“After the coffin had been put in the grave, and the relatives had gone away, there was paid a last tribute to Ole Bull,—a tribute more touching and of more worth than the king’s message, the gold crown, all the orders, and the flags of the world at half–mast, meaning more love than the pine–strewn streets of the silent city, and the tears on its people’s faces; a tribute from poor peasants, who had come in from the country far and near, men who knew Ole Bull’s music by heart,—who, in their lonely, poverty–stricken huts had been proud of the man who had played their ‘Gamle Norge’ before the kings of the earth. These men were there by hundreds, each bringing a green bough, or a fern, or a flower; they waited humbly till all others had left the grave, then crowded up, and threw in, each man, the only token he had been rich enough to bring. The grave was filled to the brim. And it is not irreverent to say, that to Ole Bull, in heaven, there could come no gladder memory of earth than that the last honors paid him there were wild leaves and flowers of Norway, laid on his body by the loving hands of Norway peasants.”
“Now long that instrument has ceased to sound,
Now long that gracious form in earth hath lain,
Tended by nature only, and unwound
Are all those mingled threads of love and pain;
So let us weep, and bend
Our heads, and wait the end,
Knowing that God creates not thus in vain.”
APPENDIX.
THE ANATOMY OF THE VIOLINIST, MR. OLE BULL: HIS POSE AND METHOD OF HOLDING THE VIOLIN.
By A. B. CROSBY, A. M., M. D.,
Professor of Anatomy, Bellevue Hospital Medical College, New York, 1877.
Thirty–one years ago, in a quaint old Congregational church in a New England village, I first heard Mr. Ole Bull perform on the violin, and witnessed
“The matchless skill, the potent art that brings
Voices of earth, or heaven, from those mute strings.”