Hyperion to Bellarmin
For six days after the battle I lay in a tortured death-like sleep. My life was like a night, punctuated by pain as by lancing lightning. The first thing I recognized was Alabanda. He had, as I heard, not left my side for an instant, he’d cared for me almost alone, with unbelievable solicitude, with a thousand tender homely attentions that would never in his life have occurred to him otherwise, and he’d been heard on his knees before my bed, crying: ‘O live, dear friend! that I may live!’
It was a happy awakening, Bellarmin! when my eye now opened again to the light, and with tears of reunion this glorious man stood before me.
I reached out my hand to him and, proud as he was, he kissed it with all the rapture of love. ‘He lives,’ he cried, ‘O nature! you kindly all-healing saviour! you at least don’t forsake your wretched pair, these errants without a fatherland! Oh, I'll never forget, Hyperion! how your ship went up in fire before my eyes and thundering swept up the sailors with it into the raging flames, and amongst those few to be saved there was no Hyperion. I was out of my senses, and the furious clamour of battle did nothing to calm me. Yet I soon got word of you, and flew after you as soon as we were altogether finished with the foe.’ —
And how he now watched over me! how with loving care he held me captive in the magic circle of his favours! how without a word he taught me through his great calmness to understand without rancour and like aman the free course of the world!
O you sons of the sun! you freer souls! much has been lost in this Alabanda. I’ve sought, and besought life in vain since he went away; such a truly Roman nature I never found again. Carefree, deeply wise, courageous, noble! Where is there a man if he was not one? And when he was mild and meek, it was as when the evening light plays in the gloom of the majestic oak and its leaves drip from the storm of the day.