REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.

Zanoni, a Novel. By the Author of “Pelham,” “Rienzi,” &c. Two Volumes. Harper & Brothers.

A few years ago, in the first volume of “The Monthly Chronicle,” a tale, or rather the fragment of one, appeared, professedly from the pen of Bulwer. But the story defied critical as well as common sense to understand it. It opened abruptly and closed abruptly. It had, properly speaking, neither beginning nor end. It was incomprehensible. By general consent, “Zicci” was regarded as a freak of the author—its only merit was the novelty of having no merit at all. After being the jest of the reviewers for years, this story has been completed, and now lies before us, under the altered name of “Zanoni.”

The idea of the novel is borrowed from the dreams of the old Rosicrucians, and of the predecessors of that sect as far back as the Chaldeans. These visionaries imagined that man, by a rigid practice of virtue and the sublimation of every earthly feeling, could attain to a perfect comprehension of the most hidden secrets of nature—could hold communion with, and exercise control over, the unseen powers of the air—and could even preserve human life to an indefinite extent, by acquiring the means by which it might be perpetually renovated. The story opens at Naples, towards the close of the last century. The hero is a noble Chaldean, who, having attained to the knowledge of this last secret of his sect while yet in the prime of youthful manhood, wears now the same aspect as when he gazed on the stars from his home in Assyria, before the temple had been built on Mount Zion—before the Greeks had fought at Marathon—before the builders of the pyramids had died. To an imaginative mind, such a character possesses peculiar charms. He comes before us with all the solemnity of the past, making vivid to us the great deeds of buried ages. He has seen the army of Alexander on the Indus. He was in Egypt when Antony’s fleet set sail for Actium. He remembers when Demosthenes thundered for the crown, when Cæsar fell in the Senate House, when Rome was sacked by Attila. For three thousand years he has gazed on mankind with a face as unchanging as that of the weird Sphinx of the desert. For ninety generations, he has survived war, and pestilence, and the slow decay of the system,—a being mysterious in his subtle power, wonderful in his awful and majestic beauty. This exemption from death he has won by the subjugation of every feeling and passion to the mastery of a PURE INTELLECT. But still retaining his youth, he retains the capacity to love; and though, for such a lapse of ages, he has withstood temptation, he is destined at last to yield to it. He meets with and loves a beautiful Italian girl. He thus endangers his earthly immortality; for the moment he yields to earthly passion, however pure, his intellect becomes clouded, and he loses the prophetic faculty as well as others of his high attributes. Conscious of this, and knowing that he will bring peril and sorrow around the path of Viola by linking her fate with his, he struggles long against his passion, and even after yielding to it, endeavors to avert from her head the dangers which, as consequences of his conduct, thicken around her. In this Titanic conflict betwixt the intellect and the heart—in the alternation of the aspirations of the one and the agonizing throes of the other, lies the burden—as the old writers would call it—of the novel.