But Italy, remember, my frigid Norseland has a heart of fire in her bosom beneath its overlying snows, before which yours dies like the white sick hearth-flame before the noonday sun. Passion, but not compassion, is here "cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." We lure our choristers with honeyed words and gentle ways: you lay your sweetest songsters on the gridiron. Our orchards ring with the full-throated happiness of a thousand birds: your pomegranate groves are silent, and your miserable cannibal kitchens would tell the reason why, if outraged spits could speak. Go away, therefore, from my window, Giuseppo; the air is growing damp and chilly, and I do not sleep in the shadows of broken temples. Yet I love music; not as you love it, my friend, with intelligence, discrimination, and delicacy, but in a dull, woodeny way, as the "gouty oaks" loved it, when they felt in their fibrous frames the stir of Amphion's lyre, and "floundered into hornpipes"; as the gray, stupid rocks loved it, when they came rolling heavily to his feet to listen; in a great, coarse, clumsy, ichthyosaurian way, as the rivers loved sad Orpheus's wailing tones, stopping in their mighty courses, and the thick-hided hippopotamus dragged himself up from the unheeded pause of the waves, dimly thrilled with a vague ecstasy. The confession is sad, yet only in such beastly fashion come sweetest voices to me,--not in the fulness of all their vibrations, but sounding dimly through many an earthly layer. Music I do not so much hear as feel. All the exquisite nerves that bear to your soul these tidings of heaven in me lie torpid or dead. No beatitude travels to my heart over that road. But as sometimes an invalid, unable through mortal sickness to swallow his needed nutriment, is yet kept alive many days by immersed in a bath of wine and milk, which somehow, through unwonted courses, penetrates to the sources of vitality,--so I, though the natural avenues of sweet sounds have been hermetically sealed, do yet receive the fine flow of the musical ether. I feel the flood of harmony pouring around me. An inward, palpable, measured tremulousness of the subtile secret essence of life attests the presence of some sweet disturbing cause, and, borne on unseen wings, I mount to loftier heights and diviner airs. So I was comforted for my waxed ears and Camilla's concert.