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From the depths there came the sweet plaintive cry of a solitary bird who felt the coming of winter. Through the mist came the clear tinkling of the goat-bells, far away, so faint they could hardly hear it, so faint it was as though it came up from their inmost hearts.... They returned to Paris. They were both sad. Antoinette was no better.
He looked at those around him with a dreary indistinctness as from a distance, almost as if he had begun his long journey and was looking back from afar. And so the afternoon wore on to the short southern twilight, and the goat-bells came tinkling up from the valley for nature must have her way though men may die, and milking-time rules through all the changes.
At last, unable to hold themselves back longer, they broke into a run and came dashing into the yard with all the goat-bells jingling, Bello barking, and their own voices raised in a joyful shout: "Mother, Mother, where are you? We're home!" But to their surprise and great disappointment, there was no answer. The house was as still as if it were asleep.
In the distance were some shepherds' tents, and musical goat-bells tinkled along the edges of the woods. From the crest of a lofty ridge beyond this plain, we looked back over the wild solitudes wherein we had been travelling for two days long ranges of dark hills, fading away behind each other, with a perspective that hinted of the hidden gulfs between.
It is a picture of the opera itself, and contains a will-o'-the-wisp passage, a rustic song with accompaniment of goat-bells, a storm, and in the midst of the storm a chant to the Virgin, sung by the unseen chorus, and then a Pilgrimage march, the whole being in the nature of a retrospect.
They stand resting with both hands on their long staves, taking stock of the hut and the clearing, noting the sound of the goat-bells up on the hillside. "Goddag" say the Lapps. "And here's fine folk come to live." Lapps talk that way, with flattering words. "You don't know of any woman hereabouts to help?" says Isak, thinking always of but one thing. "Woman to help? No.
Through the trees comes the nasal but not unmelodious singing of an unseen charcoal-burner, or the plaintive note of the little goat-herd’s rustic pipe, accompanied by the musical jingling of his goat-bells;—for a moment we try to fancy ourselves in the pastoral Italy of Theocritus, where nymphs and shepherds, peasants and dryads, lived together on terms of amity in the woods.
Sometimes, as I leaned over the wall, I heard a shepherd-boy below in the ravine play on his pipe, or I heard the goat-bells ringing under the olives.
From the road on the hillside above the valley they would watch the white clouds reflected in the still lake, and the boats moving like insects on the surface of a pond: they would drink in the warm air and the music of the goat-bells, borne on the gusty wind, and the smell of the new-mown hay and the warm resin.
He passed down into the shadows of the trees, and gradually the airy rapture of his fluting and the tinkle of the goat-bells died away towards Marechiaro. Then Hermione saw tears rolling down over Lucrezia's brown cheeks. "He can't play it like Sebastiano, signora!" she said. The little tune had brought back all her sorrow. "Perhaps we shall soon hear Sebastiano play it again," said Hermione.
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