CHAPTER 6.III.
Fuscis tellurem amplectitur alis.
Virgil.
(Embraces the Earth with gloomy wings.)
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--
...
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 ccommon 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!
Mejnour to Zanoni.
Rome.
Fallen One!--I see before thee Evil and Death and Woe! Thou to
have relinquished Adon-Ai for the nameless Terror,--the heavenly
stars for those fearful eyes! Thou, at the last to be the victim
of the Larva of the dreary Threshold, that, in thy first
novitiate, fled, withered and shrivelled, from thy kingly brow!
When, at the primary grades of initiation, the pupil I took from
thee on the shores of the changed Parthenope, fell senseless and
cowering before that Phantom-Darkness, I knew that his spirit was
not formed to front the worlds beyond; for FEAR is the attraction
of man to earthiest earth, and while he fears, he cannot soar.
But THOU, seest thou not that to love is but to fear; seest thou
not that the power of which thou boastest over the malignant one
is already gone? It awes, it masters thee; it will mock thee and
betray. Lose not a moment; come to me. If there can yet be
sufficient sympathy between us, through MY eyes shalt thou see,
and perhaps guard against the perils that, shapeless yet, and
looming through the shadow, marshal themselves around thee and
those whom thy very love has doomed. Come from all the ties of
thy fond humanity; they will but obscure thy vision! Come forth
from thy fears and hopes, thy desires and passions. Come, as
alone Mind can be the monarch and the seer, shining through the
home it tenants,--a pure, impressionless, sublime intelligence!
