e she had known in her earlier days, but more
constant and impressive, began to haunt her night and day when Zanoni
was absent, to fade in his presence, and seem less fair than THAT.
Zanoni questioned her eagerly and minutely of these visitations, but
seemed dissatisfied, and at times perplexed, by her answers.

"Tell me not," he said, one day, "of those unconnected images, those
evolutions of starry shapes in a choral dance, or those delicious
melodies that seem to thee of the music and the language of the distant
spheres. Has no ONE shape been to thee more distinct and more beautiful
than the rest,--no voice uttering, or seeming to utter, thine own
tongue, and whispering to thee of strange secrets and solemn knowledge?"

"No; all is confused in these dreams, whether of day or night; and when
at the sound of thy footsteps I recover, my memory retains nothing but
a vague impression of happiness. How different--how cold--to the rapture
of hanging on thy smile, and listening to thy voice, when it says, 'I
love thee!'"

"Yet, how is it that visions less fair than these once seemed to thee
so alluring? How is it that they then stirred thy fancies and filled
thy heart? Once thou didst desire a fairy-land, and now thou seemest so
contented with common life."

"Have I not explained it to thee before? Is it common life, then, to
love, and to live with the one we love? My true fairy-land is won! Speak
to me of no other."

And so night surprised them by the lonely beach; and Zanoni, allured
from his sublimer projects, and bending over that tender face, forgot
that, in the Harmonious Infinite which spread around, there were other
worlds than that one human heart.

CHAPTER 4.IX.

There is a principle of the soul, superior to all nature, through
which we are capable of surpassing the order and systems of the
world. When the soul is elevated to natures better than itself,
THEN it is entirely separated from subordinate natures, exchanges
this for another life, and, deserting the order of things with
which it was connected, links and mingles itself with another.
--Iamblichus.

"Adon-Ai! Adon-Ai!--appear, appear!"

And in the lonely cave, whence once had gone forth the oracles of
a heathen god, there emerged from the shadows of fantastic rocks a
luminous and gigantic column, glittering and shifting. It resembled the
shining but misty spray which, seen afar off, a fountain seems to send