Swiftly and sweetly glided the last days of joy over the island, which after the rain glistened in greenness like a German garden. The soft, cool air, the fragrance of myrtles and oranges, single clouds of brightness in the warm sky, the magic-smoke of the coasts, the golden sun at morning and evening, and love and youth decked and crowned the rare season. High burned on the blooming earth the sacrificial flame of love into the still, blue heavens. As two mirrors stand before one another, and one pictures the other and itself and the world, and the other represents all this and also the pictures and the painter, so tranquilly stood Albano and Linda before each other, attracting and imaging soul within soul. As Mont Blanc majestically mirrors himself down in the still lake of Chede in a paler heaven, so stood Albano's whole, sound, light spirit in Linda's. She said he was an honest and an honorable man at once, and had, what was so rare, a _whole_ will; only, as is often the case with men, he wanted to love still more than he did love, and therefore did not sufficiently recognize his quiet, original sin, from egotism. There was nothing against which he bristled up more indignantly and excitedly than against this latter charge, and he would not forgive it in any one save the Countess. He refuted her as strongly as he could; but her opinion became, under the best annihilation, only a mock corpse, and came back alive against him the very next hour. He became through her more nearly acquainted with himself than even with her. He called her the Uranide, because she seemed to him, like the heavens, at once so near and so far off; and she had no objection to this full laurel-wreath. There is a heavenly unfathomableness, which makes man godlike, and love toward him infinite; so did the ancients make Friendship the daughter of Night and of Erebus. When Albano thus looked out over the broad, rich spirit of Linda,--at once living for her love, and harboring every other's love, and yet, as it were, intoxicated with the thirst for knowledge; at once a child, a man, and a virgin; often hard and bold with the tongue for and against religion and womanhood, and yet full of the tenderest, most childlike love toward both; melting in her glow before the beloved, and quickly stiffening at a cold assault; without any vanity, because she always stood before the throne of a divine idea, and man is never vain before God, but entirely confiding in herself and submissive to no one, without, however, any comparison of herself or others; full of bold, manly uprightness, and full of respect for talent and for shrewd understanding of the world; so perfectly free from selfishness, and with such a childlike delight in others' gladness, without special anxiety or respect for persons; so inconstant and inflexible, the one in wishing, the other in willing; but with her eye and life ever directed toward the sun and moon of the spiritual kingdom, character