“_Vedrai Carino_ is, like so many pieces of our opera, super-dramatic music. When we hear it, we forget the text, we forget the person. There is no longer any Zerlina or Masetto. Something infinite, absolute, and verily divine announces itself to the soul. Is it perhaps nothing but love, represented under one of the countless modifications by which it is distinguished in each individual, according to the laws of his nature, and the peculiar vicissitudes of his fortune? No; the soul feels rather a direct effluence of the principle itself, from which all youth, all love, all joy, and every vital reproduction flows. The genius of the Spring’s metamorphoses, he namely, whom the old theosophists called Eros, who disembroiled chaos, who fructified germs and married hearts; this genius speaks to us in this music, as he has so often spoken in the murmurings of the brook that has escaped its icy prison, in the rustling of the young leaves, in the melodious songs of the nightingale, in the balmy odors which pervade the eloquent and inspiring stillness of a May night. Mozart had listened to and firmly held this ground-accord of this universal harmony; he arranged it for a soprano voice with orchestral accompaniment, and made of it the nuptial air of a young bride. Zerlina sings, surrounded by the shadows of the marriage night, while just about to cross the threshold, at which virginity pauses with prayer and trembling, expecting the confirmation of the holy title of wife. In this place the Aria becomes a genuine _scena_ of love, the source of life and of eternal rejuvenescence for all nature—of love, the spring-time of souls, and the most unstinted revelation of the all-goodness of the Creator. It is a marriage-song for all that loves, conceived in the same spirit with the ‘Ode to Joy’ by Schiller, allowing for the difference of tone and style between a Dithyrambic and an Eclogue. The theme, the image of the purest bliss, betrays none the less that inexplicable and seldom justified exaltation, which, in the fairest poetic hours of our existence, leads us to that unknown good whereof all other goods of earth are only shadows and foretastes. A rhythm without marked accent; a harmony without dissonances; a modulation which rests in the Tonic, and forgets itself, as if held fast there by a magic spell; a melody which cannot separate itself from its ineffaceable _motiv_; this tranquil rapture, this soft ecstasy, fill out the first half of the air. After the pause, hosts of nightingales begin to sing in chorus in the orchestra, while the voice, with exquisite monotony, murmurs, _Sentilo battere, toccami quà_. Then the same words are again uttered with the expression of passion; the heart of the young woman beats stronger and stronger; the sighs of the orchestra are redoubled, and the last vocal phrase, which bears the impress of chaste devotion, shows us the wife as she sinks softly upon the bosom of her husband. Mozart seems to have