Whatever I have undertaken in this world, no blessing went with it, but it was all crab's-track backwards and forward. I set up, in Vienna, a neat little magazine of snipes'

dung, but I made nothing out of it for want of snipes. I took hold on the other end, and hawked about in Carlsbad, for the lords and great ones, who are accustomed to set a picture upon every old stool and piece of trumpery, fine engravings for waste-paper and privy purposes, in order that, instead of the mere printed paper, they might have something tasty for consumption; but the whole set was left, a dead loss, on my hands, because the manner was too hard and not ideal enough. In London I prepared ready-made speeches (for I am a _litterateur_) to be used by men who are hanged, and yet would fain have something to say for themselves: I offered them to the richest parliamentary orators, and even knaves of booksellers, but came near having to use the speeches for myself. I would gladly have got my living by vomiting,[104] but that requires funds. I tried once to get a settlement as note-stand to a count's regiment, because it looks stupid enough on drill- and parade-days to see every one with a musical flap hanging on his shoulder, from which his next neighbor behind plays. I offered for a trifle to wear all the musicalia on my own person, and stand before them with the notes; but the first-lieutenant (who is at once in the regency and in the treasury) thought it would make the fifers laugh when they came to blow. Thus has it fared with me from time immemorial, dear Cherstens--but don't trample about on my precious cloak there! As ill luck would have it, I entered into wedlock with a lady of Vienna, who was endowed with melted seals;[105] her name was _Praenumerantia Elementaria Philanthropia_;[106] you don't know what this means in German,--a real h.e.l.l-broom, who chased me, all heated, like a hunted stag, into the reeds here. Cherstens, I should defame myself in the water, were I to come out plainly with the whole story of our woful condition;[107] ... in short, my Philanthropia before marriage was soft as the spines of a new-born hedge-hog, but in the nuptial state, when the foliage was off, I saw, as on trees in winter, one raven's- and devil's-nest after another. She was all the time dressing herself and dressing herself, till it was time to undress; when a fault in me or the children had been removed, she would still continue to scold a little, as one continues to vomit, when the emetic and everything is out; she indulged me preciously little, and had I had a Fontanel[108] she would have reproached me for the fresh pea which I should have been obliged every day to put into it; in short, we two pulled opposite ways,--the linch-pin of love came out in the struggle, and I came with the forward-wheels down into the water here, and my Praenumerantia stays with the hind-wheels at home. See, my women, this is why I do violence to myself--besides, the gnawing-man[109] would have, at any rate, caught me by the throat; but behold yourselves in me as in a mirror! For when a man who is a _litterateur_, and therefore, as you yet know by the case of Fichte, goes about as inst.i.tuted overseer, schoolmaster, and mentor of the human race, leaps overboard before his wife's face, and lets his Ephorie and tutors.h.i.+p go, you may conclude from this of what your own husbands, who cannot measure themselves with me at all in learning, are capable, in case you are such Praenumerantias, Elementarias, and Philanthropias as unfortunately you have the appearance of being. But,"

he concluded suddenly, as he saw Albano and the Doctor, "clear yourselves away; I am going to drown myself!"

"Ah, dear Schoppe!" said Albano. Schoppe blushed at his situation. "It must be a clown," said the retiring funeral retinue. "What child's foolery is this, then?" asked Sphex, resenting Albano's former pa.s.sion and the anatomical misshot, and derived satisfaction from telling the story of the latter's rage. Schoppe knew how heartily the n.o.ble youth loved him, and he would not say anything, because he was ashamed, but he swore to himself (in the grotesque style to which he was accustomed even in soliloquy) very shortly to let him into his breast-cavern, and show him hanging therein a whole, wild heart full of love.

