As she spoke she struck a chord or two on her lute, and played the first measures of an _andante maestoso_ by Dusseck. "That is not the thing," said Lelio, stifling the notes of the lute with Beppa's fan. "Play me rather one of those German waltzes in which Joy and Sorrow, in a voluptuous embrace, seem to turn slowly round and round, and to display in turn a pale tear-stained face and a radiant brow crowned with flowers." "Very good!" said Beppa. "Meanwhile Cupid plays the kit, and marks time falsely, exactly like a master of the ballet; Joy impatiently stamps her foot to incite the torpid musician who restrains her impetuosity; Sorrow, utterly exhausted, turns her moist eyes upon the pitiless fiddler to urge him to slacken that incessant whirling about, and the audience, uncertain whether to laugh or cry, concludes to go to sleep." And Beppa began the _ritornello_ of a sentimental waltz, playing the measures fast and slow alternately, making the expression of her charming face, now glistening with joy, now doleful beyond words, conform to that ironical mode of execution, and putting forth in that musical mockery all the energy of her artistic patriotism. "You are a narrow-minded creature!" said Lelio, passing his fingers over the strings, whose vibration died away in a shrill, ear-piercing wail. "No German organ!" cried the fair Venetian, laughing heartily and abandoning the instrument to him. "The artist's fatherland," said Lelio, "is the whole world, the great _Bohemia_, as we say. _Per Dio_! make war if you please on Austrian despotism, but let us respect the German waltz! Weber's waltzes, O my friends! Beethoven's waltzes and Schubert's! Oh! listen, listen to this poem, this drama, this scene of despair, of passion and delirious joy!" As he spoke, the artist touched the chords of the lute, and began to sing with all the force of his voice and soul Beethoven's sublime _Desire_; then, abruptly breaking off and throwing the still vibrating instrument on the grass, he said: "No song ever stirred my heart like that one. We may as well confess that our Italian music appeals only to the senses or to the over-heated imagination; that music speaks to the heart, to the most profound and most exquisite sentiments. I was once like you, Beppa. I resisted the power of German genius; for a long time I closed my bodily ears and the ears of my intelligence to these Northern melodies, which I neither could nor would understand. But the time has come when divine inspiration is no longer called upon to halt on the frontiers of states by reason of the color of its uniform or the pattern of its standards. There are in the air I know not what angels or sylphs, invisible messengers of progress, who bring us melody and poetic thoughts from all points of the compass. Let us not bury ourselves under our own ruins; but let our genius spread its wings and open its arms to espouse all the contemporaneous geniuses beyond the Alps."