owledge, and only driven asunder by
the hurricane which raged during that fateful time--that _we_, I say,
should come to cast anchor in the same harbour, for so much as a single
day, and yet not look upon each other with the eyes of the body, as we
had with the eyes of the spirit in the interval. And now, we have been
sitting here together for some hours, wearying ourselves to death over
the enthusiastic quality of our revived friendship, yet not one of us
has said anything worth listening to: we have talked tedious, tiresome
stuff, to a perfectly astonishing extent. And why is this, but because
we are a set of very childish children, thinking we were going to take
up the old tune which we sang twelve years ago, at the point where we
broke off with it, and go on singing it as we were doing then. Lothair,
we will say, should have read Tieck's 'Zerbino' aloud to us for the
first time, to our astonished delight; or Cyprian should have brought
some fanciful poem, or perhaps the text of a whole operatic
extravaganza, to which I should then have composed the music on the
spot, and thundered it out on the old weak-loined piano of twelve years
back; or Ottmar should have told us about some wonderful curiosity he
had come across--some remarkable wine, some extraordinary nincompoop,
etc., and set us all on fire with projects and ideas how to make the
most of our enjoyment of either, or both; and because none of all this
has happened, we sit secretly sulking at each other, each thinking (of
the other) 'Ay! what a change in the dear old fellow. Well! I never
should have believed he could have altered so!' Of course we none of us
_are_ the same. I say nothing of the circumstance that we are twelve
years older; that, no doubt, every year lays more earth upon us, which
weighs us down from aerial regions, till we go _under_ the earth at
last. But whom of us, all this time, has not the wild whirlpool carried
surging on from event to event, and from action to action? The terror,
the trouble, the anxiety of that stormy time,[1] could not pass over us
without leaving bleeding scars graven on our hearts. The pictures of
our early days are pale compared with _that_, and we cannot revive
their colours. No doubt, too, there is much in life and in ourselves
which looked very bright and glorious, and has lost its dazzling
glitter for our eyes, grown accustomed to a brighter light; but the
modes of thinking and feeling which gave rise to our friend