elf, or those
on whom I can gaze from the calm height of indifferent science, I am
blind as the merest mortal to the destinies of the creature that makes
my heart beat with the passions which obscure my gaze."

"What matter!" answered Adon-Ai. "Thy love must be but a mockery of the
name; thou canst not love as they do for whom there are death and the
grave. A short time,--like a day in thy incalculable life,--and the form
thou dotest on is dust! Others of the nether world go hand in hand, each
with each, unto the tomb; hand in hand they ascend from the worm to new
cycles of existence. For thee, below are ages; for her, but hours. And
for her and thee--O poor, but mighty one!--will there be even a joint
hereafter! Through what grades and heavens of spiritualised being will
her soul have passed when thou, the solitary loiterer, comest from the
vapours of the earth to the gates of light!"

"Son of the Starbeam, thinkest thou that this thought is not with me
forever; and seest thou not that I have invoked thee to hearken and
minister to my design? Readest thou not my desire and dream to raise the
conditions of her being to my own? Thou, Adon-Ai, bathing the celestial
joy that makes thy life in the oceans of eternal splendour,--thou,
save by the sympathies of knowledge, canst conjecture not what I,
the offspring of mortals, feel--debarred yet from the objects of the
tremendous and sublime ambition that first winged my desires above the
clay--when I see myself compelled to stand in this low world alone. I
have sought amongst my tribe for comrades, and in vain. At last I have
found a mate. The wild bird and the wild beast have theirs; and my
mastery over the malignant tribes of terror can banish their larvae from
the path that shall lead her upward, till the air of eternity fits the
frame for the elixir that baffles death."

"And thou hast begun the initiation, and thou art foiled! I know it.
Thou hast conjured to her sleep the fairest visions; thou hast invoked
the loveliest children of the air to murmur their music to her trance,
and her soul heeds them not, and, returning to the earth, escapes from
their control. Blind one, wherefore? canst thou not perceive? Because
in her soul all is love. There is no intermediate passion with which the
things thou wouldst charm to her have association and affinities. Their
attraction is but to the desires and cravings of the INTELLECT. What
have they with the PASSION that is of earth,