Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 16

_Julienne_. "Has my heart, then, already denied it thee? The glorious one,--well for her and me and thee! Thy first word of love,--which the G.o.ds have now so firmly sealed,--was to be the signal-word for my annunciation to thee; only from the beloved mightest thou receive the sister. What jugglers and ghosts have done towards it, and how much of it, no one knows better than--October; why shall I, meanwhile, be choosing between lies and perjury? I simply did all, only to bring you two together; the rest I knew beforehand. Nothing succeeded,--it all was a stifling snarl; everything went up hill. I saw precious beings[101] sowing in an unblessed spring dreadful griefs, and withal smiling so hopefully! and I could not hold their unhappy hands,--I, who with such certainty foreknew all the coming anguish. O thou pure, pious soul above!" said she, all at once, with quivering lip, looking towards heaven.

The brother and sister embraced each other softly, and wept in silence at the thought of the innocent sacrifice.

"No," said Albano, very warmly, "no h.e.l.l-conspiracy could have sundered us had she only stayed with me, or even on the earth." "See, Albano,"

said Julienne, collecting again her more cheerful life-spirits, and opening all blinds, "how the morning hill sparkles and swims up and down! Let me speak out! By the very greatest good luck, I learned in winter that thou wast turning thy thoughts toward Naples. Linda had already been there once, and her mother at the baths of the neighborhood. For me, I said to her, Ischia's baths would do as well as any. Go with me; we will not disturb or go near your triste guardian in Rome at all. She readily a.s.sented. Of course there was no mention made of thee; previously, however, there had been often enough in letters and otherwise, when I always praised thee beyond measure. And now _nous voici donc_. Yesterday I received in Naples the mournful letter of my brother. Of thy arrival I knew as yet nothing. I let the Countess go alone to the feast of tones, and hastened home with heavy heart. When she came back, she opened her glad heart, and told me all; and then I told her all. Ah, thank G.o.d," she added, falling upon his neck, "that we have now at last disembarked in Elysium, and that the rotten Charon's-boat has not sent us to the bottom. But for all Europe, even for thy Dian, mark me, the privy seal remains upon our relations.h.i.+p."

Albano must needs still put a few questions. She kept answering, in a lively tone, "October! October!" till all at once, as if awaking, she exclaimed, "O, how can I say that so gayly?" but without explaining herself on the subject.

"Now will I bring thee, as I have heretofore done, to the Countess, only by a shorter way," said she, took his hand, led him out, opened the opposite apartment, where Linda lived, and said, "I present to thee my brother." Deeply blus.h.i.+ng, the n.o.ble form came to meet them, and embraced, without a word, her dear female friend. When her eye met again Albano's, she was so struck that she sought to draw away the hand which he kissed, for she had yesterday hardly seen but in a glimmering light his beautiful eye, and his n.o.ble brow, and the lips of love; and this blooming man stood, inspired with double emotion, so bright and still and earnest before her, full of n.o.ble, real love. Her heart would gladly have fallen upon his; at least, she gave him back her hand into his, and wished him joy of this morning. The obvious answer, "and of yesterday evening," he could not get over his lips, from a peculiar, modest shyness, of giving as of taking praise. "A third man is found at last for the travelling-college," said Julienne; "for thou must go off directly, in a few days; thou, too, must be off to Pest.i.tz, Albano."

"I, too, sister?" said he; "I meant to stay a month, and here is the visit of Vesuvius, Herculaneum, and Naples crowded into a few days." He wondered afterwards himself at the sweetness of obedience under the fair commands of love, since he used once to say, "Command me to command, and I will not obey." "I accompany my friend," said Linda, "glad as I should have been to go to Greece, to which I am already, for the second time, so near."

"This very night I fly away," said he; "I will only wake, see, live, and love." Julienne had already begun to show a sister's concern about his health and his objects; divided between two brothers, gladly would she, had it only been possible, have sacrificed herself to both. "The good creature has not even yet enjoyed Ischia," said she; "he must have that to-day."

