Fuscis tellurem amplectitur alis.
Virgil.
(Embraces the Earth with gloomy wings.)
Letter from Zanoni to Mejnour.
Mejnour, Humanity, with all its sorrows and its joys, is mine once more.
Day by day, I am forging my own fetters. I live in other lives than my
own, and in them I have lost more than half my empire. Not lifting them
aloft, they drag me by the strong bands of the affections to their own
earth. Exiled from the beings only visible to the most abstract sense,
the grim Enemy that guards the Threshold has entangled me in its web.
Canst thou credit me, when I tell thee that I have accepted its gifts,
and endure the forfeit? Ages must pass ere the brighter beings can again
obey the spirit that has bowed to the ghastly one! And--
....
In this hope, then, Mejnour, I triumph still; I yet have supreme power
over this young life. Insensibly and inaudibly my soul speaks to its
own, and prepares it even now. Thou knowest that for the pure and
unsullied infant spirit, the ordeal has no terror and no peril. Thus
unceasingly I nourish it with no unholy light; and ere it yet be
conscious of the gift, it will gain the privileges it has been mine to
attain: the child, by slow and scarce-seen degrees, will communicate its
own attributes to the mother; and content to see Youth forever radiant
on the brows of the two that now suffice to fill up my whole infinity of
thought, shall I regret the airier kingdom that vanishes hourly from my
grasp? But thou, whose vision is still clear and serene, look into the
far deeps shut from my gaze, and counsel me, or forewarn! I know that
the gifts of the Being whose race is so hostile to our own are, to the
common seeker, fatal and perfidious as itself. And hence, when, at the
outskirts of knowledge, which in earlier ages men called Magic,
they encountered the things of the hostile tribes, they believed the
apparitions to be fiends, and, by fancied compacts, imagined they had
signed away their souls; as if man could give for an eternity that over
which he has control but while he lives! Dark, and shrouded forever from
human sight, dwell the demon rebels, in their impenetrable realm; in
them is no breath of the Divine One. In every human creature the Divine
One breathes; and He alone can judge His own hereafter, and allot its
new career and home. Could man sell himself to the fiend, man could
prejudge himself, and arrogate the disposal of eternity! But these
creatures, modifications as they are of matter, and some with more
than the malignanty of man, may well seem, to fear and unreasoning
superstition, the representatives of fiends. And from the darkest and
mightiest of them I have accepted a boon,--the secret that startled
Death from those so dear to me. Can I not trust that enough of power yet
remains to me to baffle or to daunt the Phantom, if it seek to pervert
the gift? Answer me, Mejnour, for in the darkness that veils me, I see
only the pure eyes of the new-born; I hear only the low beating of my
heart. Answer me, thou whose wisdom is without love!
Mejnour to Zanoni.
Rome.
Fallen One!--I see before thee Evil and Death and Woe! Thou to have
relinquished Adon-Ai for the nameless Terror,--the heavenly stars for
those fearful eyes! Thou, at the last to be the victim of the Larva of
the dreary Threshold, that, in thy first novitiate, fled, withered
and shrivelled, from thy kingly brow! When, at the primary grades of
initiation, the pupil I took from thee on the shores of the changed
Parthenope, fell senseless and cowering before that Phantom-Darkness, I
knew that his spirit was not formed to front the worlds beyond; for
FEAR is the attraction of man to earthiest earth, and while he fears, he
cannot soar. But THOU, seest thou not that to love is but to fear; seest
thou not that the power of which thou boastest over the malignant one
is already gone? It awes, it masters thee; it will mock thee and betray.
Lose not a moment; come to me. If there can yet be sufficient sympathy
between us, through MY eyes shalt thou see, and perhaps guard against
the perils that, shapeless yet, and looming through the shadow, marshal
themselves around thee and those whom thy very love has doomed. Come
from all the ties of thy fond humanity; they will but obscure thy
vision! Come forth from thy fears and hopes, thy desires and passions.
Come, as alone Mind can be the monarch and the seer, shining through the
home it tenants,--a pure, impressionless, sublime intelligence!