ith an intense
desire to learn its truth, he hurried into the streets,--he gained the
Cardinal's palace. Five minutes before noon his Eminence had expired,
after an illness of less than an hour. Zanoni's visit had occupied more
time than the illness of the Cardinal. Awed and perplexed, he turned
from the palace, and as he walked through the Chiaja, he saw Jean Nicot
emerge from the portals of the Prince di --.

CHAPTER 3.V.

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still.
--Shakespeare.

Venerable Brotherhood, so sacred and so little known, from whose secret
and precious archives the materials for this history have been drawn; ye
who have retained, from century to century, all that time has spared of
the august and venerable science,--thanks to you, if now, for the
first time, some record of the thoughts and actions of no false and
self-styled luminary of your Order be given, however imperfectly, to
the world. Many have called themselves of your band; many spurious
pretenders have been so-called by the learned ignorance which still,
baffled and perplexed, is driven to confess that it knows nothing of
your origin, your ceremonies or doctrines, nor even if you still have
local habitation on the earth. Thanks to you if I, the only one of
my country, in this age, admitted, with a profane footstep, into your
mysterious Academe (The reader will have the goodness to remember that
this is said by the author of the original MS., not by the editor.),
have been by you empowered and instructed to adapt to the comprehension
of the uninitiated, some few of the starry truths which shone on the
great Shemaia of the Chaldean Lore, and gleamed dimly through the
darkened knowledge of latter disciples, labouring, like Psellus and
Iamblichus, to revive the embers of the fire which burned in the Hamarin
of the East. Though not to us of an aged and hoary world is vouchsafed
the NAME which, so say the earliest oracles of the earth, "rushes into
the infinite worlds," yet is it ours to trace the reviving truths,
through each new discovery of the philosopher and chemist. The laws of
attraction, of electricity, and of the yet more mysterious agency of
that great principal of life, which, if drawn from the universe, would
leave the universe a grave, were but the code in which the Theurgy of
old sought the guides that led it to a legislation and science of its
own. To rebuild on words the f