How many blessed Adams of sixteen and a half years will be at this moment enjoying their siesta in the grass of Paradise, and seeing their future bosom-companion created out of the materials of their own hearts! But they seek her not, like the first Adam, close beside them on the building-spot, but at a good distance from their own couch, because distance of space lends as much enchantment to the view as distance of time. Accordingly, every youth seats himself in the mail-coach with the full persuasion that in the cities for which he is booked quite different and more divine Madonnas stand at the doors of the houses than in his cursèd one; and the young men of those cities, again, on their part, take passage in the arriving stage-coach, and go riding hopefully into his. Ah, this sounds far too rude and harsh for all that I have in my mind, and it is to me as if I were offering the reader, instead of the living, floating rose-fragrance, only the stiff, hard, thick, porcelain-rose! Albano, I will uncover and unclose thy silent, thickly-curtained heart, so that we all may see therein the saintly image of Liana, the ascending Raphael's-Mary, but, like the pictures of the saints in Passion-week, hanging behind the veil, which thou liftest with trembling to adore it, when thou openest thy books of devotion,--the Romances,--and when thou findest therein the prayers which belong to thy saint. Even _I_ find it hard not to do like thee and the ancients, and make a mystery of the name of thy guardian goddess,--concerning inner spiritual apparitions (for outer ones are bodily apparitions) the seer is glad to be silent nine days long;--and with thy blind belief in Liana's virtuous character being a thousand times higher than thine is, and with thy holy sense of honor, which watches over another's, it is, of course, a riddle to thee how others, for instance the Vienna master or Wehrfritz, without the least blushing, can talk so loudly and fondly of her, when thou thyself hardly darest before others to--dream of her much. Truly, Albano is a good creature! Further, how such a light Psyche as Liana, so crystallized into solid ether, somewhat like the risen Christ, can at all eat carps and pick the bones out,--or stir the stack of salad in the blue dish with the long, wooden, miniature pitch-forks,--or how it can be that she weighs half a pound more in the sedan than a blue butterfly,--or how she can laugh loud (but that, however, she never did, my friend);--all this, and in general the whole petty service of this incarnate earthly life, was, to the winged youth, a riddle and a real impossibility, or at least the reality thereof was a sort of _fixed-star occultation_; why shall I suppress that he would have been far less astonished at a pair of angel's footsteps stamped into Italian rocks, than at a pair of Liana's in the ground, and that he would have given for any one single trace or relic of her--I mention only a thread-spool