49. CYCLE.

The blue day on which an ascension, a rendering of allegiance, and a birthday were to be celebrated already stood over Pest.i.tz, after having cast off its morning-red,--two horses were already harbingers of four, the lowly coach-box, of the highest,--the country n.o.bility already went down, uncomfortably frizzled, into the rooms of the inn, and scolded at being cheated out of the fairest weather for heath-c.o.c.k coupling, and the city n.o.bility, yet unpowdered, spoke of the day, but without real earnestness,--the court-micrometer,[110] the court-marshal, was surrounded by all his quartermasters,--the court-transit-instruments,[111] the courtiers, instead of their half-holiday, when they work only in the afternoon, had a whole working-day, and were already standing at the wash-table,--the allegiance-preacher, Schape, believed almost every word of his discourse, because he had read it too many times over, and the nearness of publication infused emotion into him,--there was no longer a domino to be had for the evening, except among the Jews,--when a man alighted at the door of the Doctor's house, who among all others was the most honest and hearty about the allegiance, the Director Wehrfritz. There were a son and a father in each other's arms, a fiery youth and a fiery man. Albano seemed to him no longer to be the old Albano, but--warmer than ever. He brought with him from "his women," as he called them, congratulatory letters and birthday presents; he himself made not much of the birthday or forgot it, and Albano had only celebrated it a little just after waking. These festivals belong more to the other s.e.x, who gladly toy with times and seasons in the way of loving and giving.

The t.i.tular Librarian marched out to a village, named Klosterdorf, where the Mayor with his family, after an ancient custom, had to imitate the Prince with his, and so, as commissioner, drive in the allegiance of the neighboring circle; this, Schoppe said, he still was pleased with, but the other worked too fatally on his inwards. The Director, dazzled by the prospects of the day, and posted in the front with an official speech to the chivalry, fell into a quarrel with Schoppe. "The Exchequer and the Court," said he, "have been, of course, from time immemorial, such as they are; but the Princes, dear sir, are good; they are themselves sucked dry, and then they seem to be the suckers."

"Somewhat," rejoined Schoppe, "as the death-vampyres only give out blood from themselves, while they appear to take it; but I make up for that again by attributing wholly to the Regents, besides the sins of others, the merits, victories, and sacrifices of others also; herein they are the pelicans, who shed a blood for their children which really at a distance seems to be their own."

All went off: Schoppe, out into the country; Wehrfritz, to church with the procession; Albano, into a spectator's-box in the allegiance-hall; for he would not in any wise be stuck into the train of the Prince, not even as embroidery. Soon the noisy stream of pomp came sounding back into the hall. The chivalry, the spirituality, and the cities mounted the stage, where the oath was to be taken. In the court-yard of the castle one foot stood upon another, and a needle might, to be sure, have reached the ground, but no one could do so, to pick it up; everybody looked up at the balcony, and cursed before he _swore_. The Prince, too, stayed not away; the throne, that graduated and paraphrased princely seat, stood open, and Fraischdorfer had decorated it with beautiful mythological and heraldic shoulder-pieces and appendages.

Opposite the Count bloomed the court-dames, and below them a rose and a lily, Julienne and Liana. As one lifts his eye from the stiff frosty landscape of winter to the blue breathing heavens which looked down upon our spring evenings, and wherein the light summer clouds floated and the rainbow stood, so did he glance over the s.h.i.+ning snow-light of the court at the lovely Grace of spring, around whom remembrances hung, like flowers, and who now stood so far aloof, so cut off, so imprisoned in the heavy finery of the court! Only through her friend, who sits beside her, was she gently melted and harmonized with the dazzling present.

Now began fine official speeches, the longest being made by the old Minister, the shortest by Wehrfritz: the Prince let the warm eulogies glide over his December-visage without thawing it down,--a mistaken indifference! For the praise of the Minister, as well as of other court-servants, may yet help him with posterity, since, according to Bacon, no praise is of more consequence than that which servants give, because they surely know their master best.

