evelop the feelings to which music appeals. That sentiment hardly
exists as yet among you--a nation given up to philosophical theories, to
analysis and discussion, and always torn by civil disturbances.
Modern music demands perfect peace; it is the language of loving and
sentimental souls, inclined to lofty emotional aspiration.

"That language, a thousand times fuller than the language of words, is
to speech and ideas what the thought is to its utterance; it arouses
sensations and ideas in their primitive form, in that part of us where
sensations and ideas have their birth, but leaves them as they are in
each of us. That power over our inmost being is one of the grandest
facts in music. All other arts present to the mind a definite creation;
those of music are indefinite--infinite. We are compelled to accept the
ideas of the poet, the painter's picture, the sculptor's statue; but
music each one can interpret at the will of his sorrow or his gladness,
his hope or his despair. While other arts restrict our mind by fixing it
on a predestined object, music frees it to roam over all nature which
it alone has the power of expressing. You shall hear how I interpret
Rossini's _Mose_."

She leaned across to the Frenchman to speak to him, without being
overheard.

"Moses is the liberator of an enslaved race!" said she. "Remember that,
and you will see with what religious hope the whole house will listen
to the prayer of the rescued Hebrews, with what a thunder of applause it
will respond!"

As the leader raised his bow, Emilio flung himself into a back seat. The
Duchess pointed out the place he had left, for the physician to take
it. But the Frenchman was far more curious to know what had gone wrong
between the lovers than to enter the halls of music built up by the man
whom all Italy was applauding--for it was the day of Rossini's triumph
in his own country. He was watching the Duchess, and she was talking
with a feverish excitement. She reminded him of the Niobe he had admired
at Florence: the same dignity in woe, the same physical control; and yet
her soul shone though, in the warm flush of her cheeks; and her eyes,
where anxiety was disguised under a flash of pride, seemed to scorch the
tears away by their fire. Her suppressed grief seemed calmer when she
looked at Emilio, who never took his eyes off her; it was easy to see
that she was trying to mollify some fierce despair. The state of her
feelings gave a certain lofti