She had never hitherto, like the more instructed Daughters of the North, accustomed herself to that delicious Confessional, the transfusion of thought to writing. Now, suddenly, her heart felt an impulse; a new-born instinct, that bade it commune with itself, bade it disentangle its web of golden fancies,--made her wish to look upon her inmost self as in a glass. Upsprung from the embrace of Love and Soul--the Eros and the Psyche--their beautiful offspring, Genius! She blushed, she sighed, she trembled as she wrote. And from the fresh world that she had built for herself, she was awakened to prepare for the glittering stage. How dull became the music, how dim the scene, so exquisite and so bright of old. Stage, thou art the Fairy Land to the vision of the worldly. Fancy, whose music is not heard by men, whose scenes shift not by mortal hand, as the stage to the present world, art thou to the future and the past! CHAPTER 3.III. In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes. Shakespeare. The next day, at noon, Zanoni visited Viola; and the next day and the next and again the next,--days that to her seemed like a special time set apart from the rest of life. And yet he never spoke to her in the language of flattery, and almost of adoration, to which she had been accustomed. Perhaps his very coldness, so gentle as it was, assisted to this mysterious charm. He talked to her much of her past life, and she was scarcely surprised (she now never thought of TERROR) to perceive how much of that past seemed known to him. He made her speak to him of her father; he made her recall some of the airs of Pisani’s wild music. And those airs seemed to charm and lull him into reverie. “As music was to the musician,” said he, “may science be to the wise. Your father looked abroad in the world; all was discord to the fine sympathies that he felt with the harmonies that daily and nightly float to the throne of Heaven. Life, with its noisy ambition and its mean passions, is so poor and base! Out of his soul he created the life and the world for which his soul was fitted. Viola, thou art the daughter of that life, and wilt be the denizen of that world.” In his earlier visits he did not speak of Glyndon. The day soon came on which he renewed the subject. And so trustful, obedient, and entire was the allegiance that Viola now owned to his dominion, that, unwelcome as that subject was, she restrained her heart, and listened to him in silence. At last he said, “Thou hast promised thou wilt obey my counsels, and if, Viola, I should ask thee, nay adjure, to accept this stranger’s hand, and share his fate, should he offer to thee such a lot,--wouldst thou refuse?” And then she pressed back the tears that gushed to her eyes; and with a strange pleasure in the midst of pain,--the pleasure of one who sacrifices heart itself to the one who commands that heart,--she answered falteringly, “If thou CANST ordain it, why--” “Speak on.”