oetry of desire must end, and the thing possessed is seldom the thing
that we dreamed of.

Beneath Melmoth's omnipotence lurked this tragical anticlimax of so
many a passion, and now the inanity of human nature was revealed to his
successor, to whom infinite power brought Nothingness as a dowry.

To come to a clear understanding of Castanier's strange position, it
must be borne in mind how suddenly these revolutions of thought and
feeling had been wrought; how quickly they had succeeded each other;
and of these things it is hard to give any idea to those who have never
broken the prison bonds of time, and space, and distance. His relation
to the world without had been entirely changed with the expansion of his
faculties.

Like Melmoth himself, Castanier could travel in a few moments over the
fertile plains of India, could soar on the wings of demons above African
desert spaces, or skim the surface of the seas. The same insight that
could read the inmost thoughts of others, could apprehend at a glance
the nature of any material object, just as he caught as it were all
flavors at once upon his tongue. He took his pleasure like a despot;
a blow of the axe felled the tree that he might eat its fruits. The
transitions, the alternations that measure joy and pain, and diversify
human happiness, no longer existed for him. He had so completely glutted
his appetites that pleasure must overpass the limits of pleasure to
tickle a palate cloyed with satiety, and suddenly grown fastidious
beyond all measure, so that ordinary pleasures became distasteful.
Conscious that at will he was the master of all the women that he could
desire, knowing that his power was irresistible, he did not care to
exercise it; they were pliant to his unexpressed wishes, to his most
extravagant caprices, until he felt a horrible thirst for love, and
would have love beyond their power to give.

The world refused him nothing save faith and prayer, the soothing
and consoling love that is not of this world. He was obeyed--it was a
horrible position.

The torrents of pain, and pleasure, and thought that shook his soul and
his bodily frame would have overwhelmed the strongest human being; but
in him there was a power of vitality proportioned to the power of the
sensations that assailed him. He felt within him a vague immensity of
longing that earth could not satisfy. He spent his days on outspread
wings, longing to traverse the luminous fields of space to ot