the Duke? Did you understand?"

"Yes," replied Vendramin. "Capraja's great friend is a musician from
Cremona, lodging in the Capello palace, who has a theory that sounds
meet with an element in man, analogous to that which produces ideas.
According to him, man has within him keys acted on by sound, and
corresponding to his nerve-centres, where ideas and sensations take
their rise. Capraja, who regards the arts as an assemblage of means by
which he can harmonize, in himself, all external nature with another
mysterious nature that he calls the inner life, shares all ideas of
this instrument-maker, who at this moment is composing an opera.

"Conceive of a sublime creation, wherein the marvels of the visible
universe are reproduced with immeasurable grandeur, lightness,
swiftness, and extension; wherein sensation is infinite, and whither
certain privileged natures, possessed of divine powers, are able to
penetrate, and you will have some notion of the ecstatic joys of which
Cataneo and Capraja were speaking; both poets, each for himself alone.
Only, in matters of the intellect, as soon as a man can rise above the
sphere where plastic art is produced by a process of imitation, and
enter into that transcendental sphere of abstractions where everything
is understood as an elementary principle, and seen in the omnipotence
of results, that man is no longer intelligible to ordinary minds."

"You have thus explained my love for Massimilla," said Emilio. "There
is in me, my friend, a force which awakes under the fire of her look,
at her lightest touch, and wafts me to a world of light where effects
are produced of which I dare not speak. It has seemed to me often that
the delicate tissue of her skin has stamped flowers on mine as her
hand lies on my hand. Her words play on those inner keys in me, of