“As she spoke, there was a light in her eye,--a glow on her brow,--an expansive and irradiated sublimity around her figure,--that made it appear like the rare and glorious vision of the personified union of passion and purity,--as if those eternal rivals had agreed to reconcile their claims, to meet on the confines of their respective dominions, and had selected the form of Isidora as the temple in which their league might be hallowed, and their union consummated--and never were the opposite divinities so deliciously lodged. They forgot their ancient feuds, and agreed to dwell there for ever. “There was a grandeur, too, about her slender form, that seemed to announce that pride of purity,--that confidence in external weakness, and internal energy,--that conquest without armour,--that victory over the victor, which makes the latter blush at his triumph, and compels him to bow to the standard of the besieged fortress at the moment of its surrender. She stood like a woman devoted, but not humiliated by her devotion--uniting tenderness with magnanimity--willing to sacrifice every thing to her lover, but that which must lessen the value of the sacrifice in his eyes--willing to be the victim, but feeling worthy to be the priestess. “Melmoth gazed on her as she stood. One generous, one human feeling, throbbed in his veins, and thrilled in his heart. He saw her in her beauty,--her devotedness,--her pure and perfect innocence,--her sole feeling for one who could not, by the fearful power of his unnatural existence, feel for mortal being. He turned aside, and did not weep; or if he did, wiped away his tears, as a fiend might do, with his burning talons, when he sees a new victim arrive for torture; and, _repenting of his repentance_, rends away _the blot_ of compunction, and arms himself for his task of renewed infliction. “Well, then, Isidora, you will give me no proof of your love? Is that what I must understand?”--“Demand,” answered the innocent and high-souled Isidora, “any proof that woman ought to give--more is not in human power--less would render the proof of no value!”