Albano, like a world, was wonderfully changed by Rome. After he had thus, for several weeks, lain encamped among Rome's creations and ruins; after he had drunk out of Raphael's crystal magic goblet, whose first draughts only cool, while the last send an Italian fire through all the veins; after he had seen the mountain-stream of Michael Angelo, now as a succession of cataracts, now as a mirror of the ether; after he had bowed and consecrated himself before the last greatest descendants of Greece, before her gods, who, with calm, serene countenance, stand looking into the inharmonious world, and before the Vatican Apollo, who is indignant at the prose of the age, at the abject Pythonian serpent, which is ever renewing its youth;--after he had stood so long in splendor before the full moon of the past, all at once his whole inner world was overcast, and became one great cloud. He sought solitude; he ceased to draw or to practise music; he spoke little of Rome's magnificence. By night, when the daily rain ceased, he visited alone the great ruins of the earth, the Forum, the Colosseum, the Capitol; he became more passionate, unsocial, sharp; a deep, brooding seriousness reigned on the lofty brow, and a sombre spirit burned through the eye. Gaspard, unobserved, kept his eye upon all secret unfoldings of the youth. A mere sorrow for Liana did not seem to be his case. In the northern winter this wound would only have frozen up, and not healed up; but here, in the temple of the world, where gods lie buried, a noble heart gathered strength, and beat for older graves. The Princess, who, under the mask of friendship for the father, aspired after the son, he sought less than the old, cold Lauria and the fiery Dian. At this same period, he longed sadly for his Schoppe; on that breast, he thought, would the secret of his own have found the right place and comfort. It was to him as if he had, since this separation, lived with him uninterruptedly, and become bound to him by a faster fraternal bond. Thus do spirits dwell and melt together in the invisible land; and when the bodies again meet each other in the visible, the hearts find each other again mutually more acquainted. Unfortunately, among all the letters that his father received from Pestitz, he heard not one sound from his friend over the mountains, whom he had left behind in the dark relations of a strange, perplexing passion. He never reckoned silence as a fault against Schoppe, whose hatred and spite against all letter-writing he well knew. However, his own heart could not bear it any longer, and he wrote to him as follows:--