least, ‘laughter is madness.’”--“I do not understand you,” said Isidora, listening to him with that sinking of the heart which is produced by a combined and painful feeling of ignorance and terror. “Not understand me?” repeated Melmoth, with that sarcastic frigidity of countenance which frightfully contrasted the burning intelligence of his eyes, that seemed like the fires of a volcano bursting out amid masses of snow heaped up to its very edge; “not understand me!--are you not, then, fond of music?”--“I am.”--“Of dancing, too, my graceful, beautiful love?”--“I _was_.”--“What is the meaning of the different emphasis you give to those answers?”--“I love music--I must love it for ever--it is the language of recollection. A single strain of it wafts me back to the dreamy blessedness, the enchanted existence, of my own--own isle. Of dancing I cannot say so much. I have _learnt_ dancing--but I _felt_ music. I shall never forget the hour when I heard it for the first time, and imagined it was the language which Christians spoke to each other. I have heard them speak a different language since.”--“Doubtless their language is not always melody, particularly when they address each other on controverted points in religion. Indeed, I can conceive nothing less a-kin to harmony than the debate of a Dominican and Franciscan on the respective efficacy of the cowl of the order, to ascertain the salvation of him who happens to die in it. But have you no other reason for _being_ fond of music, and for only _having been_ fond of dancing? Nay, let me have ‘your most exquisite reason.’” (22) Alluding possibly to “Romeo and Juliet.” “It seemed as if this unhappy being was impelled by his ineffable destiny to deride the misery he inflicted, in proportion to its bitterness. His sarcastic levity bore a direct and fearful proportion to his despair. Perhaps this is also the case in circumstances and characters less atrocious. A mirth which is not gaiety is often the mask which hides the convulsed and distorted features of agony--and laughter, which never yet was the expression of rapture, has often been the only intelligible language of madness and misery. Extacy only smiles,--despair laughs. It seemed, too, as if no keenness of ironical insult, no menace of portentous darkness, had power to revolt the feelings, or alarm the apprehensions, of the devoted being to whom they were addressed. Her “most exquisite reasons,” demanded in a tone of ruthless irony, were given in one whose exquisite and tender melody seemed still to retain the modulation on which its first sounds had been formed,--that of the song of birds, mingled with the murmur of waters.