While he marched off toward his little house through the western triumphal arch, he felt, with indescribable strength and sweetness, that the lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of gods, temples, and bliss,--and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals stalk through and strip with their talons. His blooming path ran at length into the descending and ascending stairway, which he had passed with Spener; single streaks of day burned themselves into the moist ground and painted the scattered twigs fiery and golden. In the mystic bower, where the dead Prince had stalked along before him in the by-cavern, he found no such cavern, but only an empty niche. He stepped out above, as out of the haunch of the earth. His little house lay on the crooked back of the mountain ridge. Down below reposed around him those elephants of the earth, the hills, and Lilar gloriously swelling in blossoms, and he looked from his windows into the camp of the giants of Nature. Meanwhile he could not now stay on the window-sill, nor near the inspiring Æolian harp, nor in the eye-prison of books; through streams and woods and over mountains fresh nature longed to sweep. That he did. There are sometimes between the every-day days of life--when the rainbow of Nature appears to us only broken up, and as a misshapen, motley mass on the horizon--certain creation-days, when she rounds and contracts herself into a fair form, nay, when she becomes alive, and speaks to us like a soul. To-day Albano had such a day for the first time. Ah, years often pass away and bring no such day! While he went thus roaming along on both sides of the mountain ridge, the northeast wind began to flow fuller and fuller to meet him;--without wind, a landscape was to him a stiff, fast-nailed wall-tapestry;--and now the wind rolled the solid land over into a fluid state. The neighboring trees shook themselves like doves sweetly shuddering in its bath, but in the distance the woods stood fast, like hosts in battle array, and their summits like lances. Majestically swam through the blue the silvery islands, the clouds, and on the earth shadows stalked like giants over streams and mountains; in the valley sparkled the Rosana, and rolled into the oak grove. He went down into the warm vale; the flowery pastures foamed and their seed played in its cloud-fleece ere the earth caught it; the swan spread voluptuously his long wing; pairs of doves were pecking each other for love; and everywhere lay beds and twigs full of hot maternal bosoms and eggs. Like a glorious blue bouquet, the neck of the reposing peacock played off its dissolving colors in the high grasses. He stepped under the oaks, which with knotty arms seized hold upon heaven, and with knotty roots the earth. The Rosana talked alone with the murmuring wood, and ate away, foaming, at the rocky crags and at the decaying shore;--night and evening and day chased each other in the mystic grove.