Elizabeth Charlotte of Orleans, mother of the Regent, describes in one of her letters a Madame de Persillie, well born and well bred, but a dangerous lunatic; who however, if you could but slip a guitar into her hand when the fury-fit came on, would become calm again as soon as she began to play. “I pity her greatly,” writes the good-natured duchess (whose homely German nature never became properly assimilated to the French court); “she was very fond of me, and used to address me as Mon aimable; but whenever she came to see me I always had a guitar quite ready for her.” It was but common prudence to be thus prepared for the worst; and when the worst came to the worst, then a guitar was best.
Schleiermacher exclaims in one of his letters, “Surely, if there was any good in Saul’s innermost soul it must have been an adagio that exorcised the evil spirit.” The evil spirit in question is introduced by name, Malzah, in a recent Canadian drama, and is made to avow the accomplished fact of exorcism in the following strain:—
“Music, music hath its sway:
Music’s order I obey,
I have unwound myself at sound
From off Saul’s heart, where coiled I lay.”
Which snaky or serpentine similitude is akin to a passage in Mr. Browning’s “Paracelsus”—distant as the kinship between the two poems may be in other respects:
“My heart! they loose my heart, those simple words;
Its darkness passes, which nought else could touch;
Like some dank snake that force may not expel,