They all embarked and moved along among the sunflowers, which every ray of the sun planted thicker and thicker upon the watery beds. Albano--in his present glow, accustomed to the manners of the warm land where the lover speaks before the mother and she speaks of him with the daughter, where Love wears no veil, but only hatred and the face, and where the _myrtle_, in every sense, is the setting of the fields--forgot himself a moment before Dian, and took Linda's hand; she quickly snatched it away from him, true to the manner of maidens, which is lavish of the arm and chary of the finger and the thimble. But she looked on him softly, when she had repelled him. They passed along again, on their passage from east to north, before the rock with houses and before the streets of the suburb town on the shore. All was glad and friendly,--all sang that did not prattle,--the roofs were occupied with looms of silk ribbons, and the websters spoke and sang from roof to roof. Julienne could hardly keep her eye away from this southern sociableness and harmony. They put out farther into the sea, and the sun went down nearer to it. The waves and the breezes played with one another, the former breathing, the latter undulating,--sky and sea were arched into one blue concave, and in its centre floated, free as a spirit in the universe, the light skiff of love. The circle of the world became a golden, swollen harvest-wreath full of glowing coasts and islands,--gondolas flew singing into the distance, and had torches already prepared for the night, (sometimes a flying-fish traced his arc behind them in the air,) and Dian responded to their familiar songs as they glided along by. Yonder were seen great ships, proudly and slowly sailing along, fluttering like the sky, with red and blue plumes, and like conquerors bound to port. Everywhere was the must of life poured out, and it worked impetuously. So played a divine world around man! "O here in this great scene," said Albano, "where everything finds place, Paradises and dark Orcus-coasts of lava, and the yielding sea, and the gray Gorgon-head of Vesuvius, and the playing children of men, and the blossoms and all,--here where one must glow like a lava,--could not one, like the hot lava round about him, bury himself in the waves, in all his glow, if one knew that anything of this hour could pass away, even so much as a remembrance thereof, or a throbbing of the pulse for a loved heart? Were not that better?" "Perhaps," said Linda. Julienne was carried in thought by the softening pleasure to the distant sick-bed of her brother, and said, smiling: "Cannot one do like the fair sun over yonder, and go under the waves and yet come back again? And yet, after all, if you look upon his going down rightly, there is no such thing in reality."