love Viola himself? No; when that morning
he had 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 from his heart, and he felt no jealous pang at the
thought that she had been saved by Zanoni,--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 how 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 Zanoni, 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.
Enamoured of the goddess of goddesses, he stretched forth his arms--the
wild Ixion--and embraced a cloud!

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 Zanoni. The
figure turned, and he saw the face of a stranger: a face not stamped by
the glorious beauty of Zanoni, but equally majestic in its aspect, and
perhaps still more impressive from the mature age and the passionless
depth of thought that characterised the expanded forehead, and deep-set
but piercing eyes.

"You seek Zanoni," 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 realise your dreams."

"Hath the earth, then, another Zanoni?"

"If not," replied the stranger, "why do you cherish the hope and the
wild faith to be yourself a Zanoni? 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 in time,--who is there
in youth that has not nourished the beli