ted himself for
this misfortune by spreading his own story, with a thousand amusing
exaggerations. He declared that, as he approached the door, invisible
hands seemed to pluck him away; and that when he touched the lock, he
was struck, as by a palsy, to the ground. One surgeon, who heard the
tale, observed, to the distaste of the wonder-mongers, that possibly
Zanoni made a dexterous use of electricity. Howbeit, this room, once so
secured, was never entered save by Zanoni himself.

The solemn voice of Time, from the neighbouring church at last aroused
the lord of the palace from the deep and motionless reverie, rather
resembling a trance than thought, in which his mind was absorbed.

"It is one more sand out of the mighty hour-glass," said he,
murmuringly, "and yet time neither adds to, nor steals from, an atom in
the Infinite! Soul of mine, the luminous, the Augoeides (Augoeides,--a
word favoured by the mystical Platonists, sphaira psuches augoeides,
otan mete ekteinetai epi ti, mete eso suntreche mete sunizane, alla
photi lampetai, o ten aletheian opa ten panton, kai ten en aute.--Marc.
Ant., lib. 2.--The sense of which beautiful sentence of the old
philosophy, which, as Bayle well observes, in his article on Cornelius
Agrippa, the modern Quietists have (however impotently) sought to
imitate, is to the effect that 'the sphere of the soul is luminous when
nothing external has contact with the soul itself; but when lit by its
own light, it sees the truth of all things and the truth centred in
itself.'), why descendest thou from thy sphere,--why from the eternal,
starlike, and passionless Serene, shrinkest thou back to the mists of
the dark sarcophagus? How long, too austerely taught that companionship
with the things that die brings with it but sorrow in its sweetness,
hast thou dwelt contented with thy majestic solitude?"

As he thus murmured, one of the earliest birds that salute the dawn
broke into sudden song from amidst the orange-trees in the garden below
his casement; and as suddenly, song answered song; the mate, awakened at
the note, gave back its happy answer to the bird. He listened; and not
the soul he had questioned, but the heart replied. He rose, and with
restless strides paced the narrow floor. "Away from this world!" he
exclaimed at length, with an impatient tone. "Can no time loosen its
fatal ties? As the attraction that holds the earth in space, is the
attraction that fixes the soul to earth. Away fr