I said not a word, but knelt; and holding her hand still, I looked up at her in grateful adoration.
November 28.—For the last three months I have lived in heaven. She is changed. Music has reconciled her to exile. She has found one who speaks, though weakly, the language of that home.
We hold together through this divine medium a lofty spirited intercourse. I learn from her of that starry world in which for a brief time she was permitted to dwell. Her seraphic thoughts have become communicated to me. I have made them my own, and all my spirit has risen to a higher altitude.
So I have at last received that revelation for which I longed, and the divine thoughts with which she has inspired me I will make known to the world. How? Description is inadequate, but it is enough to say that I have decided upon an Opera as the best mode of making known these ideas.
I have reported to one of those classical themes which, though as old as civilization, are yet ever new, because they are truth.
My Opera is on the theme of Prometheus. It refers to Prometheus Delivered. My idea is derived from her. Prometheus represents Divine Love—since he is the god who suffers unendurable agonies through his love for man. Zeus represents the old austere god of the sects and creeds—the gloomy God of Vengeance—the stern—the inexorable—the cruel.
Love endures through the ages, but at last triumphs. The chief agent in his triumph is Athene. She represents Wisdom, which, by its life and increase, at last dethrones the God of Vengeance and enthrones the God of Love.
For so the world goes on; and thus it shall be that Human Understanding, which I have personified under Athene, will at last exalt Divine Love over all, and cast aside its olden adoration of Divine Vengeance.
I am trying to give to my Opera the severe simplicity of the classical form, yet at the same time to pervade it all with the warm atmosphere of love in its widest sense. It opens with a chorus of seraphim. Prometheus laments; but the chief part is that of Athene. On that I have exhausted myself.
But where can I get a voice that can adequately render my thoughts—our thoughts? Where is Bice? She alone has this voice; she alone has the power of catching and absorbing into her own mind the ideas which I form; and with it all, she alone could express them. I would wander over the earth to find her. But perhaps she is in a luxurious home, where her associates would not listen to such a proposal.