“What matter!” answered Adon-Ai. “Thy love must be but a mockery of the name; thou canst not love as they do for whom there are death and the grave. A short time,--like a day in thy incalculable life,--and the form thou dotest on is dust! Others of the nether world go hand in hand, each with each, unto the tomb; hand in hand they ascend from the worm to new cycles of existence. For thee, below are ages; for her, but hours. And for her and thee--O poor, but mighty one!--will there be even a joint hereafter! Through what grades and heavens of spiritualised being will her soul have passed when thou, the solitary loiterer, comest from the vapours of the earth to the gates of light!” “Son of the Starbeam, thinkest thou that this thought is not with me forever; and seest thou not that I have invoked thee to hearken and minister to my design? Readest thou not my desire and dream to raise the conditions of her being to my own? Thou, Adon-Ai, bathing the celestial joy that makes thy life in the oceans of eternal splendour,--thou, save by the sympathies of knowledge, canst conjecture not what I, the offspring of mortals, feel--debarred yet from the objects of the tremendous and sublime ambition that first winged my desires above the clay--when I see myself compelled to stand in this low world alone. I have sought amongst my tribe for comrades, and in vain. At last I have found a mate. The wild bird and the wild beast have theirs; and my mastery over the malignant tribes of terror can banish their larvae from the path that shall lead her upward, till the air of eternity fits the frame for the elixir that baffles death.” “And thou hast begun the initiation, and thou art foiled! I know it. Thou hast conjured to her sleep the fairest visions; thou hast invoked the loveliest children of the air to murmur their music to her trance, and her soul heeds them not, and, returning to the earth, escapes from their control. Blind one, wherefore? canst thou not perceive? Because in her soul all is love. There is no intermediate passion with which the things thou wouldst charm to her have association and affinities. Their attraction is but to the desires and cravings of the INTELLECT. What have they with the PASSION that is of earth, and the HOPE that goes direct to heaven?” “But can there be no medium--no link--in which our souls, as our hearts, can be united, and so mine may have influence over her own?” “Ask me not,--thou wilt not comprehend me!” “I adjure thee!--speak!” “When two souls are divided, knowest thou not that a third in which both meet and live is the link between them!” “I do comprehend thee, Adon-Ai,” said Zanoni, with a light of more human joy upon his face than it had ever before been seen to wear; “and if my destiny, which here is dark to mine eyes, vouchsafes to me the happy lot of the humble,--if ever there be a child that I may clasp to my bosom and call my own--” “And is it to be man at last, that thou hast aspired to be more than man?”