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.

He cast, at length, a glance at the place which surrounded him. Niobe's group, the Genius of Turin, Cupid, and Psyche, stood there in casts, borrowed from the cabinet of an artist in Naples. The walls were decorated with rare pictures, among which was--Schoppe sneezing. This alone rushed with the northern past mightily into his softened heart, and he expressed his feeling to his beloved. "You," said she, "prefer friends.h.i.+p to art, for that portrait is the worst in my collection; but the original deserves, indeed, all regard."

She went into the cabinet, and brought out a miniature likeness of herself, which represented her, after the Turkish fas.h.i.+on, veiled, and with only one eye uncovered. How livingly beside the twilight of the veil did the open, soul-speaking eye look and strike! How did the flame of its might burn through the covering of mildness! Linda named the master of the magnificent picture, that very Schoppe, and added, he had said in this case the master must, out of reciprocal complaisance, himself praise a work which praised him more partially and powerfully than any other work of his ever had. She explained this difference of his pencil by another cause, which he had stated to her almost in these words: he had, he said, in his earliest youth, loved her mother as long as he had seen her, and afterwards never any one again; and therefore he had, as she resembled her mother, painted her _con amore_, and really striven to bring out something.

"O, honest old man!" said Albano, and could hardly keep tears out of the eyes which so often were happy. But it was only the holy pang of friends.h.i.+p; for there darted through him at last, like a beam of lightning through the clearest sky, a presumption made certain by everything,--by Schoppe's diary and Linda's words and Rabette's letter,--that Linda was the soul whom the singular being secretly loved. A sharp pain cut hastily but deeply through his brow; and he conquered himself only by his present younger freshness of spirit, by newly gathered power and force, and by the free thought that a friend may well and easily give up and sacrifice to his friend a _loved_ one, but cannot or dares not so easily surrender _one who loves him_.

Julienne said, "The only wonder is that my brother, between two such fantastical beings as this Schoppe and Roquairol, has not himself become one of the same feather." A running fire broke out. Linda said, "Schoppe is only a southern nature in conflict with a northern climate." "Properly with life itself," said Albano. Julienne simply remarked, "I love always rules in life; with neither of them is one ever tranquil and _a son aise_, but only _a leur aise_." She asked him at once about Roquairol. "He was once my friend, and I speak of him no more," said Albano, whose tongue was tied by the ruined favorite's torturing love for Linda, and even his relations.h.i.+p to Liana. Linda glided over the subject with the mere verdict that he was an overstrained weakling, and without special mention of his love for her or of her abhorrence of him. She quite as coldly forgot at a distance every one who was repulsive to her inner being as she did vehemently thrust him off when he was near.

Julienne withdrew to make arrangements for the little day's journey over the island. Albano despatched a note to Dian, containing the _marche-route_ to Naples. Linda said, in respect to Julienne, "A deeply and firmly grounded character!" "The stem and twigs all buried in little fragrant blossoms!" he added. "And exactly what she hates in books and conversations,--poesy,--that she pursues right earnestly in action. Individuality is everywhere to be spared and respected, as the root of everything good. You, too, are very good," she added, with soft voice. "Truly, I am so at present," said he; "for I love right heartily; and only a complete being can one really love, and with entire disinterestedness."

"So must the sun's image strike full and round, in order to burn." "Or an image which one takes for it," said she; "I am what I am, and cannot easily become anything else. If man has only a will once for all, which goes through life, not alternating from minute to minute, from being to being, that is the main thing." "Linda," cried Albano, "I hear my own soul. There are words which are actions; yours are." When she thus spoke out her soul, her beautiful form vanished from before his enchanted spirit, as the golden string vanishes when it begins to sound. Wounded and punished by the past for his often hard energy, he breathed only with a gentle breath--although now life, the world, and the very region made him bolder, brighter, firmer, and more ardent--upon the _unisonant_ aeolian strings of this _many-toned_ soul.

