While they followed him with their eyes, as he slowly retired through the laurel shades, with the shadows dancing after him and stray sunbeams gliding down over him, and, as in a dream, gently bent the branches apart with his hands extended before him, Dian broke forth: "What a statue of Jupiter!" "And the ancients," said Schoppe, joining in, "believed, moreover, that every god dwelt in his own statue." "A magnificent, threefold breadth of brow, nasal bridge, and breast!" continued Dian. "A Hercules planting olive-trees on Olympus!" "It struck me very much," said the Lector, "that, after considerable study, I could read in his countenance what I wished and what was mutually contradictory,--coldness, warmth, innocence and gentleness, most readily defiance and force." Schoppe added: "It may be still harder for himself to compel such a congress of warring powers within him to become a peace-congress." "How beautifully," said the humanly feeling Dian, "must love sit upon so mighty a form, and how sublimely must anger!" "Those are two poetic beauties," replied Schoppe, "out of which two Pedagogiarchs and Zenophons, like us, can make little with their Cyrus in their Cyropædia." 4. CYCLE. Zesara had tasted only three glasses of wine; but the must of his thick, hot blood fermented under it mightily. The day grew more and more into a Daphnian and Delphic grove, in whose whispering and steamy thicket he lost himself deeper and deeper,--the sun hung in the blue like a white glistening snow-ball,--the glaciers cast their silvery glances down into the green,--from distant clouds it thundered occasionally,[12] as if spring were rolling along in his triumphal chariot far away towards us at the north,--the living glow of the climate and the hour, and the holy fire of two raptures, the remembered and the expected, warmed to life all his powers. And now that fever of young health seized upon him, in which it always seemed to him as if a particular heart beat in every limb,--the lungs and the heart are heavy and full of blood,--the breath is hot as a Harmattan wind,--and the eye dark in its own blaze,--and the limbs are weary with energy. In this overcharge of the electrical cloud he had a peculiar passion for destroying. When younger, he often relieved himself by rolling fragments of rock to a summit and letting them roll down, or by running on the full gallop till his breath grew _longer_, or most surely by hurting himself with a penknife (as he had heard of Cardan's doing), and even bleeding himself a little occasionally. Seldom do ordinary, and still seldomer extraordinary, men attain full-blooming youth of body and spirit, but when it does happen, so much the more luxuriantly does one root bear a whole flower-garden. With such emotions Albano now stood alone behind the palace towards the south, when a sport of his boyish years occurred to him.