Hyperion to Bellarmin
I'd lingered with the lovely maiden before her house until the lamp of the night shone into the tranquil twilight; now I came back to Notara’s dwelling, thoughtful, full of overflowing heroic life, as always when I went from her embraces. A letter had come from Alabanda.
‘Things are on the move, Hyperion,’ he wrote, ‘Russia has declared war on the Porte; they’re coming with a fleet into the Archipelago;? the Greeks shall be free if they join the uprising to drive the Sultan to the Euphrates. The Greeks will do their part, the Greeks will be free and I’m heartily glad that there’s finally something to do again. I couldn’t face the light of day before we got as far as this.
‘If you're still the old Hyperion, then come! You'll find me in the village before Coron when you come by way of Mistra. I’m staying on the hill, in the white villa by the woods.
‘T’ve broken with the people whom you met with me in Smyrna. You were right, with your finer sense, not to step into their sphere.
‘I long to see us both together again in the new life. Until now the world was too wretched for you to make yourself known to it. Since you wouldn’t do bondsman’s work you did nothing, and doing nothing made you dreamy and morose.
‘You wouldn’t swim in the swamp. Come now, come, and let us bathe in open sea!
‘That shall do us good, my sole beloved!’
3 [Hölderlin’s note] In the year 1770.
So he wrote. At first I was taken aback. My face burned with shame, my heart seethed like hot springs, and I couldn’t keep still, so did it pain me to be outflown by Alabanda, bested once and for all. Yet all the more eagerly did I now embrace the work ahead. —
‘ve grown too idle,’ I cried, ‘too fond of the quiet life, too fey, too sluggish! — Alabanda looks out into the world like a noble pilot, Alabanda is busy and searches the waves for booty; and your hands are asleep in your lap? and you would make do with words and conjure the world with magic formulas? But your words are feckless as snowflakes and merely make the air murkier, and your incantations are for the pious, but the unbelievers don’t hear you. — Yes! to be gentle in season, that may be a beautiful thing, but to be gentle out of season, that’s ugly, because it’s cowardly! — But Harmodius! it’s your myrtle I will be like, your myrtle in which the sword was concealed. I will not have walked in idleness for nothing, and my sleep shall become like oil when it’s touched by the flame. I will not look on when it counts, will not go around asking for news when Alabanda takes the laurel.’