“Isidora!” he whispered in the softest tones he could assume, approaching the casement, at which his pale and beautiful victim stood; “Isidora! will you then be mine?”--“What shall I say?” said Isidora; “if love requires the answer, I have said enough; if only vanity, I have said too much.”--“Vanity! beautiful trifler, you know not what you say; the accusing angel himself might blot out that article from the catalogue of my sins. It is one of my prohibited and impossible offences; it is an earthly feeling, and therefore one which I can neither participate or enjoy. Certain it is that I feel some share of human pride at this moment.”--“Pride! at what? Since I have known you, I have felt no pride but that of supreme devotedness,--that self-annihilating pride which renders the victim prouder of its wreath, than the sacrificer of his office.”--“But I feel another pride,” answered Melmoth, and in a proud tone he spoke it,--“a pride, which, like that of the storm that visited the ancient cities, whose destruction you may have read of, while it blasts, withers, and encrusts paintings, gems, music, and festivity, grasping them in its talons of annihilation, exclaims, Perish to all the world, perhaps beyond the period of its existence, but live to me in darkness and in corruption! Preserve all the exquisite modulation of your forms! all the indestructible brilliancy of your colouring!--but preserve it for me alone!--me, the single, pulseless, eyeless, heartless embracer of an unfertile bride,--the brooder over the dark and unproductive nest of eternal sterility,--the mountain whose lava of internal fire has stifled, and indurated, and inclosed for ever, all that was the joy of earth, the felicity of life, and the hope of futurity!”