Gala-Days [105]
a wand of divination. Nearer and nearer comes the heavenly voice, pouring around her a flood of mystic melody. And now at last it breaks upon our ears,--softly at first, only a sweet faint echo from that other sphere, but deepening, strengthening, conquering,--now rising on the swells of a controlling passion, now sinking into the depths with its low wail of pain; exultant, scornful, furious, in the glad outburst of opening joy and the fierce onslaught of strength; crowned, sceptred, glorious in garland and singing-robes, throned in the high realms of its inheritance, a kingdom of boundless scope and ever new delights: then sweeping down through the lower world with diminishing rapture, rapture lessening into astonishment, astonishment dying into despair, it gathers up the passion and the pain, the blight and woe and agony; all garnered joys are scattered. Evil supplants the good. Hope dies, love pales, and faith is faint and wan. But every death has its moaning ghost, pale spectre of vanished loves. Oh, fearful revenge of the outraged soul! The mysterious, uncomprehended, incomprehensible soul! The irrepressible, unquenchable, immortal soul, whose every mark is everlasting! Every secret sin committed against it cries out from the house-tops. Cunning may strive to conceal, will may determine to smother, love may fondly whisper, "It does not hurt"; but the soul will not BE outraged. Somewhere, somehow, when and where you least expect, unconscious, perhaps, to its owner, unrecognized by the many, visible only to the clear vision, somewhere, somehow, the soul bursts asunder its bonds. It is but a little song, a tripping of the fingers over the keys, a drawing of the bow across the strings,--only that! Only that? It is the protest of the wronged and ignored soul. It is the outburst of the pent and prisoned soul. All the ache and agony, all the secret wrong and silent endurance, all the rejected love and wounded trust and slighted truth, all the riches wasted, all the youth poisoned, all the hope trampled, all the light darkened,--all meet and mingle in a mad whirl of waters. They surge and lash and rage, a wild storm of harmony. Barriers are broken. Circumstance is not. The soul! the soul! the soul! the wronged and fettered soul! the freed and royal soul! It alone is king. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in! Tremble, O Tyrant, in your mountain-fastness! Tremble, Deceiver, in your cavern under the sea! Your victim is your accuser. Your sin has found you out. Your crime cries to Heaven. You have condemned and killed the just. You have murdered the innocent in secret places, and in the noonday sun the voice of their blood crieth unto God from the ground. There is no speech nor language. There is no will nor design. The seal of silence is unbroken. But unconscious, entranced, inspired, the god has lashed his Sybil on. The vital instinct of the soul, its heaven-born, up-springing life, flings back the silver veil, and reveals the hidden things to him who hath eyes to see.
The storm sobs and soothes itself to silence. There is a hush, and then an enthusiasm of delight. The small head slightly bows, the still face scarcely smiles, the slight form disappears,--and after all, it was only a fiddle.
"When Music, heavenly maid, was young," begins the ode; but Music, heavenly maid, seems to me still so young, so very young, as scarcely to have made her power felt. Her language is yet unlearned. When a baby of a month is hungry or in pain, he contrives to make the fact understood. If he is at peace with himself and his surroundings, he leaves no doubt on the subject. To precisely this degree of intelligibility has the Heavenly Maid attained among us. When Beethoven sat down to the composition of one of his grand harmonies, there was undoubtedly in his mind as distinct a conception of that which he wished to express, of that within him which clamored for expression, as ever rises before a painter's eye, or sings in a poet's
The storm sobs and soothes itself to silence. There is a hush, and then an enthusiasm of delight. The small head slightly bows, the still face scarcely smiles, the slight form disappears,--and after all, it was only a fiddle.
"When Music, heavenly maid, was young," begins the ode; but Music, heavenly maid, seems to me still so young, so very young, as scarcely to have made her power felt. Her language is yet unlearned. When a baby of a month is hungry or in pain, he contrives to make the fact understood. If he is at peace with himself and his surroundings, he leaves no doubt on the subject. To precisely this degree of intelligibility has the Heavenly Maid attained among us. When Beethoven sat down to the composition of one of his grand harmonies, there was undoubtedly in his mind as distinct a conception of that which he wished to express, of that within him which clamored for expression, as ever rises before a painter's eye, or sings in a poet's