Rachmaninoff, Marilyn Monroe and Milan Kundera; A Fantasia

In the 1955 film called "The Seven Year Itch," the character Richard Sherman (played by Tom Ewell imagines that he is able to seduce "The Girl," who is played by Marilyn Monroe. The plan for the seduction: classical music.

Sherman rejects a disc by Debussy and passes over Ravel before finding Stravinsky. But upon reflection; "Stravinsky'll only scare her."

It is the second piano concerto by Rachmaninoff that if perfect. As the bell-chords that open the work move into the opening theme Marilyn Monroe comes into focus...it is a fantasy sequence.

She wears a tiger-skin dress and is smoking a cigarette. Sherman reclines at the piano in a smoking jacket that looks like it came from the closet of Hugh Heffner. The conversation is deliberately campy and fabulous:

"Rachmaninoff... It isn't fair... Every time I hear it, I go to pieces... It shakes me, it quakes me. It makes me feel goose-pimply all over. I don't know where I am or who I am or what I'm doing. Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't ever stop!"

This scene is a lovely parody of what Milan Kundera calls "Homo Sentimentalis" in his novel "Immortality:"

"Homo Sentimentalis cannot be defined as a man with feelings (for we all have feelings), but as a man who has raised feelings to a category of value. As soon as feelings are seen as a value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on out values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings."

"As soon as we want to feel...feeling is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling."

"Europe: great music and homo sentimentalis. Twins nurtured side by side in the same cradle. Music taught the European not only a richness of feeling, but also the worship of his feelings and his feeling self."

It takes Marilyn Monroe to play homo sentimentalis to the perfect laugh.

A "Kreutzer Sonata" alternative with slightly lower tuning; A439

It is the second movement of the infamous Kreutzer Sonata that becomes the focus of an unusual story in a charming book of fiction written in 1900 called "A439; Being the Autobiography of a Piano." The book contains a series of 23 chapters with a prologue and epilogue written by various authors and edited by Algernon Rose.

The premise is that a piano is able to write its own story, and it is dedicated "to my tuners good, bad, and indifferent." My favorite title: "She Kissed my Cold Keys."

One of the stories, "How I helped Angus Mackay to Success," by J. C. H. Macbeth of Aberdeen, centers on how the piano comes to the assistance of a young violinist with whom it sympathizes:

"The violinist was Angus Mackay, who had recently fallen in love with and married a very charming young lady. Neither of them was endowed liberally with the good things of this world, but, in their youthful rashness, they had not stopped to consider the prosaic, unromantic question of ways and means, with the result that they were finding it a bitter struggle to make both ends meet. The supreme moment of the young husband's life was now at hand, as the violinist whom Mr. Klug had engaged to play at Herr Flügelbrecher's recital that evening, had found himself unable to appear, and Mackay had been hastily sent for to take his place."

As Flügelbrecher plays the piano the second movement of the Kruetzer sonata, the piano notices a mistake (the piano has, after all, played the work countless times), and decides to help cue the violinist.



"When they reached the glorious Andante I thought that surely Flügelbrecher would allow his artistic feelings to triumph but no, his playing of the opening bars was positively slovenly; and when he came to the ten bars solo, before the second subject [0:49], he hastened the tempo considerably. To my dismay, Mackay did not come in at the end of those ten bars, but seemed to lose himself. The note be should have played was C [1:19], the dominant of the keynote. I determined to help Angus, and, as Flügelbrecher had left my vibrating strings free by holding down the sustaining pedal, I saw my opportunity. I made a supreme effort, and, taking a liberty my designer had done his best to render impossible, I made my overtones so powerful that the dominant C started vibrating loudly enough to reach Mackay's ear, and supply the cue I was anxious to give him, and thus he was able to resume correctly.

"This narrow escape of a breakdown, instead of disconcerting him, seemed to give the violinist more confidence, and he finished the Andante and Variations as if the muse Euterpe herself had inspired him."

This musical pointer is linked to an unusual and often unnoticed place within a work that unfolds like an English Garden. The author needed an entrance on a pitch sustained long enough for the "cue." He also had to find a place that could be referenced in the imagination of his musical readers as they had the book in hand.

Anyway, you've gotta love a piano that is willing to make a "supreme effort."

Music for the Marriage of an Econometrician

Ronan O'Reilly is an econometrician in the Richard Powers novel "Plowing the Dark." He is developing a software system that can predict complex systems, like oil prices, into the distant future. What he cannot predict is that Maura, his lover will no longer wait for him as he codes in the isolation of other fully obsessive coders in Seattle. She will marry another man.

