“I love music, because when I hear it I think of you. I have ceased to love dancing, though I was at first intoxicated with it, because, when dancing, I have sometimes forgot you. When I listen to music, your image floats on every note,--I hear you in every sound. The most inarticulate murmurs that I produce on my guitar (for I am very ignorant) are like a spell of melody that raises a form indescribable--not you, but _my idea of you_. In your presence, though that seems necessary to my existence, I have never felt that exquisite delight that I have experienced in that of your image, when music has called it up from the recesses of my heart. Music seems to me like the voice of religion summoning to remember and worship the God of my heart. Dancing appears like a momentary apostasy, almost a profanation.”--“That, indeed, is a sweet and subtle reason,” answered Melmoth, “and one that, of course, has but one failure,--that of not being sufficiently flattering to the hearer. And so my image floats on the rich and tremulous waves of melody one moment, like a god of the overflowing billows of music, triumphing in their swells, and graceful even in their falls,--and the next moment appears, like the dancing demon of your operas, grinning at you between the brilliant movement of your fandangoes, and flinging the withering foam of his black and convulsed lips into the cup where you pledge at your banquetting. Well--dancing--music--let them go together! It seems that my image is equally mischievous in both--in one you are tortured by reminiscence, and in the other by remorse. Suppose that image is withdrawn from you for ever,--suppose that it were possible to break the tie that unites us, and whose vision has entered into the soul of both.”--“You may suppose it,” said Isidora, with maiden pride and tender grief blended in her voice; “and if you do, believe that I will try to suppose it too; the effort will not cost much,--nothing but--my life!” “As Melmoth beheld this blessed and beautiful being, once so refined amid nature, and now so natural amid refinement, still possessing all the soft luxuriance of her first angelic nature, amid the artificial atmosphere where her sweets were uninhaled, and her brilliant tints doomed to wither unappreciated,--where her pure and sublime devotedness of heart was doomed to beat like a wave against a rock,--exhaust its murmurs,--and expire;--As he felt this, and gazed on her, he cursed himself; and then, with the selfishness of hopeless misery, he felt that the curse might, by dividing it, be diminished.