It was not enough that he should be forced
by every consideration of honour and wisdom to hide his love for his
master's daughter; when he took refuge in his art and tried to throw his
whole life into it, he was stopped at the outset by the most impassable
barriers of impossibility. The furious desire to create, which is the
strength as well as the essence of genius, surged up and dashed itself
to futile spray upon the face of the solid rock.
He stood still before the hanging shelves on which he had placed the
objects he had occasionally made, and which his master allowed him to
keep there--light, air-thin vessels of graceful shapes: an ampulla of
exquisite outline with a long curved spout that bent upwards and then
outwards and over like the stalk of a lily of the valley; a large
drinking-glass set on a stem so slender that one would doubt its
strength to carry the weight of a full measure, yet so strong that the
cup might have been filled with lead without breaking it; a broad dish
that was nothing but a shadow against the light, but in the shadow was a
fair design of flowers, drawn free with a diamond point; there were a
dozen of such things on the shelves, not the best that Zorzi had made,
for those Beroviero took to his own house and used on great occasions,
while these were the results of experiments unheard of in those days,
and which not long afterwards made a school.
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