I feel the fanning of a thousand airs
That will not be repressed, that crave to wake
In resurrection of tone infinite
From the tranced beauty, her divinest death.
Arise, my spirits! wake, my slumbering spells!
Dawn on the dreamland of these alien dells!"
As the last words died away, pronounced alike with the rest in accents so peculiar, yet so pure, so soft, yet so unshaken,—he swept the stem of lilies around his brow. The frosted flower flashed shudderingly against the lamplight, and with its motion without a pause opened the overture, as by those words themselves invoked and magically won from the abyss of sylvan silence. Three long, longing sighs from the unseen wind instruments, in withering notes, prepared the brain for the rush of fairy melody that was as the subtlest essences of thought and fragrance enfranchised. The elfin progression, prestissimo, of the subject, was scarcely realized as the full suggestion dawned of the leafy shivering it portrayed. The violins, their splendors concentrated like the rainbows of the dewdrops, seemed but the veiling voices for that ideal strain to filter through; and yet, when the horns spoke out, a blaze of golden notes, one felt the deeper glory of the strings to be more than ever quenchless as they returned to that ever-pulsing flow. Accumulating in orchestral richness, as if flower after flower of music were unsheathing to the sun, no words, no expression self-agonized to caricature, can describe that fairy overture. I am only reverting to the feeling, the passion it suggested; not to its existent art and actual interpretation.
Its dissolution not immediate, but at its fullest stream subsiding, ebbing, seemed, instead of breaking up and scattering the ideal impression received, to retain it and expand it in itself through another transition of ecstasy into a musical state beyond. During the ethereal modulations, by a sudden illumination of the stage, the scenery behind uncurtained all along, started into light. Still beneath the leafy cloud, by mystic management, the hidden band reposed; but before the audience a sylvan dream had spread. The time was sunset, and upon those hills I spoke of it seemed to blush and burn, still leaving the foreground distinct in a sort of pearly shadow. That foreground was masked in verdure, itself precipitous with descending sides clothed thick with shrubs that lifted their red bells clear to the crimson beams behind, and shelving into a bed of enormous leaves of black-green growth such as one sometimes comes upon in the very core of the forest. Beneath those leaves we nestled, Maria and I. I can only speak of what I felt and others saw; not of that which any of us heard. For simultaneously with the blissful modulation into the keynote of the primeval strain, we began our part side by side unseen. It was a duet for Titania and Oberon, the alto being mine, the mezzo-soprano hers; and it was to be treated with the most distant softness. The excitement had overpassed its crisis with me, and no calm could have been more trance-like than that of both our voices, so far fulfilling his aspiration, which conceived for that effect all the passionless serenity of a nature devoid of pain,—the prerogative of a fairy life alone.
"Ariel, we hear thee!
Slumbering, dreaming, near thee,