Les Intelligences Celestes se font voir, et see communiquent plus
volontiers, dans le silence et dans la tranquillite de la
solitude. On aura donc une petite chambre ou un cabinet secret,
etc.
“Les Clavicules de Rabbi Salomon,” chapter 3; traduites
exactement du texte Hebreu par M. Pierre Morissoneau, Professeur
des Langues Orientales, et Sectateur de la Philosophie des Sages
Cabalistes. (Manuscript Translation.)
(The Celestial Intelligences exhibit and explain themselves most
freely in silence and the tranquillity of solitude. One will
have then a little chamber, or a secret cabinet, etc.)
The palace retained by Zanoni was in one of the less frequented quarters
of the city. It still stands, now ruined and dismantled, a monument of
the splendour of a chivalry long since vanished from Naples, with the
lordly races of the Norman and the Spaniard.
As he entered the rooms reserved for his private hours, two Indians, in
the dress of their country, received him at the threshold with the grave
salutations of the East. They had accompanied him from the far lands in
which, according to rumour, he had for many years fixed his home.
But they could communicate nothing to gratify curiosity or justify
suspicion. They spoke no language but their own. With the exception of
these two his princely retinue was composed of the native hirelings of
the city, whom his lavish but imperious generosity made the implicit
creatures of his will. In his house, and in his habits, so far as they
were seen, there was nothing to account for the rumours which were
circulated abroad. He was not, as we are told of Albertus Magnus or the
great Leonardo da Vinci, served by airy forms; and no brazen image, the
invention of magic mechanism, communicated to him the influences of
the stars. None of the apparatus of the alchemist--the crucible and the
metals--gave solemnity to his chambers, or accounted for his wealth;
nor did he even seem to interest himself in those serener studies which
might be supposed to colour his peculiar conversation with abstract
notions, and often with recondite learning. No books spoke to him in his
solitude; and if ever he had drawn from them his knowledge, it seemed
now that the only page he read was the wide one of Nature, and that
a capacious and startling memory supplied the rest. Yet was there one
exception to what in all else seemed customary and commonplace, and
which, according to the authority we have prefixed to this chapter,
might indicate the follower of the occult sciences. Whether at Rome or
Naples, or, in fact, wherever his abode, he selected one room remote
from the rest of the house, which was fastened by a lock scarcely larger
than the seal of a ring, yet which sufficed to baffle the most cunning
instruments of the locksmith: at least, one of his servants, prompted by
irresistible curiosity, had made the attempt in vain; and though he had
fancied it was tried in the most favourable time for secrecy,--not a
soul near, in the dead of night, Zanoni himself absent from home,--yet
his superstition, or his conscience, told him the reason why the next
day the Major Domo quietly dismissed him. He compensated himself for
this misfortune by spreading his own story, with a thousand amusing
exaggerations. He declared that, as he approached the door, invisible
hands seemed to pluck him away; and that when he touched the lock, he
was struck, as by a palsy, to the ground. One surgeon, who heard the
tale, observed, to the distaste of the wonder-mongers, that possibly
Zanoni made a dexterous use of electricity. Howbeit, this room, once so
secured, was never entered save by Zanoni himself.
The solemn voice of Time, from the neighbouring church at last aroused
the lord of the palace from the deep and motionless reverie, rather
resembling a trance than thought, in which his mind was absorbed.
“It is one more sand out of the mighty hour-glass,” said he,
murmuringly, “and yet time neither adds to, nor steals from, an atom in
the Infinite! Soul of mine, the luminous, the Augoeides (Augoeides,--a
word favoured by the mystical Platonists, sphaira psuches augoeides,
otan mete ekteinetai epi ti, mete eso suntreche mete sunizane, alla
photi lampetai, o ten aletheian opa ten panton, kai ten en aute.--Marc.
Ant., lib. 2.--The sense of which beautiful sentence of the old
philosophy, which, as Bayle well observes, in his article on Cornelius
Agrippa, the modern Quietists have (however impotently) sought to
imitate, is to the effect that ‘the sphere of the soul is luminous when
nothing external has contact with the soul itself; but when lit by its
own light, it sees the truth of all things and the truth centred in
itself.’), why descendest thou from thy sphere,--why from the eternal,
starlike, and passionless Serene, shrinkest thou back to the mists of
the dark sarcophagus? How long, too austerely taught that companionship
with the things that die brings with it but sorrow in its sweetness,
hast thou dwelt contented with thy majestic solitude?”
As he thus murmured, one of the earliest birds that salute the dawn
broke into sudden song from amidst the orange-trees in the garden below
his casement; and as suddenly, song answered song; the mate, awakened at
the note, gave back its happy answer to the bird. He listened; and not
the soul he had questioned, but the heart replied. He rose, and with
restless strides paced the narrow floor. “Away from this world!” he
exclaimed at length, with an impatient tone. “Can no time loosen its
fatal ties? As the attraction that holds the earth in space, is the
attraction that fixes the soul to earth. Away from the dark grey planet!
Break, ye fetters: arise, ye wings!”
He passed through the silent galleries, and up the lofty stairs, and
entered the secret chamber....