MUSIC What angel viol, effortless and sure, Speaks through the straining silence, whence, ah whence, That tremulous low joy, so keen, so pure, With rapture of sweet sound? Oh, now it wins the giddy steep, and loud and loud Over the chasm and the cloud, Swells its triumphant tide Higher and higher, and undenied Insistent to the star! Then lowlier, softer, dreamful, droops and dies Over the closing eyes, Dies with my spirit away, afar Swayed on some ocean's breast Dies into rest. Sir Rennell Rodd. AFTER MUSIC I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam, Until the music called, and called me thence, And tears stirred in my heart as tears may come To lonely children straying far from home, Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence. If I might follow far and far away Unto the country where these songs abide, I think my soul would wake and find it day, Would tell me who I am, and why I stray, Would tell me who I was before I died. Josephine Preston Peabody. MUSIC (Read at the Annual Dinner of the Harvard Musical Association, Boston, January 28, 1874.) When "Music, Heavenly Maid," was very young, She did not sing as poets say she sung. There were no Steinways then, no Chickerings, No spinnets, harpsichords, or metal strings; No hundred-handed orchestras, no schools Some rude half-octave of a shepherd's song, Such were the means she summoned to her aid, Prized as divine; on these she sang or played. awe Before the Phidian Jove. Apelles drew And Zeuxis painted. Marble temples "grew As grows the grass"; and never saw the sun A statelier vision than the Parthenon. But she, the Muse who in these latter days And steeps our souls and senses in such wine She, Heavenly Maid, must ply her music thin, E'en so poor Cinderella, when she cowered Beside her hearth, and saw her sisters, dowered With grace and wealth, go to accomplish all Their haughty triumphs at the Prince's ball, While she in russet gown sat mournfully Singing her "Once a king there chanced to be," Yet knows her prince will come; her splendid days Are all foreshadowed in her dreaming gaze. No buzzing Jew's-harps, no Pandean flutes, Were stuffed into her stockings, though they hung On Time's great chimney, as when she was young; But every rare and costly instrument soons, Huge double-basses, kettle-drum half-moons, And every queer contrivance made for tunes. Through these the master-spirits round her throng, And Europe rings with instruments and song. Through these she breathes her wondrous symphonies, Enchanting airs, and choral litanies. Through these she speaks the word that never dies, The universal language of the skies. Around her gather those who held their art sohn, And long processions of the lords of Tone |