So, an octave struck the answer.5 Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
'Brave Galuppi! that was music; good alike at grave and gay!
1 can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!'
10
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.
11
But when I sit down to reason, think to take my stand nor swerve,
While I triumph o'er a secret wrung from nature's close reserve,
In you come with your cold music till I creep through every nerve.
12
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal?where a soul can be discerned.
3. The Rialto, a bridge over the Grand Canal. devices used by Galuppi to produce alternating 4. A keyboard instrument whose strings are struck moods in his music, conflict in each instance being by metal hammers. Its mechanism resembles that resolved into harmony. Thus the 'dominant' (the of a piano, but its sound is more like that of a harp-fifth note of the scale), after being persistently sichord. sounded, is answered by a resolving chord (lines 5. The terms in these lines refer to the technical 24-25).
.
126 4 / ROBERT BROWNING
r3 'Yours for instance: you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction?you'll not die, it cannot be!
14
'As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
15
'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want' the heart to scold. lack
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.
ca. 1847 1855
Love among the Ruins
1
Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep 5 Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop?
Was the site once of a city great and gay
(So they say),
Of our country's very capital, its prince
10 Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.
2
Now?the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see,
15 To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
