Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or later?--and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow? For Liana--into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle through--was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she thought a linden-top concealed it;--and this uncertain inclination so suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away? And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her companion, and--O God! she knows not where they stand." But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor of the next life. A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana, and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked down, and Albano started back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face, upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink, tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling tones of the brother and of the nightingale,--the eyelids quivered oftener over the gleaming eyes,--and at last the gleam became a quiet tear,--it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs, though unwounded, weep. There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment, in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir itself,--that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,--kneel before her,--tell her thy whole heart;--what though thou then art lost forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!--and then cool and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah! before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."