The Goddess of Peace seemed to have here her church and her church seat. The active soldier's wife was planting early peas in a little garden full of high bushes, and now and then threw up a clod of earth into the cherry-tree among the feathered fruit-thieves, and again fell to sprinkling indefatigably the new linen and the planted salad, and yet ran willingly from time to time to the little ten-year-old maiden, who, blind from the measles, sat knitting on the door-sill, and only when she dropped a stitch called on her mother as interposing goddess. Albano stationed himself on the outermost balcony of the lovely opening valley, and every fanning of the wind breathed into his heart the old childish longing, that he could only fly. Ah, what bliss thus to snatch himself away from the receding earthly footstool, and cast himself free and passive into the broad ether!--and so plashing up and down in the cool, all-pervading air-bath, to fly at mid-day into the darkling cloud, and unseen to float beside the lark as she warbles below it,--or to sweep after the eagle, and in the flight to see cities only as sculptured assemblages of steps, and long streams only as gray, loose threads drawn between two or three countries, and meadows and hills shrunk up to little color-grains and colored shadows, and at length alight on the peak of a tower, and place himself over against the blazing evening sun, and then to soar upward when he had sunk, and look down once more into his eye still beaming on, bright and open, in the vault of night, and at last, when the earth-ball, whirling over, hides his orb, to flutter, intoxicated with rapture, into the forest-conflagration of all the red clouds!... Whence comes it that these bodily wings lift us like spiritual ones? Whence had Albano this irrepressible longing for heights, for the slater's weaver-shuttle, for mountain-peaks, for the balloon,--just as if these were helpers out of bed to the prisoners of this low earth-couch? Ah, thou dear deluded one! Thy soul, still covered with its chrysalis shell, confounds as yet the horizon of the eye with the horizon of the heart, and outer elevation with inner, and soars through the physical heaven after the ideal one! For the same power which in the presence of great thoughts lifts our head and our body and expands the chest, raises the body also even with the dark yearning after greatness, and the chrysalis swells with the beating wings of the Psyche; yes, it must needs be, that by the same band wherewith the soul draws up the body the body also can lift up the soul.