There is no other God but God!”
And Omar wept and all the people with him.
This is an outline. I’d like to have the music of that. Sent to London for it, and couldn’t get it.
L. H.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1883.
I’m so delighted with that music that I don’t know what to do.
First, I went to my friend Grueling, the organist, and got him to play and sing it. “It is very queer,” he said; “but it seems to me like chants I’ve heard some of these negroes sing.” Then I took it to a piano-player, and he played it for me. Then I went to a cornet-player—I think the cornet gives the best idea of the sound of a tenor voice—and he played it exquisitely, beautifully. Those arabesques about the name of Allah are simply divine! I noticed the difference clearly. The second version seems suspended, as a song eternal,—something never to be finished so long as waves sing and winds call, and worlds circle in space. So I thought of Edwin Arnold’s lines:—
“Suns that burn till day has flown,