Mellowness

The Cardinal is always a great singer, having a voice which, as European writers say, is almost equal to the Nightingale’s; but in this case the more stirring, martial quality of the strain had given place to an exquisite mellowness, as if it were, what I have no doubt it was, a song of love.

To mark this absolutism of change over the works of man is both pleasing and profitable, for what is more emotional than to observe the hoarness, the mellowness, and the natural final decay of objects whose beginnings date almost from the immemorial […] ?