But how must she have been charmed with a man at once so mighty and so tender,--a soft constellation of near suns,--a beautiful war-G.o.d with the lyre,--a storm-cloud full of Aurora,--a spirited, ardent youth, whose thought was so honest! She said it not, however, but simply loved, like him.

He threw an accidental glance at her little table-library. "Nothing but French!" said she. He found _Montaigne_, the life of _Guyon_, the _Contrat Social_, and, last of all, _Madame de Stael sur l'Influence des Pa.s.sions_. He had read this, and said how infinitely pleased he had been with the articles upon love, parties, and vanity, and, in short, with her German or Spanish heart of fire, but not with her bald French philosophy, least of all with her immoral suicide-mania. "Good Heaven!"

cried Linda; "is not life itself a long suicide? Albano, all men are still somewhere or other pedants, the good in morality so called, and you especially. Maxims of Kant, great, broad cla.s.sifications, principles, must they all have. You are all born Germans, real Germans of the Germans, even you, friend. Am I right?" she added, softly, as if she desired a "yes."

"No," said Albano, "so soon as a man once pursues and desires anything right earnestly and exclusively, then he is called a c.o.xcomb or a pedant." "O you everlasting readers and readeresses!" cried Julienne, stepping in and seeing him with a book in his hand. "Never has the Princess read preface or note," said Linda, "as I have never yet let any one go." Women who read prefaces and notes are of some significance; with men, at most the opposite were true. "We can set out; all is ready," said Julienne.

112. CYCLE.

When they came out into the festive world, how did the cool blue of heaven come floating, fanning down upon them instead of earthly airs!

How sparkled the world and the day--and the future! How brightly foamed over in the goblet of life the draught of love made for each of the three beings out of two intoxicating ingredients!

They followed the path to the summit of Epomeo, but in an elastic, yielding freedom, and in a rapid variety of nature which is not to be matched anywhere upon the earth. They met valleys with laurels and cherries, with roses and primroses at once. There came cool defiles filled out with ripe oranges and apples, beside high rocks of aloes and pomegranates, and on the summits of the cherry and apple tree stirred overhead the vine and orange blossoms. In the blooming clefts warbled secure nightingales, and out of the crevices poisonless serpents' heads darted to the light,--sometimes appeared a cloister in a citron-grove, sometimes a white house attached to a vine-garden, now a cool grotto, now a kitchen garden near red clover, now a little meadow full of white rose-flowers and narcissi, and at every turn a man, who went by singing, dancing, and accosting them. Heights and gardens alternately hid and revealed the land and the water, and often for a long time the far-stretching sea and its cloud-coasts glimmered after them like a second heaven through the green twigs.

They drew nearer and nearer to the hermit's house on the summit, rocking themselves upon the gay, golden flag-feathers of life. They spoke to each other now and then a word of joy, not, however, by way of communicating each other, but because the heart could not help it, and a word was nothing but a sigh of happiness. They stood at last upon the throne of the earth, and looked down as from the sun. Round about them the sea lay camped, melting away into the blue of the horizon,--from Capua, far in the depths of the distance, stretched the white Apennines around Vesuvius and over on the long coast of Sorrento still onward,--and from Posilippo the lands pursued the sea even beyond Mola and Terracina,--on the opened world-surface appeared everything, the promontories, the yellow crater-margins on the coasts and the islands round about, which the terrible, veiled fire-G.o.d under the sea had driven up out of his fiery realm to the light of the sun,--and the lovely Ischia with its little cities on the sh.o.r.es and with its little gardens and craters, stood like a green blooming s.h.i.+p in the great sea, and rested on innumerable waves.

