ionate violence, the torments she inflicted upon me at the
piano--all these I bore with patience. She alone had unsealed for me
the springs of true music. I began to study Italian, and try my hand at
a few canzonets. In what heavenly rapture was I plunged when Lauretta
sang my compositions, or even praised them. Often it seemed to me as if
it was not I who had thought out and set what she sang, but that the
thought first shone forth in her singing of it. With Teresina I could
not somehow get on familiar terms; she sang but seldom, and didn't seem
to make much account of all that I was doing, and sometimes I even
fancied that she was laughing at me behind my back. At length the time
came for them to leave the town. And now I felt for the first time how
dear Lauretta had become to me, and how impossible it would be for me
to separate from her. Often, when she was in a tender, playful mood,
she had caressed me, although always in a perfectly artless fashion;
nevertheless, my blood was excited, and it was nothing but the strange
coolness with which she was more usually wont to treat me that
restrained me from giving reins to my ardour and clasping her in my
arms in a delirium of passion. I possessed a tolerably good tenor
voice, which, however, I had never practised, but now I began to
cultivate it assiduously. I frequently sang with Lauretta one of those
tender Italian duets of which there exists such an endless number. We
were just singing one of these pieces, the hour of departure was close
at hand--'_Senza di te ben mio, vivere non poss' io_' ('Without thee,
my own, I cannot live!') Who could resist that? I threw myself at her
feet--I was in despair. She raised me up--'But, my friend, need we then
part?' I pricked up my ears with amazement. She proposed that I should
accompany her and Teresina to the capital, for if I intended to devote
myself wholly to music I must leave this wretched little town some time
or other. Picture to yourself one struggling in the dark depths of
boundless despair, who has given up all hopes of life, and who, in the
moment in which he expects to receive the blow that is to crush him for
ever, suddenly finds himself sitting in a glorious bright arbour of
roses, where hundreds of unseen but loving voices whisper, 'You are
still alive, dear,--still alive'--and you will know how I felt then.
Along with them to the capital! that had seized upon my heart as an
ineradicable resolution. But I won't tire