horrible thirst for love, and would have love beyond their power to
give.

The world refused him nothing save faith and prayer, the soothing and
consoling love that is not of this world. He was obeyed--it was a
horrible position.

The torrents of pain, and pleasure, and thought that shook his soul
and his bodily frame would have overwhelmed the strongest human being;
but in him there was a power of vitality proportioned to the power of
the sensations that assailed him. He felt within him a vague immensity
of longing that earth could not satisfy. He spent his days on
outspread wings, longing to traverse the luminous fields of space to
other spheres that he knew afar by intuitive perception, a clear and
hopeless knowledge. His soul dried up within him, for he hungered and
thirsted after things that can neither be drunk nor eaten, but for
which he could not choose but crave. His lips, like Melmoth's, burned
with desire; he panted for the unknown, for he knew all things.

The mechanism and the scheme of the world was apparent to him, and its
working interested him no longer; he did not long disguise the
profound scorn that makes of a man of extraordinary powers a sphinx
who knows everything and says nothing, and sees all things with an
unmoved countenance. He felt not the slightest wish to communicate his
knowledge to other men. He was rich with all the wealth of the world,
with one effort he could make the circle of the globe, and riches and
power were meaningless for him. He felt the awful melancholy of
omnipotence, a melancholy which Satan and God relieve by the exercise
of infinite power in mysterious ways known to them alone. Castanier
had not, like his Master, the inextinguishable energy of hate and