The noise of the vineyards came through the lovely haze,
still, at times, with the sharp sound of a bell--death-bell, perhaps,
or only a crazy summons to the vintagers. And amid those broad,
willowy reaches of the Rhine at length, from Bingen to Mannheim,
where the brown hills wander into airy, blue distance, like a little
picture of paradise, he felt that France was at hand. Before him lay
the road thither, easy and straight.--That well of light so close!
But, unexpectedly, the capricious incidence of his own humour with
the opportunity did not suggest, as he would have wagered it must,
"Go, drink at once!" Was it that France had come to be of no account
at all, in comparison of Italy, of Greece? or that, as he passed over
the German land, the conviction had come, "For you, France, Italy,
Hellas, is here!"--that some recognition of the untried spiritual
possibilities of meek Germany had for Carl transferred the ideal land
out of space beyond the Alps or the Rhine, into future time, whither
he must be the leader? A little chilly of humour, in spite of his
manly strength, he was journeying partly in search of physical heat.
To-day certainly, in this great vineyard, physical heat was about him
in measure sufficient, at least for [144] a German constitution.
Might it be not otherwise with the imaginative, the intellectual,
heat and light; the real need being that of an interpreter--Apollo,
illuminant rather as the revealer than as the bringer of light? With
large belief that the Eclaircissement, the Aufklarung (he had already
found the name for the thing) would indeed come, he had been in much
bewilderment whence and how.
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