ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring as Baralipton.

It is hard to stand alone in an age like this, - (constituted to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut,) to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art, which is said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. Yet, rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty.

I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring stripes, while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive - mine at least will spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common-life sounds; and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience!) immovable, or affecting some faint emotion till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept us, with none of the enjoyment; or like that

-Party in a parlour

All silent, and all damned.

Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension. Words are

something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a-dying; to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime - these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music.

-

I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable: · afterwards followeth the languor and the oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches: "Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amabilis insania, and mentis gratissimus error. A most incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done. So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them - winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at the last the scene turns upon a sudden, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions, they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist."

;

Something like this "scene turning" I have experienced at the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend Novwho, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor heavens.

When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim Abbey, some five-andthirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension (whether it be that, in which the Psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings - or that other which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind) a holy calm pervadeth me. I am for the time

-rapt above earth,

And possess joys not promised at my birth.

But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his "heavenly," — still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps, — I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wits' end; - clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me priests, altars, censers dazzle before me - the genius of his religion hath me in her toils a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous he is Pope, and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a shePope too, tri-coroneted like himself! - I am converted, and yet a Protestant; malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person: -I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus Gog and Magog - what not? — till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the ration

at once

alities of a purer faith; and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasantcountenanced host and hostess.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864)

ÆSOP AND RHODOPÈ

SECOND CONVERSATION

Esop. And so, our fellow-slaves are given to contention on the score of dignity?

Rhodope. I do not believe they are much addicted to contention: for, whenever the good Xanthus hears a signal of such misbehaviour, he either brings a scourge into the midst of them or sends our lady to scold them smartly for it.

Æsop. Admirable evidence against their propensity!

Rhodope. I will not have you find them out so, nor laugh at them.

Esop. Seeing that the good Xanthus and our lady are equally fond of thee, and always visit thee both together, the girls, however envious, cannot well or safely be arrogant, but must of necessity yield the first place to thee.

Rhodope. They indeed are observant of the kindness thus bestowed upon me: yet they afflict me by taunting me continually with what I am unable to deny.

Æsop. If it is true, it ought little to trouble thee; if untrue, less. I know, for I have looked into nothing else of late, no evil can thy heart have admitted: a sigh of thine before the gods would remove the heaviest that could fall on it. Pray tell me what it may be. Come, be courageous; be cheerful. I can easily pardon a smile if thou impleadest me of curiosity.

Rhodope. They remark to me that enemies or robbers took them forcibly from their parents . . . and that . . . and that . . .

Esop. Likely enough: what then? Why desist from speaking? why cover thy face with thy hair and hands? Rhodope! Rhodope! dost thou weep moreover?

Rhodope. It is so sure!

Esop. Was the fault thine?

Rhodope. O that it were! . . . if there was

any.

Esop. While it pains thee to tell it, keep thy silence; but when utterance is a solace, then impart it.

Rhodope. They remind me (oh! who could

have had the cruelty to relate it?) that my father, my own dear father..

Esop. Say not the rest: I know it: his day

was come.

Rhodope. . . . sold me, sold me. You start: you did not at the lightning last night, nor at the rolling sounds above. And do you, generous Æsop! do you also call a misfortune a disgrace?

Esop. If it is, I am among the most disgraceful of men. Didst thou dearly love thy

father?

Rhodope. All loved him. He was very fond of me.

Æsop. And yet sold thee! sold thee to a stranger!

Rhodope. He was the kindest of all kind fathers, nevertheless. Nine summers ago, you may have heard perhaps, there was a grievous famine in our land of Thrace.

Æsop. I remember it perfectly. Rhodope. O poor Esop! and were you too famishing in your native Phrygia?

Esop. The calamity extended beyond the narrow sea that separates our countries. My appetite was sharpened; but the appetite and the wits are equally set on the same grindstone.

Rhodope. I was then scarcely five years old: my mother died the year before: my father sighed at every funereal, but he sighed more deeply at every bridal, song. He loved me because he loved her who bore me: and yet I made him sorrowful whether I cried or smiled. If ever I vexed him, it was because I would not play when he told me, but made him, by my weeping, weep again.

Esop. And yet he could endure to lose thee! he, thy father! Could any other? could any who lives on the fruits of the earth, endure it? O age, that art incumbent over me! blessed be thou; thrice blessed! Not that thou stillest the tumults of the heart, and promisest eternal calm, but that, prevented by thy beneficence, I never shall experience this only intolerable wretchedness.

Rhodope. Alas! alas!

Æsop. Thou art now happy, and shouldst not utter that useless exclamation.

Rhodope. You said something angrily and vehemently when you stepped aside. Is it not enough that the handmaidens doubt the kindness of my father? Must so virtuous and so wise a man as Esop blame him also?

