At this moment a workman met them, and offered to show them over the neighboring glass factory.
"Yes, let us go in there," said La Foscarina, hurriedly following the workman. Presently they reached the furnace room, and were enveloped in its fiery breath, as they gazed at an incandescent altar, the glow from which dazzled their eyes with a painful glare.
--To disappear, to be swallowed up, to leave no sign!--cried the woman's heart, intoxicated with the thought of destruction.--In one second that fire could devour me like a dry stick, a bundle of straw.--And she went nearer to the open mouths in which she could see the molten flame, more resplendent than a midsummer sun, rolling around the earthen pots in which the shapeless mass was melting; the workmen, standing around, awaited the right moment to approach with iron tubes to shape that mass with the breath from their lips and the instruments of their art.
--O virtue of Fire!--thought the Inspirer, turned from his anxiety by the miraculous beauty of the element that had become to him as familiar as a brother, since the day he had found the revealing melody.--Ah, that I might give to the life of the creatures that love me the perfection of the forms to which I aspire! That I might fuse all their weaknesses in some white heat, and make of the product obedient matter in which to impress the commandments of my heroic will and the images of my pure poetry! Why, my friend, why will you not be the divine living statue molded by my spirit, the work of faith and sorrow whereby our lives might surpass even our art? Why are we so near resembling ordinary lovers, who lament and curse? When I heard from your lips those admirable words: 'I can do one thing that love alone cannot do,' I believed indeed that you could give me more than love. You must be able always to do those things that love can do, besides those it cannot do, in order to meet my insatiable nature.--
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.