yet so seemingly accidental, brought out by causes the most commonplace,
and yet associated with words the most prophetic, impressed him with
the deepest sentiments of admiration and awe. It was as if this dark and
wondrous being could convert the most ordinary events and the meanest
instruments into the agencies of his inscrutable will; yet, if so, why
have permitted the capture of Viola? Why not have prevented the crime
rather than punish the criminal? And did Zanoni really feel love for
Viola? Love, and yet offer to resign her to himself,--to a rival whom
his arts could not have failed to baffle. He no longer reverted to the
belief that Zanoni or Viola had sought to dupe him into marriage. His
fear and reverence for the former now forbade the notion of so poor an
imposture. Did he any longer 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