Then vanished the greatnesses of the earth from below, only the earth was great and the sun with his heavens. "O how happy we are!" said Albano. Yes, you were happy there; who will be so after you? Cradling himself upon the tree of life, at which his childish eye had already so early and longingly gazed upward, he gave utterance to all that exalted and possessed him. "Therein I recognize the all-powerful mother; angry and flaming, she comes up from the bottom of the sea, plants a burning land, and then does she again, smiling, distribute flowers among her children; so let man be, volcano--then flower." "What in comparison with this," said Julienne, "are all the winter amus.e.m.e.nts of the German May-moon! Is not that a smaller Switzerland only in a greater lake of Geneva?" The Countess, who through her Spain was more initiated in such charms, kept herself for the most part still. "Man," said she, "is the Oread and Hamadryad or some other divinity, and inspires wood and vale, and man himself, again, is inspired by man."

The Hermit appeared, and said, their meal, which was sent up, had long since arrived; he also took occasion to praise his situation. "Often,"

said he, and made Julienne laugh, "my mountain smokes like Vesuvius, and bathing-guests look up, and apprehend something, but it is only because I am baking my bread up here." They encamped themselves in the shady open air. They must needs be ever looking down again upon the lovely, diminished island, which with its gardens planted within gardens, with its springs intertwined with autumns, lay so whole and so near, a great family garden, where the people all dwell together, because there are no different lands to become entangled with each other, and the bees and the larks fly not far out over the garden of the sea. Like still, open flowers were the three souls beside each other; fragrantly flies the flower-dust to and fro, to generate new flowers. Linda sank away completely into her great deep heart; unused to love, she would fain gaze therein and find joy, while no word of Albano's escaped her, for it bespoke its birth of love in the heart.

Overflowing with mildness, and deep in thought she sat there, with her great eye half under the downcast eyelid,--after her manner, always long silent as well as long speaking. As the diamond sparkles just like the dewdrop, but only with steady power and even without the sun, her heart resembled the softest in all feminine mildness and purity, and excelled it only in strength. With delight Julienne beheld, when, now and then, after a childlike forgetting of Albano, (because her stream of speech had borne her from one world to another,) suddenly and with unembarra.s.sed joy, she replaced her finely formed hand in the youth's, to whom a pressure of her hand was nothing less than a tender embrace.

They took the nearest way down back to Albano's residence, which was ever looking up to them from its vine-shrubbery. They were ever so little with each other,--in the morning Albano was to travel. He must write from Portici, a messenger must come to take the letter,--"And he brings me one, too," said he. "Certainly not!" said Linda. Albano begged. "She will soon change and write," said Julienne. She said no.

By degrees furrows of shade stole down the mountain along with the dark lava-streams, and in the poplars nightingales began already their melodious twilight. They drew near to Albano's house. Dian ran out with delight to meet the Princess. Albano begged him, without having asked either, to procure a bark, in order that they might enjoy the evening.

Compulsory proposals of pleasure are precisely those to which maidens love best to say yes. Dian was immediately at hand with a boat; he always and quickly joined his pleasure to that of others.

They all embarked and moved along among the sunflowers, which every ray of the sun planted thicker and thicker upon the watery beds. Albano--in his present glow, accustomed to the manners of the warm land where the lover speaks before the mother and she speaks of him with the daughter, where Love wears no veil, but only hatred and the face, and where the _myrtle_, in every sense, is the setting of the fields--forgot himself a moment before Dian, and took Linda's hand; she quickly s.n.a.t.c.hed it away from him, true to the manner of maidens, which is lavish of the arm and chary of the finger and the thimble. But she looked on him softly, when she had repelled him.

