y
knowledge? I knew them not till thine evil eye fell upon me, and I was
drawn into the magic atmosphere of thy being!"

"Thou errest!--the desires were in thee; and, whether in one direction
or the other, would have forced their way! Man! thou askest me the
enigma of thy fate and my own! Look round all being, is there not
mystery everywhere? Can thine eye trace the ripening of the grain
beneath the earth? In the moral and the physical world alike, lie dark
portents, far more wondrous than the powers thou wouldst ascribe to me!"

"Dost thou disown those powers; dost thou confess thyself an
imposter?--or wilt thou dare to tell me that thou art indeed sold to the
Evil one,--a magician whose familiar has haunted me night and day?"

"It matters not what I am," returned Zanoni; "it matters only whether I
can aid thee to exorcise thy dismal phantom, and return once more to the
wholesome air of this common life. Something, however, will I tell thee,
not to vindicate myself, but the Heaven and the Nature that thy doubts
malign."

Zanoni paused a moment, and resumed with a slight smile,--

"In thy younger days thou hast doubtless read with delight the great
Christian poet, whose muse, like the morning it celebrated, came to
earth, 'crowned with flowers culled in Paradise.' ('L'aurea testa Di
rose colte in Paradiso infiora.' Tasso, "Ger. Lib." iv. l.)

"No spirit was more imbued with the knightly superstitions of the time;
and surely the Poet of Jerusalem hath sufficiently, to satisfy even the
Inquisitor he consulted, execrated all the practitioners of the unlawful
spells invoked,--

'Per isforzar Cocito o Flegetonte.' (To constrain Cocytus or
Phlegethon.)

"But in his sorrows and his wrongs, in the prison of his madhouse,
know you not that Tasso himself found his solace, his escape, in the
recognition of a holy and spiritual Theurgia,--of a magic that could
summon the Angel, or the Good Genius, not the Fiend? And do you not
remember how he, deeply versed as he was for his age, in the mysteries
of the nobler Platonism, which hints at the secrets of all the starry
brotherhoods, from the Chaldean to the later Rosicrucian, discriminates
in his lovely verse, between the black art of Ismeno and the glorious
lore of the Enchanter who counsels and guides upon their errand the
champions of the Holy Land? HIS, not the charms wrought by the aid of
the Stygian Rebels (See this remarkable passage, which does indeed
not unfaithfully