Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/35

 boldly advanced towards him, and told him what I was writing. But the coarse, obstinate, yet timid free-mason, coldly welcomed me in a language as broad as his own frosty visage.

He despises biographers; for the windows of a philosophical audience are too high,—perhaps, as in ancient temples, in the roof,—so that they cannot see into the streets of real life, as, according to Winkelmann, the Roman windows were architecturally as high. Lord Rochester is said to have been continually drunk during a whole quintennium; but such a chaplain is capable of being sober for an entire decennium. A man like this bites the buds of all powerful truths, experiences, and fictions, as ants bite the buds from corn-seeds, that they may not fructify, but wither and die and form building materials.

When the Chaplain left me to join the Baron, as consecrator of the marriage sacrament, I found Karlson in the dustrain of a near cascade. Round him, almost close to our windows, the hermitages of the farmers waded in green foliage, with the fresh harvest wreath roofed by faded ones; and inside, there bloomed families, outside, elms. He showed me Gione's card, which, he said, she had given him before her marriage. But it was not so; he had found it on the moss near the cascade. It represented a Roman landscape, and beside the living fountain was the pictured one of Tivoli, and on a stone in the foreground Gione's name was written. Such a printed trifle, a beloved name shortly before its sublunar annihilation, moves the whole heart with a succession of pleasing reflections.

Karlson went to the ceremony. I remained alone under the splendid blue heaven, and rejoiced that all the inhabitants of Campan wore its livery, the blue, which we had yesterday mistaken for black.