They pa.s.sed along again, on their pa.s.sage from east to north, before the rock with houses and before the streets of the suburb town on the sh.o.r.e. All was glad and friendly,--all sang that did not prattle,--the roofs were occupied with looms of silk ribbons, and the websters spoke and sang from roof to roof. Julienne could hardly keep her eye away from this southern sociableness and harmony. They put out farther into the sea, and the sun went down nearer to it. The waves and the breezes played with one another, the former breathing, the latter undulating,--sky and sea were arched into one blue concave, and in its centre floated, free as a spirit in the universe, the light skiff of love. The circle of the world became a golden, swollen harvest-wreath full of glowing coasts and islands,--gondolas flew singing into the distance, and had torches already prepared for the night, (sometimes a flying-fish traced his arc behind them in the air,) and Dian responded to their familiar songs as they glided along by. Yonder were seen great s.h.i.+ps, proudly and slowly sailing along, fluttering like the sky, with red and blue plumes, and like conquerors bound to port. Everywhere was the must of life poured out, and it worked impetuously. So played a divine world around man! "O here in this great scene," said Albano, "where everything finds place, Paradises and dark Orcus-coasts of lava, and the yielding sea, and the gray Gorgon-head of Vesuvius, and the playing children of men, and the blossoms and all,--here where one must glow like a lava,--could not one, like the hot lava round about him, bury himself in the waves, in all his glow, if one knew that anything of this hour could pa.s.s away, even so much as a remembrance thereof, or a throbbing of the pulse for a loved heart? Were not that better?"

"Perhaps," said Linda. Julienne was carried in thought by the softening pleasure to the distant sick-bed of her brother, and said, smiling: "Cannot one do like the fair sun over yonder, and go under the waves and yet come back again? And yet, after all, if you look upon his going down rightly, there is no such thing in reality."

The sun stood already big as a great golden s.h.i.+eld held from heaven above the Pontian islands, and gilded their blue,--the white, rocky crown of thorns, Capri, lay in glowing light, and from Sorrento's coasts to Gaeta's glimmering gold had shot up along the walls of the world,--the earth rolled with her axis, as with a music-barrel, near the sun, and struck from the great luminary rays and tones,--sideward lay in ambush the giant messenger of night, camped on the sea, the immense shadow of Epomeo.

At this moment the sun touched the sea, and a golden lightning darted trembling round through the humid ether,--and he cradled himself on a thousand fiery wave-wings, and he quivered and hung, burning and glowing with love, on the sea, and the sea, burning, drank all his glow. Then it threw, as if he was about to pa.s.s away forever, the veil of an infinite splendor over the pale-growing G.o.d. Then it became still on the earth; a floating evening redness overflowed with rose-oil all the waves; the holy islands of sundown stood transfigured; the remotest coasts drew near and showed their redness of delight; on all heights hung rose-garlands; Epomeo glowed upward even to the ether, and on the eternal cloud-tree, which grows up out of the hollow Vesuvius, went out on the summit the last thin glimmering of splendor.

Speechless, the companions turned from the west toward the sh.o.r.e. The sailors began again to talk. "Make thy brother," Linda softly begged her friend, "keep himself always turned toward the west." She fulfilled the request without immediately guessing its motive. Linda looked continually into his beautifully irradiated face: "Ask him again," said she a second time, "the twilight is too deep, and my weak eyes see so poorly without light." It was not done, for they immediately went on sh.o.r.e. The earth trembled beneath and after them as they trod upon it, as a sounding-board of the blissful hour. Albano was fastened in speechless emotion upon the beloved face, which he must soon leave again. "I'll write to you," said she, unasked, with so touching a recall of her former threat, that, had he not been among strange eyes, he must have fallen, intoxicated with grat.i.tude upon her hand, upon her n.o.ble heart. Hard was the parting, and the end of an harmonious day in which the tone of every single minute had been again a tri-clang. By this time Dian had already departed. "Not even the roses of evening,"

said Julienne, "are without thorns." "An abrupt leave-taking is always the best; we will go home," said Linda. Albano begged that he might be allowed to attend her. "Whither?" said Linda. Softly she added, for the sake of her eyes, "I can hardly see you any longer; however, only come, I can hear, nevertheless." "Beautiful inconstant one!" said Julienne.

"I change myself," said she, "but no other does it; only as far as the chapel, Albano; you sail early in the morning." "Even earlier; perhaps this very night," said he.

While they thus more and more slowly descended the mountain, and the nightingales warbled, and the myrtle-blossoms breathed their perfume, and the tepid breezes fluttered, and overhead the whole second world, like a veiled nun, looked with a holy eye through the silver-grating of the constellations, every heart overflowed with faithful love, and the brother and the sister and the beloved took alternately each other's hand.

