Titan: A Romance. v. 1 (of 2)

Footnotes

[1] The Titan was published during the years 1800-1803. The four sisters were the four daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, viz. the Duchess of Hildburghausen, the Princess von Solms, the Princess of Thun and Taxis, and the Louisa who afterward became Queen of Prussia, and was so in the Liberation War.—TR.

1. CYCLE.

On a fine spring evening, the young Spanish Count Cesara came, with his companions, Schoppe and Dian, to Sesto, in order the next morning to cross over to the Borromæan island, Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore. The proudly blooming youth glowed with the excitement of travelling, and with thoughts of the coming morrow, when he should see the isle, that gayly decorated throne of Spring, and on it a man who had been promised him for twenty years. This twofold glow exalted my picturesque hero to the form of an angry god of the Muses. His beauty made a more triumphal entry into Italian eyes than into the narrow Northern ones from the midst of which he had come; in Milan many had wished he were of marble, and stood with elder gods of stone, either in the Farnese Palace or in the Clementine Museum, or in the Villa of Albani; nay, had not the Bishop of Novara, with his sword at his side, a few hours before, asked Schoppe (riding behind) who he was? And had not the latter, with a droll squaring of the wrinkle-circle round his lips, made this copious answer (by way of enlightening his spiritual lordship): "It's my Telemachus, and I am the Mentor. I am the milling-machine and the die which coins him,—the wolf's tooth and flattening mill which polishes him down,—the man, in short, that regulates him"?