“At these words, Melmoth advanced and gazed on her more closely. Any thing of intense and terrible resolution,--of feeling or action in extremity,--made harmony with the powerful but disordered chords of his soul. He required her to repeat the words--she did so, with quivering lip, but unfaultering voice. He advanced still nearer to gaze on her as she spoke. It was a beautiful and fearful sight to see her as she stood;--her marble face--her moveless features--her eyes in which burned the fixed and livid light of despair, like a lamp in a sepulchral vault--the lips that half opened, and remaining unclosed, appeared as if the speaker was unconscious of the words that had escaped them, or rather, as if they had burst forth by involuntary and incontroulable impulse;--so she stood, like a statue, at her casement, the moonlight giving her white drapery the appearance of stone, and her wrought-up and determined mind lending the same rigidity to her expression. Melmoth himself felt confounded--appalled he could not feel. He retreated, and then returning, demanded, “Is this your resolution, Isidora?--and have you indeed resolution to”---- “To die!” answered Isidora, with the same unaltered accent,--the same calm expression,--and seeming, as she spake, capable of all she expressed; and this union, in the same slight and tender form, of those eternal competitors, energy and fragility, beauty and death, made every human pulse in Melmoth’s frame beat with a throbbing unknown before. “Can you, then,” he said, with averted head, and in a tone that seemed ashamed of its own softness--“Can you, then, die for him you will not live for?”--“I have said I will die sooner than be the bride of Montilla,” answered Isidora. “Of death I know nothing, nor do I know much of life--but I would rather perish, than be the perjured wife of the man I cannot love.”--“And why can you not love him?” said Melmoth, toying with the heart he held in his hand, like a mischievous boy with a bird, around whose leg he has fastened a string.--“Because I can love but one. You were the first human being I ever saw who could teach me language, and who taught me feeling. Your image is for ever before me, present or absent, sleeping or waking. I have seen fairer forms,--I have listened to softer voices,--I might have met gentler hearts,--but the first, the indelible image, is written on mine, and its characters will never be effaced till that heart is a clod of the valley. I loved you not for comeliness,--I loved you not for gay deportment, or fond language, or all that is said to be lovely in the eye of woman,--I loved you because you were my _first_,--the sole connecting link between the human world and my heart,--the being who brought me acquainted with that wondrous instrument that lay unknown and untouched within and me, whose chords, as long as they vibrate, will disdain to obey any touch but that of their first mover--because your