The moon shone on the barques along
the Riva de' Schiavoni. The waters of Venice, where there is no tide,
looked as if they were alive, dancing with a myriad spangles. Never
had a singer a more splendid stage.
Genovese, with an emphatic flourish, seemed to call Heaven and Earth
to witness; and then, with no accompaniment but the lapping waves, he
sang _Ombra adorata_, Crescentini's great air. The song, rising up
between the statues of San Teodoro and San Giorgio, in the heart of
sleeping Venice lighted by the moon, the words, in such strange
harmony with the scene, and the melancholy passion of the singer, held
the Italians and the Frenchman spellbound.
At the very first notes, Vendramin's face was wet with tears. Capraja
stood as motionless as one of the statues in the ducal palace. Cataneo
seemed moved to some feeling. The Frenchman, taken by surprise, was
meditative, like a man of science in the presence of a phenomenon that
upsets all his fundamental axioms. These four minds, all so different,
whose hopes were so small, who believed in nothing for themselves or
after themselves, who regarded their own existence as that of a
transient and a fortuitous being,--like the little life of a plant or
a beetle,--had a glimpse of Heaven.
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