up on a starry night. The radiance lit the stalactites, the crags,
the arches of the cave, and shed a pale and tremulous splendour on the
features of Zanoni.

"Son of Eternal Light," said the invoker, "thou to whose knowledge,
grade after grade, race after race, I attained at last, on the
broad Chaldean plains; thou from whom I have drawn so largely of the
unutterable knowledge that yet eternity alone can suffice to drain; thou
who, congenial with myself, so far as our various beings will permit,
hast been for centuries my familiar and my friend,--answer me and
counsel!"

From the column there emerged a shape of unimaginable glory. Its
face was that of a man in its first youth, but solemn, as with the
consciousness of eternity and the tranquillity of wisdom; light, like
starbeams, flowed through its transparent veins; light made its limbs
themselves, and undulated, in restless sparkles, through the waves of
its dazzling hair. With its arms folded on its breast, it stood distant
a few feet from Zanoni, and its low voice murmured gently, "My counsels
were sweet to thee once; and once, night after night, thy soul could
follow my wings through the untroubled splendours of the Infinite. Now
thou hast bound thyself back to the earth by its strongest chains, and
the attraction to the clay is more potent than the sympathies that drew
to thy charms the Dweller of the Starbeam and the Air. When last thy
soul hearkened to me, the senses already troubled thine intellect and
obscured thy vision. Once again I come to thee; but thy power even to
summon me to thy side is fading from thy spirit, as sunshine fades from
the wave when the winds drive the cloud between the ocean and the sky."

"Alas, Adon-Ai!" answered the seer, mournfully, "I know too well the
conditions of the being which thy presence was wont to rejoice. I know
that our wisdom comes but from the indifference to the things of the
world which the wisdom masters. The mirror of the soul cannot reflect
both earth and heaven; and the one vanishes from the surface as the
other is glassed upon its deeps. But it is not to restore me to that
sublime abstraction in which the intellect, free and disembodied, rises,
region after region, to the spheres,--that once again, and with the
agony and travail of enfeebled power I have called thee to mine aid. I
love; and in love I begin to live in the sweet humanities of another. If
wise, yet in all which makes danger powerless against mys