Calm, gentle, passionless in outward aspect, the count became noted as an earnest scholar, and yet his heart contained many a hidden stratum of volcanic passion, which burned scathingly at the thought of his mother's shame! From an intense consciousness that the conduct of his parent entailed its measure of reproach upon himself, he shrank from the society of men, and sought sources of relaxation in tracing to their sequences those great thoughts which the thinkers of all time, in their debasement and their exaltation, have written down and immortalized—some, on the undying page; some, on the living canvas; some, on the ever-moving firmament of ceaseless action! The shadow of the wing of time fell upon him as a man, at an age when most of us are immature, unthinking boys. The epochs of strong natures are dialed upon the mind not by the sunshine but by the darkness of the heart! Our sorrows are the evil genii who transform in a moment boyhood to manhood, and manhood to age!
Every day, every hour, this young man acquired something from ancient or from modern lore; at twenty-four he was versed in a learning beyond that of many a lifelong scholar. His studies, within a year of the period at which we introduce him to the reader, had taken a form different from any he had before pursued; the old disciples of a gorgeous mythology being neglected for the mystical and alluring spiritualism of the exponents of modern German philosophy. The English philosophy is entirely destructive of the grand, the lofty, the divine! It lowers and debases by its precepts, and chills by its explanations. The French, on the other hand, attempts no explanations; but the system is an elaborate sneer at all that is good, and true, and high, and noble. The aim of the German "is at least the nobler one, and elevates, not dwarfs, the souls of men." "There is a Godlike within us that feels itself akin to the God; and if we are told that both the 'Godlike and the God are dreams,' we can but answer that so to dream is better than to wake and find ourselves nothing!"
Who among us—but worms of the dust, low things, fit only for the mire in which they wallow—but has at one time or another demanded initiation into the secret order of the "searchers after truth?" Who among us but, unsatisfied with the knowledge that may be achieved, grasps wildly after heaven's thunderbolts, and would embrace the unattainable, feeling, as we so terribly do, the restlessness and the might of the Deity in our burning veins? Who among us but has tried to look deep into the future, and read the fate, not of the next year or moment, but of the undying spirit in that other world, of which we dream so much, and know so little?
And who among us who has had the heroism honestly to make the attempt, and to pursue to their sequences the terrible thoughts to which such reflection gives rise, but has gone down headlong to the pit? If no actual phantoms haunt the waking dreams of such unsuccessful neophytes, yet a more terrible thing is that accursed skepticism—that coldness that does not brook to be questioned, and that cannot be understood—that fills his soul. It does not come over his hours of mirth, when the wine-cup passes and the jest goes round; but, like the fabled fiend of the romancers, comes only over the lost one's soul, when his intellect would aspire and his genius dare. Comes it, with its eternal sneer, that sees nothing so high that it does not make it appear utterly despicable! When his genius would dare, comes it with its evil eyes, and he loses faith in his genius and doubts his power; loses faith when he knows that faith only can bear him through life's tempests; doubts while he feels doubt to be the unpardonable sin.[1]
Count Zanotti had passed through each of the stages of which I speak—first, an unquenchable yearning for forbidden knowledge; next, the rapture that glows when the lip touches the sparkle on the brim of the cup—and then the flatness and the weariness that follow! But for him, there was yet a hope. His heart had never beat with the quick pulse of love! Its youthful vigor was unimpaired, and in a contest with the intellect there was strong hope of it proving victorious. The struggle came soon enough.
CHAPTER II.
"Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one."—INGOMAR.
AT the end of the long, gloomy day following the conclusion of the carnival, Zanotti accompanied his father to a midnight mass, and there for the first time saw Leonora D'Alvarez, the daughter of Spain's ambassador to the court of the winged Lion of St. Mark's. She was one of those beautiful creations that we so often dream of, and sigh for, and sometimes, but very seldom, see. Soul there shed its spiritual attributes over one from whose features even the bloom of youth seemed to catch a brighter hue. Like all Italians, Zanotti had dreamed of love—the love of the poet and the dreamer; and now he felt it in its strength—the love of a pure, unselfish, yet deep and ardent nature!