Whoso will feel the tenderest participation in joy, let him look not at happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina--across whose face time had struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no step-motherly discord appeared--look oftener to and fro, and more benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and perturbations of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the "hypocrisy and spiritlessness[173] of the young people now-a-days," compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day assigned himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had he--(others have the devil, the deuse)--the journeyman's greeting of genius, _Rascal_, together with the derivatives, _rascality_, &c. But how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits. The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly. The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art, by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom! 66. CYCLE. The carriage flew through the village with the four young people. How grateful to our youth was the expanse of heaven and of earth! The portal of life--youth--was hung with flowers and lights. They rolled along at the foot of the mountain by the bird-pole, the sign-post of a boyish Arcadia, by the cradle where, in the enraptured sleep of childhood, he had stretched out his boyish arm after the high heaven; and through the birch thicket, now dwindled in his eyes to a bush, which, on that golden morning, he had found so broad and long; and by the open triumphal arch of the east, behind which the sea of the many-shaped Lilar poured the tide of its charms; and when they arrived behind the mountain-wall of the flute-dell, they sent back the carriage.