May Byron

“ He wants to do all the talking himself."
"How does he do the boom-boom?" said Robin, wild with curiosity. For he thought he would like to learn how to boom-boom himself. It would silence Mrs. Robin when she scolded him.
But the Water-Lady said, "Sh-s-s-h, go away!" and disappeared inside. She was all in pale pink and gold, like the cuckoo-flowers and king-cups.
Robin wouldn't go away. He suddenly became very obstinate, and determined to find out what the Last-of-the-Bitterns looked like. And he squeezed, and shoved, and slithered between the bulrushes. ”

“ That, indeed, is the sum total of his outward appearance: as for the inward man, it is not to be known save through his writings. Literature and music are the only means of expression, of communication with others, which are possessed by this modest, pensive, reserved maestro, upon whom the sounding titles of Doctor and Professor sit so strangely.
In the unparalleled fervour and romance of his compositions,—in the passionate heart-opening of his letters,—in the sane, wholesome, racy colloquialism of his critiques,—the real Robert Schumann is unfolded. ”

“ There is enough to do in a May garden to occupy the most diligent: and as Coleridge raked and hoed and thinned out and weeded his vegetable beds, with blistered hands and a back that longed for a hinge in it, he was inclined to wish that Lloyd had come as an agricultural rather than a poetical pupil. From time to time he rested on his tool and assimilated with rapt eye the innumerable surrounding touches of simple beauty. He was a man who, like Wordsworth, interested himself in every little trifle. ”

“ If the actual dewy freshness of the Warwickshire water-meadows were not present in the London air—if the wild roses of the Avon-side did not bloom in Holborn—yet Shakespeare had only to close his eyes one moment, to project himself back into his boyhood's scenes. For London was emphatically a "garden city," encircled by forests, and fields, and farms, and wooded hills; and the ecstatic sweetness of an English June was wafted over its cobbled thoroughfares. ”

“ Fanny Brawne enters her mother's house, and John Keats goes into his room and sits down, brooding, brooding. "O," he says, "that something fortunate had ever happened to me or my brothers! Then I might hope—but despair is forced upon me as a habit." And he is only too well aware, that although he is naturally "the very soul of courage and manliness," this habit of despair is growing upon him, and eating his energy away. A wintry chill settles down upon the May-time, and his misery finds vent in lovely lines—
Yet Keats is young, and youth means buoyancy. ”

“ Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,
At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America,
That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul,
What joys! what joys were thine!
and out of the smoke and din of conflict, he believed, should spring "the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon," knit in sublime unity of brotherhood.
Dinner over, Whitman retired awhile to his own apartment: that fearful chaos of pell-mell untidiness which was the delight of its occupant and the despair of Mrs. Stafford. ”

“ Not, perhaps, in the role of a gourmet—but as an artist in the more recondite delicacies of taste and smell. "To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of a sunset," he observed; he coupled the flavour of wine with the beauty of the dawn, and declared that we do not recognise at its full value the great part in life that is played by eating and drinking. "There is a romance about the matter after all," he observed. "Probably the table has more devotees than love; and I am sure food is more generally entertaining than scenery." ”

“ But—"Heavens, Shelley!" cries his host, "what infinite nonsense are you quoting?" and he hastily turns the current of conversation towards more impersonal subjects.
The evening wears on: the guests depart: the clear spring moonlight streams upon the winding Arno. Byron stands dreaming at the open window, the bridges and buildings of Pisa lie still and silver-lit before him: a subtle influence of quietude steals down upon him from the stars. "What nothings we are," he murmurs, "before the least of these stars!" ”

“ The composer's art, moreover, is not stationary at one fixed point—one moment, so to speak, seized and immortalised upon canvas: but has the fluidity and onward movement of actual life, passing with bewildering rapidity of transition from one phase of thought to another, even as life does. And the composer, while he shares with the great prose writer and the poet the power of expressing things marvellously well,—of uttering in beautifully poised and balanced rhythm the whole gamut of human emotion,—yet has a greater power than theirs. ”

“ Sometimes he fell into the stately, almost stilted diction of his great prose pamphlets,—sometimes he spoke in racy English vernacular,—sometimes, warming to his subject, he assumed an almost fiery eloquence. But when, at twelve o'clock, he was escorted downstairs to dinner in the parlour, the metamorphosis was complete. This was no longer the brooding introspective man of the early morning, but one "extreme pleasant in his conversation," almost merry in society so congenial,—the life of the party: abstinent, but not ascetic, having a healthy, human enjoyment of the dishes set before him. ”

