ams and dear
delusions of our beauty-hungry hearts. For, as you may have guessed,
the sundial is a symbol.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

_On Singing Songs with One Finger_

James Huneker has pointed out that lovers of the drama, who are sound
judges as well, too frequently have so little taste in music that they
tolerate or even approve the most atrocious noises emitted in the name
of musical comedy; while lovers and sound judges of music are quite as
often woefully remiss in their knowledge of stagecraft, accepting
scenery and stage management in their opera which would put men less
skilled in the creation of theatric illusion than David Belasco to the
blush.

How true it is that unto him who hath shall be denied, and unto him
who hath not shall be given what the other man could use to such
advantage! The composer who can both pucker the lips of the
gallery-gods and satisfy the ears of the musical critics, how
infrequent a visitor on this planet! so that Offenbach and Sullivan
must often have suffered from loneliness. The singer who can also act,
how rare a song-bird! The interpreter of the _lieder_ of Franz or
Schubert or Grieg who will sacrifice vocal display to the composer's
meaning, and who has the fineness of soul to grasp and make manifest
the mood of the lyric, how welcome a guest! And yet those who could
write undying comic music if only they were composers, who could lift
the hearts of their hearers into the skies with "Hark, hark, the
lark," if only they could sing, are legion in number. How often, in
short, like those two in Lord Houghton's poem, are temperament and
technique--"strangers yet."

So are they in me, alas! total strangers. From my earliest years I
have been filled with the joyous impulse of song, but never were ears
more false to the one true pitch than mine, never was voice less
commensurate with ambition. My youthful dreams, when they were not of
foot-ball or swimming, were all of the Sirens, and I deemed Ulysses,
if prudent, none the less a lack-sentiment sort of hero, not inspiring
to know, because he stopped his ears to their song. The jeers of my
fellows long ago taught me the bitter lesson to keep my melody to
myself, but the impulse is still in me to sing, the myriad moods of
music are still mine, and I still consider Ulysses the first of the
Philistines.

For some time I thought my own case u