her
spheres that he knew afar by intuitive perception, a clear and hopeless
knowledge. His soul dried up within him, for he hungered and thirsted
after things that can neither be drunk nor eaten, but for which he could
not choose but crave. His lips, like Melmoth's, burned with desire; he
panted for the unknown, for he knew all things.

The mechanism and the scheme of the world was apparent to him, and its
working interested him no longer; he did not long disguise the profound
scorn that makes of a man of extraordinary powers a sphinx who knows
everything and says nothing, and sees all things with an unmoved
countenance. He felt not the slightest wish to communicate his knowledge
to other men. He was rich with all the wealth of the world, with one
effort he could make the circle of the globe, and riches and power were
meaningless for him. He felt the awful melancholy of omnipotence, a
melancholy which Satan and God relieve by the exercise of infinite power
in mysterious ways known to them alone. Castanier had not, like his
Master, the inextinguishable energy of hate and malice; he felt that he
was a devil, but a devil whose time was not yet come, while Satan is a
devil through all eternity, and being damned beyond redemption, delights
to stir up the world, like a dung heap, with his triple fork and to
thwart therein the designs of God. But Castanier, for his misfortune,
had one hope left.

If in a moment he could move from one pole to the other as a bird
springs restlessly from side to side in its cage, when, like the bird,
he has crossed his prison, he saw the vast immensity of space beyond it.
That vision of the Infinite left him for ever unable to see humanity and
its affairs as other men saw them. The insensate fools who long for the
power of the Devil gauge its desirability from a human standpoint; they
do not see that with the Devil's power they will likewise assume his
thoughts, and that they will be doomed to remain as men among creatures
who will no longer understand them. The Nero unknown to history who
dreams of setting Paris on fire for his private entertainment, like
an exhibition of a burning house on the boards of a theatre, does not
suspect that if he had the power, Paris would become for him as little
interesting as an ant-heap by the roadside to a hurrying passer-by. The
circle of the sciences was for Castanier something like a logogriph
for a man who does not know the key to it. Kings and Governments