des not
the wise. Thou meetest Plato when thine eyes moisten over the Phaedo.
May Homer live with all men forever!

They converse; they confess to each other; they conjure up the past, and
repeople it; but note how differently do such remembrances affect the
two. On Zanoni's face, despite its habitual calm, the emotions change
and go. HE has acted in the past he surveys; but not a trace of the
humanity that participates in joy and sorrow can be detected on the
passionless visage of his companion; the past, to him, as is now
the present, has been but as Nature to the sage, the volume to the
student,--a calm and spiritual life, a study, a contemplation.

From the past they turn to the future. Ah! at the close of the last
century, the future seemed a thing tangible,--it was woven up in all
men's fears and hopes of the present.

At the verge of that hundred years, Man, the ripest born of Time,

("An des Jahrhunderts Neige, Der reifste Sohn der Zeit." "Die
Kunstler.")

stood as at the deathbed of the Old World, and beheld the New Orb,
blood-red amidst cloud and vapour,--uncertain if a comet or a sun.
Behold the icy and profound disdain on the brow of the old man,--the
lofty yet touching sadness that darkens the glorious countenance of
Zanoni. Is it that one views with contempt the struggle and its issue,
and the other with awe or pity? Wisdom contemplating mankind leads but
to the two results,--compassion or disdain. He who believes in other
worlds can accustom himself to look on this as the naturalist on
the revolutions of an ant-hill, or of a leaf. What is the Earth to
Infinity,--what its duration to the Eternal? Oh, how much greater is
the soul of one man than the vicissitudes of the whole globe! Child of
heaven, and heir of immortality, how from some star hereafter wilt
thou look back on the ant-hill and its commotions, from Clovis
to Robespierre, from Noah to the Final Fire. The spirit that can
contemplate, that lives only in the intellect, can ascend to its star,
even from the midst of the burial-ground called Earth, and while the
sarcophagus called Life immures in its clay the everlasting!

But thou, Zanoni,--thou hast refused to live ONLY in the intellect; thou
hast not mortified the heart; thy pulse still beats with the sweet music
of mortal passion; thy kind is to thee still something warmer than an
abstraction,--thou wouldst look upon this Revolution in its cradle,
which the storms rock; thou wouldst see th