Visions indistinct and beautiful, such as those she had known in her earlier days, but more constant and impressive, began to haunt her night and day when Zanoni was absent, to fade in his presence, and seem less fair than THAT.
Zanoni questioned her eagerly and minutely of these visitations, but seemed dissatisfied, and at times perplexed, by her answers.
"Tell me not," he said, one day, "of those unconnected images, those evolutions of starry shapes in a choral dance, or those delicious melodies that seem to thee of the music and the language of the distant spheres.

Has no ONE shape been to thee more distinct and more beautiful than the rest,--no voice uttering, or seeming to utter, thine own tongue, and whispering to thee of strange secrets and solemn knowledge ?" "No; all is confused in these dreams, whether of day or night; and when at the sound of thy footsteps I recover, my memory retains nothing but a vague impression of happiness.

How different--how cold--to the rapture of hanging on thy smile, and listening to thy voice, when it says, 'I love thee!'" "Yet, how is it that visions less fair than these once seemed to thee so alluring?
How is it that they then stirred thy fancies and filled thy heart?
Once thou didst desire a fairy-land, and now thou seemest so contented with common life." "Have I not explained it to thee before?
Is it common life, then, to love, and to live with the one we love?
My true fairy-land is won! Speak to me of no other." And so night surprised them by the lonely beach; and Zanoni, allured from his sublimer projects, and bending over that tender face, forgot that, in the Harmonious Infinite which spread around, there were other worlds than that one human heart..