A POWER NOT HERSELF
Yet life's long silence, after song,
Can do thy lyric heart no wrong.
Once broken music fell from thee,
While now--now thou art harmony.
Those notes that soared from thee of old,
Wrapt in dusk wings they ne'er unfold,
Brood vocal in thy clouded eyes;
And in thy bosom's fall and rise--
O poor, sad, sea-like surging breast--
Is song itself made manifest!
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Lost Voice."
A song in the heart is worth two in the book.--"The Silver Poppy."
An astonished city awoke one morning to find that Cordelia Vaughan was a
poetess. For some time it had been rumored persistently about that the
beautiful young authoress from Kentucky was soon to place a new and
wonderful novel of modern life and manners before the reading world. At
a time, too, when the talk of her play was on every tongue, the public
press was seldom without an anticipatory note or two about Cordelia's
next effort. But when, instead of either novel or study, the Sunday
issue of a commendably enterprising New York newspaper came out with her
now well-known The Need of War, those admiring followers--and they
were, indeed, no small army--whom she had won over by the strength and
charm of her first book, turned to one another bewildered and asked what
new token of versatility and genius this wonderful girl writer from the
South would next fling before them.
The Need of War, with a striking portrait of its author in a black
velvet and Irish point gown, a loose Russian coat of pale gray Venetian
cloth, surmounted by an immense plumed hat of beaver, occupied, with a
luridly symbolic figure of "War" in the background, an entire page of
the newspaper in which it first appeared.
While The Need of War was, perhaps, slightly above the heads of the
audience to which that particular journal appealed, the more discerning
critics and paragraphers soon saw that the poem was in reality an
emotional and vitalized appreciation of the divinity of struggle, and,
seeming to strike, as it did, the key-note of our American strenuous
life, the lines crept from city to city, appeared by special arrangement
in one of the popular magazines, and eventually percolated throughout
the country. The power and vigor of the flowing blank verse could not be
denied--in fact, there were those who regarded it as remarkable that
such metrical skill could be shown by a hand unknown to years of patient
and laborious exercise. The beauty of the poem, however, continued to
evoke comment from the press, and even those more academic periodicals
which had not deigned to take notice of her earlier work in the field
of prose now opened their pages to an occasional discussion of Cordelia
Vaughan's new treatment of an old problem.
It all resulted in a very unlooked-for shower of newspaper articles from
Cordelia's clipping agency. These told in many incongruously different
ways just how the poem came to be written, just what its author had
planned it should mean, and just how remarkable it was that the
thundering forth of such a sermon should fall to the lot of a young and
fragile American girl.
Cordelia, remembering the source of all this unlooked-for publicity, sat
in melancholy apprehension amid these notices, frightened a little at
the stir she had made, and made so unwittingly, in the world of letters.
Hartley, too, she soon found, fully shared in her own depression of
spirits over the episode. So she decided it was best not even to speak
of it, when it could be avoided, before him. While alone with her own
thoughts she vainly attempted to school herself to regard it all in the
words of one of her critics, "as only the musical _entr' acte_ in the
drama of a busy literary life."
When Repellier looked searchingly at Cordelia, and asked her, while
speaking of The Need of War, how she had ever come by a touch so
decisive and so powerful, she smiled quietly and said:
"Did you ever hear of Ægles?"
Repellier had not.
"Well, according to that old Greek myth, Mr. Repellier, Ægles was a
wrestler. He was born dumb, they say, and hadn't ever uttered a word in
all his life. But one day in the arena he saw an athlete resort to some
piece of dishonest trickery--I can't remember just what it was. Then, in
his passion to denounce that trickery, he broke the strings of his
tongue, and suddenly spoke."