ent
on the boughs: all was still, hushed, and tranquil; but how different
the tranquillity of reviving day from the solemn repose of night! In the
music of silence there are a thousand variations. These men, who alone
seemed awake in Naples, were Zanoni 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 seared myself ere my
researches had made it mine, thou wouldst have escaped the curse of
which thou complainest now,--thou wouldst not have mourned over the
brevity of human affection as compared to the duration of thine own
existence; for thou wouldst 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 children of the Empyreal, 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 Zanoni. "The transport and the
sorrow, so wildly blended, which have at intervals diversified 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 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,
Zanoni (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 quic