Freshly and meaningly did the glimmering creation broaden out before the convalescent. Saturn was just rising, and the god of time set himself, as a soft, flashing jewel, in the glittering magic belt of heaven. With sealed eyes was the unconscious youth conducted down from the pastoral cottage of his early years, and out of the shepherd's vale of his first love, away where the great, eternal constellations of art beckoned, into the divine land, where the dark ether of heaven is golden, and the lofty ruins of the earth are clothed with grace, and the nights are days. No eye looked over to the heights of Blumenbühl, from which, at this very moment, a black train of coaches was passing slowly down, with upright-burning funeral torches, like a moving shadow-realm, to convey the still, good heart, wherein Albano and God lived, with its dead wounds, to the soft place of rest. Flaming rolled the torch-carriage up the mountain-road towards Italy. Tearless and far-gazing, Albano's eye rested on the glimmering, ceaselessly moving fountain-wheel of time, eternally drawing up constellations in the east, and pouring them out in the west; and his childlike hand gently clasped his father's. TWENTY-SIXTH JUBILEE.[69] The Journey.--The Fountain.--Rome.--The Forum. 101. CYCLE. So long as the night lasted, the images of Albano's dream went on gleaming with the constellations, and not until the bright morning rose were they all extinguished. Gaspard told him, smilingly, he was on his way to Italy. He received the intelligence of his going abroad with an unexpected composure. He merely asked where his Schoppe was. When told that _he_ had not been disposed to join them, then did he seem to see all at once in fancy's eye the Linden-city come following after him over the mountains and valleys, and his last friend standing in the middle of the market-place all alone, engaged in mock-play with himself, by way of quieting his true, strong heart, which would fain worry down its grief and hold fast its love. With this friend, whom he would not let go out of his soul, Albano drew after him, as by a Jupiter's-chain, the whole stage and world of his past, and every sad scene came close up to him. Cities and lands rolled along before him unseen. The waves which sorrow lashes up around us, stand high between us and the world, and make our ship solitary in the midst of a haven full of vessels. He turned away with a shudder from every beautiful virgin; she reminded him, like a dirge, of her who was pale in death; forever did Liana's white face, uncovered,--like a corpse in Italy,[70]--seem to be travelling along on the endless way to the grave, and only indistinguishable forms with masks followed after her alive. So is it with man and his grief; by a process the reverse of ship-drawing, in which the living drag the dead along with them, here