more."

"I have heard, in truth," said Glyndon, "that his companions at Naples
were observed to lead purer and nobler lives after intercourse with
Zanoni; yet were they not strange companions, at the best, for a sage?
This terrible power, too, that he exercises at will, as in the death of
the Prince di --, and that of the Count Ughelli, scarcely becomes the
tranquil seeker after good."

"True," said Mejnour, with an icy smile; "such must ever be the error of
those philosophers who would meddle with the active life of mankind. You
cannot serve some without injuring others; you cannot protect the good
without warring on the bad; and if you desire to reform the faulty, why,
you must lower yourself to live with the faulty to know their faults.
Even so saith Paracelsus, a great man, though often wrong. ('It is as
necessary to know evil things as good; for who can know what is good
without the knowing what is evil?' etc.--Paracelsus, 'De Nat. Rer.,'
lib. 3.) Not mine this folly; I live but in knowledge,--I have no life
in mankind!"

Another time Glyndon questioned the mystic as to the nature of that
union or fraternity to which Zanoni had once referred.

"I am right, I suppose," said he, "in conjecturing that you and himself
profess to be the brothers of the Rosy Cross?"

"Do you imagine," answered Mejnour, "that there were no mystic and
solemn unions of men seeking the same end through the same means before
the Arabians of Damus, in 1378, taught to a wandering German the secrets
which founded the Institution of the Rosicrucians? I allow, however,
that the Rosicrucians formed a sect descended from the greater and
earlier school. They were wiser than the Alchemists,--their masters are
wiser than they."

"And of this early and primary order how many still exist?"

"Zanoni and myself."

"What, two only!--and you profess the power to teach to all the secret
that baffles Death?"

"Your ancestor attained that secret; he died rather than survive the
only thing he loved. We have, my pupil, no arts by which we CAN PUT
DEATH OUT OF OUR OPTION, or out of the will of Heaven. These walls may
crush me as I stand. All that we profess to do is but this,--to find
out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the
blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventives to the effects of
time. This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood.
In our order we hold most noble,--first, that knowledge wh