is holy innocence
to the naked breast.)
And they buried the musician and his barbiton together, in the same
coffin. That famous Steiner--primeval Titan of the great Tyrolese
race--often hast thou sought to scale the heavens, and therefore must
thou, like the meaner children of men, descend to the dismal Hades!
Harder fate for thee than thy mortal master. For THY soul sleeps with
thee in the coffin. And the music that belongs to HIS, separate from
the instrument, ascends on high, to be heard often by a daughter's pious
ears when the heaven is serene and the earth sad. For there is a sense
of hearing that the vulgar know not. And the voices of the dead breathe
soft and frequent to those who can unite the memory with the faith.
And now Viola is alone in the world,--alone in the home where loneliness
had seemed from the cradle a thing that was not of nature. And at
first the solitude and the stillness were insupportable. Have you, ye
mourners, to whom these sibyl leaves, weird with many a dark enigma,
shall be borne, have you not felt that when the death of some best-loved
one has made the hearth desolate,--have you not felt as if the gloom of
the altered home was too heavy for thought to bear?--you would leave it,
though a palace, even for a cabin. And yet,--sad to say,--when you obey
the impulse, when you fly from the walls, when in the strange place in
which you seek your refuge nothing speaks to you of the lost, have ye
not felt again a yearning for that very food to memory which was just
before but bitterness and gall? Is it not almost impious and profane
to abandon that dear hearth to strangers? And the desertion of the home
where your parents dwelt, and blessed you, upbraids your conscience as
if you had sold their tombs.
Beautiful was the Etruscan superstition that the ancestors become the
household gods. Deaf is the heart to which the Lares call from the
desolate floors in vain. At first Viola had, in her intolerable anguish,
gratefully welcomed the refuge which the house and family of a kindly
neighbour, much attached to her father, and who was one of the orchestra
that Pisani shall perplex no more, had proffered to the orphan. But the
company of the unfamiliar in our grief, the consolation of the stranger,
how it irritates the wound! And then, to hear elsewhere the name of
father, mother, child,--as if death came alone to you,--to see elsewhere
the calm regularity of those lives united in love and orde
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