Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art) dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to the Selam-cipher, signify _hopes_; but really one after another was short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,--he kept plucking away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance, when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo, and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of sparkling silver. Albano looked out.... Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly beautiful form! As Grecian gods stand and look unearthly before the torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation and no effort had as yet cast a wave,--and the thin, tender, scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,--and the face like a perfect pearl, oval and white,--and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the May-flowers over her heart,--and the delicate grace's-proportions, which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,--and the ideal stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a finger upon the balustrade, as if the Psyche only floated over the lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,--and the large blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow! Thou too fortunate man!--to whom the only visible goddess, Beauty, appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,--the past fades away,--the near tones seem to steal from the depth of distance,--the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with splendor the mortal breast!