Zanoni — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

that Viola now owned to his dominion, that, unwelcome as that subject was, she restrained her heart, and listened to him in silence. At last he said, “ Thou hast promised thou wilt obey my counsels, and if, Viola, I shou d ask thee, nay adjure, to accept this stranger’s hand, and share his fate, should he offer to thee such a lot, — wouldst thou refuse ? ” And then she pressed back the tears that gushed to her eyes; and with a strange pleasure in the midst of pain,— the pleasure of one who sacrifices heart itself to the one who commands that heart, — she answered falteringly, “ Tf thou canst ordain it, why —” “ Speak on.” “ Dispose of me as thou wilt! ” Zanoni stood in silence for some moments: he saw the struggle which the girl thought she concealed so well; he made an involuntary movement towards her, and pressed her hand to his lips; it was the first time he had ever departed even so far from a certain austerity which perhaps made her fear him and her own thoughts the less. “Viola,” said he, and his voice trembled, “ the danger that I can avert no more, if thou linger still in Naples, comes hourly near and near to thee! On the third day from this thy fate must be decided. I accept thy promise. Before the last hour of that day, come what may, I shall see thee again, here, at thine own house. Till then, farewell! ”

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CHAPTER IV.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star *Twixt night and morn. Byron.

Wuen Glyndon left Viola, as recorded in the concluding chapter of the second division of this work, he was absorbed again in those mystical desires and conjectures which the haunting recollection of Zanoni always served to create. And as he wandered through the streets, he was scarcely conscious of his own movements till, in the mechanism of custom, he found himself in the midst of one of the noble collections of pictures which form the boast of those Italian cities whose glory is in the past. Thither he had been wont, almost daily, to repair, for the gallery contained some of the finest specimens of a master especially the object of his enthusiasm and study. There, before the works of Salvator, he had often paused in deep and earnest reverence. The striking characteristic of that artist is the Vigor of Will; void of the elevated idea of abstract beauty, which furnishes a model and archetype to the genius of more illustrious order, the singular energy of the man hews out of the rock a dignity of his own. His images have the majesty, not of the god, but the savage; utterly free, like the sublimer schools, from the common-place of imitation, — apart, with them, from the conventional littleness of the Real, — he grasps the imagination, and compels it to follow him, not to the heaven, but through

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all that is most wild and fantastic upon earth; a sorcery, not of the starry magian, but of the gloomy wizard, —a man of romance whose heart beat strongly, griping art with a hand of iron, and forcing it to idealize the scenes of his actual life. Before this powerful will, Glyndon drew back more awed and admiring than before the calmer beauty which rose from the soul of Raphael, like Venus from the deep. And now, as awaking from his reverie, he stood opposite to that wild and magnificent gloom of Nature which frowned on him from the canvas, the very leaves on those gnome-like, distorted trees seemed to rustle sibylline secrets in his ear. Those rugged and sombre Apennines, the cataract that dashed between, suited, more than the actual scenes would have done, the mood and temper of his mind. The stern, uncouth forms at rest on the crags below, and dwarfed by the giant size of the Matter that reigned around them, impressed him with the might of Nature and the littleness of Man. As in genius of the more spiritual cast, the living man, and the soul that lives in him, are studiously made the prominent image; and the mere accessories of scene kept down, and cast back, as if to show that the exile from paradise is yet the monarch of the outward world, — so, in the landscapes of Salvator, the tree, the mountain, the waterfall, become the principal, and man himself dwindles to the accessory. ‘he Matter seems to reign supreme, and its true lord to creep beneath its stupendous shadow. Inert matter giving interest to the immortal man, not the immortal man to the inert matter, A terrible philosophy in art! While something of these thoughts passed through the mind of the painter, he felt his arm touched, and saw Nicot by his side.

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