At once Linda stood upon the spot of yesterday's union and said, "Here he must go, Julienne!" and swiftly drew her hand out of his, and smoothed lightly his locks and cheek and then his eye, and asked, "How?" in the confusion of a dream. "Immediately," said Julienne; "one must, however, wait at least for the Italian winter, for the moon, before one can even go home." Then the brother fell upon the bosom of the tender sister, who would fain hereby procure for him a longer tarrying, and for her friend the privilege of seeing him again by a stronger illumination, and he exclaimed, with tears, "O sister! how much hast thou done for me, before I could do anything for thee, or even thank thee! Thou givest me, indeed, everything,--every joy, the highest felicity; O, what art thou like!" "There is the moon!" cried she; "now farewell, and a happy journey!"

Like a silvery day the moon had climbed the mountains, and the transfigured beloved one saw again the blooming face of her beloved. He took her hand and said, "Farewell, Linda!" Long looked they upon each other, their eyes full of soul, and they grew more strange and exalted in each other's eyes. Then did he, without knowing how, press to his heart the n.o.ble maiden, like a blessed spirit embracing a spring sun,--and he touched her holy countenance with his, and like the red mornings of two worlds their lips melted together. Linda closed her eyes, and kissed with trembling, and only a single life and bliss rolled and glowed between two hearts and lips. Julienne gently enfolded the embrace with her own, and desired no other bliss. Thereupon all parted, without speaking again, or looking round.

113. CYCLE.

Albano, with the new haste which now reigned in his actions, was already, beneath the cool morning star, flying from the happy soil. He told the architect, Dian, all his whole blessedness, because he knew how very much of a youth the man still remained in matters of love.

"Bravo!" answered Dian, "who can escape without love in Italy? At least none of us. It is to be hoped your magnificent Juno is not so haughty toward you as toward other people: then there may well be for you a life of the G.o.ds."

In the morning breezes, irradiated with sun and wave, he swept gliding along on the blue, liquid mirror between two heavens, and his eye was blest when it looked back at the Olympus of Epomeo, and blest when it looked back again on the coasts that gleamed up and down on the long, outspread market-place of the earth.

When they came through the midst of those glimmering palaces, the s.h.i.+ps, to the stationary ones, they found the people in the ecstasy of a saint's festival. He was compelled to bury the blue day and the sea in temples, in picture-halls, in fourth stories, where, according to the custom, several of the grandees dwelt, to whom he delivered letters from his father, and more beautifully in the subterranean, gloomy street which arches itself through the blooming Posilippo.

Only the prospect that, in the very next solitude, he should converse with his distant heart quieted his spirit, which was always flying away from the present. At evening they ascended the finest of the heights above Naples, the cloister of Camaldole, where, among the pleasures of the prospect, he saw, standing in gray distance behind Posilippo, the lofty Epomeo. He could no longer contain himself, but began, in a spot more thickly hidden with blossoms than others, which he had sought out for the purpose, the following letter to Linda:--

"At last, n.o.ble soul, I can speak to thee, and behold again thy island, although only as a sunny-red evening cloud looming in the horizon.

Linda, Linda, O that I have and have had thee! Does, then, the two days' divine dream last even over into the cold to-day? Thou art now so far off and dumb, and I hear no yes. When, in Rome, on the dome of St.