Then the Upper-Secretary, Heiderscheid, read Luigi's genealogical table, and illuminated the hollow family-tree, together with its dryness, and the last pale green twig; with sunken eyes Julienne heard this amid the _vivat_ of the people, and Albano, never subdued by _one_ thought alone, saw her eyes, and could not, however intently the Regent listened, avoid the funeral picture, how, one day, and that very soon, this extinguished man would bear down after him the name of his whole race into the vault; he saw them carving the inverted arms and hanging the s.h.i.+eld upside down, and heard the shovels strike against the helmet and fling the earth after the coffin. Gloomy idea! the tender sister would certainly have wept, had she only been alone!

At last the turn came to those, to whom it never comes first, although they are the only ones who have a hearty meaning in such ceremonies.

Heiderscheid stepped out on the balcony, and caused the noisy swarming mult.i.tude to stretch out the forefinger and thumb, and repeat the oath after him. The ma.s.s, always fascinated, shouted their _vivat_; in the dazzled eyes gleamed the confident expectation of a better regency and love for the unknown individual. The Count, whom a mult.i.tude generally made enthusiastic, as it did Schoppe melancholy, glowed with the inspiration of brotherly love and thirst for achievement; he saw princes, like omnipotent ones, holding sway on their eminences, and saw the blooming provinces and the gay cities of a wisely-ruled land spread out before him; he represented to himself how he, were he a prince, could, with the electric sparkling of the sceptre-point, dart, with an animating shock, into millions of united hearts at once, whereas he could now, with so great difficulty, scarcely kindle a few of the nearest; he saw his throne, as a mountain in morning light, pouring out, instead of lava, navigable streams through the lands, and breaking the storms, with a hum of harvests and festivals around its feet; he thought to himself how far, from such a high place, he could send light abroad, like a moon, which does not hide the sun by day, but, from her elevation, flings his distant brightness into the night,--and how he would, instead of only defending, _create_ and _educate_ freedom, and be a regent for the sake of forming self-regents.[112] "But why am I not one?" said he mournfully.

n.o.ble youth! do thy estates, then, furnish thee no subjects? But just so does the lesser prince believe he would govern a duchy quite otherwise, and the higher one believes the same in regard to a kingdom, and so does the highest, in regard to universal monarchy.

Meanwhile, all through this singular uneasy day, wild perspectives of youth pa.s.sed to and fro before him, and the old spirit-voice, which he was going to meet to-day, repeated in him the dark exhortation, Take the crown! Wehrfritz came back in the evening with a red face from the fiery allegiance-banquet, and Albano took an agitated leave of him, as if of the ebb and calm of life--his childish youth; for to-day he launched out deeper into its waves. Schoppe came back and wanted to have him before the sight-hole of his show-box, wherein he slid through the vicariate-allegiance-swearing in Klosterdorf, in a series of comic pictures; but these contrasted too severely with higher ones, and gave little pleasure.

At night Albano put on his beautiful, serious character-mask, that of a knight-templar,--for a comic one his form, and almost his mood, was too great;--the latter was made still more solemn by this funeral dress of a whole murdered knightly order. After he had caused to be described to him once more the awful paths of Tartarus, and the burial-place of the Prince's heart, to avoid mistaking of the way in the night, he went forth, about ten o'clock, with a high-heaving bosom, which the night-larvae[113] of fancy, together with friends.h.i.+p and love and the whole future, conspired to excite.

50. CYCLE.

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. Ah, this is the b.l.o.o.d.y scaffold, was his first thought, where the brother of thy Liana rent his young life, like a mourning-garment; and he looked fearfully round, as if he feared Roquairol might again attempt death.

Among the masks he found no one under which he could suppose him to be; this meaningless cousins.h.i.+p of standing parts, footmen, butchers, Moors, ancestors, &c.,--these could not conceal any loved one of Albano's.

Lonesomely and inquisitively he paced up and down behind the rows of the Anglaise; and more than ten eyes, which glistened opposite in the annular eclipse of the lace mask,--for women, from their open-heartedness, do not love masks, but are fond of showing themselves,--followed the powerfully and pliantly built form, which, with the bold helm and plume, with the crossed white mantle and the gleaming mail on his breast, seemed to bring a knight out of the heroic age.

