"Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,
Love, Love alone can pore
On thy dissolving score
Of harsh half-phrasings,
Blotted ere writ, [351]
And double erasings
Of chords most fit.
Yea, Love, sole music-master blest,
May read thy weltering palimpsest.
To follow Time's dying melodies through,
And never to lose the old in the new,
And ever to solve the discords true --
Love alone can do.
And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying,
And ever Love hears the women's sighing, [361]
And ever sweet knighthood's death-defying,
And ever wise childhood's deep implying,
But never a trader's glozing and lying.
"And yet shall Love himself be heard,
Though long deferred, though long deferred:
O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
Music is Love in search of a word."
____
Baltimore, 1875.
Notes: The Symphony
The `Introduction' (pp. xxviii f., xxxiii ff. [Part III], xlvii [Part IV])
gives, besides the plan of `The Symphony', a detailed statement
of its two themes, -- the evils of the trade-spirit
in the commercial and social world and the need in each of the love-spirit.
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