Scan 21
The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1In the Beginning
3likes to know why and how. And so it is a loving labour to us to climb down the rocky pathway to the ancientest days of all to find the birthplaces of those divinities which have become the very loves of our hearts in their fulness of perfection. Art, literature,—whatever be the winged thing whose perilous flight we follow awkwardly,—we must needs pilgrimage to the spinning-place of its cocoon,—or to the small corners of the earth when first it was a blind caterpillar. If you will, let us go together as far back as we may in search of the first faint pulsations of the Heart of Music.
5For the violin is music's innermost heart. Soul and brain and body we may find in organ thunders, in passionate voices, in noble harmonies; but the heart is imprisoned for all time in the throbbing wood and quivering strings of the perfect violin. There are those who do not know that the violin is alive, that it has nerves and muscles and moods and impulses like anyone else; that it has fits of temper and moments of exaltation, and times of bitter melancholy and despair, even as the rest of us. The violin is almost as old as man, and its spirit is older, for it fled somewhere through sky spaces before it came to its earthly incarnation. Sometimes, when it is with a friend, it sings of the lost splendour
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