Elizabeth Sara Sheppard

“ Santonio's cantabile, whatever they say of Ernst or of Sivori, is superior to either. There is a manly passion in his playing that never condescends to coquette with the submissive strings; it wailed enough that night for anything, and yet never degenerated into imitation. I knew directly I heard him draw the first quickening, shivering chord—shivering to my heart—I knew that the violin must become my master, or I its own.
Davy, still pale, but radiant with sympathetic pleasure, continued to glance down upon me, and Clara's eyes were lost in drooping to the ground. ”

“ How mysterious that no one should talk about her as a very great wonder! She is almost as great a wonder as Miss Benette. I should like to know whether Mr. Davy has seen her dance."
But though I called it dancing, as I supposed I must, it was totally unlike all that I had considered dancing to be. She seemed now suspended in the air, her feet flew out with the spangles like a shower of silver sparks, her arms were flung above her, and the silver bells, as she floated by me without even brushing my coat, clinked with a thrilling monotone against Clara's voice. ”

“ I thought, sir, somehow that you did not teach."
"Understand me, then, that what I say I say to satisfy you: you are better as you are, better than you could be with me. I am a wanderer, and it is not my right to teach; I am bound to another craft, and the only one for the perfecting of which it is not my right to call myself poor. Do you understand, Charles?"
"I think, sir, that you mean you make music, and that therefore you have no time for the dirty work."
He broke into a burst of laughter, like joy-bells. "There is as much dirty work, however, in what you call making music. ”

“ Again some hidden hand had touched the gas, which burst in tongues of splendor that shook themselves immediately over us; then was the orchestra a blaze defined as day. But still dark, and darkening, like a vast abyss, lay the hall before us; and the great chandelier was itself a blot, like a mystery hung in circumambient nothingness.
I was lost in the light around me, and striving to pierce into that mystery beyond, when a whisper thrilled me: "Now, Charles, I must leave you. You are Mr. Auchester at present. Stand firm and sing on. Look alone at the conductor, and think alone of your part. ”

“ Do you like me, Charles,—well enough to wish to know me?"
I can never describe the innocent regality of his manner here,—it was something never to be imagined, that voice in that peculiar key.
"Sir, I know how many friends you must have, and how they must admire you. I don't think any of them love you as I do, and always did ever since that day. I wish I could tell you, but it's of no use. I can't, though I quite burn to tell you, and to make you know. I do love you better than I love my life, and you are the only person I love better than music. ”

“ The bed was perfectly plain, with no curtains and but a head-board, a mattress, looking as hard as the ground, and a very singular portrait, over the head, of a gentleman, in line-engraving, which does not intellectualize the contour. This worthy wore a flowing wig and a shirt bedecked with frills.
"That is John Sebastian Bach," said Lenhart Davy,—"at least, they told me so in Dresden. I keep it because it means to be he."
"Ah!" I replied; for I had heard the jaw-breaking name, which is dearer to many (though they, alas! too few, are scattered) than the sound of Lydian measures. ”

“ I could see she was quite puzzled with pleasure, but more than all she seemed lost in watching Clara's calm, cloudless face.
"Which of the pieces do you like best?" asked Miss Benette at last, after we had fully examined all.
"Oh! it is really impossible to say; but if I could prefer, I should confess, perhaps, that this is the most exquisitely imagined;" and Millicent pointed to a veil of thin white net, with the border worked in the most delicate shades of green floss silk, a perfect wreath of myrtle-leaves; and the white flowers seemed to tremble amidst that shadowy garland. ”

“ You seem to know everything that everybody says."
"No; it is because I see so few people that I remember all they say."
"Are you not at all fonder of music than of dancing? Oh, Miss Benette!"
She laughed heartily, showing one or two of her twinkling teeth.
"I am fonder of music than of anything that lives or is, or rather I am not fond of it at all; but it is my life, though I am only a young child in that life at present. But I am rather fond of dancing, I must confess." ”

“ The violet holds the blue, but also that deeper soul by the blue alone made visible. All sounds seem to sleep in one, when that is the violin."
"You are speaking too well; it makes me afraid you will be disappointed," I said in my first surprise. Then, feeling I had blundered, "I mean in me."
"That would make no difference. Music is, and is eternal. We cannot add one moment to its eternity, nor by our inaptitude diminish the proper glory of our art. Is it not so, sir?" ”

“ And the more thou busiest thyself in mechanical preparation, the more leisure thou shalt discover so to observe; the more serene and brilliant shall thy imagination find itself,—a clear sky filled with the sunshine of that enthusiasm which spreads itself over every object in earth and heaven.
"Again, of music, or the tone-art, as thou hast heard me name it, never let thy conception cease. Never believe thou hast adopted the trammels of a pursuit bounded by progress because thine own progress bounds thine own pursuit. ”

“ Clara smiled. "Thank you for saying so." Miss Lawrence had risen to go, yet she still detained herself, as having something left to do or say.
"I should like to see you both again, and to hear you. You, Miss Benette, I am sure of; but I also expect to discover something very wonderful about Master Charles Auchester. You are to be a singer, of course?" she quickly said to me.
"I hope I shall be a player, if I am to be anything."
"What, another Santonio, or another Milans-André?"
"Oh! neither; but I must learn the violin." ”

