The passion for music which prompted her visit to Vetranio, which alone
saved her affections from pining in the solitude imposed on them, and
which occupied her leisure hours in the manner we have already
described, was an inheritance of her birth.
Her Spanish mother had sung to her, hour after hour, in her cradle, for
the short time during which she was permitted to watch over her child.
The impression thus made on the dawning faculties of the infant, nothing
ever effaced. Though her earliest perception were greeted only by the
sight of her father's misery; though the form which his despairing
penitence soon assumed doomed her to a life of seclusion and an
education of admonition, the passionate attachment to the melody of
sound, inspired by her mother's voice--almost imbibed at her mother's
breast--lived through all neglect, and survived all opposition. It
found its nourishment in childish recollections, in snatches of street
minstrelsy heard through her window, in the passage of the night winds
of winter through the groves on the Pincian Mount, and received its
rapturous gratification in the first audible sounds from the Roman
senator's lute.
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