strawberries.  Here and there stands a chalet and at the window you may see the rosy face of a yellow-haired Swiss girl.  According to the moods of the sky the water in this tarn is blue and green, but as a sapphire is blue, as an emerald is green.  Well, nothing in the world can give such an idea of depth, peace, immensity, heavenly love, and eternal happiness—­to the most heedless traveler, the most hurried courier, the most commonplace tradesman—­as this liquid diamond into which the snow, gathering from the highest Alps, trickles through a natural channel hidden under the trees and eaten through the rock, escaping below through a gap without a sound.  The watery sheet overhanging the fall glides so gently that no ripple is to be seen on the surface which mirrors the chaise as you drive past.  The postboy smacks his whip; you turn past a crag; you cross a bridge:  suddenly there is a terrific uproar of cascades tumbling together one upon another.  The water, taking a mighty leap, is broken into a hundred falls, dashed to spray on the boulders; it sparkles in a myriad jets against a mass that has fallen from the heights that tower over the ravine exactly in the middle of the road that has been so irresistibly cut by the most formidable of active forces.

If you have formed a clear idea of this landscape, you will see in those sleeping waters the image of Emilio’s love for the Duchess, and in the cascades leaping like a flock of sheep, an idea of his passion shared with la Tinti.  In the midst of his torrent of love a rock stood up against which the torrent broke.  The Prince, like Sisyphus, was constantly under the stone.

“What on earth does the Duke do with a violin?” he wondered.  “Do I owe this symphony to him?”

He asked Clara Tinti.

“My dear child,”—­for she saw that Emilio was but a child,—­“dear child,” said she, “that man, who is a hundred and eighteen in the parish register of vice, and only forty-seven in the register of the Church, has but one single joy left to him in life.  Yes, everything is broken, everything in him is ruin or rags; his soul, intellect, heart, nerves,—­everything in man that can supply an impulse and remind him of heaven, either by desire or enjoyment, is bound up with music, or rather with one of the many effects produced by music, the perfect unison of two voices, or of a voice with the top string of his violin.  The old ape sits on my knee, takes his instrument,—­he plays fairly well,—­he produces the notes, and I try to imitate them.  Then, when the long-sought-for moment comes when it is impossible to distinguish in the body of sound which is the note on the violin and which proceeds from my throat, the old man falls into an ecstasy, his dim eyes light up with their last remaining fires, he is quite happy and will roll on the floor like a drunken man.