The still, warm enthusiasm grew under the hot covering of this glass bell much greater yet; namely, to such a degree, that he touchingly begged his foster-parents to let him on the first Whitsuntide holiday go to the--Holy Sacrament. The dilapidated state of the village church, wherein it could hardly be partaken a year longer, must needs speak as strongly in his favor, as the dilapidated state of Liana's health did in hers. Always will there remain in our poor human souls, separated from each other by bodies and wildernesses, the longing to be at least doing the same thing at the same time with one another, at one and the same hour to look up at the moon, or (as Addison relates) to send our prayers above it; and thus is thy wish, Albano, a human, a tender one, to kneel at the same hour with thy invisible Liana, at the steps of the altar, and then to rise fiery and commanding after the coronation of the inner man! He had in the still country built up the altar of religion high and firm in his soul, as all men of lofty fancy do: on mountains are always seen temples and chapels. But I must never accompany him into the Whitsuntide church before ascending with him the church-tower. Could anything be conceived more delicious, than when, at this period, on fair Sundays, so soon as there was nothing but the heavy sun swimming through the wide heavens, he climbed to the belfry of the tower, and, covered with the murmuring waves of the chime, looked out all alone over the earth below, and upon the western boundary hills of the beloved city? When presently the storm of sound swept and confounded all together, and when the jewel-sparkling of the ponds, and the flowery pleasure-tent of the frolicking spring, and the red castles on the white roads, and the scattered trains of church-going people slowly winding along between the dark-green corn-fields, and the stream girdling round the rich pastures and the blue mountains, those smoking altars of morning sacrifices, and the whole extended splendor of the visible creation poured into his soul with a glimmering overflow, and all appeared to him as a dim dream-landscape--O then arose his inner colosseum full of silent, godlike forms of spiritual antiques, and the torch-gleam of Fancy[39] glanced round upon them like the play of a moving magic life,--and there he saw among the gods a _friend_ and a _loved_ one reposing, and he glowed and trembled.... Then the bells died away with a heavy groan, and became dumb,--he stepped back from the bright spring into the dark tower,--he fastened his eye only on the empty, blue night before him, into which the distant earth sent up nothing save sometimes a butterfly blown out of its course, a swallow cruising by, or a pigeon hovering overhead,--the blue veil of Ether[40] fluttered in a thousand folds over veiled gods in the distance,--O then, then the cheated heart could not but exclaim, in its loneliness, Ah! where shall I find--where, in the