“But a child,--a second Viola!” murmured Zanoni, scarcely heeding the Son of Light; “a young soul fresh from heaven, that I may rear from the first moment it touches earth,--whose wings I may train to follow mine through the glories of creation; and through whom the mother herself may be led upward over the realm of death!” “Beware,--reflect! Knowest thou not that thy darkest enemy dwells in the Real? Thy wishes bring thee near and nearer to humanity.” “Ah, humanity is sweet!” answered Zanoni. And as the seer spoke, on the glorious face of Adon-Ai there broke a smile. CHAPTER 4.X. Aeterna aeternus tribuit, mortalia confert Mortalis; divina Deus, peritura caducus. “Aurel. Prud. contra Symmachum,” lib. ii. (The Eternal gives eternal things, the Mortal gathers mortal things: God, that which is divine, and the perishable that which is perishable.) EXTRACTS FROM THE LETTERS OF ZANONI TO MEJNOUR. Letter 1. Thou hast not informed me of the progress of thy pupil; and I fear that so differently does circumstance shape the minds of the generations to which we are descended, from the intense and earnest children of the earlier world, that even thy most careful and elaborate guidance would fail, with loftier and purer natures than that of the neophyte thou hast admitted within thy gates. Even that third state of being, which the Indian sage (The Brahmins, speaking of Brahm, say, “To the Omniscient the three modes of being--sleep, waking, and trance--are not;” distinctly recognising trance as a third and coequal condition of being.) rightly recognises as being between the sleep and the waking, and describes imperfectly by the name of TRANCE, is unknown to the children of the Northern world; and few but would recoil to indulge it, regarding its peopled calm as maya and delusion of the mind. Instead of ripening and culturing that airy soil, from which Nature, duly known, can evoke fruits so rich and flowers so fair, they strive but to exclude it from their gaze; they esteem that struggle of the intellect from men’s narrow world to the spirit’s infinite home, as a disease which the leech must extirpate with pharmacy and drugs, and know not even that it is from this condition of their being, in its most imperfect and infant form, that poetry, music, art--all that belong to an Idea of Beauty to which neither SLEEPING nor WAKING can furnish archetype and actual semblance--take their immortal birth. When we, O Mejnour in the far time, were ourselves the neophytes and aspirants, we were of a class to which the actual world was shut and barred. Our forefathers had no object in life but knowledge. From the cradle we were predestined and reared to wisdom as to a priesthood. We commenced research where modern Conjecture closes its faithless wings. And with us, those were common elements of science which the sages of to-day disdain as wild chimeras, or despair of as unfathomable mysteries. Even the fundamental