itself to mechanism. Could
he, who saw nothing in the soul but a combination of matter, prate of
schools that should excel a Raphael? Yes, art was magic; and as he owned
the truth of the aphorism, he could comprehend that in magic there may
be religion, for religion is an essential to art. His old ambition,
freeing itself from the frigid prudence with which Mervale sought to
desecrate all images less substantial than the golden calf of the world,
revived, and stirred, and kindled. The subtle detection of what he
conceived to be an error in the school he had hitherto adopted, made
more manifest to him by the grinning commentary of Nicot, seemed to open
to him a new world of invention. He seized the happy moment,--he placed
before him the colours and the canvas. Lost in his conceptions of a
fresh ideal, his mind was lifted aloft into the airy realms of beauty;
dark thoughts, unhallowed desires, vanished. Zanoni was right: the
material world shrunk from his gaze; he viewed Nature as from a
mountain-top afar; and as the waves of his unquiet heart became calm and
still, again the angel eyes of Viola beamed on them as a holy star.

Locking himself in his chamber, he refused even the visits of Mervale.
Intoxicated with the pure air of his fresh existence, he remained for
three days, and almost nights, absorbed in his employment; but on the
fourth morning came that reaction to which all labour is exposed. He
woke listless and fatigued; and as he cast his eyes on the canvas, the
glory seemed to have gone from it. Humiliating recollections of the
great masters he aspired to rival forced themselves upon him; defects
before unseen magnified themselves to deformities in his languid and
discontented eyes. He touched and retouched, but his hand failed him; he
threw down his instruments in despair; he opened his casement: the day
without was bright and lovely; the street was crowded with that life
which is ever so joyous and affluent in the animated population of
Naples. He saw the lover, as he passed, conversing with his mistress by
those mute gestures which have survived all changes of languages, the
same now as when the Etruscan painted yon vases in the Museo Borbonico.
Light from without beckoned his youth to its mirth and its pleasures;
and the dull walls within, lately large enough to comprise heaven and
earth, seemed now cabined and confined as a felon's prison. He welcomed
the step of Mervale at his threshold, and unbarred the d