As he believed Liana to be much tenderer and better than he, and as she appeared to his fancy like Hesper, who, among all the planets, moves around the sun with the least eccentricity, and he to himself like the distant Uranus, who does so with the greatest; and since he could not, without a blaze of shame on his cheek, think of falling behind the daughter and mother in moral polish, he became at once (no man knew why) more gentle, mild, compliant, attentive to his person, obedient to the Vienna teacher,--for Liana had been so too,--and his whole Vesuvius[38] was kept under by the veil of a saint. The North American adores the form which appears to him in dreams, as his guardian spirit. O, does not even thus, to the youth, a fair dream often become his genius? 22. CYCLE. A Whitsuntide, such as I am now about to describe, Albano, excepting in the Acts of the Apostles, one can hardly find anywhere else than in thine! He had, hitherto, often listened to Liana's invalid-history with the deafness of a vigorous, fire-proof youth, when, on one occasion, the Director brought word home, that the pious lady of the Minister would let her daughter partake the sacrament on the first Whitsuntide holiday, because she was apprehensive death regarded such a creature as a strawberry, which must be plucked before the sun had shone upon it. Ah, Albano saw death at this moment groping about, and with his stony heel treading on the pale red berry and crushing it. And then this Philomela without a tongue, because she had hitherto been compelled to be dumb, had, like a Procne, sent him only the pictured history of her heavy existence, and only the leaves of parchment! All loving emotions, like plants, shoot up the most rapidly in the tempestuous atmosphere of life. Albano felt at once a wide, deep woe, and a tormenting fever-warmth in his heart, eaten hollow as it was by death. In his musical and poetic phantasyings on his Oesterlein's-harpsichord, the dreamed tones of Liana's voice and the weeping music of the harmonica, which she could play, and which he had never heard, strangely mingled, like her swan-song, with his harmonies. But this was not enough; he even wrote, secretly, a Tragedy, (thou good soul!) wherein he, with wet eyes, intrusted all his tenderest and bitterest feelings to _another's_ lips,--but he only kindled them fearfully, while he expressed them. Every one can remark that he proposed in this way to escape that babbler and spy, accident; but not every one observes--something quite original in the case; in _another's_ name, he might, he thought, venture to give his deep pain a more passionate expression, for which, in his own name, before so many stoic classical heroes, he could not for shame muster up the courage. But in this way the classics could not touch him.