But written down, they are dull
larvae, compared with what they are with the proper pronunciation and
expression. What is it Byron says?:
I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin.
I shall really feel a void when Filomena goes away. The unfortunate part
of it is that her dialect pronunciation is so difficult to make out, and
that she swallows so many syllables in order to make the metre right, as
there are generally too many feet, and it is only the delicacy of her
declamation that makes up for the incorrectness of the rhymes and the
verses. For instance, she constantly says _lo_ instead of _il_
(_lo soldato_), and she can never tell me how many words there are
in a line, since neither she nor Maria knows what a single word, as
opposed to several, is, and because it is no use spelling the word to
her and asking: "Is that right?" since she cannot spell, and does not
recognise the letters. Saredo tells me that a driver who once drove him
and his wife about for five days in Tuscany sang all day long like
Filomena, and improvised all the time. This is what she, too, does
continually; she inserts different words which have about the same
meaning, and says: "It is all the same" (_c'e la stessa cosa_).
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