scious of
the terrible sacrifice, but awaking and missing him, has a vision of the
procession to the guillotine, with Zanoni there, radiant in youth
and beauty, followed by the sudden vanishing of the headsman,--the
horror,--and the "Welcome" of her loved one to Heaven in a myriad of
melodies from the choral hosts above.

"Zanoni" was originally published by Saunders and Otley, London, in
three volumes 12mo., in 1842. A translation into French, made by M.
Sheldon under the direction of P. Lorain, was published in Paris in the
"Bibliotheque des Meilleurs Romans Etrangers."

W.M.

PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1853.

As a work of imagination, "Zanoni" ranks, perhaps, amongst the highest
of my prose fictions. In the Poem of "King Arthur," published many years
afterwards, I have taken up an analogous design, in the contemplation
of our positive life through a spiritual medium; and I have enforced,
through a far wider development, and, I believe, with more complete and
enduring success, that harmony between the external events which are
all that the superficial behold on the surface of human affairs, and the
subtle and intellectual agencies which in reality influence the conduct
of individuals, and shape out the destinies of the world. As man has two
lives,--that of action and that of thought,--so I conceive that work
to be the truest representation of humanity which faithfully delineates
both, and opens some elevating glimpse into the sublimest mysteries of
our being, by establishing the inevitable union that exists between
the plain things of the day, in which our earthly bodies perform their
allotted part, and the latent, often uncultivated, often invisible,
affinities of the soul with all the powers that eternally breathe and
move throughout the Universe of Spirit.

I refer those who do me the honour to read "Zanoni" with more attention
than is given to ordinary romance, to the Poem of "King Arthur," for
suggestive conjecture into most of the regions of speculative research,
affecting the higher and more important condition of our ultimate being,
which have engaged the students of immaterial philosophy in my own age.

Affixed to the "Note" with which this work concludes, and which treats
of the distinctions between type and allegory, the reader will find,
from the pen of one of our most eminent living writers, an ingenious
attempt to explain the interior or typical meanings of the work now
before him.

I