L. H.
TO H. E. KREHBIEL
New Orleans, 1878.
My dear Krehbiel,—That I should have been able even by a suggestion to have been of any use to you is a great pleasure. Your information in regard to Père Rouquette interested me. The father—the last of the Blackrobe Fathers—is at present with his beloved Indians at Ravine-les-Cannes; but I will see him on his return and read your letter to the good old soul. If the columns of a good periodical were open to me, I should write the romance of his life—such a wild strange life—inspired by the magical writings of Châteaubriand in the commencement; and latterly devoted to a strangely beautiful religion of his own—not only the poetic religion of Atala and Les Natchez, but that religion of the wilderness which flies to solitude, and hath no other temple than the vault of Heaven itself, painted with the frescoes of the clouds, and illuminated by the trembling tapers of God’s everlasting altar, the stars of the firmament.
I have received circular and organ-talk. You are right, I am convinced, in your quotation of St. Jerome. To-day I send you the book—an old copy I had considerable difficulty in coaxing from the owner. It will be of use to you chiefly by reason of the curious list of writers on mediæval and antique music quoted at the end of the volume.
If you do not make a successful volume of your instructive “Talks,” something dreadful ought to happen to you,—especially as Cincinnati has now a musical school in which children will have to learn something about music. You are the professor of musical history at that college. Your work is a work of instruction for the young. As the professor of that college, you should be able to make it a success. This is a suggestion. I know you are not a wire-puller—couldn’t be if you tried; but I want to see those talks put to good use, and made profitable to the writer, and you have friends who should be able to do what I think.
Your friend is right, no doubt, about the
“Tig, tig, malaboin
La chelema che tango
Redjoum!”