O, the wound of conscience is no sear, and time cools it not with his wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe! Albano called back to remembrance Liana's bitter entreaty for indulgence; and then it was no consolation to him, that, during that eclipse of the sun, he had not wished to sacrifice her eyes, but only her heart. In the burning-glass and magnifying-mirror of consequences fate shows us the light, playing worms of our inner man as grown-up and armed furies and serpents. How many sins pass through us unseen and with soft looks, like nightly robbers, because, like their sisters in dreams, they steal not out from the circle of the breast, and get no outward object to fall upon and strangle. The fair soul readily detects in an accident a sin. Only those hard stormers of heaven and earth before whose triumphal chariots there starts up beforehand a wagon-rampart full of wounds and corpses,--that is, the fathers of war, which, in the long course of history, ministers have oftener been than princes,--only these can calmly kindle all the volcanoes of earth, and let all their lava-torrents stream down, merely that they may have--fair prospects. They manure Elysian fields into a battle-field, in order to raise therein a redder rose-bush for a mistress. The first thing Albano did, when he arrived at the Doctor's house, was to trudge out of it down into the remote valley town, in order neither to see the suspected Lector, still less to hear daily the malicious Doctor Sphex upon the relapse of the blindness. Only the faithful Schoppe jogged off with him, especially as he, by a well-adapted course of behavior, had contrived to get up an opposition party against himself in the Sphex family, which could no longer suffer him in the house. The Librarian's warmth toward the Count had grown very much with the Lector's coldness, and on similar grounds. The bold march out to Lilar and the passionate wildness of the youth had fastened him more closely to Albano's side. "I thought at first," said Schoppe, "the young man was coming to be nothing but an elderly one, when I saw him stalking along so to school. I often held the man in the moon--where notoriously, from an absence of thirst and atmosphere, there is nothing to drink--to be a greater tippler than he. But at last he strikes out. A youth must not, like old Spener, represent everything in bird's-eye perspective, from the apex downward. He must, in the beginning, like incipients in authors' studies and painters' studios, make all lines a little too large, because the little ones come of themselves. There are thunder-steeds, but no thunder-asses and thunder-sheep; as, however, the tutors and lectors would be glad if there were, and would be glad to have such to drive along before them,--they who, like the billiard-markers, suffer no open fire in the pipe, but only one under cover."