Peter's, I looked into the blue morning heavens, and life swelled and sounded around me as the breezes swept by, then it seemed to me as if I must fling myself into a flying royal s.h.i.+p, and seek a sh.o.r.e which grows green under the farthest constellation; as if I must flutter down, like a cascade, through the heavens, and tear my way below there through this stony life, pressing onward, and destroying and bearing everything before me and with me. And so is it with me again at this moment, and still more emphatically. I could fly over to thee, and say, 'Thou art my glory, my laurel-wreath, my eternity, but I must deserve thee; I can do nothing for thee, except what I do for myself.' In the olden time, beloved youths were great, deeds were their graces, and the coat of mail their festal dress. Today, as I looked across on the Gulf of Baja, and on the ruins where the gardens and palaces of the great Romans still lie in ruins or names, and when I saw the old, defying giants stand in the midst of flowers and oranges, and in tepid, incense-breathing breezes, refreshed and quickened by them, but not softened and subdued,--lifting with the hand the heavy trident which moved three quarters of the globe, and with sinewy breast going forth to meet winter in the north, burning heat in Africa, and every wound,--then did my whole heart ask, 'Is it so with thee?' O Linda, can a man be otherwise? The lion roams over the earth, the eagle sweeps through the heavens, and the king of these kings should have his path on the earth and in the heavens at once. I have as yet been and done nothing; but when life is as yet an empty mist, canst thou overcome it, or seize it fast and dash it to pieces? Wilt thou one day, thou Uranide, love a man? then will I shrink back from no one. But words are to actions only the sawdust of the club of Hercules, as Schoppe says.

So soon as war and freedom clash against each other, then will I deserve thee in the storm of the times, and bring with me to thee actions and immortal love.

"Here I stand on the divine heights of the cloister-garden, and look down into a green, heavenly realm which knows no equal. The sun is already away over the gulf, and flings his rose-fire among the s.h.i.+ps, and a whole sh.o.r.e full of palaces and full of men burns red. Through the long, wide-extending streets below me rolls up already the din of the festival, and the roofs are full of decorated men and women, and full of music. Balconies and gondolas wait to welcome the divine night with songs. And here am I alone, and am nevertheless so happy, and yearn without pain. But had I been standing here four days ago, Linda, when, as yet, I knew thee not and had thee not, and had I been looking upon such an evening as this,--upon the golden sea,--the gay Portici, upon which sun and sea are rippling with flames,--the majestic Vesuvius, wound round with gold-green myrtles, and with his gray, ashen head full of the glow of the sun,--and, behind me, the green plain full of clouds of flower-dust, which rise out of gardens and rain down in gardens again,--and the whole busy, magic circle of glad energies,--a world swimming in light and life,--then, Linda, without thee, would a cold pang have darted through the warm bliss, and remembrances with mourning masks would have gone about in the golden light of evening.

"O Linda, how hast thou cleansed and widened my world, and I am now happy everywhere! Thou hast transformed the heavy, sharp ploughshare of life, which painfully toils at the harvest, into a light brush and pencil, which plays about till it has wrought out a G.o.d's form. Have I not seen to-day every temple and every hill more glad, as if gilded by thee, and every beauty, whether it bloomed on a statue, on canvas, on the singing lip, or on the summits, wear a richer l.u.s.tre, and felt it breathe a richer fragrance? and then did I not fly up from the little flower to the blooming Linda?

"How the dark Power holds sway behind the cloud! It gives us sealed orders, that we may break them open at a later time, upon a distant spot. O G.o.d! upon Ischia's Epomeo it was for me first to open mine.

Then rose a moment over life, and bore eternity; the b.u.t.terfly brought the G.o.ddess!

"Evening goes down, and I must be silent. Might I only know how thy evening is! My life consists now of two hours, thine and mine, and I can no longer live with myself alone. May this day have stolen away from thee richly and mildly, and thy evening have been like mine! Only Vesuvius now reddens in the lingering sun. The islands slowly fade away in the dark sea. I behold now, without speaking to thee, the great evening, but, O G.o.d, so otherwise than in Rome! Blissfully shall I fix my eye only on thy island as it is about to be extinguished in the glittering din of the evening twilight, and yet long shall I look thitherward, when already the summit of Epomeo is dissolved in night; and then shall I look cheerfully down into the grave of colors encircled with lights below me. Happy songs will steal through the twilight; the stars will glimmer affectionately; and I shall say, 'I am alone and still, but inexpressibly happy, for Linda has my heart, and I weep only out of love, because I think of her heart'; and then I shall go down in blissful rapture through the blossom-smoke of the mountain."