Vigil and vision :: :: University of Virginia Library

“WERE music not, in this our world, well nigh
“Might we avouch, the Beautiful is dead”.
So it of one who knew life well was said,
Beauty of that which to the ear and eye
Immediate is, which to the sense speaks high,
Intending. Here for how were beauty bred,
Where all fore-ordered is by count of head
Of brute majorities, but born to die?
Wherefore, thou darling spirit of delight,
That to our souls, with toil and misery
Forwearied, speak'st of lands of love and light,
Of isles of rest beyond the sheer sun's sight,
Whereas new heavens new earth o'erarch and sea,
Blesséd be thou to all eternity!

Disraeli.

HAYDN.

AS on one walking in the graves by night
The glad May morning comes at unawares
And the young day, with all its frolic airs
And throstles' song and scent and flower-delight,
Brims up his darkling soul with life and light,
So, in our time, when vain Tchaikowsky tears
Our still-vexed ears and dreary Dvorak shares
With Brahms and Sullivan the dullard might,
Haydn, thine unsophisticated strain,
Wherein the fields flower and the small birds sing,
Our saddened souls to life and love again
Restores and sets our laggard thought a-wing
To where May-memories fill the heart's inane
With all the happy auspices of Spring.

SCHUBERT.

DEATH, weary grown of monody and dirge,
A singer sought to fill his funeral halls
With strains of jubilation, such as Saul's
Dark spirit in its frenzied hour did purge,
And hearing from afar thy golden surge,
Schubert, of song, straight from earth's echoing walls
He bore thee off, with all its swells and falls,
The tide of tune for him thenceforth to urge.
Surely, such strains as thine might never die,
But, here though mute, must otherwhere throb high:
Surely, in heaven above thou dost prolong
The measures of thine unaccomplished song
And heark'nest, in some interstellar land,
The sphere-harp answer to thy pulsing hand.

MENDELSSOHN.

THIS of the children of the bride-chamber
Was, sure, who mourn not, for the bridegroom yet
With them abideth. Pure of passion's fret,
His song the springs of love and peace doth stir,
Brimming with bliss unmingled heart and ear,
As of the harps before the White Throne set,
That, with their golden jubilance, unlet
Of time, hymn on in heaven's eternal year.
Whilst in this weary world yet hearts there be,
Which forth unto sweet music fain must go,
Still shall his glory fill the lands, though he,
From fret of life and death delivered long,
The rapturous tides of heaven ebb and flow
Feeleth and hearkeneth to the angels' song.

BERLIOZ.

WHAT didst thou here, proud spirit, sad and stern,
In this stepmother world, where praise and fame
But seldom wait upon his living name
Whose high-plumed soul the accustomed ways doth spurn?
To thee alive thy France deaf ears did turn
And now, when all the world doth thee acclaim,
Waking too late to her undying shame,
Vain offerings pours upon thy funeral urn.
Ah would the Gods beyond the grave may some
Requital for thy life's long martyrdom
Foreordered have! May Shakspeare's mighty spright
With Byron, Virgil, Goethe there unite
With love to welcome thee and thanks and praise
And bind thy brows with sempervernal bays!

LISZT.

1. CONCERTO IN E♭.

WHERE art thou, art thou, King of Faërie?
These be thy golden woods, where human foot
Befalleth not nor noise of hounds nor bruit
Of bugle echoing from tree to tree;
No mortal thing is there to hear or see;
Only thine ivory horn and Robin's flute,
Mab's silver psaltery and Titania's lute,
Answer my call with elfin minstrelsy.
And lo! what splendours shimmer through the green?
Here be the revels of the fairy queen.
Yonder she fareth on her milkwhite steed
And in her train, with many a pipe and reed,
The elf-rout sweeps the jewelled glades along,
Fluttering the silence with a fairy song.

2. CONCERTO IN A.

WHERE hast thou hearkened to these strains, my soul?
Sure, in some realm beyond the stars it must
Have been, some land where love is free from lust,
Some plane of peace above the topmost pole,
Where, quit of hope and passion, joy and dole,
The unfettered spirit, not yet set to rust
And wither in this raiment of the dust,
Resteth serene upon the Eternal Whole.
There, cradled on the Present's golden shore,
No Past behind it, no To-be before,
From love and memory and doubt and strife
Absolved, it meditates the things that are,
Or e'er it leave its own particular star
And launch anew upon the storms of life.

