“But can there be no medium—­no link—­in which our souls, as our hearts, can be united, and so mine may have influence over her own?”

“Ask me not,—­thou wilt not comprehend me!”

“I adjure thee!—­speak!”

“When two souls are divided, knowest thou not that a third in which both meet and live is the link between them!”

“I do comprehend thee, Adon-Ai,” said Zanoni, with a light of more human joy upon his face than it had ever before been seen to wear; “and if my destiny, which here is dark to mine eyes, vouchsafes to me the happy lot of the humble,—­if ever there be a child that I may clasp to my bosom and call my own—­”

“And is it to be man at last, that thou hast aspired to be more than man?”

“But a child,—­a second Viola!” murmured Zanoni, scarcely heeding the Son of Light; “a young soul fresh from heaven, that I may rear from the first moment it touches earth,—­whose wings I may train to follow mine through the glories of creation; and through whom the mother herself may be led upward over the realm of death!”

“Beware,—­reflect!  Knowest thou not that thy darkest enemy dwells in the Real?  Thy wishes bring thee near and nearer to humanity.”

“Ah, humanity is sweet!” answered Zanoni.

And as the seer spoke, on the glorious face of Adon-Ai there broke a smile.

CHAPTER 4.X.

     Aeterna aeternus tribuit, mortalia confert
     Mortalis; divina Deus, peritura caducus. 
     “Aurel.  Prud. contra Symmachum,” lib. ii.

     (The Eternal gives eternal things, the Mortal gathers mortal
     things:  God, that which is divine, and the perishable that which
     is perishable.)

Extracts from the letters of Zanoni to Mejnour.

Letter 1.

Thou hast not informed me of the progress of thy pupil; and I fear that so differently does circumstance shape the minds of the generations to which we are descended, from the intense and earnest children of the earlier world, that even thy most careful and elaborate guidance would fail, with loftier and purer natures than that of the neophyte thou hast admitted within thy gates.  Even that third state of being, which the Indian sage (The Brahmins, speaking of Brahm, say, “To the Omniscient the three modes of being—­sleep, waking, and trance—­are not;” distinctly recognising trance as a third and coequal condition of being.) rightly recognises as being between the sleep and the waking, and describes imperfectly by the name of trance, is unknown to the children of the Northern world; and few but would recoil to indulge it, regarding its peopled calm as maya and delusion of the mind.  Instead of ripening and culturing that airy soil, from which Nature, duly known, can evoke fruits so rich and flowers so fair, they strive but to exclude it from their gaze; they esteem that struggle of the intellect from men’s narrow