He went up thither, and the round table of the earth lay clear and with a singularly softening aspect around his thirsty eye. Truly, the stretch of distance, together with weariness, must have reminded this bird of passage, behind the song-grating of the breast, of his own distant lands and times, and have made him melancholy at the thought, when the landscape so mottled with red roofs spread out before him its white, glistening stones and ponds, like light-magnets and sun-splinters,--when he saw on the long, gray causeway to Linden-town--views of which hung in the summer-house, and of which two spires shot up among the mountains--distant travellers plodding on toward the city whose gates for him were closed,--and when, indeed, everything seemed flying westward, the pigeons that went whispering by, floating over the grain-fields, and the shadows of the clouds that glided lightly away over high gardens.... Ah, the youngest heart has the waves of the oldest, only without the sounding-lead to fathom their depths! Learned Germany has, I perceive, for several cycles, held itself ready for great fates and fatalities, which are to give this herdsman's day of my hero the necessary dignity; I, who ought to have the first knowledge on the subject, do not at present know of any such. Childhood--ah yes, every age--often leaves behind in our hearts imperishable days, which every other heart had forgotten: so did this day never fade from Albano's. Sometimes a child's-day is at once made immortal by a clearer glimpse of consciousness; in children, especially such as Zesara, the spiritual eye turns far earlier and more sharply upon the world within the breast than they show or we imagine. Now it struck one o'clock in the castle-tower. The near and beloved tone, reminding him of his near foster-mother, and of the denied dinner, and the sight of the little blind one, who already had her twig of the bread-tree or her dry reindeer's moss in her hand,--and the thought that this was the birthday of his foster-father,--and his inexpressible love for his afflicted mother, upon whose neck he often suddenly fell when he was alone,--and his heart, bedewed with Nature, made him begin to weep. But not for this did the stubborn little fellow go home; only the Alpine shepherdess had run on unbidden to betray the fugitive to his seeking mother. He would fain in this noonday stillness extort from the little blind Lea, upon whose countenance a soft, delicate line-work ran legibly through the punctuation of the pocks, a few words, or at least, as a fellow-laborer, the long stick wherewith she had to drive the pigeons from the peas and the sparrows from the cherries; but she pressed her arm in silence against her eyes, bashful before the distinguished young gentleman. At last the woman brought the pottage for the lost son, and from Rabette a little smelling-bottle of dessert-wine into the bargain.