landscape. And what a healing to your soul will the deeply religious
strain be of the heaven-sent Healer who will stay this cruel plague!
How skilfully is everything wrought up to end in that glorious
invocation of Moses to God.

"By a learned elaboration, which Capraja could explain to you, this
appeal to heaven is accompanied by brass instruments only; it is that
which gives it such a solemn, religious cast. And not merely is the
artifice fine in its place; note how fertile in resource is genius.
Rossini has derived fresh beauty from the difficulty he himself
created. He has the strings in reserve to express daylight when it
succeeds to the darkness, and thus produces one of the greatest
effects ever achieved in music.

"Till this inimitable genius showed the way never was such a result
obtained with mere _recitative_. We have not, so far, had an air or a
duet. The poet has relied on the strength of the idea, on the
vividness of his imagery, and the realism of the declamatory passages.
This scene of despair, this darkness that may be felt, these cries of
anguish,--the whole musical picture is as fine as your great Poussin's
_Deluge_."

Moses waved his staff, and it was light.

"Here, monsieur, does not the music vie with the sun, whose splendor
it has borrowed, with nature, whose phenomena it expresses in every
detail?" the Duchess went on, in an undertone. "Art here reaches its
climax; no musician can get beyond this. Do not you hear Egypt waking
up after its long torpor? Joy comes in with the day. In what
composition, ancient or modern, will you find so grand a passage? The