The whispered reply was no denying one, and he seemed to have attained all of happiness the world can offer. Months flew by--months in which life seemed born, like Venus, "of a rosy sea and a drop from heaven;" months when each to-morrow hung an "arch of promise," a ladder of sunlight, each round of which seemed made to lead the feet through Ivan gardens--up--up towards the sky! The glorious sun, warming like a lover's glance the beautiful bosom of the "Doge's bride"--the swelling "Adriatic"--the churches, the palaces, the prisons, whose gloom was hallowed by romantic memories, the legends attached to the palatial home of his own proud sires--these were subjects upon which, all the livelong day, he could expatiate, and she delightedly listen; and when night stole like a dream through the soft atmosphere, the stars, with their Chaldaic interpretations, furnished a new page from whence he could cull prophecies of their fate! Then would he weave old superstitions with the fancies of the poet and the lover, till he grew amazed at his own strange eloquence! She, too, on her part, had an exhaustless theme in telling how, by degrees, _his_ soul had, as it were, become a part of hers; how every emotion in his own mind, by an imperceptible and view-less magnetism, awakened hers to action. The simplest speech had a charm for him; there was music in her voice; her thoughts were dimless mirrors reflecting the spirituality of her soul; to use his own language, "each word was the spray of her heart, which mirrored in its sparkling globule all the beauty and none of the defects of the world around it!" The days glided by upon the swift pinions lent by unclouded happiness. They lived in an atmosphere where all was of the past, save their love and their hopes; the multitude of traffickers and idlers that crossed their daily path were as unheeded shadows; they mingled only with beings of other times. Their friends--for the friends of the scholar became those of the maiden--were Homer and Virgil, Tasso and Marino, the graceful Catullus, and the rough, but noble-tongued Lucretius! They strolled in imagination through Ilion's Scæn gate, along the luxuriant banks of her winding rivers, and lay down to repose beneath her wild and broad-leaved fig-tree. And then, when they had gathered around them the heroes and the poets of past and buried ages, unlike Alaric, they would weigh the myrtle crown against the laurel wreath, and see glory kick the beam!