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—­

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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!