This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears; a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild self, and every selfish thought. Softly he laid himself on his friend's bosom, and with magical, low words, and full of humility, and without fiery images, told him his whole heart; and that it was not wicked, but only unhappy and weak, and that he ought to have been as heartily sincere towards him, who thought too well of him, as towards God; and that he swore, by the hour of death, to be such as he,--to confess to him everything, always,--to become holy through him. "Ah, I have only been loved so very little!" he concluded. And Albano, the love-intoxicated, glowing man, the good man, who knew by his own experience the sacred excesses and exaggerations of remorse, and took these confessions to be such, came back, inspired, to the old covenant with unmeasured love. "Thou art an ardent man!" said Charles; "why do men, then, always lie frozen together on each other's breasts, as on Mount Bernard,[133] with rigid eye, with stiffened arms? O why camest thou to me so late? I had been another creature. Why came she[134] so early? In the village down below there, at the narrow, lowly church-door,--there I first saw her through whom my life became a mummy. Verily, I am speaking now with composure. They carried along before me, as I went out to walk, a corpse-like white youth on a bier into Tartarus: it was only a statue, but it was the emblem of my future. An evil genius said to me, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee.' She stood at the church-door, surrounded by people of the congregation, who wondered at the boldness with which she took up, in her two hands, a silver-gray, tongue-darting snake, and dandled it. Like a daring goddess, she bent her firm, smooth brow, her dark eye, and the rose-blossoms of her countenance upon the adder's head, which Nature had trodden flat, and played with it close to her breast. 'Cleopatra!' said I, although a boy. She, too, even then, understood it, looked up calmly and coldly from the snake, and gave it back, and turned round. O, on my young breast she flung the chilling, life-gnawing viper. But, truly, it is now all gone by, and I speak calmly. Only in the hours, Albano, when my bloody clothes of that night, which my sister has laid up, come before my eyes, then I suffer once more, and ask, 'Poor, well-meaning boy! wherefore didst thou then grow older?' But, as I said, it is all over now. To thee, only to thee, may a better genius say, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee!'"