“You do not love?” he would say;--“you cannot love _me_ at least. Love, in your happy Christian country, must be the result of cultivated taste,--of harmonized habits,--of a felicitous congeniality of pursuits,--of thought, and hopes, and feelings, that, in the sublime language of the Jewish poet, (prophet I meant), ‘tell and certify to each other; and though they have neither speech or language, a voice is heard among them.’ You cannot love a being repulsive in his appearance,--eccentric in his habits,--wild and unsearchable in his feelings,--and inaccessible in the settled purpose of his fearful and fearless existence. No,” he added in a melancholy and decided tone of voice, “you cannot love me under the circumstances of your new existence. Once----but that is past.--You are now a baptized daughter of the Catholic church,--the member of a civilized community,--the child of a family that knows not the stranger. What, then, is there between me and thee, Isidora, or, as your Fra Jose would phrase it, (if he knows so much Greek), τι εμοι και σοι.”--“I loved you,” answered the Spanish maiden, speaking in the same pure, firm, and tender voice in which she had spoken when she first was the sole goddess of her fairy and flowery isle; “I loved you before I was a Christian. They have changed my creed--but they never can change my heart. I love you still--I will be yours for ever! On the shore of the desolate isle,--from the grated window of my Christian prison,--I utter the same sounds. What can woman, what can man, in all the boasted superiority of his character and feeling, (which I have learned only since I became a Christian, or an European), do more? You but insult me when you appear to doubt that feeling, which you may wish to have analysed, because you do not experience or cannot comprehend it. Tell me, then, _what it is to love?_ I defy all your eloquence, all your sophistry, to answer the question as truly as I can. If you would wish to know what is love, inquire not at the tongue of man, but at the heart of woman.”--“What is love?” said Melmoth; “is that the question?”--“You doubt that I love,” said Isidora--“tell me, then, what is love?”--“You have imposed on me a task,” said Melmoth smiling, but not in mirth, “so congenial to my feelings and habits of thought, that the execution will doubtless be inimitable. To love, beautiful Isidora, is to live in a world of the heart’s own creation--all whose forms and colours are as brilliant as they are deceptive and unreal. To those who love there is neither day or night, summer or winter, society or solitude. They have but two eras in their delicious but visionary existence,--and those are thus marked in the heart’s calendar--_presence_--_absence_. These are the substitutes for all the distinctions of nature and society. The world to them contains but one individual,--and that individual is to them the world as well as its single inmate. The atmosphere of his presence is the only