CHAPTER 6.VII.
Des Erdenlebens
Schweres Traumbild sinkt, und sinkt, und sinkt.
"Das Ideal und das Lebens."
(The Dream Shape of the heavy earthly life sinks, and sinks, and
sinks.)
She stood within the chamber, and gazed around her; no signs by
which an inquisitor of old could have detected the scholar of the
Black Art were visible. No crucibles and caldrons, no brass-
bound volumes and ciphered girdles, no skulls and cross-bones.
Quietly streamed the broad moonlight through the desolate chamber
with its bare, white walls. A few bunches of withered herbs, a
few antique vessels of bronze, placed carelessly on a wooden
form, were all which that curious gaze could identify with the
pursuits of the absent owner. The magic, if it existed, dwelt in
the artificer, and the materials, to other hands, were but herbs
and bronze. So is it ever with thy works and wonders, O Genius,
--Seeker of the Stars! Words themselves are the common property
of all men; yet, from words themselves, Thou Architect of
Immortalities, pilest up temples that shall outlive the Pyramids,
and the very leaf of the Papyrus becomes a Shinar, stately with
towers, round which the Deluge of Ages, shall roar in vain!
But in that solitude has the Presence that there had invoked its
wonders left no enchantment of its own? It seemed so; for as
Viola stood in the chamber, she became sensible that some
mysterious change was at work within herself. Her blood coursed
rapidly, and with a sensation of delight, through her veins,--she
felt as if chains were falling from her limbs, as if cloud after
cloud was rolling from her gaze. All the confused thoughts which
had moved through her trance settled and centred themselves in
one intense desire to see the Absent One,--to be with him. The
monads that make up space and air seemed charged with a spiritual
attraction,--to become a medium through which her spirit could
pass from its clay, and confer with the spirit to which the
unutterable desire compelled it. A faintness seized her; she
tottered to the seat on which the vessels and herbs were placed,
and, as she bent down, she saw in one of the vessels a small vase
of crystal. By a mechanical and involuntary impulse, her hand
seized the vase; she opened it, and the volatile essence it
contained sparkled up, and spread through the room a powerful and
delicious fragrance. She inhaled the odour, she laved her
temples with the liquid, and suddenly her life seemed to spring
up from the previous faintness,--to spring, to soar, to float, to
dilate upon the wings of a bird. The room vanished from her
eyes. Away, away, over lands and seas and space on the rushing
desire flies the disprisoned mind!
Upon a stratum, not of this world, stood the world-born shapes of
the sons of Science, upon an embryo world, upon a crude, wan,
attenuated mass of matter, one of the Nebulae, which the suns of
the myriad systems throw off as they roll round the Creator's
throne*, to become themselves new worlds of symmetry and glory,--
planets and suns that forever and forever shall in their turn
multiply their shining race, and be the fathers of suns and
planets yet to come.
(*"Astronomy instructs us that, in the original condition of the
solar system, the sun was the nucleus of a nebulosity or luminous
mass which revolved on its axis, and extended far beyond the
orbits of all the planets,--the planets as yet having no
existence. Its temperature gradually diminished, and, becoming
contracted by cooling, the rotation increased in rapidity, and
zones of nebulosity were successively thrown off, in consequence
of the centrifugal force overpowering the central attraction.
The condensation of these separate masses constituted the planets
and satellites. But this view of the conversion of gaseous
matter into planetary bodies is not limited to our own system; it
extends to the formation of the innumerable suns and worlds which
are distributed throughout the universe. The sublime discoveries
of modern astronomers have shown that every part of the realms of
space abounds in large expansions of attenuated matter termed
nebulae, which are irregularly reflective of light, of various
figures, and in different states of condensation, from that of a
diffused, luminous mass to suns and planets like our own."--From
Mantell's eloquent and delightful work, entitled "The Wonders of
Geology," volume i. page 22.)
There, in that enormous solitude of an infant world, which
thousands and thousands of years can alone ripen into form, the
spirit of Viola beheld the shape of Zanoni, or rather the
likeness, the simulacrun, the LEMUR of his shape, not its human
and corporeal substance,--as if, like hers, the Intelligence was
parted from the Clay,--and as the sun, while it revolves and
glows, had cast off into remotest space that nebular image of
itself, so the thing of earth, in the action of its more luminous
and enduring being, had thrown its likeness into that new-born
stranger of the heavens. There stood the phantom,--a phantom
Mejnour, by its side. In the gigantic chaos around raved and
struggled the kindling elements; water and fire, darkness and
light, at war,--vapour and cloud hardening into mountains, and
the Breath of Life moving like a steadfast splendour over all.
As the dreamer looked, and shivered, she beheld that even there
the two phantoms of humanity were not alone. Dim monster-forms
that that disordered chaos alone could engender, the first
reptile Colossal race that wreathe and crawl through the earliest
stratum of a world labouring into life, coiled in the oozing
matter or hovered through the meteorous vapours. But these the
two seekers seemed not to heed; their gaze was fixed intent upon
an object in the farthest space. With the eyes of the spirit,
Viola followed theirs; with a terror far greater than the chaos
and its hideous inhabitants produced, she beheld a shadowy
likeness of the very room in which her form yet dwelt, its white
walls, the moonshine sleeping on its floor, its open casement,
with the quiet roofs and domes of Venice looming over the sea
that sighed below,--and in that room the ghost-like image of
herself! This double phantom--here herself a phantom, gazing
there upon a phantom-self--had in it a horror which no words can
tell, no length of life forego.
But presently she saw this image of herself rise slowly, leave
the room with its noiseless feet: it passes the corridor, it
kneels by a cradle! Heaven of Heaven! She beholds her child!--
still with its wondrous, child-like beauty and its silent,
wakeful eyes. But beside that cradle there sits cowering a
mantled, shadowy form,--the more fearful and ghastly from its
indistinct and unsubstantial gloom. The walls of that chamber
seem to open as the scene of a theatre. A grim dungeon; streets
through which pour shadowy crowds; wrath and hatred, and the
aspect of demons in their ghastly visages; a place of death; a
murderous instrument; a shamble-house of human flesh; herself;
her child;--all, all, rapid phantasmagoria, chased each other.
Suddenly the phantom-Zanoni turned, it seemed to perceive
herself,--her second self. It sprang towards her; her spirit
could bear no more. She shrieked, she woke. She found that in
truth she had left that dismal chamber; the cradle was before
her, the child! all--all as that trance had seen it; and,
vanishing into air, even that dark, formless Thing!
"My child! my child! thy mother shall save thee yet!"
