co and Vittoria gave the verses a life that
cannot belong to them now; yet, as they contain much of the vital spirit
of the revolt, they may assist you to some idea of the faith animating
its heads, and may serve to justify this history.

Rocco's music in the opera of Camilla had been sprung from a fresh
Italian well; neither the elegiac-melodious, nor the sensuous-lyrical,
nor the joyous buffo; it was severe as an old masterpiece, with veins
of buoyant liveliness threading it, and with sufficient distinctness of
melody to enrapture those who like to suck the sugarplums of sound.
He would indeed have favoured the public with more sweet things, but
Vittoria, for whom the opera was composed, and who had been at his
elbow, was young, and stern in her devotion to an ideal of classical
music that should elevate and never stoop to seduce or to flatter
thoughtless hearers. Her taste had directed as her voice had inspired
the opera. Her voice belonged to the order of the simply great voices,
and was a royal voice among them. Pure without attenuation, passionate
without contortion, when once heard it exacted absolute confidence.
On this night her theme and her impersonation were adventitious
introductions, but there were passages when her artistic pre-eminence
and the sovereign fulness and fire of her singing struck a note of
grateful remembered delight. This is what the great voice does for us.
It rarely astonishes our ears. It illumines our souls, as you see
the lightning make the unintelligible craving darkness leap into long
mountain ridges, and twisting vales, and spires of cities, and inner
recesses of light within light, rose-like, toward a central core of
violet heat.

At the rising of the curtain the knights of the plains, Rudolfo,
Romualdo, Arnoldo, and others, who were conspiring to overthrow Count
Orso at the time when Camillo's folly ruined all, assemble to deplore
Camilla's banishment, and show, bereft of her, their helplessness
and indecision. They utter contempt of Camillo, who is this day to be
Pontifically divorced from his wife to espouse the detested Michiella.
His taste is not admired.

They pass off. Camillo appears. He is, as he knows, little better than
a pensioner in Count Orso's household. He holds his lands on sufferance.
His faculties are paralyzed. He is on the first smooth shoulder-slope
of the cataract. He knows that not only was his jealousy of his wife
groundless, but it was forced by a spleen