The Tales of Haunted Nights (Gothic Horror: Bulwer-Lytton-Series). Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон

when absent: yet even in absence to see thee everywhere!—I dreamed not how strong and all-pervading is the connection between nature and the human soul! …

      “And yet,” she continued, “I am now assured of what I at first believed—that the feelings which attracted me towards thee at first were not those of love. I know THAT, by comparing the present with the past—it was a sentiment then wholly of the mind or the spirit! I could not hear thee now say, ‘Viola, be happy with another!’ ”

      “And I could not now tell thee so! Ah, Viola, never be weary of assuring me that thou art happy!”

      “Happy while thou art so. Yet at times, Zanoni, thou art so sad!”

      “Because human life is so short; because we must part at last; because yon moon shines on when the nightingale sings to it no more! A little while, and thine eyes will grow dim, and thy beauty haggard, and these locks that I toy with now will be grey and loveless.”

      “And thou, cruel one!” said Viola, touchingly, “I shall never see the signs of age in thee! But shall we not grow old together, and our eyes be accustomed to a change which the heart shall not share!”

      Zanoni sighed. He turned away, and seemed to commune with himself.

      Glyndon’s attention grew yet more earnest.

      “But were it so,” muttered Zanoni; and then looking steadfastly at Viola, he said, with a half-smile, “Hast thou no curiosity to learn more of the lover thou once couldst believe the agent of the Evil One?”

      “None; all that one wishes to know of the beloved one, I know—That thou lovest me!”

      “I have told thee that my life is apart from others. Wouldst thou not seek to share it?”

      “I share it now!”

      “But were it possible to be thus young and fair forever, till the world blazes round us as one funeral pyre!”

      “We shall be so, when we leave the world!”

      Zanoni was mute for some moments, and at length he said—

      “Canst thou recall those brilliant and aerial dreams which once visited thee, when thou didst fancy that thou wert preordained to some fate aloof and afar from the common children of the earth?”

      “Zanoni, the fate is found.”

      “And hast thou no terror of the future?”

      “The future! I forget it! Time past and present and to come reposes in thy smile. Ah, Zanoni, play not with the foolish credulities of my youth! I have been better and humbler since thy presence has dispelled the mist of the air. The future!—well, when I have cause to dread it, I will look up to heaven, and remember who guides our fate!”

      As she lifted her eyes above, a dark cloud swept suddenly over the scene. It wrapped the orange-trees, the azure ocean, the dense sands; but still the last images that it veiled from the charmed eyes of Glyndon were the forms of Viola and Zanoni. The face of the one rapt, serene, and radiant; the face of the other, dark, thoughtful, and locked in more than its usual rigidness of melancholy beauty and profound repose.

      “Rouse thyself,” said Mejnour; “thy ordeal has commenced! There are pretenders to the solemn science who could have shown thee the absent, and prated to thee, in their charlatanic jargon, of the secret electricities and the magnetic fluid of whose true properties they know but the germs and elements. I will lend thee the books of those glorious dupes, and thou wilt find, in the dark ages, how many erring steps have stumbled upon the threshold of the mighty learning, and fancied they had pierced the temple. Hermes and Albert and Paracelsus, I knew ye all; but, noble as ye were, ye were fated to be deceived. Ye had not souls of faith, and daring fitted for the destinies at which ye aimed! Yet Paracelsus—modest Paracelsus—had an arrogance that soared higher than all our knowledge. Ho, ho!—he thought he could make a race of men from chemistry; he arrogated to himself the Divine gift—the breath of life. (Paracelsus, ‘De Nat. Rer.,’ lib. i.)

      “He would have made men, and, after all, confessed that they could be but pygmies! My art is to make men above mankind. But you are impatient of my digressions. Forgive me. All these men (they were great dreamers, as you desire to be) were intimate friends of mine. But they are dead and rotten. They talked of spirits—but they dreaded to be in other company than that of men. Like orators whom I have heard, when I stood by the Pnyx of Athens, blazing with words like comets in the assembly, and extinguishing their ardour like holiday rockets when they were in the field. Ho, ho! Demosthenes, my hero-coward, how nimble were thy heels at Chaeronea! And thou art impatient still! Boy, I could tell thee such truths of the past as would make thee the luminary of schools. But thou lustest only for the shadows of the future. Thou shalt have thy wish. But the mind must be first exercised and trained. Go to thy room, and sleep; fast austerely, read no books; meditate, imagine, dream, bewilder thyself if thou wilt. Thought shapes out its own chaos at last. Before midnight, seek me again!”

      CHAPTER 4.IV.

       Table of Contents

      It is fit that we who endeavour to rise to an elevation so

       sublime, should study first to leave behind carnal affections,

       the frailty of the senses, the passions that belong to matter;

       secondly, to learn by what means we may ascend to the climax of

       pure intellect, united with the powers above, without which never

       can we gain the lore of secret things, nor the magic that effects

       true wonders.—Tritemius “On Secret Things and Secret Spirits.”

       It wanted still many minutes of midnight, and Glyndon was once more in the apartment of the mystic. He had rigidly observed the fast ordained to him; and in the rapt and intense reveries into which his excited fancy had plunged him, he was not only insensible to the wants of the flesh—he felt above them.

      Mejnour, seated beside his disciple, thus addressed him:—

      “Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. Man’s natural tendency is to egotism. Man, in his infancy of knowledge, thinks that all creation was formed for him. For several ages he saw in the countless worlds that sparkle through space like the bubbles of a shoreless ocean only the petty candles, the household torches, that Providence had been pleased to light for no other purpose but to make the night more agreeable to man. Astronomy has corrected this delusion of human vanity; and man now reluctantly confesses that the stars are worlds larger and more glorious than his own—that the earth on which he crawls is a scarce visible speck on the vast chart of creation. But in the small as in the vast, God is equally profuse of life. The traveller looks upon the tree, and fancies its boughs were formed for his shelter in the summer sun, or his fuel in the winter frosts. But in each leaf of these boughs the Creator has made a world; it swarms with innumerable races. Each drop of the water in yon moat is an orb more populous than a kingdom is of men. Everywhere, then, in this immense design, science brings new life to light. Life is the one pervading principle, and even the thing that seems to die and putrify but engenders new life, and changes to fresh forms of matter. Reasoning, then, by evident analogy: if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is, no less than yonder star, a habitable and breathing world—nay, if even man himself is a world to other lives, and millions and myriads dwell in the rivers of his blood, and inhabit man’s frame as man inhabits earth, commonsense (if your schoolmen had it) would suffice to teach that the circumfluent infinite which you call space—the countless Impalpable which divides earth from the moon and stars—is filled also with its correspondent and appropriate life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true? Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself, is