"Stephen is probably no you," she writes to him, "but then again, you're no you, either. At any rate, you're not here anymore are you?"

O'Reilly had "failed to predict the obvious." Lost in thought he makes four passes past his apartment before entering it again to find the one CD that was to be the recessional music played for their own wedding.

Cantata 197, the 6th movement. "A bass aria, for Nach der Trauung (after the wedding), rolling in innocence, sung by a bass whose perfect, amused intonation declared that he had never lived anywhere but here, his vocal chords squarely at home in the bungled, compromised, roundly resonant place nearest to hand."



The music that is quoted begins at [16:12].

O du angenehmes Paar, (O you sweet delightful pair)
Dir wird eitel Heil begegnen, (May all happiness caress you)
Gott wird dich aus Zion segnen (May God from Zion bless you)
Und dich leiten immerdar (and lead you evermore)

Figuration opens this aria in a state of complexity laid upon simple, slowing changing chords. It is music of sweet contradiction.

The opening line is set twice; addressed individually to the couple. The first line is echoed at [0:57] then connected breathlessly to the next three lines which are presented together, then echoed together [1:22] after a strange passing dissonance.

O you sweet, delightful pair.

"O'Reilly raised his ethereal stemware of now-imaginary ambrosia and toasted the pair in question, across a distance that no amount of technology would ever be able to close." (p.300-302).

An Arrangement that Conjures the Past; Beethoven's Op. 104 in "An Equal Music"

In "An Equal Music," by Vikram Seth," Beethoven's arrangement of the Op. 1 No. 3 Piano Trio (which was published as his Op. 104), becomes an integral part of the storyline.

Soon after his memory of Julia is triggered by the C minor trio, Michael hears about the arrangement that Beethoven did in 1817 of the trio for string quintet. “But that’s crazy. That’s at the wrong end of his life.” In his obsessive pre-internet search for the score and parts he also finds a specific an actual recording of the quintet:

“There are two Beethoven string quintets on the LP: my C minor, so desperately sought, so astonishingly found; and one in E flat major, another complete surprise, though I recall the librarian mentioning in passing its opus number, 4. They were recorded (with an extra viola player) by the Suk quartet and issued in 1977 under the Czech label Supraphon. . . .Bravo. Bravo Suk. Bravo Supraphon. What would I have done if it had not been for you? In twenty minutes I will be back in my flat, but I won’t listen to it immediately. Late tonight, after the rehearsal, I’ll come home, light a candle, lie down on my duvet, and sink into the quintet.”

This LP was re-released on CD in 1999 by Supraphon Archive [SU 3447-2 111]. The specific reference to hearing the trio through Michael’s past its symbolism are developed when Michael hears the transformations made in the arrangement:

"The sound fills the room: so familiar, so well-loved, so disturbingly and enchantingly different. From the moment, a mere ten bars from the beginning, where it is not the piano that answers the violin but the violin itself that provides its own answer, to the last note of the last movement where the cello, instead of playing the third, supports with its lowest, most resonant, most open note the beautifully spare C major chord, I am in a world where I seem to know everything and nothing.

 

(Fine Arts Quartet with Gil Sharon playing the fourth movement of Op. 104)

"My hands travel the strings of the C minor trio while my ears sing to the quintet. Here Beethoven robs me of what is mine, giving it to the other violin; there he bequeaths me of what is mine, giving it to the other violin; there he bequeaths me the upper reaches of what Julia used to play. It is a magical transformation. I listen to it again from beginning to end. In the second movement it is the first violin—who else?—who sings what was the piano’s theme, and the variations take on a strange, mysterious distance, as being, in a sense, variations one degree removed, orchestral variants of variations, but with changes that go beyond what could be explained by orchestration alone."

The musical references harmonize the changes in Michael’s life in relation to Julia. Later, Michael’s quartet is joined by a guest violist to read through the quintet. Julia’s personality as represented by the piano part in the trio is transformed into string parts that now represent Michael’s present. This story now creates a context in which hear Op. 104 as a personality transformed. The first violin sings what was the piano’s theme in Op. 1 No. 3. From the standpoint of personality this allows Michael to visit Julia like only a musician can.

“We play the first movement without stopping, and do not get entangled once. It ends with Piers playing a tremendously zippy set of ascending and descending scales, followed by a huge resonant chord from all five of us, ebbing swiftly away I three softer chords.
We look at one another beaming.”

