Zanoni — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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“What matter!” answered Adon-Ai. “Thy love must be but a mockery of the name; thou canst not love as they do for whom there are death and the grave. A short time, — like a day in thy incalculable life, — and the form thou dotest on is dust! Others of the nether world go hand in hand, each with each, unto the tomb; hand in hand they ascend from the worm to new cycles of existence, For thee, below are ages; for her, but hours. And for her and thee —O poor, but mighty one! — will there be even a joint hereafter! Through what grades and heavens of spiritualized being will her soul have passed when thou, the solitary loiterer, comest from the vapors of the earth to the gates of light! ” “Son of the Starbeam, thinkest thou that this thought is not with me forever; and seest thou not that I have invoked thee to hearken and minister to my design? Readest- thou not my desire and dream to raise the conditions of her being to my own? Thou, Adon-Ai, bathing the celestial joy that makes thy life in the oceans of eternal splendor, — thou, save by the sympathies of knowledge, canst conjecture not what I, the offspring of mortals, feel — debarred yet from the objects of the tremendous and sublime ambition that first winged my desires above the clay — when I see myself compelled to stand in this low world alone. I have sought amongst my tribe for comrades, andin vain. At last I have found a mate. The wild bird and the wild beast have theirs; and my mastery over the malignant tribes of terror can banish their larve from the path that shall lead her upward, till the air of eternity fits the frame for the elixir that baffles death,” “And thou hast begun the initiation, and thou art foiled! I know it. Thou hast conjured to her sleep the

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fairest visions; thou hast invoked the loveliest children of the air to murmur their music to her trance, and her soul heeds them not, and, returning to the earth, escapes from their control. Blind one, wherefore? Canst thou not perceive? Because in her soul all is love. There is no intermediate passion with which the things thou wouldst charm to her have association and affinities. Their attraction is but to the desires and cravings of the intellect. What have they with the passion that is of earth, and the hope that goes direct to heaven? ” “But can there be no medium —no link —in which our souls, as our hearts, can be united, and so mine may have influence over her own?” “ Ask me not, — thou wilt not comprehend me! ” “T adjure thee! — speak! ” “ When two souls are divided, knowest thou not that a third in which both meet and live is the link between them! ” “T do comprehend thee, Adon-Ai,” said Zanoni, with a light of more human joy upon his face than it had ever before been seen to wear; “and if my destiny, which here is dark to mine eyes, vouchsafes to me the happy lot of the humble, —if ever there be a child that I may clasp to my bosom and call my own — ” “ And is it to be man at last, that thou hast aspired to be more than man? ” “But a child, — a second Viola!” murmured Zanoni, scarcely heeding the Son of Light; “a young soul fresh from heaven, that I may rear from the first moment it touches earth,—whose wings I may train to follow mine through the glories of creation; and through whom the mother herself may be led upward over the realm of death! ”

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“Beware, —reflect! | Knowest thou not that thy darkest enemy dwells in the Real? Thy wishes bring thee near and nearer to humanity.” “Ah, humanity is sweet! ” answered Zanoni. And as the seer spoke, on the glorious face of Adon: Ai there broke a smile.

° . . . ° . ° o .

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CHAPTER X.

ZEterna eternus tribuit, mortalia confert Mortalis ; divina Deus, peritura caducus.} Aurel. Prud, contra Symmachum, lib, ii.

EXTRACTS FROM THE LETTERS OF ZANONI TO MEJNOUR.

LETTER I.

Tuov hast not informed me of the progress of thy pupil; and I fear that so differently does circumstance shape the minds of the generations to which we are descended, from the intense and earnest children of the earlier world, that even thy most careful and elaborate guidance would fail, with loftier and purer natures than that of the neophyte thou hast admitted within thy gates. Even that third state of being, which the Indian sage? rightly recognizes as being between the sleep and the waking, and describes imperfectly by the name of TRANCE, is unknown to the children of the Northern world; and few but would recoil to indulge it, regarding its peopled calm as mdyd@ and delusion of the mind. Instead of ripening and culturing that airy soil, from which Nature, duly known, can evoke fruits so rich and flowers so fair, they strive but to exclude it from their gaze; they esteem that struggle of the intellect from men’s narrow world to the spirit’s infinite home, as a disease which the leech must extirpate with pharmacy and drugs, and know not even that it is from this condition of