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 quickened his grosser senses, have blunted his imagination. I
relinquish him to his doom."

"And still, then, Mejnour, you cherish the desire to revive our
order, limited now to ourselves alone, by new converts and allies.
Surely--surely--thy experience might have taught thee, that scarcely
once in a thousand years is born the being who can pass through the
horrible gates that lead into the worlds without! Is not thy path
already strewed with thy victims? Do not their ghastly faces of agony