When the queen paused, a joyful smile overspread his features, which had hitherto been gloomy and ill at ease. “Your majesty pauses?” he asked, hastily. “Well, I wish your majesty joy of it. That Mr. Reichardt, of Halle, is too sentimental and arrogant a composer, and never should I have dared to lay these new pieces of his before your majesty if you had not asked me to bring you every thing written by Reichardt. Well, you have seen it now; it displeases your majesty, and I am glad of it, for—”
“For,” said the queen, gently interrupting him, “for the great composer Himmel is again jealous of the great composer Reichardt. Is it not so?”
She raised her dark-blue eyes at this question to Himmel’s face, and he saw to his dismay that there were tears in those eyes.
“What!” he asked in terror, “your majesty has wept?”
She nodded in the affirmative, smiling gently. “Yes,” she said, after a pause, “I have wept, and hence I could not continue singing. Do not scold me, do not be angry with me, my dear and stern teacher. This song has moved me profoundly; it is so simple and yet so touching, that it must have come out of the depths of a truly noble heart.”
Mr. Himmel replied only with a low sigh and an almost inaudible murmur, which the queen, however, understood very well.
“Perhaps,” she said, trying gently to heal the jealous pangs of the composer, “perhaps I was so deeply moved by the words rather than by the music; these words are so beautiful that it seems to me Goethe never wrote any thing more beautiful.”
And bending over the music-book, she read in an undertone:
“Wer nie sein Brod mit Thranen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nachte
Auf seinem Bette einsam sass,
Der kennt euch nicht, Ihr himmlischen Machte!”
[Footnote: “He who never ate his bread with tears,
He who never, through nights of affliction,
Sat on his lonely bed,
He does not know you, powers of heaven!”]