Lady Eureka; or, The Mystery: A Prophecy of the Future. Volume 1

by Robert Folkestone Williams

But the song had other listeners than the party just described. Oriel Porphyry, after escaping from a weary lecture from the learned professor Fortyfolios, who seemed laudably anxious to fulfil his duties to his pupil, had been pacing the quarter-deck with long and hasty strides, when he was roused from the ambitious reveries of his ardent imagination by the mellow sounds of a harp at no great distance. In him, the voice, the song, its sentiments, and their expression, recalled to his memory the delicious beauty of her, from the wondrous lustre of whose gaze he had drunk of that intoxicating stream which had bound his senses in a wild and rapturous delirium. The dark eyes, radiant with the light of the impassioned soul that floated in their depths, again raised on him their sunny splendour; and the budding mouth, bearing the odorous spirits of a thousand roses on its lips, once more appeared to teach those smiling lessons that had been to him the fairest pages in the book of knowledge. He listened, and his heart was filled with the sweet influence of a happier time. The dreams of ambition were forgot—the suggestions of pride were unthought of—fame, glory, power, the pomp of greatness, the sway of empire, and the adulation of the governed, were now as things for which he had no sympathy; and he thought only of the time when the noble, gifted, young, and beautiful Eureka, regardless of the loftiness of her exalted station, the opinions of her princely family, or the sentiments of the world, ennobled him with the passionate ecstacies of her enthusiastic nature, and first filled his youthful brain with those heroic dreams which made him yearn after the glorious influence of superiority.

During the continuance of the song he listened with breathless attention, and the rich harmonies of the music kept him spell-bound to the spot on which he stood; but as the last chords of the closing symphony were struck, he stood by the side of the musician.

“I knew not, Zabra, that you were so well skilled in the science of sweet sounds,” said he.

Zabra had appeared so lost in his own meditations, that he had not noticed master Porphyry’s approach. His gaze was fixed; and as he bent over his harp, allowing the long curls of his dark hair to mingle with its strings, no attitude, and no expression of countenance, could more plainly interpret the perfect state of self-abandonment in which he then existed; but when he heard the voice of him by whom he was addressed, in an instant his dark handsome features assumed a different expression, and throwing back the shining tresses that shaded his face, he seemed a creature all smiles, devotion, and enjoyment.

“Music has been to me the food of my existence,” remarked the page: “on its divine essence I was nurtured; and as the perfume forms a part of the breeze on which it is borne, harmony has entered into my nature, and is now my life, my strength, and my felicity.”

“Where did you learn the song I have just heard?” inquired the merchant’s son.

“From the impulses of my own creative spirit,” replied the other. “From sympathies awakened into action by the strong power that creates and controls them. See you the mighty tide that swells up into universal motion, bearing by its own strength the burthen of resistless armaments as if they were but reeds, and when it does put forth its power, assuming such shapes and doing such things as make the marvel of every age; and know you not that it is the operation of its attraction for that fair world of light that dwelleth in the starry heaven, whose glimpses of a glory not to be subdued enter into its innermost depths, and stir its everlasting waves with passionate emotion?”

“Surely one so young cannot have felt the power of Love?” asked the elder of the two, in a tone that betrayed the influence of which it spoke.

“Who shall say when it shall come or when it shall depart?” said Zabra, as the dusky hue of his cheek gave evidence of the warm blood that filled his veins. “It is a presence that appeareth at all times when the soul is fit to receive it. It cometh not at this time, nor at that—it dwelleth not here, nor there; it filleth eternity of time, and infinity of space. Look around you, over the vast circumference of boundless nature—wherever there is life, wherever there is motion—wherever there is an object that hath beauty in its form and fitness for its purpose, it hath all its energies swayed by the thrilling impulses of that almighty passion. The flower that liveth but a few days, trembles in the warm embraces of the southern breeze; and the planet that smiled upon the infancy of the world, in the unconquerable maturity of a thousand ages, still enamoured, drinks in the beauty of the mountain stream. The heart is ever young, as mine is; and as the mellowing sunbeam calls into activity the principle of life in the insect’s egg, the sunshine in which I have basked, hath stirred the vital seed implanted within my breast, and given it restless hopes and fond desires, and properties and motives to an end, that are the wings with which it flutters in its shell. The only thing in which I differ from the rest is that my Spring hath preceded theirs. All have their seasons, but till the sun comes the winter endures; and in me the frost hath been broken up, and the current, freed from its icy chains, rushes through its channels in the soft light of its first bright day, and makes a world of its own, full of music and flowers.”

“But how can you bear to be parted from the object with which your sympathies are so closely united?” asked master Porphyry.