Wouldst thou not seek to share it ?" "I share it now!" "But were it possible to be thus young and fair forever, till the world blazes round us as one funeral pyre!" "We shall be so, when we leave the world!" Zanoni was mute for some moments, and at length he said,-- "Canst thou recall those brilliant and aerial dreams which once visited thee, when thou didst fancy that thou wert preordained to some fate aloof and afar from the common children of the earth ?" "Zanoni, the fate is found." "And hast thou no terror of the future ?" "The future! I forget it! Time past and present and to come reposes in thy smile.

Ah, Zanoni, play not with the foolish credulities of my youth! I have been better and humbler since thy presence has dispelled the mist of the air.

The future!--well, when I have cause to dread it, I will look up to heaven, and remember who guides our fate!" As she lifted her eyes above, a dark cloud swept suddenly over the scene.

It wrapped the orange-trees, the azure ocean, the dense sands; but still the last images that it veiled from the charmed eyes of Glyndon were the forms of Viola and Zanoni.

The face of the one rapt, serene, and radiant; the face of the other, dark, thoughtful, and locked in more than its usual rigidness of melancholy beauty and profound repose.
"Rouse thyself," said Mejnour; "thy ordeal has commenced! There are pretenders to the solemn science who could have shown thee the absent, and prated to thee, in their charlatanic jargon, of the secret electricities and the magnetic fluid of whose true properties they know but the germs and elements.