CHAPTER 2.IV.
Les Intelligences Celestes se font voir, et see communiquent plus
volontiers, dans le silence et dans la tranquillite de la
solitude. On aura donc une petite chambre ou un cabinet secret,
etc.
"Les Clavicules de Rabbi Salomon," chapter 3; traduites
exactement du texte Hebreu par M. Pierre Morissoneau, Professeur
des Langues Orientales, et Sectateur de la Philosophie des Sages
Cabalistes. (Manuscript Translation.)
(The Celestial Intelligences exhibit and explain themselves most
freely in silence and the tranquillity of solitude. One will
have then a little chamber, or a secret cabinet, etc.)
The palace retained by Zanoni was in one of the less frequented
quarters of the city. It still stands, now ruined and
dismantled, a monument of the splendour of a chivalry long since
vanished from Naples, with the lordly races of the Norman and the
Spaniard.
As he entered the rooms reserved for his private hours, two
Indians, in the dress of their country, received him at the
threshold with the grave salutations of the East. They had
accompanied him from the far lands in which, according to rumour,
he had for many years fixed his home. But they could communicate
nothing to gratify curiosity or justify suspicion. They spoke no
language but their own. With the exception of these two his
princely retinue was composed of the native hirelings of the
city, whom his lavish but imperious generosity made the implicit
creatures of his will. In his house, and in his habits, so far
as they were seen, there was nothing to account for the rumours
which were circulated abroad. He was not, as we are told of
Albertus Magnus or the great Leonardo da Vinci, served by airy
forms; and no brazen image, the invention of magic mechanism,
communicated to him the influences of the stars. None of the
apparatus of the alchemist--the crucible and the metals--gave
solemnity to his chambers, or accounted for his wealth; nor did
he even seem to interest himself in those serener studies which
might be supposed to colour his peculiar conversation with
abstract notions, and often with recondite learning. No books
spoke to him in his solitude; and if ever he had drawn from them
his knowledge, it seemed now that the only page he read was the
wide one of Nature, and that a capacious and startling memory
supplied the rest. Yet was there one exception to what in all
else seemed customary and commonplace, and which, according to
the authority we have prefixed to this chapter, might indicate
the follower of the occult sciences. Whether at Rome or Naples,
or, in fact, wherever his abode, he selected one room remote from
the rest of the house, which was fastened by a lock scarcely
larger than the seal of a ring, yet which sufficed to baffle the
most cunning instruments of the locksmith: at least, one of his
servants, prompted by irresistible curiosity, had made the
attempt in vain; and though he had fancied it was tried in the
most favourable time for secrecy,--not a soul near, in the dead
of night, Zanoni himself absent from home,--yet his superstition,
or his conscience, told him the reason why the next day the Major
Domo quietly dismissed him. He compensated himself for this
misfortune by spreading his own story, with a thousand amusing
exaggerations. He declared that, as he approached the door,
invisible hands seemed to pluck him away; and that when he
touched the lock, he was struck, as by a palsy, to the ground.
One surgeon, who heard the tale, observed, to the distaste of the
wonder-mongers, that possibly Zanoni made a dexterous use of
electricity. Howbeit, this room, once so secured, was never
entered save by Zanoni himself.
The solemn voice of Time, from the neighbouring church at last
aroused the lord of the palace from the deep and motionless
reverie, rather resembling a trance than thought, in which his
mind was absorbed.
"It is one more sand out of the mighty hour-glass," said he,
murmuringly, "and yet time neither adds to, nor steals from, an
atom in the Infinite! Soul of mine, the luminous, the Augoeides
(Augoeides,--a word favoured by the mystical Platonists, sphaira
psuches augoeides, otan mete ekteinetai epi ti, mete eso
suntreche mete sunizane, alla photi lampetai, o ten aletheian opa
ten panton, kai ten en aute.--Marc. Ant., lib. 2.--The sense of
which beautiful sentence of the old philosophy, which, as Bayle
well observes, in his article on Cornelius Agrippa, the modern
Quietists have (however impotently) sought to imitate, is to the
effect that "the sphere of the soul is luminous when nothing
external has contact with the soul itself; but when lit by its
own light, it sees the truth of all things and the truth centred
in itself."), why descendest thou from thy sphere,--why from the
eternal, starlike, and passionless Serene, shrinkest thou back to
the mists of the dark sarcophagus? How long, too austerely
taught that companionship with the things that die brings with it
but sorrow in its sweetness, hast thou dwelt contented with thy
majestic solitude?"
As he thus murmured, one of the earliest birds that salute the
dawn broke into sudden song from amidst the orange-trees in the
garden below his casement; and as suddenly, song answered song;
the mate, awakened at the note, gave back its happy answer to the
bird. He listened; and not the soul he had questioned, but the
heart replied. He rose, and with restless strides paced the
narrow floor. "Away from this world!" he exclaimed at length,
with an impatient tone. "Can no time loosen its fatal ties? As
the attraction that holds the earth in space, is the attraction
that fixes the soul to earth. Away from the dark grey planet!
Break, ye fetters: arise, ye wings!"
He passed through the silent galleries, and up the lofty stairs,
and entered the secret chamber.
