The Duchess feared that she was seeing her Emilio for the last time.  As to the Prince:  in the presence of the Duchess, the sovereign divinity who lifted him to the skies, he had forgotten where he was, he no longer heard the voice of the woman who had initiated him into the mysteries of earthly pleasure, for deep dejection made his ears tingle with a chorus of plaintive voices, half-drowned in a rushing noise as of pouring rain.

Vendramin saw himself in an ancient Venetian costume, looking on at the ceremony of the Bucentaur.  The Frenchman, who plainly discerned that some strange and painful mystery stood between the Prince and the Duchess, was racking his brain with shrewd conjecture to discover what it could be.

The scene had changed.  In front of a fine picture, representing the Desert and the Red Sea, the Egyptians and Hebrews marched and countermarched without any effect on the feelings of the four persons in the Duchess’ box.  But when the first chords on the harps preluded the hymn of the delivered Israelites, the Prince and Vendramin rose and stood leaning against the opposite sides of the box, and the Duchess, resting her elbow on the velvet ledge, supported her head on her left hand.

The Frenchman, understanding from this little stir, how important this justly famous chorus was in the opinion of the house, listened with devout attention.

The audience, with one accord, shouted for its repetition.

“I feel as if I were celebrating the liberation of Italy,” thought a Milanese.

“Such music lifts up bowed heads, and revives hope in the most torpid,” said a man from the Romagna.

“In this scene,” said Massimilla, whose emotion was evident, “science is set aside.  Inspiration, alone, dictated this masterpiece; it rose from the composer’s soul like a cry of love!  As to the accompaniment, it consists of the harps; the orchestra appears only at the last repetition of that heavenly strain.  Rossini can never rise higher than in this prayer; he will do as good work, no doubt, but never better:  the sublime is always equal to itself; but this hymn is one of the things that will always be sublime.  The only match for such a conception might be found in the psalms of the great Marcello, a noble Venetian, who was to music what Giotto was to painting.  The majesty of the phrase, unfolding itself with episodes of inexhaustible melody, is comparable with the finest things ever invented by religious writers.

“How simple is the structure!  Moses opens the attack in G minor, ending in a cadenza in B flat which allows the chorus to come in, pianissimo at first, in B flat, returning by modulations to G minor.  This splendid treatment of the voices, recurring three times, ends in the last strophe with a stretto in G major of absolutely overpowering effect.  We feel as though this hymn of a nation released from slavery, as it mounts to heaven, were