At evening came happy church-goers from Blumenbühl, and praised the
consecration and the burial mightily. He saw the pious father still
standing up there on the back of the mountain. The morning when he
should be able to see Liana a whole day, and perhaps tell her all,
overspread his life with a morning dew, glimmering around him in
splendid rainbow circles. Even in bed he sang for joy the morning song
of the rowers on Lago Maggiore,--the constellations over Blumenbühl
shone through the open window of his little Alp-house down into his
closing eye. When the bright moon and flute-tones from the vale awakened
him again, the silent rapture still glowed on under the ashes of
slumber, and grew till it closed his eyes again.
65. CYCLE.
Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day
clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same
old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in
order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path
was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully
pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the
broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and
shepherd-boys had not, like the grass, shot up taller during his
absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and
the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much
prolonged to his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear
alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his
breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the
Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even
the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up
both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the
earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high
to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that
the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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