External relations might, perhaps, have helped him somewhat, and the vow of poverty might have made the two other vows lighter for him; had he been sold as a negro slave, his spirit would have been a free white, and a work-house would have been to him a purgatory. It was for this reason the early Christians always gave those who were possessed some occupation or other, e. g. sweeping out the churches,[124] &c. But the lazy life of an officer wrought upon him to make him only still more vain and bold. So stood matters in his breast, when he came to Albano's,--hunting like an epicure after love, but merely to play with it; with an untrue heart, whose feeling was more lyric poetry, than real, sound being; incapable of being true, nay, hardly capable of being false, because every truth assimilated to the poetic representation, and this again to that; able much more easily on the stage and at the tragic writing-desk to hit the true language of passion than in life, as Boileau could only imitate dancers, but never a dance; indifferent, contemptuous, and decided against the exhausted, worthless life, wherein all that is settled and indispensable--hearts and joys and truths--melted down and floated about; with reckless energy, capable of daring and sacrificing anything which a man respects, because he respected nothing, and ever looking round after his iron patron-saint, Death; faint-hearted in his resolutions, and even in his errors fluctuating, and yet devoid only of the _tuning-hammer_, and not of the _tuning-fork_, of the finest morality; and, in the midst of the roar of passion, standing in the bright light of reflection, as the victim of the hydrophobia knows his madness, and gives warning of it. Only _one_ good angel had not flown with the rest,--Friendship. His so often blown-up and collapsed heart could hardly soar to love; but friendship it had not yet squandered away. His sister he had hitherto loved as a friend,--so fraternally, so freely, so increasingly! And now Albano, splendidly armed, had come to his embrace! In the beginning he played with him, too, lyingly, as he had with himself at the masquerade and in Tartarus. He soon observed that the country youth saw him falsely, dazzled by his own rays, but he chose rather to verify the error than to correct it. Men--and he--are like the fountain of the sun near the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, which in the morning only was cold; at noon, lukewarm; in the evening, warm; and at midnight, hot: now he depended so much on the seasons of the day, as the sound and vigorous Albano did so little, who accordingly imagined a great man was great all day, from the time of getting up to the time of lying down, as the heralds always represent the eagle with outspread wings, that he seldom went in the morning, but mostly in the evening, to Albano, when the whole girandole[125] of his faculties and feelings burned in the wine-spirit which he had previously poured upon it out of flasks.