3. CONSOLATION IN E.

LOVE comes to us at morning,
With hands fulfilled of flowers,
Youth's path with sun and showers
He fareth still adorning;
But, when the West gives warning
Of night and Life's sky lowers
Toward the evening hours,
He flees from us with scorning.
Yet in his room he leaveth,
For those who serve him well,
One who more often grieveth
Than joyeth, but whose spell
Salveth Love's loss's shame:
Affection is his name.

4. LIEBESTRAUM.

MEDREAMT I saw Love like a luteplayer
Come carolling to me along the stream.
Bound were his temples with the glad sun's beam
And in his hand he held a dulcimer,
Among whose strings a little wind did stir.
And “Do I wake”, to him I said, “or dream?
“And dost thou live, indeed, or only seem?
“Long have I lacked thee, many a weary year.”
But he, “Away! I come not now for thee.
“What would you rhymesters with my golden boon,
“Who all things twist into an idle tune?
“Forsooth, for those alone my favours be,
“Who in this round do nothing but my will
“And without thought the world's desire fulfil.”

5. GLANES DE WORONINCE, No. 3.

THE wind about the mountain wandered sighing;
The autumn day with showers was sad and chill;
No light from heaven there fell on field and rill,
Save some faint gold-streaks on the cloud-line lying,
Where in the Western sky the day was dying:
And in the ways that circled round the hill
I wandered straying at the wild wind's will,
My soul for sadness with its sadness vying.
But, as I came unto the topmost mountain,
Out from the cloudwrack sudden burst the sun
And all the landscape with their flooding fountain
Of rosy gold his rays did overrun;
And a voice whispered me, “A truce to sorrow!
“Belike, the sun shall shine again to-morrow.”

6. DIVINA COMMEDIA SYMPHONY.

Andante con moto quasi Allegretto.

THIS is the purging-place for things ill-done
And things left undone. In the twilit air
Of dawn, I mount Eld's purgatorial stair,
Whilst all about my way thought's fires there run,
Wherein Life's absolution must be won:
And at the hill-foot, upward as I fare,
For sign of hope and charm against despair,
The waters tremble in the waxing sun.
Here be no pangs of hell; no fiends affright
Our constance, as we urge our pilgrim way,
With eyes uplifted to the morrowing day;
Only the fining-fires of age contrite,
That, with their purging, purifying breath,
Befit us for the sacrament of death.

SMETANA.

RÊVE IN E (AU SALON).

ALL night through the dance and its mazes we swayed:
The folk murmured round us, I knew not of what;
A dream was upon me; I heeded them not,
As I lay in the arms of that loveliest maid.
The wind of the night in her tresses there played;
The stars through the casements their rays on us shot,
As we danced on together, the world all forgot,
To the music the flutes and the violins made.
Through orange-groves gleaming with flowerage and fruit
We floated, we twain, whilst, around and above,
The horn-notes, that blent with the voice of the flute,
Still mimicked the moan of the murmurous dove.
Had the flute-notes not failed and the horns fallen mute,
We had danced on for ever, myself and my love.

WAGNERIANA.

1. SIEGLINDE.

ALACK, Sieglinde, whither wilt thou flee?
All things conspire against thee, old and new;
Fire, earth, air, water, all will thee undo.
Why wast thou born, fair maid? Ah, woe is me!
For in thy footsteps, over land and sea,
Wherever earth is green and heaven blue,
Fate and the hour, relentless, still pursue:
There is no room in this wide world for thee.
Nor yet, in all, thy death, sad loveling, may
The vengeance of the Gods supernal sate
And the red maw of unrelenting Fate.
Quick art thou with a seed, which, day by day,
Unto a flower of hate and grief shall grow
And whelm the heavens and the earth with woe.

2. WOTAN.

“REMOTE, unfriended, melancholy, slow!”
Such are the names, o eldest of the Gods,
That on thy head they heap, the crackbrain clods,
For whom Francesca and her Paolo
Are but an idle tale of long ago,
For whom Orestes with the Furies' rods
And pale Prometheus on his rock at odds
With the fierce Fates are but a passing show.
Heed thou them not; they fool their hour and go,
Some little fulsome honey filched from life,
Back to their hell. But we, who love and know
That which it is to suffer evenso,
Look with wet eyes upon thy luckless strife
And our hearts throb in answer to thy woe.

3. BRÜNNHILDE.

LADY of Sorrows, sore of Love's wild will
Undone, of love, indeed, transformed to hate,
Yet love enough abiding with thy mate
Thee, that didst slay him, in his death to kill,
How wilt thou do? Walhalla's burnings fill
The heavens inane with smoke: in Asgard's gate
Wotan thy sire lies fall'n, the wise, the great;
And the Gods' Twilight holds Gladheimr hill.
Where wilt thou flee? Yet, though thy heavenly place
No longer wait thee, thou, from Siegfried's pyre
With him ascending on the wings of fire
To heaven, Walhalla with a tripled grace
Shalt find rebuilt and with thy hero stand
By Balder in the new immortal band.

