Des Erdenlebens
Schweres Traumbild sinkt, und sinkt, und sinkt.
“Das Ideal und das Lebens.”
(The Dream Shape of the heavy earthly life sinks, and sinks, and
sinks.)
She stood within the chamber, and gazed around her; no signs by which an
inquisitor of old could have detected the scholar of the Black Art were
visible. No crucibles and caldrons, no brass-bound volumes and ciphered
girdles, no skulls and cross-bones. Quietly streamed the broad moonlight
through the desolate chamber with its bare, white walls. A few bunches
of withered herbs, a few antique vessels of bronze, placed carelessly on
a wooden form, were all which that curious gaze could identify with the
pursuits of the absent owner. The magic, if it existed, dwelt in the
artificer, and the materials, to other hands, were but herbs and bronze.
So is it ever with thy works and wonders, O Genius,--Seeker of the
Stars! Words themselves are the common property of all men; yet, from
words themselves, Thou Architect of Immortalities, pilest up temples
that shall outlive the Pyramids, and the very leaf of the Papyrus
becomes a Shinar, stately with towers, round which the Deluge of Ages,
shall roar in vain!
But in that solitude has the Presence that there had invoked its wonders
left no enchantment of its own? It seemed so; for as Viola stood in the
chamber, she became sensible that some mysterious change was at work
within herself. Her blood coursed rapidly, and with a sensation of
delight, through her veins,--she felt as if chains were falling from
her limbs, as if cloud after cloud was rolling from her gaze. All the
confused thoughts which had moved through her trance settled and centred
themselves in one intense desire to see the Absent One,--to be with him.
The monads that make up space and air seemed charged with a spiritual
attraction,--to become a medium through which her spirit could pass from
its clay, and confer with the spirit to which the unutterable desire
compelled it. A faintness seized her; she tottered to the seat on which
the vessels and herbs were placed, and, as she bent down, she saw in one
of the vessels a small vase of crystal. By a mechanical and involuntary
impulse, her hand seized the vase; she opened it, and the volatile
essence it contained sparkled up, and spread through the room a powerful
and delicious fragrance. She inhaled the odour, she laved her temples
with the liquid, and suddenly her life seemed to spring up from the
previous faintness,--to spring, to soar, to float, to dilate upon the
wings of a bird. The room vanished from her eyes. Away, away, over lands
and seas and space on the rushing desire flies the disprisoned mind!
Upon a stratum, not of this world, stood the world-born shapes of the
sons of Science, upon an embryo world, upon a crude, wan, attenuated
mass of matter, one of the Nebulae, which the suns of the myriad systems
throw off as they roll round the Creator’s throne*, to become themselves
new worlds of symmetry and glory,--planets and suns that forever and
forever shall in their turn multiply their shining race, and be the
fathers of suns and planets yet to come.
(* “Astronomy instructs us that, in the original condition of
the solar system, the sun was the nucleus of a nebulosity or
luminous mass which revolved on its axis, and extended far
beyond the orbits of all the planets,--the planets as yet
having no existence. Its temperature gradually diminished,
and, becoming contracted by cooling, the rotation increased
in rapidity, and zones of nebulosity were successively
thrown off, in consequence of the centrifugal force
overpowering the central attraction. The condensation of
these separate masses constituted the planets and
satellites. But this view of the conversion of gaseous
matter into planetary bodies is not limited to our own
system; it extends to the formation of the innumerable suns
and worlds which are distributed throughout the universe.
The sublime discoveries of modern astronomers have shown
that every part of the realms of space abounds in large
expansions of attenuated matter termed nebulae, which are
irregularly reflective of light, of various figures, and in
different states of condensation, from that of a diffused,
luminous mass to suns and planets like our own.”--From
Mantell’s eloquent and delightful work, entitled “The
Wonders of Geology,” volume i. page 22.)
There, in that enormous solitude of an infant world, which thousands and
thousands of years can alone ripen into form, the spirit of Viola beheld
the shape of Zanoni, or rather the likeness, the simulacrun, the LEMUR
of his shape, not its human and corporeal substance,--as if, like hers,
the Intelligence was parted from the Clay,--and as the sun, while it
revolves and glows, had cast off into remotest space that nebular image
of itself, so the thing of earth, in the action of its more luminous and
enduring being, had thrown its likeness into that new-born stranger of
the heavens. There stood the phantom,--a phantom Mejnour, by its side.
In the gigantic chaos around raved and struggled the kindling elements;
water and fire, darkness and light, at war,--vapour and cloud hardening
into mountains, and the Breath of Life moving like a steadfast splendour
over all.
As the dreamer looked, and shivered, she beheld that even there the
two phantoms of humanity were not alone. Dim monster-forms that that
disordered chaos alone could engender, the first reptile Colossal race
that wreathe and crawl through the earliest stratum of a world labouring
into life, coiled in the oozing matter or hovered through the meteorous
vapours. But these the two seekers seemed not to heed; their gaze was
fixed intent upon an object in the farthest space. With the eyes of the
spirit, Viola followed theirs; with a terror far greater than the chaos
and its hideous inhabitants produced, she beheld a shadowy likeness
of the very room in which her form yet dwelt, its white walls, the
moonshine sleeping on its floor, its open casement, with the quiet roofs
and domes of Venice looming over the sea that sighed below,--and in that
room the ghost-like image of herself! This double phantom--here herself
a phantom, gazing there upon a phantom-self--had in it a horror which no
words can tell, no length of life forego.
But presently she saw this image of herself rise slowly, leave the room
with its noiseless feet: it passes the corridor, it kneels by a cradle!
Heaven of Heaven! She beholds her child!--still with its wondrous,
child-like beauty and its silent, wakeful eyes. But beside that cradle
there sits cowering a mantled, shadowy form,--the more fearful and
ghastly from its indistinct and unsubstantial gloom. The walls of that
chamber seem to open as the scene of a theatre. A grim dungeon; streets
through which pour shadowy crowds; wrath and hatred, and the aspect
of demons in their ghastly visages; a place of death; a murderous
instrument; a shamble-house of human flesh; herself; her child;--all,
all, rapid phantasmagoria, chased each other. Suddenly the
phantom-Zanoni turned, it seemed to perceive herself,--her second self.
It sprang towards her; her spirit could bear no more. She shrieked,
she woke. She found that in truth she had left that dismal chamber; the
cradle was before her, the child! all--all as that trance had seen it;
and, vanishing into air, even that dark, formless Thing!
“My child! my child! thy mother shall save thee yet!”