Page:Vivian Grey, Volume 2.djvu/78

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68
VIVIAN GREY.

commingle with humanity, on the condition that they may sometimes commune with Nature.""

"Superior spirits! say you?" and here they paced the gallery. "When Valerian, first Lord Carabas, raised this fair castle—when, profuse for his posterity, all the genius of Italian art and Italian artists was lavished on this English palace; when the stuffs, and statues, the marbles, and the mirrors, the tapestry, and the carvings, and the paintings of Genoa, and Florence, and Venice, and Padua, and Vicenza, were obtained by him at miraculous cost, and with still more miraculous toil; what think you would have been his sensations, if, while his soul was revelling in the futurity of his descendants keeping their state in this splendid pile, some wizard had foretold to him, that ere three centuries could elapse, the fortunes of his mighty family would be the sport of two individuals; one of them, a foreigner unconnected in blood, or connected only in hatred;