how delicious it is to such a being (and such was Isidora) to touch
her harp amid crowds, and watch, when the noisy and tasteless bravoes
have ceased, for the heart-drawn sigh of _the one_, to whom alone her
soul, not her fingers, have played,--and whose single sigh is heard, and
heard alone, amid the plaudits of thousands! Yet how delicious to her to
whisper to herself, “I heard his sigh, but he has heard the applause!”

“And when she glides through the dance, and in touching, with easy and
accustomed grace, the hands of many, she feels there is but one hand
whose touch she can recognize; and, waiting for its thrilling and
life-like vibration, moves on like a statue, cold and graceful, till the
Pygmalion-touch warms her into woman, and the marble melts into flesh
under the hands of the resistless moulder. And her movements betray, at
that moment, the unwonted and half-unconscious impulses of that fair
image to which love had given life, and who luxuriated in the vivid and
newly-tried enjoyment of that animation which the passion of her lover
had breathed into her frame. And when the splendid portfolio is
displayed, or the richly-wrought tapestry expanded by outstretched arms,
and cavaliers gaze, and ladies envy, and every eye is busy in
examination, and every tongue loud in praise, just in the inverted
proportion of the ability of the one to scrutinize with accuracy, and
the other to applaud with taste--then to throw round the secret silent
glance, that searches for that eye whose light alone, to her intoxicated
gaze, contains all judgment, all taste, all feeling--for that lip whose
very censure would be dearer than the applause of a world!--To hear,
with soft and submissive tranquillity, censure and remark, praise and
comment, but to turn for ever the appealing look to one who alone can
understand, and whose swiftly-answering glance can alone reward
it!--This--this had been Isidora’s hope. Even in the isle where he first
saw her in the infancy of her intellect, she had felt the consciousness
of superior powers, which were then her solace, not her pride. Her value
for herself rose with her devotion to him. Her passion became her pride;
and the enlarged resources of her mind, (for Christianity under its most
corrupt form enlarges every mind), made her at first believe, that to
behold her admired as she was for her loveliness, her talents, and her
wealth, would compel this proudest and most eccentric of beings to
prostrate himself before her, or at least to acknowledge the power of
those acquirements which she had so painfully been arrived at the
knowledge of, since her involuntary introduction into European society. “This had been her hope during the earlier period of his visits; but
innocent and flattering to its object as it was, she was disappointed. To Melmoth “nothing was new under the sun.” Talent was to him a burden. He knew more than man could tell him, or woman either. Accomplishments
were a bauble--the rattle teazed his ear, and he flung it away. Beauty
was a flower he looked on only to scorn, and touched only to wither. Wealth and distinction he appreciated as they deserved, but not with the
placid disdain of the philosopher, or the holy abstraction of the saint,
but with that “fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation,”
to which he believed their possessors irreversibly devoted, and to the
infliction of which he looked forward with perhaps a feeling like that
of those executioners who, at the command of Mithridates, poured the
melted ore of his golden chains down the throat of the Roman ambassador. “With such feelings, and others that cannot be told, Melmoth experienced
an indescribable relief from the eternal fire that was already kindled
within him, in the perfect and unsullied freshness of what may be called
the untrodden verdure of Immalee’s heart,--for she was Immalee still to
him. She was the Oasis of his desert--the fountain at which he drank,
and forgot his passage over the burning sands--and the _burning_ sands
to which his passage must conduct him. He sat under the shade of the
gourd, and forgot the worm was working at its root;--perhaps the undying
worm that gnawed, and coiled, and festered in his own heart, might have
made him forget the corrosions of that he himself had sown in hers. “Isidora, before the second week of their interview, had lowered her
pretensions. She had given up the hope to interest or to dazzle--that
hope which is twin-born with love in the purest female heart. She now
had concentrated all her hopes, and all her heart, no longer in the
ambition _to be_ beloved, but in the sole wish _to_ love. She no longer
alluded to the enlargement of her faculties, the acquisition of new
powers, and the expansion and cultivation of her taste. She ceased to
speak--she sought only to listen--then her wish subsided into that quiet
listening for his form alone, which seemed to transfer the office of
hearing into the eyes, or rather, to identify both. She saw him long
before he appeared,--and heard him though he did not speak. They have
been in each other’s presence for the short hours of a Spanish summer’s
night,--Isidora’s eyes alternately fixed on the sun-like moon, and on
her mysterious lover,--while he, without uttering a word, leaned against
the pillars of her balcony, or the trunk of the giant myrtle-tree, which
cast the shade he loved, even by night, over his portentous
expression,--and they never uttered a word to each other, till the
waving of Isidora’s hand, as the dawn appeared, was the tacit signal for
their parting. “This is the marked graduation of profound feeling. Language is no
longer necessary to those whose beating hearts converse audibly--whose
eyes, even by moonlight, are more intelligible to each other’s stolen
and shadowed glances, than the broad converse of face to face in the
brightest sunshine--to whom, in the exquisite inversion of earthly
feeling and habit, darkness is light, and silence eloquence. “At their last interviews, Isidora sometimes spoke,--but it was only to
remind her lover, in a soft and chastened tone, of a promise which it
seems he had at one time made of disclosing himself to her parents, and
demanding her at their hands. Something she murmured also of her
declining health--her exhausted spirits--her breaking heart--the long
delay--the hope deferred--the mysterious meeting; and while she spoke
she wept, but hid her tears from him. “It is thus, Oh God! we are doomed (and justly doomed when we fix our
hearts on any thing below thee) to feel those hearts repelled like the
dove who hovered over the shoreless ocean, and found not a spot where
her foot might rest,--not a green leaf to bring back in her beak. Oh
that the ark of mercy may open to such souls, and receive them from that
stormy world of deluge and of wrath, with which they are unable to
contend, and where they can find no resting-place!