Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/58
her father had taught her to sing it. The beautiful music in which a great artist—arrived at the highest point of success in his art, his love, and his genius, while still in the first golden radiance of his honeymoon—poured out the inextinguishable desire of the soul for something higher still, and so wonderfully translated that “divine despair” into melody, rose to her lips almost involuntarily. She played a few chords, and began the recitative in a low and nervous tone; but by degrees her voice seemed to gain new life from the music, and rose in the soprano part with all the lift and spring of a fountain starting into the sunshine:
Far away—far away—far away would I rove.”
Her higher notes were pure and spontaneous, and there was a dramatic power and intensity in her singing which she had never shown before. The depths were stirred, and her whole mind and soul seemed to seize on the music as a vital instrument to express that inexpressible “yearning for the lamps of night,” which all the poets have striven to reveal, but never so nobly and simply as in the words of the Hebrew shepherd:
And remain there for ever at rest;
In the wilderness build me, build me a nest,
And remain there for ever—for ever at rest,”