"Come live with me and be my love,"—
old, yet always new,—sweet and tender, and not to be gainsaid, whether it be piped to a shepherdess in Arcadia, or whether a princess hears it from princely lips in her palace on the sea.
But the mountain shadows stretch down the valleys and wrap the meadows in twilight. Farther and farther the notes recede as the flutesman gathers his quiet flock along the winding paths. Smooth and far in the tranquil evening-air fall the receding notes, a clear, silvery sweetness; farther and farther in the hushed evening-air, lessening and lowering, as you bend to listen, till the vanishing strain just cleaves, a single thread of pearl-pure melody, finer, finer, finer, through the dewy twilight, and—you hear only your own heart-beats. It is not dead, but risen. It never ceased. It knew no pause. It has gone up the heights to mingle with the songs of the angels. You rouse yourself with a start, and gaze at your neighbor half bewildered. What is it? Where are we? Oh, my remorseful heart! There is no shepherd, no mountain, no girl with scarlet ribbon and black braids bound on her beautiful temples. It was only a fiddle on a platform!
Now you need not tell me that. I know better. I have lived among fiddles all my life,—embryotic, Silurian fiddles, splintered from cornstalks, that blessed me in the golden afternoons of green summers waving in the sunshine of long ago,—sympathetic fiddles that did me yeomen's service once, when I fell off a bag of corn up garret and broke my head, and the frightened fiddles, not knowing what else to do, came and fiddled to me lying on the settee, with such boundless, extravagant flourish that nobody heard the doctor's gig rolling by, and so sinciput and occiput were left overnight to compose their own quarrels, whereby I was naturally all right before the doctor had a chance at me, suffering only the slight disadvantage of going broken-headed through life. What I might have been with a whole skull, I don't know; but I will say, that, even in fragments, my head is the best part of me.
Yes, I think I may dare affirm that whatever there is to know about a fiddle I know, and I can give my affidavit that it is no fiddle that takes you up on its broad wings, outstripping the "wondrous horse of brass," which required
"the space of a day natural,
This is to sayn, four and twenty houres,
Wher so you list, in drought or elles showres,
To beren your body into every place
To which your herte willeth for to pace,
Withouten wemme of you, thurgh foule or faire,"—
since it bears you, "withouten" even so much as your "herte's" will, in a moment's time, over the seas and above the stars.
A fiddle, is it? Do not for one moment believe it.—A poet walked through Southern woods, and the Dryads opened their hearts to him. They unfolded the secrets that dwell in the depths of forests. They sang to him under the starlight the songs of their green, rustling land. They whispered the loves of the trees sentient to poets:—
"The sayling pine; the cedar, proud and tall;
The vine-propt elme; the poplar, never dry;
The builder oake, sole king of forrests all;
The aspine, good for staves; the cypresse funerall;
The lawrell, meed of mightie conquerours
And poets sage; the firre, that weepeth stille;
The willow, worne of forlorne paramours;
The eugh, obedient to the benders will;
The birch, for shaftes; the sallow, for the mill;
The mirrhe, sweete-bleeding in the bitter wounde;
The warlike beech; the ash, for nothing ill;
The fruitful olive; and the platane round;
The carver holme; the maple, seldom inward sound."
They sang to him with their lutes. They danced before him with sunny, subtile grace, wreathing him with strange loveliness. They brought him honey and wine in the white cups of lilies, till his brain was drunk with delight; and they kept watch by his moss pillow, while he slept.