With what blissful presentiments did they step out again before the
sphinx of night, who lay smiling before them with soft, starry glances!
Did they not go through a still, glimmering, subterranean world, light
and free, without the heavy clogging earth on their feet, while in the
wide Elysium the warm ether only flutters because invisible Psyches fan
it with their wings? And out of the flute-dell the old man sends after
them his tones as sweet arrows of love, in order that the swelling heart
may blissfully bleed of their woundings. Albano and Liana came out upon
a prospect where the broad eastern landscape, with its light-streaks of
blooming poppy-fields, and its dark villages, ascended the soft
mountains, where the moon awoke, and the splendor of her garment already
swept like that of a spirit through heaven: here they remained standing
and waiting for Luna. Albano held her hand. All the mountain-ridges of
his life stood in a glowing dawn. "Liana," said he, "what innumerable
springs are there at this moment up yonder on the worlds which hang in
the heavens; but this is the fairest!" "Ah, life is lovely, and to-day
it is too dear to me! Albano," she added, in a low voice, and her whole
face became an exalted, tearless love, and the stars wove and
embroidered its bridal dress, "if God calls me, then may he let me
always appear to thee as Caroline does to me. O, if I could only attend
thee thus through thy whole dear life, and console and warn thee, I
would willingly wish for no other heaven."
But as he was about to express the fulness of his love, and the anger
of his pain about the death-delusion, just then came his wild friend,
who, like a Vesuvius, pouring out at once lava- and rain-streams over
the credulous Rabette, had made both her heart and his own only fuller,
not lighter; then Charles beheld the glorified beings and the blue
horizon, where already the moon was flinging forth her glimmering light
between the bristling mast-peaks and summits, and looked again into the
splendor of holy love. Then could he no longer contain himself; his
heart, full of agony, mounted to an eternal purpose, as if to God, and
he embraced Albano and Rabette, and said: "Beloved man! beloved maiden!
keep my unhappy heart!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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