added to strengthen the general harmony.  The voices come in with sighs of delight and surprise.  At last the brass breaks out, the trumpets sound.  Light, the source of all harmony, inundates all nature; every musical resource is produced with a turbulence, a splendor, to compare with that of the Eastern sun.  Even the triangle, with its reiterated C, reminds us by its shrill accent and playful rhythm of the song of early birds.

“Thus the same key, freshly treated by the master’s hand, expresses the joy of all nature, while it soothes the grief it uttered before.

“There is the hall-mark of the great genius:  Unity.  It is the same but different.  In one and the same phrase we find a thousand various feelings of woe, the misery of a nation.  In one and the same chord we have all the various incidents of awakening nature, every expression of the nation’s joy.  These two tremendous passages are soldered into one by the prayer to an ever-living God, author of all things, of that woe and that gladness alike.  Now is not that introduction by itself a grand poem?”

“It is, indeed,” said the Frenchman.

“Next comes a quintette such as Rossini can give us.  If he was ever justified in giving vent to that flowery, voluptuous grace for which Italian music is blamed, is it not in this charming movement in which each person expresses joy?  The enslaved people are delivered, and yet a passion in peril is fain to moan.  Pharaoh’s son loves a Hebrew woman, and she must leave him.  What gives its ravishing charm to this quintette is the return to the homelier feelings of life after the grandiose picture of two stupendous and national emotions:—­general misery, general joy, expressed with the magic force stamped on them by divine vengeance and with the miraculous atmosphere of the Bible narrative.  Now, was not I right?” added Massimilla, as the noble sretto came to a close.

  “Voci di giubilo,
  D’ in’orno eccheggino,
  Di pace l’ Iride
  Per noi spunto.”

(Cries of joy sound about us.  The rainbow of peace dawns upon us.)

“How ingeniously the composer has constructed this passage!” she went on, after waiting for a reply.  “He begins with a solo on the horn, of divine sweetness, supported by arpeggios on the harps; for the first voices to be heard in this grand concerted piece are those of Moses and Aaron returning thanks to the true God.  Their strain, soft and solemn, reverts to the sublime ideas of the invocation, and mingles, nevertheless, with the joy of the heathen people.  This transition combines the heavenly and the earthly in a way which genius alone could invent, giving the andante of this quintette a glow of color that I can only compare to the light thrown by Titian on his Divine Persons.  Did you observe the exquisite interweaving of the voices? the clever entrances by which the composer has grouped them round the main idea given out by