These passages give us opportunity to hear the trio through the characters, to make contact with how specific passages fit into the lives of its characters. We hear the affect of the music as it intertwines with the circumstances and the strangeness of living. We can hear the exact recording, we can observe and make contact with the exact notes and specific passages that take on or transmit the personality of those who played and loved it. It is also an emblem of a difficult time in his life that he is trying to interpret and transcend.

Vikram Seth vs. Berlioz: Op. 1 no. 3

In "An Equal Music," by Vikram Seth, one of the major figures in the book, the pianist Julia, loves the Opus I No. 3 piano trio in C minor.

"She particularly loved the minor variation in the second movement, though it was almost as if the cello and violin were, in that calm melancholy, robbing her of her own prominence. Whenever she would hear it or play it or even read it in the score, she would move her head slowly from side to side. And she loved the unflamboyant close of the entire work."

(Amelia Piano Trio )

The "unflamboyant close" refers to the ending of the finale, worthy of attention because Beethoven has so many triumphant endings. An unusual figure [Db-C] sounds restlessly [5:12], and we are deflected into a picardy ending in the major with a series of rising scales in the piano part [5:21]. It is an eerie and somewhat unresolved ending. Julia favors design above technique. She is a likable character.

Hector Berlioz reported his reaction to this piece in the quasi-fiction of "Evenings with the Orchestra." But it is amped-up prose; passion bent to the point where it is louder than the music:

“One evening I heard Beethoven’s Trio in C minor: I open wide the door--come in, come in and be welcome, proud melody! Heavens! How noble and beautiful it is! Where, oh where did Beethoven find all those thousands of phrases, each more poetically characterized than the rest, each different, each original, and without even the family resemblance one finds among the melodies of masters that are known for their fertility? And what ingenious developments! What unexpected turns! How swiftly the indefatigable eagle flies! How he hovers poised in his harmonious sky! He dives into it, loses himself in it, soars, swoops again, disappears; then returns to his staring place, his eye more brilliant his pinions stronger, intolerant of rest, quivering, thirsting for the infinite!”

Some Early Early Music "Evelyn Innes" by George Moore (1898)

George Moore (1852-1933) wrote a haunting and lyrical book about a soprano who is torn between early music and Wagner, between two very different lovers, between religion and atheism. According to Moore's biographer Adrian Frazier, "Evelyn Innes" was inspired by a visit that Moore made on January 30, 1894 to the home (called "Dowlands") of early music specialist Arnold Dolmetsch in Dulwich, Greater London, UK. The book appeared in print in 1898.

"Moore found enormously engaging," wrote Frazier, "the strangely tuned instruments, the domestic charm of Dowlands with its music room hung with viols, lutes, and violins, and the beauty of Dolmetsch's daughter Helene."

In this expert from the opening chapter, we meet Mr. Innes at work on a virginal. After he finishes his adjustments he plays two identified works. We hear these pieces in their entirety before learning anything of the plot. They set a sonic attitude and open the narrative with their rhythms, suggesting that the sense of the opening passage must be absorbed at a speed appropriate to hearing.

The opening passage of "Evelyn Innes" by George Moore:

"The thin winter day had died early, and at four o’clock it was dark night in the long room in which Mr. Innes gave his concerts of early music. An Elizabethan virginal had come to him to be repaired, and he had worked all the afternoon, and when overtaken by the dusk, he had impatiently sought a candle end, lit it, and placed it so that its light fell upon the jacks. . . . Only one more remained to be adjusted. He picked it up, touched the quill and dropped it into its place, rapidly tuned the instrument, and ran his fingers over the keys.

"Iron-grey hair hung in thick locks over his forehead, and, shining through their shadows, his eyes drew attention from the rest of his face, so that none noticed at first the small and firmly cut nose, nor the scanty growth of beard twisted to a point by a movement habitual to the weak, white hand. His face was in his eyes: they reflected the flame of faith and of mission; they were the eyes of one whom fate had thrown on an obscure wayside of dreams, the face of a dreamer and propagandist of old-time music and its instruments. He sat at the virginal, like one who loved its old design and sweet tone, in such strict keeping with the music he was playing—a piece by W. Byrd, 'John, come kiss me now.'

(Performance by Elena Zhukova)

"—-and when it was finished, his fingers strayed into another, 'Nancie,' by Thomas Morley.



