There was a great quantity of these lyrical pieces, however, and they gained a high popularity. For the most part they remain to-day in their original state, published with the curious notation and the archaic clefs of the time, unknown except to the savants. But certain anthologies have presented a few of the songs to the general public, and these have astonished hearers with their strange placid beauty. In some ways it is the best genius of the time which we find in these songs. In them the lyric impulse of the Italians came out in its purest form. The flashy ideals of the opera house were far removed from their tender strains. Their beauty is like the sunlight of an early spring morning, which illumines all things and exaggerates none. The words, though naïve and somewhat conventional in their continual playing with sentimental love, are not without their grace and beauty. And the music is remarkably varied. Among these songs we find lullabies, fanciful dialogues, dance songs, gentle laments, and delightful musical jokes. There is among them much less of pure convention than in the operas of the period, and at times there is a sensuous or emotional quality which seems to look forward many decades. To the singer these songs are especially valuable, since they represent at its purest the old Italian ideal of _bel canto_, free from either declamatory or coloratura influence. There can be no better school for the formation of purity of tone and fluency of phrasing than these early _canzoni_. Their general character, as contrasted with that of modern music, is strikingly illustrated in Strauss’s opera _Der Rosenkavalier_. In the first act of this work the court musician sings a few strophes of a song which is supposed to be of the period of the opera, and the composer has deftly imitated the music of the time. The song shows no touch of emotional agitation or harshness. It has no climaxes, scarcely any variations of tonal power. It is merely a lovely melody, sung purely and smoothly, somewhat aimless in melodic formation, in long fluent phrases and gentle melancholy cadences. To hear this _canzone_, contrasted with the agitated modern music which surrounds it in the opera, will demonstrate most eloquently the spiritual difference between the music of the seventeenth and that of the twentieth century.