“ Shakespeare, through the mouth of Hamlet, was gibing at. Was he decrying actors? Was he contemning audiences? Was he scorching, with bitter disdain, all who wrote for, or acted in, or crowded into playhouses?... The young gallants, uncomfortable and uncertain, were glad when the Play-scene was over, and one arrived at more familiar matters of battle, murder, and sudden death. Too much metaphysics about this Hamlet fellow, so they held. A dramatist should stick to his last, and not drag his hearers into deep waters of conjecture, where a man might well flounder for ever.... ”

“ And each step of the way was a pure joy to him. "What a day!" he murmured, "what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never before so filling me body and soul!" So rhapsodizing inwardly and drinking in the beauty of sight and sound, he proceeded, "still sauntering on, to the spring under the willows—musical as soft clinking glasses—pouring a sizeable stream, pure and clear, out from its vent where the bank arches over like a great brown shaggy eyebrow or mouth-roof—gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly ”

“ The poet is recalled from these rapturous flights to the fugitive sweetness of the present: he is wandering in May meadows, young and impetuous, on fire with hopes, and his heart's beloved beside him. It is almost too good to be true. "I have never known any unalloyed happiness for many days together," he tells Fanny; "the death or sickness of someone has always spoilt my home. I almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain." ”

“ There it once more stands before him as in the Pastoral Symphony: everything is rendered luminous to him by his inner happiness.
They seated themselves upon a grassy bank, and Beethoven discoursed freely of the things dearest to his heart: his keen desire to visit England, and his fear lest his deafness might prove a hopeless obstacle to this. Neate, speaking to him in slow German, close to his left ear, managed to make himself intelligible; while the master expressed his unbounded admiration for everything English, especially Shakespeare, who was his favourite poet. ”

“ Very seldom has the view of the confirmed invalid, the doomed consumptive, been put forth to the world with the frankness with which Stevenson invested it. He has been sometimes charged with a certain lack of reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably, his candour was to the benefitting of mankind: to whom these close views of the inevitable end are rarely possible under such deliberate and clear-headed conditions.
There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal, about Stevenson's treatment of this subject: the same cheerful philosophy bears him up, the same vitality of joy. ”

“ Thomas Poole, his friend and benefactor, was a well-to-do tanner, well-educated and a devout student of literature: he discerned the potentialities of great things in Coleridge, and felt honoured by his acquaintanceship. For the poet had something of that peculiar fascination for more prosaic men, that magnetic charm of personality, which atones for so many minor defects,—which obviates weakness and ill-balance of mind,—which even endears him who is "impossible" from a worldly standpoint, to those of saner and robuster calibre. ”

“ God has always been and will continue to be my helper. I have always had perfect trust in Him, which I will ever preserve." She, and she alone, is aware of all those mysterious clouds of melancholia, those strange sounds of inexplicable music, which brood at times above her darling husband—friend, comrade and lover in one. She, and she only, can banish, as David did from Saul, the terrible phases of irrational depression, and exorcise the evil power which is always lurking ambushed in Schumann's outwardly happy life. ”

“ And he depicted various features of this woman, in various rôles, in play after play: he could not shut her out. Whether he pilloried her dark beauty as Cressida or Cleopatra—whether he masked her wit and spirit under the name of Beatrice or Rosalind—whether he alternately implored or inveighed against her in the Sonnets—he was enthralled by so magnetic a fascination that it influenced his art at all points. Shakespeare the man—Shakespeare the artist—was obsessed by—bound fast in—a hopeless infatuation for a woman whom he knew to be unworthy. ”

“ John Milton's theories of education, which he had expounded at length in pamphlets, were a curious blend of the practical and the ideal. Vastly in advance of his time in his demand for a practical training, he had evolved that "fine definition which has never been improved upon,"—"I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform, justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." ”

“ I do not know the male human being, except Lord Clare, the friend of my infancy, for whom I feel anything that deserves the name. All my others are men-of-the-world friendships." Be that as it may, it is with a warmly cordial expression, and with that peculiarly sweet smile of his, that Byron welcomes his usual visitors,—Captain Williams, Captain Medwin, Taafe the Irishman, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, "the most companionable person under thirty," he has avowed, "that ever I knew." ”

“ The further I ascend from animated nature ... the greater in me becomes the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has nor can have an opposite. God is everywhere, and where is there room for death?
And he determinedly developed in his theory of poetry, his sense of the depths that lie below nature's more superficial aspects. ”

“ No author sits so austerely aloft as to disdain popular applause altogether. Yet a born stylist and a conscious artist, like Stevenson, knew that his most finished work was above and beyond the appreciation of the general public. For money,—though it was a necessity of life to him, and although, with all his recent triumphs, he was not at present earning more than £400 a year,—for money he did not care, except as a means to an end. "Wealth is only useful for two things," he said, "a yacht and a string quartet. Except for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as a man can possibly want." ”