Baldassare Galuppi, who made his world dance to the strains of its own
requiem, and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very climax of
the feast:--

"What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished,
sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions--'Must
we die?'
Those commiserating sevenths--"Life might last! We can but try!"

The musician himself has no such illusions; but his music is only a more
bitter echo:--

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned:
The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."

And so the poet, in the self-consciousness of his immense vitality,
sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty _débris_ of the past, with
no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of
old time or to Villon's awestruck contemplation of the mysterious
evanishment of storied beauty, than the half-contemptuous echo--

"'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."

In the other music-poem of the Italian time it is not difficult to
detect a kindred mood beneath the half-disguise of rollicking rhymes and
whimsical comparisons. Once more Browning seems preoccupied with that in
music which lends expression to a soulless animation, a futile and