IONE was one of those brilliant characters which, but once or twice, flash across our career. She united in the highest perfection the rarest of earthly gifts—Genius and Beauty. No one ever superior intellectual qualities without knowing them—the of and merit is pretty enough, but where merit is great, the veil of that modesty you admire never disguises its extent from its possessor. It is the proud consciousness of certain qualities that it cannot reveal to the everyday world, that gives to genius that shy, and reserved, and troubled air, which puzzles and flatters you when you encounter it.  
Ione, then, knew her genius; but, with that charming that belongs of right to women, she had the so few of a kindred genius in the less sex can claim—the faculty to bend and model her intellect to all whom it encountered. The sparkling fountain threw its waters alike upon the , the , and the flowers; it refreshed, it smiled, it dazzled everywhere. That pride, which is the necessary result of superiority, she wore easily—in her breast it concentred itself in independence. She pursued thus her own bright and path. She asked no matron to direct and guide her—she walked alone by the torch of her own unflickering purity. She obeyed no tyrannical and absolute custom. She moulded custom to her own will, but this so delicately and with so feminine a grace, so perfect an from error, that you could not say she custom but commanded it. The wealth of her graces was inexhaustible—she beautified the commonest action; a word, a look from her, seemed magic. Love her, and you entered into a new world, you passed from this and commonplace earth. You were in a land in which your eyes saw everything through an medium. In her presence you felt as if listening to music; you were steeped in that sentiment which has so little of earth in it, and which music so well inspires—that which refines and , which seizes, 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 when you adored her. It was no wonder that she had completely chained and the mysterious but burning soul of the Egyptian, a man in whom dwelt the fiercest passions. Her beauty and her soul alike him.
 
Set apart himself from the common world, he loved that daringness of character which also made itself, among common things, and alone. He did not, or he would not see, that that very put her yet more from him than from the vulgar. Far as the poles—far as the night from day, his was divided from hers. He was solitary from his dark and solemn vices—she from her beautiful fancies and her purity of .
 
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 which seemed woven from the beams of light had led Glaucus into pleasure. He obeyed no more vicious 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 . Of far more than his companions deemed, he saw that they sought to upon his riches and his youth: but he despised wealth save as the means of , 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 , 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 and bloated civilization, all that was noble in was forbidden. Ambition in the regions of a despotic and court was but the contest of flattery and craft. had become the sole ambition—men desired praetorships and provinces only as the to , and government was but the excuse of rapine. It is in small states that glory is most active and pure—the more confined the limits of the circle, the more the . In small states, opinion is concentrated and strong—every eye reads your actions—your public are blended with your private ties—every spot in your narrow sphere is crowded with forms familiar since your childhood—the applause of your citizens is like the of your friends. But in large states, the city is but the court: the provinces—unknown to you, in customs, perhaps in language—have no claim on your patriotism, the of their inhabitants is not yours. In the court you desire favor instead of glory; at a distance from the court, public opinion has vanished from you, and self-interest has no counterpoise.
 
Italy, Italy, while I write, your skies are over me—your seas flow beneath my feet, listen not to the blind policy which would unite all your cities, mourning for their republics, into one empire; false, pernicious ! your only hope of regeneration is in division. Florence, Milan, Venice, Genoa, may be free once more, if each is free. But dream not of freedom for the whole while you enslave the parts; the heart must be the centre of the system, the blood must circulate freely everywhere; and in vast communities you but a bloated and feeble giant, whose brain is imbecile, whose limbs are dead, and who pays in disease and weakness the penalty of the natural proportions of health and .
 
Thus thrown back upon themselves, the more ardent qualities of Glaucus found no , save in that imagination which gave grace to pleasure, and poetry to thought. Ease was less despicable than with and slaves, and luxury could yet be refined though ambition could not be ennobled. But all that was best and brightest in his soul woke at once when he knew Ione. Here was an empire, of demigods to ; here was a glory, which the smoke of a society could not soil or dim. Love, in every time, in every state, can thus find space for its golden altars. And tell me if there ever, even in the ages most favorable to glory, could be a triumph more and elating than the conquest of one noble heart?
 
