pace. With the eyes of the
spirit, Viola followed theirs; with a terror far greater than the chaos
and its hideous inhabitants produced, she beheld a shadowy likeness
of the very room in which her form yet dwelt, its white walls, the
moonshine sleeping on its floor, its open casement, with the quiet roofs
and domes of Venice looming over the sea that sighed below,--and in that
room the ghost-like image of herself! This double phantom--here herself
a phantom, gazing there upon a phantom-self--had in it a horror which no
words can tell, no length of life forego.

But presently she saw this image of herself rise slowly, leave the room
with its noiseless feet: it passes the corridor, it kneels by a cradle!
Heaven of Heaven! She beholds her child!--still with its wondrous,
child-like beauty and its silent, wakeful eyes. But beside that cradle
there sits cowering a mantled, shadowy form,--the more fearful and
ghastly from its indistinct and unsubstantial gloom. The walls of that
chamber seem to open as the scene of a theatre. A grim dungeon; streets
through which pour shadowy crowds; wrath and hatred, and the aspect
of demons in their ghastly visages; a place of death; a murderous
instrument; a shamble-house of human flesh; herself; her child;--all,
all, rapid phantasmagoria, chased each other. Suddenly the
phantom-Zanoni turned, it seemed to perceive herself,--her second self.
It sprang towards her; her spirit could bear no more. She shrieked,
she woke. She found that in truth she had left that dismal chamber; the
cradle was before her, the child! all--all as that trance had seen it;
and, vanishing into air, even that dark, formless Thing!

"My child! my child! thy mother shall save thee yet!"

CHAPTER 6.VIII.

Qui? Toi m'abandonner! Ou vas-tu? Non! demeure,
Demeure!
La Harpe, "Le Comte de Warwick," Act 3, sc. 5.

(Who? THOU abandon me!--where goest thou? No! stay, stay!)

Letter from Viola to Zanoni.

"It has come to this!--I am the first to part! I, the unfaithful one,
bid thee farewell forever. When thine eyes fall upon this writing thou
wilt know me as one of the dead. For thou that wert, and still art my
life,--I am lost to thee! O lover! O husband! O still worshipped and
adored! if thou hast ever loved me, if thou canst still pity, seek not
to discover the steps that fly thee. If thy charms can detect and tract
me, spare me, spare our child! Zanoni, I will rear it to love thee, to