| | 1 | Author: | Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 | Add | | | Title: | The Island of the Fay  | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | 'La musique,' says Marmontel, in those 'Contes Moraux'
1
which, in all our translations, we have insisted upon calling
'Moral Tales' as if in mockery of their spirit — 'la musique est
le seul des talents qui jouissent de lui-même; tous les autres
veulent des témoins.' He here confounds the pleasure derivable
from sweet sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more
than any other talent, is that for music susceptible of complete
enjoyment, where there is no second party to appreciate its
exercise. And it is only in common
with other talents that it produces effects which may be fully
enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the raconteur has either
failed to entertain clearly, or has sacrificed in its expression
to his national love of point, is, doubtless, the very tenable
one that the higher order of music is the most thoroughly
estimated when we are exclusively alone. The proposition, in
this form, will be admitted at once
by those who love the lyre
for its sake, and for its spiritual uses. But there is one
pleasure still within the reach of fallen mortality — and perhaps
only one — which owes even more than does music to the accessory
sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness experienced in the
contemplation of natural scenery. In truth, the man who would
behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in solitude behold
that glory. To me, at least, the presence — not of human life
only, but of life in any other form than that of the green things
which grow upon the soil and are voiceless — is a stain upon the
landscape — is at war with the genius of the scene. I love,
indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the grey rocks, and the
waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy
slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon
all — I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal
members of one vast animate and sentient whole — a whole whose
form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive
of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek
handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose
life is eternity; whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment
is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity; whose
cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the
animalculae which infest the brain — a being which we, in
consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the
same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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