"Does it not seem to you, Effrena, that these surroundings express the true soul of Venice, and that the other picture, which you presented to the multitude, is only your own fancy?" said La Foscarina, nodding her head slightly in time with the rhythm of the sweet song that spread through the Grand Canal and was reechoed from afar by singers in other gondolas.
"No," Stelio replied, "this does not at all represent the true soul of Venice. In each one of us, fluttering like a butterfly over the surface of our deeper nature, is a lighter soul, an animula, a little playful sprite that often dominates us for the moment, and leads us toward simple and mediocre pleasures, toward puerile pastimes and frivolous music. This animula vagula exists even in the gravest and most violent natures, like the clown attached to the person of Othello; and sometimes it misleads our better judgment. That which you hear now, in the songs and the melodies of the guitars, is the animula, or lighter spirit, of Venice; but her real soul is discovered only in silence, and most terribly, be assured, in full summer, at noonday, like the soul of the great god Pan. Out in the harbor of San Marco, I thought that you felt its mystic vibration during those moments of the great conflagration. You are forgetting Giorgione for Rosalba!"
Around the large gondola beneath the balcony had gathered other gondolas bearing languid women who leaned out to listen to the music in attitudes of graceful abandon, as if in fancy they felt themselves sinking into invisible arms. And around this romantic group the reflections of the lanterns in the water quivered like a flowering of rare and luminous water-lilies.
Se lassarè passar
La bela e fresca età,
Un zorno i ve dirà
Vechia maura,
E bramarè, ma invan,
Quel che ghavevi in man
Co avè lassà scampar