But where is our youth now going with his dreams? He is yet on the
romantic road that leads into Lilar, properly the first garden-walk of
the same. He strolled along an embowered road, which gently rose over
hills, with open orchards, and into yellow-blooming grounds, and which,
like the Rhine, now forced its way through green, ivy-clad rocks, and
now opened its flying, smiling shores behind the twigs. Now the white
benches under jessamine bushes and the white country-seats became more
frequent; he drew nearer, and the nightingales and canary-birds[82] of
Lilar came roving along, like birds announcing land. The morning blew
fresh through the spring, and the indented foliage yet held fast its
light, ethereal drops. A carrier lay sleeping on his rack-wagon, which
the beasts, browsing right and left, safely drew along the smooth road.
Albano heard, in the Sunday stillness, not the war-cry of oppressive
labor, but the peace-bells of the towers: in the morning chime the
future speaks, as in evening chimes the past; and at this golden age of
the day there stood, also, a golden age in his fresh bosom.
Now the fork-tailed chimney-swallows began to quiver with their purple
breasts over the heavenly blue of the wild germanders, announcing the
approach of our dwellings as well as their own; when his road seemed
about to pass through an old, open, ruined castle, overhung with rich,
thick leaves, like scales, at whose entrance, or egress, a red arm,
pointing aside with the white inscription, "Way out of Tartarus into
Elysium," stretched out toward a neighboring thicket.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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