4. HAGEN.

“GROWN old before my time, the glad I hate”,
Quoth haughty Hagen. I, that, hating none,
Still in my heart Love harbour, as a sun,
The winterward of life that doth abate,
And do but scorn the glad, the fools of Fate,
I cannot yet but hail thee, dreadful son
Of Night and Hell, unconquerable one,
In sin and shame that yet art grimly great.
Stern fallen Angel of the old Norse day,
Thou, as the Satan of our latter lay,
The protest 'gainst triumphant dulness art
And brute o'erweening force of the world's heart,
That, when our Siegfrieds wax intolerable,
Some Hagen sends to hurl them down to hell.

5. ISOLDE.

ALONE, Isolde, is thy hero fled
Unto the wild and darkling wastes of death,
Whose road no traveller retravelleth,
To tell the tale of how he there hath sped;
Nor spared his henchman to the place of dread
With him to carry where he journeyeth;
Yet thee, his bride, awaited not a breath,
That thou mightst follow him among the dead.
How in Death's incommensurable halls
Wilt thou discover where he doth abide?
How wilt thou win to come unto his side?
“Love to love, spirit unto spirit calls;
“And I, forbidden though to see his face,
“Shall spend Eternity in his embrace”.

THE PEDIGREE OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN MUSIC.

HAYDN, thy hand 'twas first from heaven that brought
Promethean fire, fair music's failing light
Anew to kindle. From thy slackening might
The falling torch of song sweet Schubert caught
And bore it onward with the speed of thought,
Brightlier forever burning and more bright,
Till all too soon, for Time's untimeous spite,
He too must pass and leave his work half-wrought.
Then Berlioz took the fiery cross again
And bore it flaming over land and sea,
'Spite dearth and doubt and scorn, triumphantly,
Till to his succour other champions twain,
Wagner and Liszt, there came: and who were fain
To add a fourth unto these Thunderers three?

MENDELSSOHN.

1. QUARTETT OP. 12 IN E♭

WHAT are these wild sweet voices, swelling, thronging
About the wood-ways, with the frolic beams
Of fancy oversunned, wherein, meseems,
Shy Nature's very speech I hear prolonging
A tale of realms of rapture, from Life's wronging
Removed afar, of Paradisal dreams,
Dreamt out by undiscovered meads and streams,
That overfloods my soul with love and longing?
Nought is there here of the affright and sadness
Which haunt the traces of our toiling feet;
But here the primal innocence and sweet
Of life abide, in all content and gladness,
Nor consolation from the hope need borrow
Of some imaginary better morrow.

2. A MINOR SYMPHONY.—ADAGIO.

ALL hail, thou holy, heaven-attempered soul,
That, hither banished from thy native sky
And in our dust-heap doomed to live and die,
Unstirred by all its chances, joy and dole,
With eyes fast fixed upon the constant pole,
Through all Life's shifting scenes, smile, tear, frown, sigh,
Earth's blandishments disdained, her lures put by,
Farest unfaltering tow'rd thy heavenly goal!
Now, happy spright, is thy release at hand;
Well nigh thy weary pilgrimage is o'er:
For, hark, the harps and flutes of heaven resound,
To welcome thee; its airs and flames around
Breathing, the angels hover, to the shore
To bear thee of the blue celestial land.

MERKEL.

MAILIED, OP. 18, No. 1.

TEN o'clock of a morn of May!
The air wells over with wilding rhyme;
The throstle trills on the leafing lime:
“The nest is built on the bending spray;
“The eggs are hatching”; I hear him say.
“The summer cometh! With song 'tis time
“To hail the heart of the pleasant prime,
“The mid-Spring sweet of the dainty day.”
Come, throstle, trill me thy sweetest song!
God wot, we have languished over long
For Winter-weariness, thou and I!
Our best and brightest behoveth sing,
Whilst green the grass is and blue the sky;
Alack! for Summer is swift of wing.

LA COURSE À L'ABÎME.

(BERLIOZ'S FAUST).

