When, in the meadows of Persia, a happy one, who, on the luxuriant enamel has been sleeping down among the pinks and lilies and tulips, blissfully opens his eyes at the first evening call of the nightingale upon the still, tepid world, and the motley twilight, through which some gold threads of the evening sun float glowingly: that blissful one is like the youth Albano in the enchanted chamber,--the Venetian blinds scattered round broken lights, trembling green shadows; and there was a holy twilight as in groves around temples; only murmuring bees flew, out of the loud, distant world, through the silent cell, into the noise again. Some sharp streaks of sunshine, like lightnings before sleepers, were wafted romantically to and fro with the rose; and in this dreamy grotto, amid the rustling wood of the world, the solitude was not disturbed by so much as the shadowy existence of a mirror. Into this enchantment she let the tones fly out of her hands like nightingales,--the tones were propelled towards Albano, as by a storm, now more clearly, and now more faintly; he stood before her, with folded hands, as if in prayer, and hung with thousand looks of love on the downward gazing form; all at once she lifted upon him that holy eye, full of sympathy, but she suddenly cast it down before the sun-glance of his. Now the great eyelids immovably closed upon the sweet looks, and gave her, like a sleep, the appearance of absence; she seemed a white May-flower on wintry soil, hanging down its blossom-bells. She was a dying saint in the devotion of harmony, which she heard rather than made; only the red lip she took with her as a warm reflection of life, as a last rose, that was to deck the fleeting angel; O could he disturb this prayer of music with a word of his? With narrower and narrower circles did the magnetic vortex of tones and of love clasp him round,--and now, when the drawing of the harmonica, like the water-drawing of the scorching sun, licked up his heart; and when the lightnings of passion darted over his whole life, and illumined the mountain-ridges of the future and the valleys of the past, and when he felt his whole being concentrated into one moment, he saw some drops trickle out from Liana's drooping eyes, and she looked up cheerfully to let them fall; then Albano snatched her hand away from the keys, and cried, with the heart-rending tone of his longing, "O God, Liana!" She trembled, she blushed, she looked at him, and knew not that she still wept and looked on, and continued to play no more. "No, Albano, no!" she said, softly, and drew her hand out of his, and covered her face, started at the pause of the musical tones, and collected herself and again made them flow out slowly, and said, with trembling voice: "You are a noble being. You are like my Charles, but quite as passionate. Only one request! I am about to leave the city for a while."