that he often neglected to infuse into his work the depth and passion of
which it was easily capable; that he placed too high a value on merely
brilliant effects _ad captandum vulgus_--there remains the fact that his
operas embody a mass of imperishable music, which will live with the
art itself. Musicians of every country now admit his wondrous grace,
his fertility and freshness of invention, his matchless treatment of the
voice, his effectiveness in arrangement of the orchestra. He can
never be made a model, for his genius had too much spontaneity and
individuality of color. But he impressed and modified music hardly less
than Gluck, whose tastes and methods were entirely antagonistic to his
own. That he should have retired from the exercise of his art while in
the full flower of his genius is a perplexing fact. No stranger story
is recorded in the annals of art with respect to a genius who filled
the world with his glory, and then chose to vanish, "not unseen." On
finishing his crowning stroke of genius and skill in "William Tell," he
might have said with Shakespeare's enchanter, Prospero:

".... But this magic I here abjure; and when I have required
Some heavenly music (which even now I do)
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff--
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book."

A bright English critic, whose style is as charming as his judgments are
good, says, in his study of the Donizetti music: "I find myself thinking
of his music as I do of Domenichino's pictures of 'St. Agnes' and the
'Rosario' in the Bologna gallery, of the 'Diana' in the Borghese Palace
at Rome, as pictures equable and skillful in the treatment of their
subjects, neither devoid of beauty of form nor of color, but which