sabel himself? No. When, that morning, he heard
of her danger, he had, it is true, returned to the sympathies and the
fears of affection; but with the death of the Prince her image faded
again from his heart, and he felt no jealous pang at the thought that
she had been saved by Zicci,--that at that moment she was perhaps
beneath his roof. Whoever has, in the course of his life, indulged the
absorbing passion of the gamester, will remember bow all other pursuits
and objects vanished from his mind, how solely he was wrapped in the one
wild delusion; with what a sceptre of magic power the despot demon ruled
every feeling and every thought. Far more intense than the passion of
the gamester was the frantic yet sublime desire that mastered the breast
of Glyndon. He would be the rival of Zicci, not in human and perishable
affections, but in preternatural and eternal lore. He would have laid
down life with content, nay, rapture, as the price of learning those
solemn secrets which separated the stranger from mankind.. Such fools
are we when we aspire to be over-wise! To be enamoured too madly of the
goddess of goddesses is only to embrace a cloud, and to forfeit alike
heaven and earth.

The night was most lovely and serene, and the waves scarcely rippled at
his feet as the Englishman glided on by the cool and starry beach. At
length he arrived at the spot, and there, leaning against the broken
pillar, he beheld a man wrapped in a long mantle and in an attitude
of profound repose. He approached, and uttered the name of Zicci. The
figure turned, and he saw the face of a stranger,--a face not stamped by
the glorious beauty of the Corsican, but equally majestic in its
aspect, and perhaps still more impressive from the mature age and the
passionless depth of thought that characterized the expanded forehead
and deep-set but piercing eyes.

"You seek Zicci," said the stranger,--"he will be here anon; but perhaps
he whom you see before you is more connected with your destiny, and more
disposed to realize your dreams."

"Hath the earth then another Zicci?"

"If not," replied the stranger, "why do you cherish the hope and the
wild faith to be yourself a Zicci? Think you that none others
have burned with the same godlike dream? Who, indeed, in his first
youth;--youth, when the soul is nearer to the heaven from which it
sprang, and its divine and primal longings are not all effaced by the
sordid passions and petty cares that are begot i