“ In a word, she has expressed the very spirit of music in language, and in a language so pure and adoring as to amount to worship. In Disraeli's words, it is "the imaginative classic of the divine art." To those who have not lost their early enthusiasms, this little book will come like the perfume of a flower, or some tone of a well-remembered voice, recalling the old days and reviving an old pleasure. ”

“ He has right, if he thinks them cold, to find them alone beautiful." He spoke as if in sleep.
"Sir, I do not know what you mean, for I never heard even Milans-André."
"You are to hear him, then; it is positively needful."
Again the raillery pointed every word, as if arrows "dipped in balm."
"I mean that I scarcely know what those keys are like, for I never heard them really played, except by one young lady. I did not find the 'Tone-Wreath' cold, but I thought, when she played with Santonio, that her playing was cold,—cold compared with his; for he was playing, as you know, sir, the violin." ”

“ But what shocked me, had been the denuding treatment of my all-glorious festival,—my romance of perfectibility, my ideal world. How they talked—for I cannot remember the phrases they strung into cold chains, at much greater length than I record—of what had been for me as heaven outspread above in mystery and beauty, and as a heaven-imaging deep beneath, beyond my fathom, yet whereon I had exulted as on the infinite unknown! they making it instead a reality not itself all lovely,—a revelation not itself complete. ”

“ For just then starting and sitting up, I beheld a lamp upon the table, and heard Santonio's voice in the entry, haranguing a waiter about a coach. But looking round and round into every corner I saw no Davy, and I cannot describe how I felt when I found he had kissed me asleep, and gone away altogether. As Santonio re-entered, the sweet cordiality with which he tempered his address to me was more painful than the roughest demeanor would have been just then, thrilling as I was with the sympathy I had never drawn except from Davy's heart, and which I had never lost since I had known him. ”

“ I am very matter of fact, I know; but that is better than to be commonplace,—and not the same thing, though they are often confounded. If the real be the ideal, then is the matter of fact the true. This ghost of an aphorism stalked forth from my brain, whose chambers are unfraught with book-lore as with worldly knowledge; and to lay its phantomship, I am compelled to submit it to paper.
I could not make Clara attend to me until all was over. Then she said to me of her own accord,—
"Little Laura is ill; she caught cold after she danced the other evening, and has been in bed since." ”

“ I had not been mixed in the musical world; for there is such a world as is not heaven, but earth, in the realm of tone, and tone-artists must pass, as it were, through it. How few receive not from it some touch, some taint of its clinging presence! How few, indeed, infuse into it—while in it they are necessitated to linger—the spirit of their heavenly home! 159 Dimly, of a truth, had the life of music been then opened to my ken; but it seemed at that moment again enclosed, and I fell back into the first darkness. ”

“ But it was a hand too refined for model beauty, too thin and rare for the youth, the almost boyhood, that shone on his forehead and in his unwearied eye. The brightness of heaven seemed to pour itself upon my soul as I sat beside him and felt that no one in the whole world was at that moment so near him as I. He pulled a few rushes from the margin, and began to weave a sort of basket. So fleetly his fingers twisted and untwisted themselves that it was as if he were accustomed to do nothing but sit and weave green rushes the livelong day. ”

“ I had expected a tall man,—broad; here was a little gentleman no bigger than Davy, with a firm and defiant tread, clad in a garment that wrapped about his feet, in color brown, that passed well into the atmosphere of his cave. He confronted Santonio as if that wonder were a little girl in petticoats, with no more reverence and not less benevolence, for he laid one arm upon his shoulder and embraced him, as in England only very young and tender brothers embrace, or a son embraces his father. There was complaisance together with condescension in his aspect ”

“ The door beneath the orchestra was shut, but every instant or two a hand turned the lock outside; one agitated face peeped in, then another, but were immediately withdrawn. I scarcely suppose the perfect silence lasted three minutes; it was like an electrical suspension, and as quickly snapped. The surcharging spleen of the audience began to break in a murmuring, humming, and buzzing, from centre to gallery. The confusion of forms and faces became a perfect dream, it dazzled me dizzy, and I felt quite sick. A hundred fans began to ply in the reserved seats, the gentlemen bent over the ladies ”

“ No, of course not; there is no right to say so anywhere now, except in Germany, for here alone has music its priesthood, and here alone, though little enough here, is reverentially regarded as the highest form of life, subserving to the purposes of the soul. But thou art right to believe entirely so, that, young as thou art, thou mayest keep thy purity, and mighty may be thy aptness to discern what is new to thee in the old, no less than what answers to the old in the new. ”

“ We arose, and again walked on.
"Sir, I would rather have the basket than the strawberries."
"I wish a little child may be of your mind. Were you happy, Charles, when you were a little child?"
"Sir, I was always longing to be a man. I never considered what it was to be a little child."
"Thou art a boy, and that is to be a man-child,—the beautiful fate! But it is thy beautiful fate to teach others also, as only children teach."
"I, sir,—how?"
"Charles, a man may be always longing to be an angel, and never consider what it is to be a man." ”