At last a masked lady, who was chatting between unmasked ones, came up to him with long steps and large feet, and boldly grasped his hand as if for a dance. He was extremely embarra.s.sed at the boldness of the summons, and about the choice of an answer; it is valor precisely that loves to marry itself to gallantry, as the Damascene blade, besides hardness, possesses a perpetual fragrance; but the lady only wrote in his hand his initials, with the interrogation-mark after them,--"_v.

C.?_" and after the Yes, the charming one said, softly, "Do you not remember me? the master of exercises, Von Falterle?" Albano testified, notwithstanding his dislike of the part, a real joy at finding again a companion of his youth. He asked which mask was Captain Roquairol; Falterle a.s.sured him he had not yet arrived.

By this time--as the footmen, the butchers, Falterle, &c., were only the snow-drops of this masquerade-spring--better flowers--violets, forget-me-nots, and primroses--had sprung up or come in. For one such forget-me-not I see a churl entering, puffed out behind and before, and convex like a burning-gla.s.s, who now opened the back-door and shook out confects from his hump-back, and then the front-door and produced sausages. Hafenreffer, however, writes me the invention has once before appeared at a masquerade in Vienna. Then came a company of German play-cards, which shuffled and played out and took each other; a fine emblem of atheism, which exhibits it wholly free from the absurdity wherewith men have so loved to disfigure it! Mr. Von Augusti appeared also, but in simple dress and domino; he became (incomprehensibly to the Count) very soon the polar-star of the dancers, and the controlling Cartesian vortex of the dancing-school.

With what miserable, black ammunition-biscuit and beggar's-bread of enjoyment these people get along! thought Albano, to whom, all day long, his dreams, those Jupiter's-doves, had been bringing ambrosia. And how pale and stale is their fire, their fancy, and their speech, he thought too. Verily, a life down in a gloomy glacier-chasm! for he imagined everybody must speak and feel as intensely and ardently as he.

Now came a limping man, with a great gla.s.s-chest on his belly; of course it was easy to recognize the Librarian; he had on--either because he sent too late, or would not pay, for a domino--something black, which he had borrowed of a mourning-cloak lender, and was covered from shoulder-blade to s.h.i.+n-bone with awful masks, which he, with many finger-signs, offered mostly to those people who played their parts behind the opposite kind, e. g. short-nosed ones to long noses. He was waiting for the beginning of a hop Anglaise, the notes for which stood just on the hand-organ of his chest; then he, too, began; he had therein an excellent puppet-masquerade which had been planed out by Bestelmaier, and now he set the little masks to hopping parallel with the great ones.

His object was a comparative anatomy of the two masquerades, and the parallelism was melancholy. Besides, he had rigged it all out with by-work: little dumb persons swung their little bells in the chest; a tolerably grown-up child rocked the cradle of an inanimate doll, with which the little fool still played; a mechanic was working away at his speaking machine, by which he was going to show the world how far mere mechanism could go toward giving life to puppets; a live, white mouse[114] sprang out by a little chain, and would have upset many of the club, if he could have broken it; a starling, buried-alive, a true first Greek comedy and school for scandal in miniature, was practising upon the dancing-company the death-blow of the tongue with perfect freedom and without distinction; a looking-gla.s.s-wall mimicked the living scenes of the chest so deceptively, that every one took the images for true puppets.

The point of this comico-tragic dagger came home directly enough upon Albano, as, besides, the hopping wax-figure-cabinet of the great masquerade seemed to double the solitude of man, and to separate two selves by four faces; but Schoppe went further.

In his gla.s.s case stood a faro-bank, and by it a little man, who cut out the masked banker in black paper, but into a likeness of the German gentleman; this picture he carried into the card-chamber, where a bank-keeping mask--most certainly Cephisio--must needs hear and see him.

