The passage ran through the torch-dance of the waves. The distances shone and smoked magnificently. "Why do distances take so mighty a hold of the soul, although painted with the same colors as what is nearer?" said Albano. "That is the very question," said Dian. Mightily lay the sea like a monster along the coasts stretched out over their whole way to Rome, and tossed up and down the scales of waves. Albano said, "When I saw on Vesuvius the mountain and the sea, I thought how pettily and falsely narrow man sunders the two Colossi of the earth into little, familiar members, and acts as if the same sea did not stretch round the whole earth." His friends were too deeply and sadly moved to make any reply, and before strange eyes neither words nor hardly looks were at their command. When Albano saw again more nearly the battle-field of time,--the ruin-coasts, which ever grasp and lift the man; the old temples and Thermæe, like old ships, dying on the land; here a crushed and crumbling giant temple, there a city street down on the bottom of the sea;[105] the holy memorial-columns and light-houses of former greatness deserted and extinguished amidst the eternally youthful beauty of ancient nature,--he forgot the neighborhood of his own transitoriness, and said to Linda, whose eye he saw directed thither, "Perhaps I can guess what you are now thinking of,--that the ruins of the two greatest times, the Greek and the Roman, remind us only of a _strange_ past, whereas other ruins, like music, only admonish us of our _own_. That was perhaps your thought." "We think of nothing at all here," said Julienne; "it is enough, if we weep that we are obliged to go away." "Truly the Princess is right," said Linda, and added, as if displeased at Albano and everything, "and what is life, more than a glass door to heaven? It shows us what is fairest and every joy, but it is, after all, not open." By the accident of strangers' company they were compelled to leave each other with cold show, and, according to the custom of teasing, tantalizing fate, to conclude a great past with a little present. Albano travelled as hastily as his sensibility would allow over the sublime world round about him. When he arrived in Mola, he heard the singular intelligence that they had found in Gaeta a whole leathern dress, with a mask, swimming far out to sea, which must have belonged to the ascended monk, and in respect to which they found nothing so inexplicable as the empty casing, without the dead body. In Mola, the fair island of Ischia at length breathed out its last fragrance; the high citadel of heaven and the ascending pole hid among other southern constellations this warm one also, which had so long gleamed over him with suns of bliss; and the last star of the short spring went down.