MESEEMS, the World-Faust, through the ages' night,
Upon the courser of the Will-to-be,
Hurtling across Life's darkling plains I see.
Deaf are his ears and blinded is his sight;
He turneth not aside to left or right;
Nay, through the shadows and the darkness, he,
The Mephistophiles Democracy
Spurring, ensueth still his headlong flight.
He noteth not the spectres of the Past,
That on his either hand for warning rise;
He heedeth not the snakes of doom that hiss
About him nor the portents in the skies;
But, at the demon's instance, hard and fast,
Urgeth, unchecked, his course to the abyss.

SCHUBERT.

Symphony in C major.

1. ANDANTE—ALLEGRO.

WHENCE come these golden horn-notes, waning, swelling,
The soul with memories of the Past that stir?
From India's hills and Scythia's deserts drear
Afar they come, of ancient peoples telling,
Beyond the Oxus and the Indus dwelling,
And of the Wander-Lust, from year to year
In them that waxed, until it grew a spur,
Their feet into the wander-ways compelling.
Of impulse old they tell and ancient longing,
Unknowing that whereafter it did yearn,
Of vague strange fancies on the spirit thronging,
Of wishes wild that in the breast did burn,
Till all the thought became a wandering fire,
That needs must up and after its desire.

2. ANDANTE CON MOTO.

THE hautboys of the stir of preparation
Tell, of the gathering of the caravan,
Of the departure, man ensuing man,
Horde after horde and nation after nation,
Till all the deserts, station unto station,
With tribe on tribe are filled and clan on clan,
The rear belike a year behind the van,
All pouring Europe-ward without cessation.
Onward they press, of obstacles uncounting,
Hills over-climbing, crossing stream and sea,
Armies out-warring, battlements affronting,
Restless, resistless as fatality,
Till, with a final flux, the Alps surmounting,
They overflood the plains of Italy.

3. ALLEGRO VIVACE.

DOWN-LAPSING from the hills, a human ocean,
With shining arms and standards topped for foam,
To the sheer heart the torrent surges home
Of the old world: nor courage nor devotion
Nor wit can stay its Fate-foreordered motion.
No hope for her beneath the blue sky-dome,
At the barbarians' hands Imperial Rome,
Like Hannibal, must drink the deathly potion.
To their sphinx Asia used, where nothing alters,
Drunk with the wine of change they are: behold,
How of queens' necklets they their horses' halters
Make and kings' crowns cast in the pot for gold,
Their weapon-dance about the ruined altars
Of either faith wild urging, new and old.

4. ALLEGRO FINALE.

THE stress is over, done the work of rending
Present from Past and soul from body free;
Accomplished is the appointed surgery,
That must avail the rotten Past for ending.
Now, with its healing salves, intent on mending
Life's bleeding wounds, from War's subsiding sea
Peace lifts its head and to the fair To-be
All things which live and are again are tending.
The world-leach Time, the Assainer and Forgiver,
War's breaches heals in town and plain and mart;
From every quarter flow Life's streams—as dart
On dart poured out they were from Natures quiver,
—Together, as a mighty, placid river,
Tow'rd the rebirth of the old world in Art.

AT THE PIANO.

AS o'er the answering keys my fingers stray,
The fluctuant fancies into music wooing
And through the haunts of harmony pursuing
The memories of many a bygone day,
The curtain of the Present drawn away
Is from my thought and with the veil's undoing,
The dear dead Past arises, the renewing
Seeking of that which moulders in the clay.
The loves of old once more I see resurging,
That long have slept beside the mouldered hates;
The olden joys and woes the dreamland's gates
Give up again and I, as o'er the abyss
Of thought I lean and watch the wraiths emerging,
Feel on my lips once more my first love's kiss.

FIELD'S NOCTURN, No. 16 IN F.

THE larks are up, abroad in heaven outflinging
Their gladsome cadences of golden rhyme;
Upon the ground bass of the cuckoo's chime
The wrens make descant; all the woods are ringing
With the glad noise of thrush and linnet bringing
Their happy homage to the pleasant prime:
It is the early sweet of Summer-time
And all the air is full of scent and singing.
But hark! Whence comes that minor cadence, breaking
The sweet concent of happy harmony,
As of some moaning surf, sad music making
Upon the beach-bend of a sullen sea?
It is the thought of loves laid waste, awaking
The surges of the sea of memory.

J. P. E. HARTMANN.

ANDANTINO SOSTENUTO IN B♭.

SLEEP, sleep, sad memories, and in your sleep
Be woven all into a dulcet dream.
Wherein, regenerate by the salving stream
Of fain forgetfulness, your sense shall steep
In that afar unfathomable deep
Of peace, that lies beyond the sunset-gleam
And on its bosom bears the Hesperian beam
To lands of rest, where hope in heaven shall reap.
Look through the painted pane of Time's effacement,
Life's sweets remembering and its sours forgetting,
And fill my soul with light of consolation,
Even as the sunlight of a stormful setting
Shines through some many-hued cathedral casement,
O'erflooding all with Faith's transfiguration.