"His hands moved over the keyboard softly, as if they loved it, and his thoughts, though deep in the gentle music, entertained casual admiration of the sixteenth century organ, which had lately come into his possession, and which he could see at the end of the room on a slightly raised platform. Its beautiful shape, and the shape of the old instruments, vaguely perceived, lent an enchantment to the darkness. In the corner was a viola da gamba, and against the walls a harpsichord and a clavichord.

Music within The Wreckage of Agathon by John Gardner

Agathon was a "famous and respected" Athenian Seer in ancient Sparta ruled by the tyrant Lykourgos. Agathon became "the foulest man alive, by any reasonable standard: a maker of suggestions to ugly fat old cleaning ladies, a midnight prowler in the most disgusting parts of town. . . and lived, whenever his onion patch had nothing in it but burdocks and brambles, by foraging in the garbage tubs behind houses."

For no immediate reason, he was led away to prison, and Demodokos, a follower that he nicknamed Peeker, accompanied him with his jug. (Peeker: "Was it my fault that he couldn't carry his own damn jug? . . . I may be an old man myself sometime, thought I doubt it. 'All right,' I screamed, 'all right!' So they found out I was his follower, and put me with him in the cell.") They coexisted in a rat-infested prison cell—"a sprawling gray-stone mass of buildings filled with sickness and misery, honeycombed with windows like bugs' holes, and smoking here and there, day and night, like a garbage dump."

Agathon feels he has been "disloyal to everything [he] knows." He abandoned his wife and children, his city, his art."

In "The Wreckage of Agathon," by John Gardner we find another passage of ancient music overheard, and like Grendel, who listens unobserved and is utterly transformed, Agathon listens “clinging to the ledges [of her window on] the polished stone by [his] fingertips and toes.”

“Tuka sat, facing away from me, and her movements, as she played, were not like those I saw when she played for an audience: it was as if, now, she was inside the music, moving only as the music moved, swaying for an instant, hovering, sometimes touching the dark wood beam of the harp with her face as though the harp, too, knew the secret. I was torn by contradictory emotions, like the music, and, like the music, I turned them over and over, as if by feeling them intensely, not with my mind but with my body, I might grasp them. I felt outside time, as if all things merely temporal, coldly dianoetic, were of no importance.”

The sound of secrets. A Dionysian image grasped by the body outside of time. Harpists do that sort of thing. Agathon hears music intended for practicing, for communing with sound and the harp itself; as a voyeur, as an outsider.

In prison he remains an outsider who transcribes his prior world onto scrolls. He writes of his memories.

Agathon continued to listen: "the music moving in my chest like wind, like annulate waves, the cold night air moving softly across my skin, until my fingertips and toes ached from clinging, and I climbed back down. When I saw her by daylight it was as if what had happened in the night were unreal. The girl I had seen at her harp might easily have been anyone or no one, a spirit, but this daylit girl was Tuka, my friend, almost sister."

Art of Fugue in a Novel: An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth's novel "An Equal Music" is a fabulous account of a violinist haunted by his past.

The Art of Fugue develops as a symbol in the book as his quartet undertakes a recording of the complete work. The idea materializes after the quartet plays Contrapunctus I as an encore. Michael, the second violinist of the quartet in "An Equal Music" described how it happened:



"I have made a small adjustment to the Tononi backstage. I now check it almost silently, and tell it not to let me down.

Normally Piers would announce the encore. Instead, he and the others look at me and nod almost imperceptibly. I begin to play. I take my first two notes on open strings, almost as if they were a transition from tuning into music.

As I play the first few slow notes I hear from different points of the dark hall the indrawn breath of startled recognition. After my four lonely bars, Piers joins me [0:16], then Billy [0:24] and then Helen [0:31].

We play almost without vibrato, keeping the bow on the string, taking open strings where they fall naturally, even if that means our phrases do not exactly replicate one another's. [...]

As I move to the tiny quaver, the minuscule quibble of a note that was the source of all my anxiety, [1:16] Helen, who has a rest here, turns her head slightly and looks at me. I can tell she is smiling. It is the F below middle C. I have had to tune my lowest string down a whole tone in order to be able to play it."

Michael refers to the second 8th of the third measure in the second violin part.

Bruce Berger; Musical Poet

For a long time now I have carried around a collection of poems by Bruce Berger called "Facing the Music." It was an unexpected find in a old and quiet used bookstore on the upper west side in the late 1990s when quiet old used bookstores existed.

The biographical statement on the back flycover said Berger "attended Yale University and did graduate work in English until, "wondering what Crater Lake looked like in the snow, he left academia for good."

It did not say that he was a musician. No need.