Esop. Perhaps he is little to be blamed; certainly he is much to be pitied.

Rhodope. Kind heart! on which mine must never rest!

Æsop. Rest on it for comfort and for counsel when they fail thee: rest on it, as the deities on the breast of mortals, to console and purify it.

Rhodope. Could I remove any sorrow from it, I should be contented.

Esop. Then be so; and proceed in thy narrative.

Rhodope. Bear with me a little yet. My thoughts have overpowered my words, and now themselves are overpowered and scattered.

Forty-seven days ago (this is only the fortyeighth since I beheld you first) I was a child; I was ignorant, I was careless.

Esop. If these qualities are signs of childhood, the universe is a nursery.

Rhodope. Affliction, which makes many wiser, had no such effect on me. But reverence and love (why should I hesitate at the one avowal more than at the other?) came over me, to ripen my understanding.

Esop. O Rhodopè! we must loiter no longer upon this discourse.

Rhodope. Why not?

Esop. Pleasant is yonder beanfield, seen over the high papyrus when it waves and bends: deep laden with the sweet heaviness of its odour is the listless air that palpitates dizzily above it: but Death is lurking for the slumberer beneath its blossoms.

Rhodope. You must not love then! . . . but may not I?

Esop. We will . . . but . .

Rhodope. We! O sound that is to vibrate on my breast forever! O hour! happier than all other hours since time began! O gracious Gods! who brought me into bondage!

Esop. Be calm, be composed, be circumspect. We must hide our treasure that we may not lose it.

Rhodope. I do not think that you can love me; and I fear and tremble to hope so. Ah, yes; you have said you did. But again you only look at me, and sigh as if you repented.

Esop. Unworthy as I may be of thy fond regard, I am not unworthy of thy fullest confidence: why distrust me?

Rhodope. Never will I . . . never, never. To know that I possess your love, surpasses all other knowledge, dear as is all that I receive from you. I should be tired of my own voice if I heard it on aught beside: and, even yours is less melodious in any other sound than Rhodope.

Esop. Do such little girls learn to flatter? Rhodope. Teach me how to speak, since you could not teach me how to be silent.

Æsop. Speak no longer of me, but of thyself; and only of things that never pain thee. Rhodope. Nothing can pain me now.

Esop. Relate thy story then, from infancy. Rhodope. I must hold your hand: I am afraid of losing you again.

Esop. Now begin. Why silent so long? Rhodope. I have dropped all memory of what is told by me and what is untold.

Esop. Recollect a little. I can be patient with this hand in mine.

Rhodope. I am not certain that help to recollection.

yours is any

Esop. Shall I remove it? Rhodope. O! now I think I can recall the whole story. What did you say? did you ask any question?

Esop. None, excepting what thou hast answered.

Rhodope. Never shall I forget the morning when my father, sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his last measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth fringed with silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked wistfully into the cornchest. I, who thought there was something worth seeing, looked in also, and, finding it empty, expressed my disappointment, not thinking however about the corn. A faint and transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me, and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the glittering fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; and I know not what flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some he placed in my bosom, and some in my hair. But I told him with captious pride, first that I could arrange them better, and again that I would have only the white. However, when he had selected all the white, and I had placed a few of them according to my fancy, I told him (rising in my slipper) he might crown me with the remainder. The splendour of my apparel gave me a sensation of au thority. Soon as the flowers had taken their station on my head, I expressed a dignified satisfaction at the taste displayed by my father, just as if I could have seen how they appeared! But he knew that there was at least as much pleasure as pride in it, and perhaps we divided the latter (alas! not both) pretty equally. He now took me into the market-place, where

a concourse of people was waiting for the purchase of slaves. Merchants came and looked at me; some commending, others disparaging; but all agreeing that I was slender and delicate, that I could not live long, and that I should give much trouble. Many would have bought the chlamys, but there was something less salable in the child and flowers.

Æsop. Had thy features been coarse and thy voice rustic, they would all have patted thy cheeks and found no fault in thee.

Rhodope. As it was, every one had bought exactly such another in time past, and been a loser by it. At these speeches I perceived the flowers tremble slightly on my bosom, from my father's agitation. Although he scoffed at them, knowing my healthiness, he was troubled interfally, and said many short prayers, not very unlike imprecations, turning his head aside. Proud was I, prouder than ever, when at last several talents were offered for me, and by the very man who in the beginning had undervalued me the most, and prophesied the worst of me. My father scowled at him, and refused the money. I thought he was playing a game, and began to wonder what it could be, since I never had seen it played before. Then I fancied it might be some celebration because plenty had returned to the city, insomuch that my father had bartered the last of the corn he hoarded. I grew more and more delighted at the sport. But soon there advanced an elderly man, who said gravely, "Thou hast stolen this child: her vesture alone is worth above a hundred drachmas. Carry her home again to her parents, and do it directly, or Nemesis and the Eumenides will overtake thee." Knowing the estimation in which my father had always been holden by his fellow-citizens, I laughed again, and pinched his ear. He, although naturally choleric, burst forth into no resentment at these reproaches, but said calmly, "I think I know thee by name, O guest! Surely thou art Xanthus the Samian. Deliver this child from famine."

