; to walk the revolutions of the
earth unharmed,--think you that this life could teach them other desire
than to yearn the more for the Immortal, and to fit their intellect the
better for the higher being to which they might, when Time and Death
exist no longer, be transferred? Away with your gloomy fantasies of
sorcerer and demon!--the soul can aspire only to the light; and even the
error of our lofty knowledge was but the forgetfulness of the weakness,
the passions, and the bonds which the death we so vainly conquered only
can purge away!"

This address was so different from what Glyndon had anticipated, that he
remained for some moments speechless, and at length faltered out,--

"But why, then, to me--"

"Why," added Zanoni,--"why to thee have been only the penance and the
terror,--the Threshold and the Phantom? Vain man! look to the commonest
elements of the common learning. Can every tyro at his mere wish and
will become the master; can the student, when he has bought his Euclid,
become a Newton; can the youth whom the Muses haunt, say, 'I will equal
Homer;' yea, can yon pale tyrant, with all the parchment laws of a
hundred system-shapers, and the pikes of his dauntless multitude, carve,
at his will, a constitution not more vicious than the one which the
madness of a mob could overthrow? When, in that far time to which I have
referred, the student aspired to the heights to which thou wouldst have
sprung at a single bound, he was trained from his very cradle to the
career he was to run. The internal and the outward nature were made
clear to his eyes, year after year, as they opened on the day. He was
not admitted to the practical initiation till not one earthly wish
chained that sublimest faculty which you call the IMAGINATION, one
carnal desire clouded the penetrative essence that you call the
INTELLECT. And even then, and at the best, how few attained to the
last mystery! Happier inasmuch as they attained the earlier to the holy
glories for which Death is the heavenliest gate."

Zanoni paused, and a shade of thought and sorrow darkened his celestial
beauty.

"And are there, indeed, others, besides thee and Mejnour, who lay claim
to thine attributes, and have attained to thy secrets?"

"Others there have been before us, but we two now are alone on earth."

"Imposter, thou betrayest thyself! If they could conquer Death, why
live they not yet?" (Glyndon appears to forget that Mejnour had before
answered the v