Song.
I confess I was a little dismayed to find what a solemn
turn the club-stories had taken. But this dismay
lasted for a moment only; for I saw that Adela was
deeply interested, again wearing the look that indicates
abstracted thought and feeling. I said to myself:
“This is very different mental fare from what
you have been used to, Adela.”
But she seemed able to mark, learn, and inwardly digest
it, for she had the appearance of one who is stilled
by the strange newness of her thoughts. I was
sure that she was now experiencing a consciousness
of existence quite different from anything she had
known before. But it had a curious outcome.
For, when the silence began to grow painful, no one
daring to ask a question, and Mrs. Cathcart had resumed
her knitting, Adela suddenly rose, and going to the
piano, struck a few chords, and began to sing.
The song was one of Heine’s strange, ghost-dreams,
so unreal in everything but feeling, and therefore,
as dreams, so true. Why did she choose such a
song after what we had been listening to? I accounted
for it by the supposition that, being but poorly provided
as far as variety in music went, this was the only
thing suggested to her by the tone of the paper, and,
therefore, the nearest she could come to it. It
served, however, to make a change and a transition;
which was, as I thought, very desirable, lest any
of the company should be scared from attending the
club; and I resolved that I would divert the current,
next time, if I could.
This was what Adela sang; and the singing of it was
evidently a relief to her:
I dreamt of the daughter of a king,
With a cheek white, wet, and
chill;
Under the limes we sat murmuring,
And holding each other so
still!
“Oh! not thy father’s sceptre
of gold,
Nor yet his shining throne,
Nor his diamond crown that glitters cold—
’Tis thyself I want,
my own!”
“Oh! that is too good,” she
answered me;
“I lie in the grave
all day;
And only at night I come to thee,
For I cannot keep away.”
It was something that she had volunteered a song,
whatever it was. But it is a misfortune that,
in writing a book, one cannot give the music of a
song. Perhaps, by the time that music has its
fair part in education, this may be done. But,
meantime, we mention the fact of a song, and then
give the words, as if that were the song. The
music is the song, and the words are no more than
the saddle on which the music sits, the singer being
the horse, who could do without a saddle well enough.—May
Adela forgive the comparison!—At the same
time, a true-word song has music of its own, and is
quite independent, for its music, both of that which
it may beget, and of that with which it may be associated.
As she rose, she glanced towards the doctor, and said:
