izes, it is true, the
senses, but gives them the character of the soul.

She was peculiarly formed, then, to command and fascinate the less
ordinary and the bolder natures of men; to love her was to unite two
passions, that of love and of ambition--you aspired when you adored her.
It was no wonder that she had completely chained and subdued the
mysterious but burning soul of the Egyptian, a man in whom dwelt the
fiercest passions. Her beauty and her soul alike enthralled him.

Set apart himself from the common world, he loved that daringness of
character which also made itself, among common things, aloof and alone.
He did not, or he would not see, that that very isolation put her yet
more from him than from the vulgar. Far as the poles--far as the night
from day, his solitude was divided from hers. He was solitary from his
dark and solemn vices--she from her beautiful fancies and her purity of
virtue.

If it was not strange that Ione thus enthralled the Egyptian, far less
strange was it that she had captured, as suddenly as irrevocably, the
bright and sunny heart of the Athenian. The gladness of a temperament
which seemed woven from the beams of light had led Glaucus into
pleasure. He obeyed no more vicious dictates when he wandered into the
dissipations of his time, than the exhilarating voices of youth and
health. He threw the brightness of his nature over every abyss and
cavern through which he strayed. His imagination dazzled him, but his
heart never was corrupted. Of far more penetration than his companions
deemed, he saw that they sought to prey upon his riches and his youth:
but he despised wealth save as the means of enjoyment, and youth was the
great sympathy that united him to them. He felt, it is true, the
impulse of nobler thoughts and higher aims than in pleasure could be
indulged: but the world was one vast prison, to which the Sovereign of
Rome was the Imperial gaoler; and the very virtues, which in the free
days of Athens would have made him ambitious, in the slavery of earth
made him inactive and supine. For in that unnatural and bloated
civilization, all that was noble in emulation was forbidden. Ambition in
the regions of a despotic and luxurious court was but the contest of
flattery and craft. Avarice had become the sole ambition--men desired
praetorships and provinces only as the license to pillage, and
government was but the excuse of rapine. It is in small states that
glory is most