Again I laughed aloud and heartily; and, thinking it was now my part of the game, I held out both my arms and protruded my whole body towards the stranger. He would not receive me from my father's neck, but he asked me with benignity and solicitude if I was hungry: at which I laughed again, and more than ever: for it was early in the morning, soon after the first meal, and my father had nourished me most carefully and plentifully in all the days of the famine. But

Xanthus, waiting for no answer, took out of a sack, which one of his slaves carried at his side, a cake of wheaten bread and a piece of honey-comb, and gave them to me. I held the honey-comb to my father's mouth, thinking it the most of a dainty. He dashed it to the ground; but, seizing the bread, he began to devour it ferociously. This also I thought was in play; and I clapped my hands at his distortions. But Xanthus looked on him like one afraid, and smote the cake from him, crying aloud, “Name the price." My father now placed me in his arms, naming a price much below what the other had offered, saying, "The gods are ever with thee, O Xanthus; therefore to thee do I consign my child." But while Xanthus was counting out the silver, my father seized the cake again, which the slave had taken up and was about to replace in the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the taste and the delay. Suddenly there arose much tumult. Turning round in the old woman's bosom who had received me from Xanthus, I saw my beloved father struggling on the ground, livid and speechless. The more violent my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me away; and many were soon between us. Little was I suspicious that he had suffered the pangs of famine long before: alas! and he had suffered them for me. Do I weep while I am telling you they ended? I could not have closed his eyes; I was too young; but I might have received his last breath; the only comfort of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him blamable, O Æsop?

Esop. It was sublime humanity: it was forbearance and self-denial which even the immortal gods have never shown us. He could endure to perish by those torments which alone are both acute and slow; he could number the steps of death and miss not one: but he could never see thy tears, nor let thee see his. O weakness above all fortitude! Glory to the man who rather bears a grief corroding his breast, than permits it to prowl beyond, and to prey on the tender and compassionate! Women commiserate the brave, and men the beautiful. The dominion of Pity has usually this extent, no wider. Thy father was exposed to the obloquy not only of the malicious, but also of the ignorant and thoughtless, who condemn in the unfortunate what they applaud in the prosperous. There is no shame in poverty or in slavery, if we neither make ourselves poor by our improvidence nor slaves by our venality. The lowest and highest of

the human race are sold: most of the intermediate are also slaves, but slaves who bring no money in the market.

Rhodope. Surely the great and powerful are never to be purchased: are they?

Esop. It may be a defect in my vision, but I cannot see greatness on the earth. What they tell me is great and aspiring, to me seems little and crawling. Let me meet thy question with another. What monarch gives his daughter for nothing? Either he receives stone walls and unwilling cities in return, or he barters her for a parcel of spears and horses and horsemen, waving away from his declining and helpless age young joyous life, and trampling down the freshest and the sweetest memories. Midas in the highth of prosperity would have given his daughter to Lycaon, rather than to the gentlest, the most virtuous, the most intelligent of his subjects. Thy father threw wealth aside, and, placing thee under the protection of Virtue, rose up from the house of Famine to partake in the festivals of the Gods.

Release my neck, O Rhodopè! for I have other questions to ask of thee about him. Rhodope. To hear thee converse on him in such a manner, I can do even that.

Esop. Before the day of separation was he never sorrowful? Did he never by tears or silence reveal the secret of his soul?

Rhodope. I was too infantine to perceive or imagine his intention. The night before I became the slave of Xanthus, he sat on the edge of my bed. I pretended to be asleep: he moved away silently and softly. I saw him collect in the hollow of his hand the crumbs I had wasted on the floor, and then eat them, and then look if any were remaining. I thought he did so out of fondness for me, remembering that, even before the famine, he had often swept up off the table the bread I had broken, and had made me put it between his lips. I would not dissemble very long, but said:

"Come, now you have wakened me, you must sing me asleep again, as you did when I was little."

He smiled faintly at this, and, after some delay, when he had walked up and down the chamber, thus began:

"I will sing to thee one song more, my wakeful Rhodope! my chirping bird! over whom is no mother's wing! That it may lull thee asleep, I will celebrate no longer, as in the days of wine and plenteousness, the glory of Mars, guiding in their invisibly rapid onset the dappled steeds of Rhesus. What hast thou