“Who carry music in their heart
Through dusty lane and wrangling mart,
Plying their daily task with busier feet,
Because their secret souls a holier strain repeat.”
It would be interesting to have the statistics of what number, out of
all the human stream that pours into the city every morning coming to
their work, are singing inwardly.
How many are thinking tunefully? How many are moving rhythmically? And
how many are going, as dead drays and carts, rumbling lifelessly to
their tasks?
It is good that the greater part of the world is in love. For love is
the Song of Songs. To the young lover Nature is transformed. Some
Ithuriel has touched the deadly commonplace; all is miraculous. The
moon, the dead companion to our earth, the pale and washed-out pilgrim
of the sky, has been changed into a silver-fronted fairy whose beams
thrill him with a heady enchantment. Every breeze has its secret. The
woods, the houses, all men and women are notes of that sweet harmony
that fills him.
“Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow their heads when he did sing.”
Every man is an Orpheus, so he but carry about in him an inward melody.
There is for him “a new heaven and a new earth.”
This world is an insolvable puzzle to human reason. It is full of the
most absurd antinomies, the most distressing cruelties, the most amazing
contradictions. No wonder men’s minds take refuge in stubborn stoicism,
in agnosticism, in blank unfaith.
There is no intellectual faith, no rational creed, no logical belief.
FAITH COMES ONLY THROUGH MUSIC. It is when the heart sings that the mind
is cleared. Then the pieces of the infinite chaos of things drop into
order, confusion ceases, they march, dance, coming into radiant concord.
Marcus Aurelius, that curious anomaly of the Roman world, perfect
dreamer in an age of iron, was rich in inner music. The thought in him
beamed like a ray of creative harmony over the disordered crowd of men
and events.
“Welcome all that comes,” he wrote, “untoward though it may seem, for it
leads you to the goal, the health of the world order. Nothing will
happen to me that is not in accord with nature.”
None but so noble a mind can see a noble universe, a noble humanity, a
noble God.
What a drop from such a level to the place of the mad sensualists and
pleasure-mongers who only know
“To seize on life’s dull joys from a strange fear,
Lest losing them all’s lost and none remains!”
What a whirl of cabaret music, what motion and forced laughter, what
wild discord of hot viands, drugged drinks, and myriad-tricked lubricity
it takes to galvanize us when our souls are dry and cracked and
tuneless!
Have you ever had the feelings of Hazlitt? “Give me,” he said, “the
clear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a
winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to
thinking! I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”
Whoever does something that makes the souls of men and women sing within
them does more to make this earth habitable and this life tolerable than
all the army of them that widen our comforts and increase our luxuries.