Meanwhile, work was going on about the furnace. At the end of the blow pipes the molten glass swelled, twisted, became silvery as a little cloud, shone like the moon, cracked, divided into a thousand infinitesimal fragments, glittering and thin as the threads we see at daybreak stretching from tree to tree. The glass-blowers were making harmonious vases. The apprentices placed a small, pear-shaped mass of burning paste on the spot chosen by the master-workmen; and the pear lengthened, twisted, transformed itself into a handle, a rim, a spout, a foot, or a stem. The glowing heat slowly died out under the instruments, and the half-formed cup was again exposed to the heat, then drawn from it docile, ductile, sensitive to the lightest touches that ornamented and refined it, conforming it to the model handed down by their ancestors, or to the free invention of a new creator.
Extraordinarily light and agile were the human gestures that produced these elegant creatures of the fire, of breath and iron; they were like the movements of a silent dance. The figure of La Tanagra appeared to the Inspirer among the perpetual undulations of the flame, like a salamander. Donatella's voice seemed to sing to him the powerful melody.
—To-day, again, I myself have given you the thought of her for a companion—thought La Foscarina—I myself have called her up between us, and evoked her shadow when perhaps your thoughts were elsewhere; I have suddenly led her to you, as on that night of delirium.—
It was true, it was true! From the instant when the singer's name had been spoken on the water by Foscarina, she herself had unconsciously exalted the new image in the poet's mind, had nourished it with her jealousy and fear, had strengthened and increased it day by day, and had at last illumined it with certainty. More than once she had said to the young man, who perhaps had forgotten: "She awaits you!" More than once she had presented to his imagination that distant, mysterious figure of expectancy. As on that Dionysian night, when the conflagration of Venice had lighted up the two youthful faces with the same reflection, it was now her own passion that illumined them, and they glowed only because she herself had made them.—Certainly, he now possesses that image, and it possesses him. My anguish only augments his ardor. It is a joy to him to love her before my despairing eyes!—
"As soon as the vase is shaped, we put it in the furnace room to be tempered," replied one of the men to a query from Stelio. "If it were exposed to the air immediately it would crack in a thousand pieces."
They could see the radiant vases, still slaves of the fire, still under its empire, gathered in a receptacle joined to the furnace in which they had been fused.
"They have been there ten hours," said the workman, pointing to his graceful family. "Is this our great Foscarina?" he added in an undertone to Stelio. He had recognized her when she had lifted her veil, suffocating with the heat.
Revealing ingenuous emotion, the master workman took a step toward her and bowed respectfully.
"One evening, my lady, you made me tremble and weep like a child. Will you allow me, in memory of that evening, which I never shall forget, to offer you a little work from the hands of the poor Seguso?"
"A Seguso, are you?" said the poet, leaning toward the little man, to look at him closer; "are you of the great family of glass-blowers, one of the genuine race?"