f silence there are a thousand variations. These men, who
alone seemed awake in Naples, were Zicci and the mysterious stranger,
who had but an hour or two ago startled the Prince di--in his voluptuous
palace.

"No," said the latter, "hadst thou delayed the acceptance of the Arch
Gift until thou hadst attained to the years and passed through all the
desolate bereavements that chilled and scared myself ere my researches
had made it mine, thou wouldest have escaped the curse of which thou
complainest now. Thou wouldest not have mourned over the brevity of
human affection as compared to the duration of thine own existence, for
thou wouldest have survived the very desire and dream of the love of
woman. Brightest, and but for that error perhaps the loftiest, of the
secret and solemn race that fills up the interval in creation between
mankind and the demons, age after age wilt thou rue the splendid folly
which made thee ask to carry the beauty and the passions of youth into
the dreary grandeur of earthly immortality."

"I do not repent, nor shall I," answered Zicci, coldly. "The transport
and the sorrow, so wildly blended, which diversify my doom, are better
than the calm and bloodless tenor of thy solitary way. Thou, who lovest
nothing, hatest nothing,--feelest nothing, and walkest the world with
the noiseless and joyless footsteps of a dream!"

"You mistake," replied he who had owned the name of Mejnour; "though I
care not for love, and am dead to every passion that agitates the sons
of clay, I am not dead to their more serene enjoyments. I have still
left to me the sublime pleasures of wisdom and of friendship. I carry
down the Stream of the countless years, not the turbulent desires
of youth, but the calm and spiritual delights of age. Wisely and
deliberately I abandoned youth forever when I separated my lot from
men. Let us not envy or reproach each other. I would have saved this
Neapolitan, Zicci (since so it now pleases thee to be called), partly
because his grandsire was but divided by the last airy barrier from our
own brotherhood, partly because I know that in the man himself lurk the
elements of ancestral courage and power, which in earlier life would
have fitted him for one of us. Earth holds but few to whom nature has
given the qualities that can bear the ordeal! But time and excess,
that have thickened the grosser senses, have blunted the imagination. I
relinquish him to his doom."

"And still then, Mejnour,