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The story itself is almost too repulsive for stage representation; but in beauty, freshness, originality, and dramatic expression the music of "Rigoletto" is Verdi's best; and in all this music the quartet is the masterpiece. "La Traviata," an opera in three acts, words by Piave, is founded upon Dumas's "Dame aux Camelias," familiar to the English stage as "Camille."
It keeps twisting round and round, like a stone in the air;... but ... you have all the freshness and life of a vast streaming river and all the tranquillity of a mere pond.... One day, a man who wished to go down the river on our raft swam to us on a goatskin.... As a Thames wherry to a Thames steamer, so is a goatskin to a raft.... It has no prow nor stern.... If driven ashore it may burst many of the skins, some of which indeed from time to time need to be blown and tied afresh.... The oars are enormous, as in English barges.
He was a little less sure of this when he saw Agatha, who sat near an open window, in a scantily furnished match-boarded room. She had not slept at all. Her eyes were heavy, but there was a look of resolution in them which seemed out of place just then, and it struck him that she had lost the freshness which had been her distinguishing charm in England.
There was no wind now, but a wonderful exhilarating freshness crept into the cooling air, and the stillness was broken only by the clamor of startled wildfowl which Agatha could see paddling in clusters about the gleaming slough. "Those are ducks wild ones?" she asked. "Yes," answered Wyllard; "ducks of various kinds. Most of them the same as your English ones." "Do you shoot them?"
"Monsieur," she said to her husband, "I am the only daughter of a wealthy man, who, when he gave me to a magistrate older than himself, did not intend to sacrifice me. You have been young, no doubt, and you, therefore, ought to know how revolting to youth, all freshness and perfume, are the cuddlings and caresses of decrepitude.
Her face had lost its fine oval and youthful freshness, but who of any feeling or intelligence would not have far preferred the worn countenance, expressing in a thousand sensitive shades and emotions the story of her life and love? And if every other beauty had failed, Angelica's eyes would have atoned for the loss.
No matter how limited the conceptions in which the spiritual richness first took form, those conceptions can be understood by the students who look back through the ages, while the spiritual value itself shines out with perennial freshness.
We were not yet in sight of Drake Hill, but the morning smoke from the slave cabins had begun to thrust itself athwart the honeyed sweetness of blossoms, and the salt freshness of the breath of the tidal river, as the homely ways of life will ever do athwart the beauty and inspiration of it, maybe to the making of its true harmony, when of a sudden we both stopped and listened.
It was well adapted to its purpose as a refuge from the heat of the summer day, for the walls were lined with cool, colored earthenware tiles, the floor was a brightly-tinted mosaic of patterns on a ground of gold glass, and in the circular central ornament of this artistic pavement stood the real source of freshness: a basin, two man's length across, of brown porphyry flecked with white, from which a fountain leaped, filling the surrounding air with misty spray.
Clean and faultless in his appearance, he had the rare gift of being able to get up at two in the afternoon with much of the dewy freshness and all of the moral superiority of an early riser. "You ought to have been here just now, Jack," said the editor. "Not a row, old man, eh?" inquired Jack, with a faint accession of interest. "No," said the editor, smiling.
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