entire
social epoch--the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in
Venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite
the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile
"simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature,
since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness
is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted,
brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid its folly.

"Well, and it was graceful of them--they'd break talk off and
afford
--She, to bite her mask's black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord."

The music trickled then through the room, as it trickles now for the
listening poet: with its minor cadences, the "lesser thirds so
plaintive," the "diminished sixths," the suspensions, the solutions:
"Must we die?"--

"Those commiserating sevenths--'Life might last! we can but try!'"

The question of questions, even for "ladies and gentlemen"! And then
come the other questions: "Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must
be answered to."

"So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
'Brave Galuppi, that was music! Good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play.'
Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by
one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well
undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun."

. . . The "cold music" has seemed to the modern listener to say that
_he_, learned and wise, shall not pass away like these:

". . . You know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction--you'll not die, it cannot be!
As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the
crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to
stop?" . . .

Yet while it seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. What,
"creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since
he is neither deaf nor blind:

"But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy
mind! . . .
'Dust