There are musical insights in these poems. A schematic called "Opus 28, The Preludes" invokes each of the twenty-four preludes with the actual keys listed along the outer left and right margins:

"The agitated aftervoices pour
Their Chilling pulses and harmonic shocks
Into Chopin's closing music box,
Saving one hid fuse of energy
To detonate death's thrice-resolving D."

The margins show that the first two lines summon the g minor prelude, the third line invokes the F major prelude and the last two two lines the d minor prelude.

In his poem called "Enigma Variations," Berger explores the meaning of "gone." It was a lesson he "had to unlearn:"

"Now nears that someday when I should understand,
The master tune, we probably agree,
Is memory,
All sound mere variation. I buy
New releases, a fresh try."

Other imaginative poems contemplate the "secret laughter" of an acquaintance who had given the poet a copy of Gaspard and committed suicide years later, "And tough little Scarbo, who dances and disappears."

There is a poem called "Late Sibelius" that voices silences and "after-silence:"

"Disconnections brought to a final ripeness
In the full silence of the awaited Eighth
Promised, denied, destroyed. Or never begun."

At the close he gives advice: "Put this down and listen to late Sibelius."

My favorite is the final poem, "These Arias." It is a melancholy meditation about the "inflammation of the unceasing lastness / Of every untorn thing." Berger says that these disappearances repeat "useless the way Addio / Runs through Italian opera:"

"Goodbye old car.
Forgive tomorrow's absence, fond cafe.
Poor faithful chair, abandoned at Goodwill.
Any you, unexpected friend. Addio. Addio."





ANVVQZZY33ZG

Reading Traviata; Opera in Fiction

Marcia Davenport was the daughter of the legendary opera singer and early recording artist Alma Gluck (1884–1938). Just two years before her mother's death at age 54, Marcia published a novel called "Of Lena Geyer" that develops the life story of a soprano with many similarities to her mother.

Early in the novel an infamous vocal coach named Pizzetti begins to improvise after an informal diner in his New York apartment. Lenzka, who with her mother had followed him to the new world from Prague:

"One evening they were talking about Traviata, with Pizzetti sitting at the piano. He began the introduction to "Ah fors' e lui che l'anima," making comments about the Violetta he had heard the week before.

She should have done it this way," he said, playing, and presently he found Lenzka standing at her elbow. Her lips were moving and her fingers clasped tight together. He looked over his shoulder and nodded his head.

'Cone on, Lenzka,' he said. He played with his left hand and beckoned her with a circling motion of his right arm. 'Come on, sing.'

She began, piano, with a smoothness that Pizzetti said made his insides melt. He thought she had probably never seen the score. She had heard it in Prague and had probably heard him talk about the right way to sing it. How she knew the words he never stopped to think. Actually she had picked them up down on the East Side where everybody walked around singing Verdi arias. In the same way, as a child, she had picked up the German words of Don Giovanni in Prague. As time went on he was to marvel more and more at her extraordinary memory.

She sang through the first part; then at the change to F major she let out "A quell'amor," in full voice, childishly unconscious of what she was doing, but standing like a statue with her head thrown back and her big chest expanded. Pizzetti said that something inside him curled like fire licking at a log. He said her voice was not so big but alive and glowing with force that almost frightened him. Its quality was earthy."

The place in the opera that is quoted is near the end of Act I [1:07] in this recording:

The "change to F major" happens at [2:16]. This is a significant moment in the opera because Violetta is quoting the tune, and key, that Alfredo sang to her in the waltz-duet earlier that evening. The same music is used in act three in G-flat major as Violetta reads the letter from Germont and moments before she dies it is heard in the orchestra, played in A major.

Davenport uses this theme as a form of vocal discovery comparing musical discovery with the discovery of love through this reference to Traviata.

The "Notorious Dr. August" meets Brahms

"Life is eternal," writes Dr. August, "but lives are short." Novelist Christopher Bram sent Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd into the world in "The Notorious Dr. August," written in 2000. "Perhaps," writes Boyd, blind narrator who is an improvisational pianist inspired by spirits, "the music is the true story and my words merely a way of beating time."

In a passage of quality imagination, Dr. August hears Brahms play:

"I attended the Kurhaus concert that evening, alone, [...] it had been announced that Brahms himself would perform. I had forgotten all about Brahms. There was no orchestra in the pavilion that evening, only the composer at the piano—short, square, and babyfaced—-and a quartet of string players. They performed his Piano Quintet in F Minor, spacious and dramatic. Brahms disliked concertizing, and his arpeggios were a bit rusty, but it was of no matter. I can be quite nasty about other musicians, yet I did not sneer that evening. His quintet was all of a piece, the instruments equal, their playing unmarred by showy displays. They wove a single skein of changing colors, emotional, thoughtful, intimate, the short musical phrases combining into long, elaborate sentences. [...]

