But gaze down, fiery man, with thy fresh heart, full of youth, on the magnificent, immeasurable, enchanted Lilar! A second twilight-world, such as tender tones picture to us, an open morning-dream spreads out before thee, with high triumphal arches, with whispering labyrinthine walks, with islands of the blest; the pure snow of the sunken moon lingers now only on the groves and triumphal gates, and on the silver-dust of the fountain-water, and the night, flowing off from all waters and vales, swims over the Elysian fields of the heavenly realm of shadows, in which, to earthly memory, the unknown forms appear like Otaheite-shores, pastoral countries, Daphnian groves, and poplar-islands of our present world,--wondrous lights glide through the dark foliage, and all is one lovely, magic confusion. What mean those high, open doors or arches, and the pierced groves and the ruddy splendor behind them, and a white child sleeping among orange-lilies and gold-flowers, from whose cups delicate flames trickle,[43] as if angels had flown too near over them? 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? or in the arbor between the rose-fields? or up there in the green Arcadian summer-house?" If love makes even pangs to be pleasures, and exalts the shadowy sphere of the earth into a starry sphere, O what an enchantment will it lend to delight! Albano could not possibly, in this outer and inner splendor, think of Liana as sick; he represented to himself just now only the blissful future, and with a yearning embrace knelt down at the altar; he looked toward the glittering garden, and pictured to himself how it would be when he should one day tread with _her_ every island of this Eden,--when holy Nature should lay his and her hands in one another upon these altar-steps,--when he should sketch to her on the way the Hesperia of life, the pastoral land of first love, and then its holy exultation and its sweet tears, and how he should not then be able to look round into the eyes of that most tender heart, because he should already know that they were overflowing with bliss. Just then he saw, in the moonshine above the triumphal arches, two illuminated forms move like spirits; but his glowing soul went on with its painting, and he imagined to himself how, when the nightingales trilled in this Eden, he should look up to her and say, in a delirium of love, "O Liana, I bore thee long ago in my heart,--once upon that mountain, when thou wast sick."...