music still
The player shall outlast!

The sun-touch'd cloud that mounts the sky,
That brightly glows to warm the eye,
Then fades we know not where,
Is image of the little breath
Of life--and then, the doom of Death
That you and I must share!

Helpless to make or mar our birth,
We blindly grope the ways of earth,
And live our paltry hour;
Sure, that when life has ceased to please,
To die at will, in Stoic ease,
Is yielded to our pow'r!

Who, timely wise, would meanly wait
The dull delay of tardy Fate,
When Life's delights are shorn?
No! When its outer gloss has flown,
Let's fling the tarnish'd bauble down
As lightly as 'twas worn.

'A health to Glyco! A deep draught to a singer from heaven come down
upon earth!' cried the guests, seizing their wine-cups, as the ode was
concluded, and draining them to the last drop. But their drunken
applause fell noiseless upon the ear to which it was addressed. The
boy's voice, as he sang the final stanza of the ode, had suddenly
changed to a shrill, almost an unearthly tone, then suddenly sank again
as he breathed forth the last few notes; and now as his dissolute
audience turned towards him with approving glances, they saw him
standing before them cold, rigid, and voiceless. The next instant his
fixed features were suddenly distorted, his whole frame collapsed as if
torn by an internal spasm--he fell back heavily to the floor. Those
around approached him with unsteady feet, and raised him in their arms.
His soul had burst the bonds of vice in which others had entangled it;
the voice of Death had whispered to the slave of the great despot,
Crime--'Be free!'

'We have heard the note of the swan singing its own funeral hymn!' said
the patrician Placidus, looking in maudlin pity from the corpse of the
boy to the face of Vetranio, which presented for the moment an
involuntary expression of grief and remorse.

'Our miracle of beauty and boy-god of melody has departed before us to
the Elysian fields!' muttered the hunchback Reburrus, in harsh,
sarcastic accents.

Then, during the short silence that ensued, the voices from the street,
joined on this occasion to a noise of approaching footsteps on the
pavement, became again distinctly audible in the banqueting-hall.
'News! news!' cried these fresh auxiliaries of the horde already
assembled before the palace. 'Keep together, you who still care f