Such is life; such is bliss. Like the playing moon, it consists of first and last quarters, and slowly waxes and slowly wanes. In its hope, in its fear, a brief flash is the full moon of the deepest rapture; a short invisibility the new moon of the deepest desolateness;--and always is the light game, like the moon, beginning its circle anew. THIRTEENTH JUBILEE. Tivoli.--Quarrel.--Isola Bella.--Nursery of Childhood. --Love.--Departure. 116. CYCLE. Albano alighted again at the Prince Lauria's, who had hitherto swum in such a flood-tide of new incidents, that he had hardly been conscious of the absence, and was disposed to wonder at the return. Meanwhile the German war against France had been settled upon. This news he brought to his grandson, full of the joyful expectation what great scenes such a struggle must unfold. Even Albano was for a long time carried away with him by this high stream, before he thought that this intelligence would work otherwise and more dishearteningly on his sister than on him. But the heroic fire, into which he talked himself with the political Lauria, preluded to him easy victory over a sister's affection. He was going to announce his arrival to his two friends, when he heard from the Prince that they had both, as he had heard from the Princess Altieri, with whom they resided, already gone to Tivoli. How happily he departed, guessing the friendly design of this episode journey, out of Rome, radiant as it was with love and spring, and looked quite as gayly towards the future, where his life opened so bloomingly before him, as toward Tivoli, where he hoped to press two hearts to one. He found, when he arrived in the town of Tivoli, that the ardent maidens had already stolen away to the cascade. As a man in the Vale of Tempe, or before the Lake of Geneva, passes along only in a careless dream over the shore by the watery images of the heavens and the earth, because the blooming originals round about seize and kindle him,--even so the rocks of the thickly peopled landscape, and the round Temple of Vesta, and the vales dissolving into one another, from the Roman gate to the temple,--this shining procession glided by only as dream- and water-images before a heart, in which a living loved one bloomed, and crowded out a world with a world's fulness. He roved around amidst the swarm of prospects, without finding the fairest, when a short, pale-yellow, richly dressed man eyed him with a shrivelled up face, and with a silken arm pointed unasked the way to the falls, saying if he were looking after the ladies, he would find them at the great cascade.