“Have I not explained it to thee before?  Is it common life, then, to love, and to live with the one we love?  My true fairy-land is won!  Speak to me of no other.”

And so night surprised them by the lonely beach; and Zanoni, allured from his sublimer projects, and bending over that tender face, forgot that, in the Harmonious Infinite which spread around, there were other worlds than that one human heart.

CHAPTER 4.IX.

There is a principle of the soul, superior to all nature, through which we are capable of surpassing the order and systems of the world.  When the soul is elevated to natures better than itself, then it is entirely separated from subordinate natures, exchanges this for another life, and, deserting the order of things with which it was connected, links and mingles itself with another.  —­Iamblichus.

“Adon-Ai!  Adon-Ai!—­appear, appear!”

And in the lonely cave, whence once had gone forth the oracles of a heathen god, there emerged from the shadows of fantastic rocks a luminous and gigantic column, glittering and shifting.  It resembled the shining but misty spray which, seen afar off, a fountain seems to send up on a starry night.  The radiance lit the stalactites, the crags, the arches of the cave, and shed a pale and tremulous splendour on the features of Zanoni.

“Son of Eternal Light,” said the invoker, “thou to whose knowledge, grade after grade, race after race, I attained at last, on the broad Chaldean plains; thou from whom I have drawn so largely of the unutterable knowledge that yet eternity alone can suffice to drain; thou who, congenial with myself, so far as our various beings will permit, hast been for centuries my familiar and my friend,—­answer me and counsel!”

From the column there emerged a shape of unimaginable glory.  Its face was that of a man in its first youth, but solemn, as with the consciousness of eternity and the tranquillity of wisdom; light, like starbeams, flowed through its transparent veins; light made its limbs themselves, and undulated, in restless sparkles, through the waves of its dazzling hair.  With its arms folded on its breast, it stood distant a few feet from Zanoni, and its low voice murmured gently, “My counsels were sweet to thee once; and once, night after night, thy soul could follow my wings through the untroubled splendours of the Infinite.  Now thou hast bound thyself back to the earth by its strongest chains, and the attraction to the clay is more potent than the sympathies that drew to thy charms the Dweller of the Starbeam and the Air.  When last thy soul hearkened to me, the senses already troubled thine intellect and obscured thy vision.  Once again I come to thee; but thy power even to summon me to thy side is fading from thy spirit, as sunshine fades from the wave when the winds drive the cloud between the ocean and the sky.”