of the
love song.

It is, I suppose, one of the supreme lyric expressions in the English
language of the passion of love. Furthermore, Whitman's free unmetered
swing, the glorious length of his stride, fell in with March's rhythmic
idiom as though they had been born under the same star.

The result is one of those happy marriages so rare as to be almost
unique, in which the emotional power of a great song is enhanced by its
musical setting, and where, conversely, a great piece of lyric music
gains rather than loses by its words.

March did not use the whole poem. His setting begins on the line "Low
hangs the moon," and ends with the "Hither, my love! Here I am! Here!"
Why he elected not to go on with it, I don't know. Possibly, because his
own impulse was spent before Whitman's; possibly, because he did not wish
to impose the darker melancholy of the latter stanzas upon the clear
ecstasy of that last call.

It lost something, of course, from the inadequacy of the piano
transcription, for it was conceived and written orchestrally. Paula, too,
has given finer performances of it;--indeed, she sang it better a little
later that same evening. But spurred as she was by the knowledge that the
composer was listening to it and by her determination to win a victory
for it, she flung herself into it with all the power and passion she had.

I doubt whether any other auditor ever is more completely overwhelmed
by it than Mary was. It was so utterly her own, the cry of it so verily
the unacknowledged cry of her own heart, that the successive stanzas
buried themselves in it like unerring arrows. The intensity of its
climax was more poignant, more nearly intolerable, than anything in all
the music she had ever heard. Limp, wet, breathless, trembling all
over, she sat for a matter of minutes after that last ineffable
yearning note had died away.

There was a certain variety in the emotions of the rest of the audience,
but they met on common ground in the feeling of not knowing where to look
or what to say. Their individualities submerged in a great crowd, they
might--most of them--have allowed themselves to be carried away,
especially if they'd come in the expectation--founded on the experience
of other audiences--that they would be carried away. But to sit like
this, all very much aware of each other while a woman they knew, the
wife of a man they had long known, proclaimed a naked passion like that,
was simply painful. What th