Scan 25

Songs of my violin, 1901

27 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.

1XV.

3And now and then there crept into the room,

4As northern lights creep through the northern gloom,

5The whisperings of love and plighted faith;

6The sound of revelry, the songs of joy—

7Pure gold of hearts forgetting their alloy—

8Quick-passing as the shadow of a wraith.

10XVI.

12As tree-life passed into the beam of wood,

13So beam-life passes into fiddle-hood,

14The last Nirvana of the chosen tree,

15Where breast of pine and back of maple meet,

16Two souls of sound, with memories replete,

17That lose themselves in one, like waves at sea.

19XVII.

21So do we reach at last the perfect thing;

22And when a master comes and makes it sing

23With tones in which a thousand years are massed,

24We do not hear the hand-stopped notes alone,

25We catch an over- and an undertone,

26We hear the present while we feel the past.

The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.