And whether it was that this sentiment inspired him, his ideas glowed more brightly, his soul seemed more awake and more visible, in Ione's presence. If natural to love her, it was natural that she should return the passion. Young, brilliant, , enamoured, and Athenian, he was to her as the incarnation of the poetry of her father's land. They were not like creatures of a world in which and sorrow are the elements; they were like things to be seen only in the holiday of nature, so glorious and so fresh were their youth, their beauty, and their love. They seemed out of place in the harsh and every-day earth; they belonged of right to the Saturnian age, and the dreams of demigod and nymph. It was as if the poetry of life gathered and fed itself in them, and in their hearts were concentrated the last rays of the sun of Delos and of Greece.
 
But if Ione was independent in her choice of life, so was her modest pride proportionably and easily alarmed. The falsehood of the Egyptian was invented by a deep knowledge of her nature. The story of coarseness, of indelicacy, in Glaucus, stung her to the quick. She felt it a reproach upon her character and her career, a punishment above all to her love; she felt, for the first time, how suddenly she had yielded to that love; she blushed with shame at a weakness, the extent of which she was startled to perceive: she imagined it was that weakness which had the contempt of Glaucus; she endured the bitterest curse of noble natures—humiliation! Yet her love, perhaps, was no less alarmed than her pride. If one moment she murmured reproaches upon Glaucus—if one moment she , she almost hated him—at the next she burst into tears, her heart yielded to its softness, and she said in the bitterness of , 'He despises me—he does not love me.'
 
From the hour the Egyptian had left her she had to her most , she had shut out her handmaids, she had denied herself to the crowds that her door. Glaucus was excluded with the rest; he wondered, but he guessed not why! He never attributed to his Ione—his queen—his goddess—that woman—like caprice of which the love-poets of Italy so unceasingly complain. He imagined her, in the of her candour, above all the arts that torture. He was troubled, but his hopes were not dimmed, for he knew already that he loved and was beloved; what more could he desire as an against fear?
 
At deepest night, then, when the streets were hushed, and the high moon only his devotions, he stole to that temple of his heart—her home; and wooed her after the beautiful fashion of his country. He covered her threshold with the richest garlands, in which every flower was a volume of sweet passion; and he charmed the long summer night with the sound of the Lydian : and verses, which the inspiration of the moment sufficed to weave.
 
But the window above opened not; no smile made yet more holy the shining air of night. All was still and dark. He knew not if his verse was welcome and his suit was heard.
 
Yet Ione slept not, nor to hear. Those soft strains to her chamber; they , they subdued her. While she listened, she believed nothing against her lover; but when they were stilled at last, and his step departed, the spell ceased; and, in the bitterness of her soul, she almost conceived in that delicate flattery a new .
 
I said she was denied to all; but there was one exception, there was one person who would not be denied, assuming over her actions and her house something like the authority of a parent; Arbaces, for himself, claimed an exemption from all the ceremonies observed by others. He entered the threshold with the license of one who feels that he is privileged and at home. He made his way to her solitude and with that sort of quiet and unapologetic air which seemed to consider the right as a thing of course. With all the independence of Ione's character, his heart had enabled him to obtain a secret and powerful control over her mind. She could not shake it off; sometimes she desired to do so; but she never struggled against it. She was fascinated by his serpent eye. He arrested, he commanded her, by the magic of a mind long accustomed to and to . of his real character or his hidden love, she felt for him the which genius feels for wisdom, and virtue for sanctity. She regarded him as one of those of old, who to the mysteries of knowledge by an exemption from the passions of their kind. She scarcely considered him as a being, like herself, of the earth, but as an at once dark and sacred. She did not love him, but she feared. His presence was unwelcome to her; it dimmed her spirit even in its brightest mood; he seemed, with his chilling and lofty aspect, like some which casts a shadow over the sun. But she never thought of forbidding his visits. She was passive under the influence which created in her breast, not the , but something of the stillness of terror.
 
Arbaces himself now resolved to exert all his arts to possess himself of that treasure he so burningly . He was cheered and elated by his conquests over her brother. From the hour in which Apaecides fell beneath the sorcery of that fete which we have described, he felt his empire over the young priest and insured. He knew that there is no victim so subdued as a young and man for the first time delivered to the of the senses.
 
When Apaecides recovered, with the morning light, from the profound sleep which succeeded to the of wonder and of pleasure, he was, it is true, ashamed—terrified—appalled. His of austerity and echoed in his ear; his thirst after holiness—had it been at so unhallowed a stream? But Arbaces knew well the means b............