“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! “Isidora now had arrived at the last stage of that painful pilgrimage through which she had been led by a stern and reluctant guide.