The banker looked at him some time inquiringly. Another, dressed wholly in black, with a dying expression, which represented the _Hippocratica facies_,[115] did the same. Albano looked towards it with a fiery glance, because it occurred to him it might be Roquairol, for it had his stature and torch-like eye. The pale mask lost much, and kept redoubling its loss; at that it drank out of a quill immoderate draughts of Champagne wine. The Lector came up; Schoppe kept on playing before the eyes that crowded round; the pale mask looked steadily and sternly at the Count. Schoppe took off his own before Bouverot; but there was another under it; he pulled this off; it disclosed an under-mask of the under-mask; he carried on the process to the fifth root;--at last his own rough face came forth, but bronzed with gold-beater's skin and distorted, as it turned towards Bouverot, with an almost frightful glaze and smile.

The pale mask itself seemed to start, and hastened with long strides off into the dancing-hall; it threw itself wildly into the wildest of the dance. This, too, confirmed Albano's conjecture, as well as its great defying hat, which seemed to him a crown, because he prized nothing more highly about manly attire than fur, cloak, and hat.

More and more fingers continually drew the letters "_v. C._" in his hand, and he nodded composedly. The time surrounded him with manifold dramas, and everywhere he stood between theatre-curtains. As with uneasy head and heart he stepped to the window, to see whether he should soon have moons.h.i.+ne for his night-walk, he saw a heavy hea.r.s.e, flanked by torches, move along across the market, which was conveying a manor-lord to his family-vault; and the undisturbed night-watchman called out, behind the creeping dead man, the beginning of the spirit-hour and of a birth-hour, which is precious to us. Could his smitten heart refrain from saying to him how sharply Death, the hard, solid, insoluble, with its glacier-air, sweeps through the warm scenes of life, and leaves behind it all over which it breathes stiff and snow-white? Could he help thinking of the cold young sister, whose voice now awaited him in Tartarus? And as Schoppe, with his puppet-parody, came to him, and he pointed out to him the street, and the latter said: "Bon! Friend Death sits on his game-wagon, and glances quietly up, as if the friend would say, 'Bon! only dance on; I make my return trip, and carry you too to your place and spot,'"--how close must it have been to him under his sultry visor! At this second the pale mask came, with others, to the window; he opened his glowing face for coolness; a hasty draught of wine, and still more his fancy, showed him the world in burning surfaces; the mask surveyed him closely, with a dark, uncertain glow of the eye, which he at last could no longer bear, because it might as well have been kindled by hatred as by love, just as the spots on the sun seem now like abysses and now like mountains.

Eleven o'clock had gone by; he suddenly disappeared from the hot looks and the crus.h.i.+ng throng, and betook himself on his way to the heart without a breast.

51. CYCLE.

While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks (mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand, &c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be murdered than shamed before his father.

How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars, stood erect before thee!--Beneath the heavens there is no terror, only under the earth!--Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and b.u.t.terflies. In the distance fiery p.r.o.ngs grew out of the earth and moved along;--it was the hea.r.s.e with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey (probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro.

He pa.s.sed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward Elysium,--a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were continually seizing and vanis.h.i.+ng.

Impetuously Albano ran down a stairway darkened with hangings, and came upon an old battle-field,--a gloomy waste with a black wall, of which the monotony was broken only by white gypsum heads, which stood in the earth as if they were on the point of sinking or of resurrection; a tower full of blind gates and blind windows stood in the midst, and the solitary clock talked with itself therein, and, with its iron rod swaying to and fro, seemed fain to divide the wave of time, which ever tended to run together again: it struck three quarters to twelve, and deep in the wood the echo murmured as if in sleep, and softly spake once more to fleeting man of fleeting time. The road ran in an eternal circle round about the churchyard wall, without coming to a gate. Alban must, according to his information, seek a spot in the wall where it roared and reeled under him.