VALLÉE D'OBERMANN.

(A VERSE-TRANSCRIPTION OF LISZT'S TONE-POEM).

1.

I wander o'er the hills in lonely leisure;
Returning ever to the ancient ground,
Thought in my head still runs its endless round.
That which I prized of old no more I treasure;
In that which once I loved I have no pleasure:
Though still unchanged to touch and sight and sound,
In all I find no more what once I found;
Life's goods and ills I mete by other measure.
Since that for us, alas! the loss is certain,
Since no unthinkable enchanted goal
For us there waits behind the Future's curtain,
Such as might render to our shipwrecked soul
That which lost life from us hath year by year ta'en,
What for the loss shall of a world console?

2.

The tempest in my soul hath long subsided;
The winds have fallen calm, the waves are still;
Yet no sun comes hope's auspice to fulfil.
The light by which my spirit's bark I guided,
In whose direction I of old confided,
Whereby my way to steer 'twixt good and ill,
Is blotted out, nor aught for ever will
The hopes renew whereon I once abided.
No faith is left me in the olden story,
Which once my heart sufficed in every thing.
The light is faded from its golden glory;
Its holy memories have taken wing,
To their long home gone back in limbos hoary:
Doubt in the darkened soul of me is king.

3.

Much have I wrought, yet nought with me remaineth;
Long have I sought, yet nothing have in hand;
Far have I fared, yet never came to land.
How shall I do, whilst yet Life's light obtaineth,
The shores to reach where peace primæval reigneth,
As in some sea-pool on a summer-strand,
Through whose bright waters, on the golden sand,
A fairy scape of seaflowers waxeth, waneth?
Not one am I that from the Past can borrow,
To gild to-day, the light of days fordone,
Nor on some fair fallacious golden morrow
False faith can stablish: nay, I am as one
Yet living buried in a grave of sorrow,
Who seeks no more to look upon the sun.

4.

When Life's account I reckon, gains and losses,
It sickens me its unrequited slain
To count and see how many Christs in vain
Through this our changeless world have borne their crosses,
How many fighters perished in Life's fosses,
Whilst, with the old indifferent disdain,
Mankind upon its waves of strife and pain
From peak to peak the world-storm's torrent tosses.
Yet, as those bred and born in wars and slaughters
That sleep their dreamless sleep through fire and fight,
My consolation is that Lethe's waters
Have not yet lost their salutary might
The foolish hearts of Adam's sons and daughters
To solace with oblivion's dulcet night.

5.

Once consolation did I seek from Nature
For my sick soul; but now, alas! I know
That she no sympathy with man can show,
Heeds not his glee nor his distemperature,
But, from the cold heights of her Titan stature,
Indifferent down upon his joy and woe
Looks, as upon the plains that spread below
The snow-peaks gaze, with faces blank of feature.
Yet, in her summer woods, her wastes hybernal,
Quit is the spirit of men's idle prate:
In her snow-death, in her renascence vernal,
With the world's soul it holds communion strait
And hears the throbbing pulse of Time eternal
Measure the marches of foreordered Fate.

6.

Since thought as life is, fleeting as the wind,
What booteth it to drive one's barren furrow
Through the dumb Past or in Time's grave to burrow
For that which none this side of death to find
May hope? What saith the wisest of our kind,
“Increase of knowledge brings increase of sorrow;
“Availeth not thought-taking for the morrow;
“Unto much wisdom is much grief assigned”.
Since all must perish for the All's renewing,
Why waste for ever on thought's sterile fire?
Hearken no more to hope's fallacious wooing;
Cast stress and passion on life's funeral pyre.
This only thing on earth is worth th' ensuing,
Deliverance from the bondage of desire.

7.

Could we but look, indeed, in coming ages
New hope in a new world of things to find,
Yet might we live, to this our day resigned.
Alas! in all the Past's recurrent stages,
In every word of poets, prophets, sages,
We read the changeless future of our kind,
What lies before us that which is behind,
The Past rewritten in the Present's pages.
Only the thought that life is not for ever,
That at the last a time shall come to free
Our hearts and brains from sterile thought's endeavour
And hopeless hope, some solace hath for me.
Hiding my face in thine all-sheltering Never,
Eternity, be thou my sanctuary!

Senancour's last words.