The sister was softened by both, and a minute of the tenderest love soon entwined the three beings in one embrace. The hyperboles of anger are never so serious with man as those of love; the former only the other party must believe, the latter he believes himself. All had been brightened and cleared up by this free expression. If generally a cold past moment shuts up to lovers, as a cold night does to bees, the flowers out of which they take the honey, here, however, after the storm, the clear blue air of heaven had become purer and stiller, and the tranquillity became bliss, as the bliss tranquillity. Through Albano, although rapidly, the Fury of fear had passed, who holds an inverted telescope, and through it shows man a very distant, empty heaven, without stars. But not so through Linda; she had throughout spoken in love and hope, and for her glowing heart there were no icy places. Therefore was he now so happy and so blessed by the contemplation of that vigorous nature! A long, deep chain of valleys, wherein wine and oil flowed in the fragrance of blossoms, led them all towards the great Rome. For a space the youth could accompany them; at last, for a long separation, he must tear heart and eye away from the loved ones, when over the green, glistening vales the mighty dome of St. Peter's already sparkled, and the cypresses, proudly encircled only with cypresses, bore the gold of evening on their twigs without stirring them. All had their eyes on the fair Rome, but their hearts were only on Isola Bella, where they promised to find each other again. 117. CYCLE. On the way to Isola Bella, he thought of his hour of contention with the vehement Linda, and the character of this war-goddess. He shuddered at the very recollection of the steep precipice upon which, within a few days, he had leaned so far over; for Linda is so decided, knows no alternative between passion and annihilation. And yet, in this time of cool reflection, he felt her imperious demand upon his liberty more severely than ever, and said to himself, firmly, "Woman must not be allowed to circumscribe or rule the holy domain of man's development." On the other hand, it was, to be sure, all love, and an excess of it; and the longer he journeyed and compared, so much the darker and lonelier was it on that spot of his life upon which she alone cast the great flame. She moved before him much more clearly and nearly in spirit by his still contemplation of her spirit, than in bodily presence, because the former presented her at once in harmony, the latter with the individual dissonances without the solution. Her power of all-sided impartiality towards all characters had appeared to him, for a woman, quite as rare as it was great, especially as he himself let this power work more in the shape of respect for her and in a glad, free appreciation of great, eccentric, poetical manifestations, but not of all, even the flat and the worthless.