“And these men, to commence their era of improvement and equality, are jealous even of the Creator.  They would deny an intelligence,—­a God!” said Zanoni, as if involuntarily.  “Are you an artist, and, looking on the world, can you listen to such a dogma?  Between God and genius there is a necessary link,—­there is almost a correspondent language.  Well said the Pythagorean (Sextus, the Pythagorean.), ’A good intellect is the chorus of divinity.’”

Struck and touched with these sentiments, which he little expected to fall from one to whom he ascribed those powers which the superstitions of childhood ascribe to the darker agencies, Glyndon said:  “And yet you have confessed that your life, separated from that of others, is one that man should dread to share.  Is there, then, a connection between magic and religion?”

“Magic!” And what is magic!  When the traveller beholds in Persia the ruins of palaces and temples, the ignorant inhabitants inform him they were the work of magicians.  What is beyond their own power, the vulgar cannot comprehend to be lawfully in the power of others.  But if by magic you mean a perpetual research amongst all that is more latent and obscure in Nature, I answer, I profess that magic, and that he who does so comes but nearer to the fountain of all belief.  Knowest thou not that magic was taught in the schools of old?  But how, and by whom?  As the last and most solemn lesson, by the Priests who ministered to the Temple. (Psellus de Daemon (Ms.)) And you, who would be a painter, is not there a magic also in that art you would advance?  Must you not, after long study of the Beautiful that has been, seize upon new and airy combinations of a beauty that is to be?  See you not that the grander art, whether of poet or of painter, ever seeking for the true, abhors the real; that you must seize Nature as her master, not lackey her as her slave?

“You demand mastery over the past, a conception of the future.  Has not the art that is truly noble for its domain the future and the past?  You would conjure the invisible beings to your charm; and what is painting but the fixing into substance the Invisible?  Are you discontented with this world?  This world was never meant for genius!  To exist, it must create another.  What magician can do more; nay, what science can do as much?  There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to heaven and away from hell,—­art and science.  But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.  You have faculties that may command art; be contented with your lot.  The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call a universe from the atom; the chemist may heal with his drugs the infirmities of the human form; the painter, or the sculptor, fixes into everlasting youth forms divine, which no disease can ravage, and no years impair.  Renounce those wandering fancies that lead you now to myself, and now to yon orator of the human race; to us two, who are the antipodes of each other!  Your pencil is your wand; your canvas may raise Utopias fairer than Condorcet dreams of.  I press not yet for your decision; but what man of genius ever asked more to cheer his path to the grave than love and glory?”