so comes but nearer to the fountain of all belief. Knowest thou not that
magic was taught in the schools of old? But how, and by whom? As the
last and most solemn lesson, by the Priests who ministered to the
Temple. (Psellus de Daemon (MS.)) And you, who would be a painter, is
not there a magic also in that art you would advance? Must you not,
after long study of the Beautiful that has been, seize upon new and airy
combinations of a beauty that is to be? See you not that the grander
art, whether of poet or of painter, ever seeking for the TRUE, abhors
the REAL; that you must seize Nature as her master, not lackey her as
her slave?

"You demand mastery over the past, a conception of the future. Has not
the art that is truly noble for its domain the future and the past? You
would conjure the invisible beings to your charm; and what is painting
but the fixing into substance the Invisible? Are you discontented with
this world? This world was never meant for genius! To exist, it must
create another. What magician can do more; nay, what science can do
as much? There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear
calamities of earth; both lead to heaven and away from hell,--art and
science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art
creates. You have faculties that may command art; be contented with your
lot. The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the
universe; the poet can call a universe from the atom; the chemist may
heal with his drugs the infirmities of the human form; the painter,
or the sculptor, fixes into everlasting youth forms divine, which
no disease can ravage, and no years impair. Renounce those wandering
fancies that lead you now to myself, and now to yon orator of the human
race; to us two, who are the antipodes of each other! Your pencil is
your wand; your canvas may raise Utopias fairer than Condorcet dreams
of. I press not yet for your decision; but what man of genius ever asked
more to cheer his path to the grave than love and glory?"

"But," said Glyndon, fixing his eyes earnestly on Zanoni, "if there be a
power to baffle the grave itself--"

Zanoni's brow darkened. "And were this so," he said, after a pause,
"would it be so sweet a lot to outlive all you loved, and to recoil from
every human tie? Perhaps the fairest immortality on earth is that of a
noble name."

"You do not answer me,--you equivocate. I have read of the long lives
far beyond the dat