ragments of this history, it seems to me
as if, in a solemn trance, I was led through the ruins of a city whose
only remains were tombs. From the sarcophagus and the urn I awake the
genius (The Greek Genius of Death.) of the extinguished Torch, and so
closely does its shape resemble Eros, that at moments I scarcely know
which of ye dictates to me,--O Love! O Death!

And it stirred in the virgin's heart,--this new, unfathomable, and
divine emotion! Was it only the ordinary affection of the pulse and the
fancy, of the eye to the Beautiful, of the ear to the Eloquent, or did
it not justify the notion she herself conceived of it,--that it was born
not of the senses, that it was less of earthly and human love than the
effect of some wondrous but not unholy charm? I said that, from that day
in which, no longer with awe and trembling, she surrendered herself to
the influence of Zanoni, she had sought to put her thoughts into words.
Let the thoughts attest their own nature.

THE SELF CONFESSIONAL.

"Is it the daylight that shines on me, or the memory of thy presence?
Wherever I look, the world seems full of thee; in every ray that
trembles on the water, that smiles upon the leaves, I behold but a
likeness to thine eyes. What is this change, that alters not only
myself, but the face of the whole universe?

....

"How instantaneously leaped into life the power with which thou swayest
my heart in its ebb and flow. Thousands were around me, and I saw but
thee. That was the night in which I first entered upon the world which
crowds life into a drama, and has no language but music. How strangely
and how suddenly with thee became that world evermore connected! What
the delusion of the stage was to others, thy presence was to me. My
life, too, seemed to centre into those short hours, and from thy lips
I heard a music, mute to all ears but mine. I sit in the room where my
father dwelt. Here, on that happy night, forgetting why THEY were so
happy, I shrunk into the shadow, and sought to guess what thou wert to
me; and my mother's low voice woke me, and I crept to my father's side,
close--close, from fear of my own thoughts.

"Ah! sweet and sad was the morrow to that night, when thy lips warned me
of the future. An orphan now,--what is there that lives for me to think
of, to dream upon, to revere, but thou!

"How tenderly thou hast rebuked me for the grievous wrong that my
thoughts did thee! Why should I have shuddered to feel the