He swayed like a bear at the keyboard, tensing into each transition, making endless faces. He was notorious for being critical of his own compositions. I sat close enough that I could actually hear him grumble and groan as he played. The other musicians swarmed and blended around him, intensely alert to Brahms and each other, a coven of musical conspirators.

They came to the slow movement, "Andante, un poco adagio," and I recognized the wander of notes: It was the passage I'd heard during my walk with Isaac, when Brahms blew smoke bubbles and I thought my world was solid. I sank back into my own troubles again, yet the music continued to move me, not just the music but the situation of its making. Five people made it together, a family of friends, a sonorous little utopia. [...]

There were the racing rhythms of the finale, a descent into a home not quite a home, and the piece ended. Brahms and his friends took their bows and applauded each other, the string players thanking the composer with a grasshopperish tapping of bows against music stands. The audience hurried off to cafés and restaurants. I remained in my chair, stranded under stars and mountains, thinking about music, thinking about life. Art seemed a beautiful consolation, but could it set right all that had gone wrong in my life?

I needed to think at a piano. A keyboard would concentrate my thoughts."

Dr. August thinks through the performance; improvising on the same piano that Brahms had just played. "If my emotions were too deep for tears," writes August "they were not too deep for a piano."

Brahms discovers him playing. "'We are wondering,' said the bearded friend, 'if you find your lost chord.'"

When you get the chance, look through this book. It will reward your efforts.

Hopelessly Romantic Summer Music

Myrtle Reed wrote her first book in 1899 called "Love Letters of a Musician." In it a musician writes letters to a woman he loves. Because he is too shy to mail the letters to her he drops them into a trunk at the foot of his bed that he imagines to be a mailbox. She finds them but I won't tell you how. Be careful of excessive romance.

Each letter is prefaced with a musical quotation that sets the mood of the narrative. The way one reads them is influenced by the mood and tempo of the music. Reed was seeking an experience that wasn't readily possible in 1899. She was seeking embedded videos and a blog.

This Letter was called "The River of Rest," and it was prefaced by the Grieg Berceuse Op. 38 No. 1 which she called "Slumber Song:"



"Summer has stolen upon us with her soft, dreamy wings, and the world is singing her praises. With a ripple of leaves and a tinkle of streams, the full earth rolls in a stately march, from sun to shadow and back to sun again.

There is a drowsy murmur of bells to-night, and looking across the fields, I can see the sheep going home. I have lulled myself to sleep many a time, fancying I saw them going one by one over the hill, and to-night, in the violet shadow, I see a picture so like that of my dreams that my eyelids droop even at the memory of it.

He was a brave man who first closed his eyes in sleep, but what a reward was his!

Within the borders of Slumberland lies the Country of Dreams, beyond the night and far, far past the day. The breath of a thousand springs is in the air and shadowy wings sweep over the fields, aflame with blossoms that only dreamers know.

There is a river winding through that country—-they call it the River of Rest. The still, wide waters are cool and clear, and there is no room for disappointment on that lily-lined shore.

The sky is always blue there, and there is no heartache in my dream. You put your hand in mine and we go on together, through meadows brave with bloom.

The dead, lost violets of my happy days with you blossom afresh in those fair plains, and I watch the light in your eyes, forgetting he cruel gulf of years that must ever lie between your heart and mine.

Dear Lady, those fields are sweet with summer now, and you go on, without knowing how I love you. But it is only a step to the land where my hungry lips can speak to you and my empty hands grasp yours, and when I wake, I can only pray that I may dream again.

 The hill over which the sheep have passed is lost in the shadow now, but I can hear the far-off tinkle which means “follow.” Some mystic bell is calling me to that dear land where I always find you, and I shall obey, though I must pass through dark to reach it.

On the stately, majestic river there is a shallop moored among the lilies for me, and I shall find you there, with love on your face and the gold of sunset lying on your hair. We shall sail down the river together, dear Heart, and you will be a willing guest.

In fancy I can see you now, as you reach over the side of the boat and trail your fingers in the water, half expecting to find them stained crimson with the reflected clouds. Then you will look up at me, smiling, and point toward the west, where, upraised on a slender pillar of purple cloud, is the faint, exquisite lamp of a star."