He bears a great loss and sorrow who has "no ear for music." Into one
great garden of delights he may not go. There needs no flaming sword
to bar the way, since for him there is no gate called Beautiful which
he should seek to enter. Blunted and stolid he stumbles through life
for whom its harp-strings vainly quiver. Yet, on the other hand, what
does he not gain? He loses the concord of sweet sounds, but he is
spared the discord of harsh noises. For the surges of bewildering
harmony and the depths of dissonant disgust, he stands on the levels of
perpetual peace. You are distressed, because in yonder well-trained
orchestra a single voice is pitched one sixteenth of a note too high.
For me, I lean out of my window on summer nights enraptured over the
organ-man who turns poor lost Lilian Dale round and round with his
inexorable crank. It does not disturb me that his organ wheezes and
sputters and grunts. Indeed, there is for me absolutely no wheeze, no
sputter, no grunt. I only see dark eyes of Italy, her olive face, and
her gemmed and lustrous hair. You mutter maledictions on the infernal
noise and caterwauliug. I hear no caterwauliug, but the river-god of
Arno ripples soft songs in the summertide to the lilies that bend above
him. It is the guitar of the cantatrice that murmurs through the
scented, dewy air,--the cantatrice with the laurel yet green on her
brow, gliding over the molten moonlit water-ways of Venice, and
dreamily chiming her well-pleased lute with the plash of the oars of
the gondolier. It is the chant of the flower-girl with large eyes
shining under the palm-branches in the market-place of Milan; and with
the distant echoing notes come the sweet breath of her violets and the
unquenchable odors of her crushed geraniums borne on many a white sail
from the glorified Adriatic. Bronzed cheek and swart brow under my
window, I shall by and by throw you a paltry nickel cent for your
tropical dreams; meanwhile tell me, did the sun of Dante's Florence
give your blood its fierce flow and the tawny hue to your bared and
brawny breast? Is it the rage of Tasso's madness that burns in your
uplifted eyes? Do you take shelter from the fervid noon under the
cypresses of Monte Mario? Will you meet queenly Marguerite with myrtle
wreath and myrtle fragrance, as she wanders through the chestnut vales?
Will you sleep tonight between the colonnades under the golden moon of
Napoli? Go back, O child of the Midland Sea! Go out from this cold
shore, that yields crabbed harvests for your threefold vintages of
Italy. Go, suck the sunshine from Seville oranges under the elms of
Posilippo. Go, watch the shadows of the vines swaying in the
mulberry-trees from Epomeo's gales. Bind the ivy in a triple crown
above Bianca's comely hair, and pipe not so wailingly to the Vikings of
this frigid Norseland.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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