Scan 31
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.
1The Heart of Music
3of mystery and a splendour of symbolism which haunts the land still, like the ghosts of its dead. Not emptily was it written above the Temple of Sais, "I am all that is, that was, and that will be; no mortal has lifted my veil." Not without reason does the Sphinx stand, an eternal question that no man may answer. Not only in the great, but in the little things, Egypt, the most civilised of nations, the most communicative of chroniclers, has remained dumb. We read her papyri, study her tombs and temples, images and hieroglyphics, see the exquisite remnants of her beautiful daily life, and pause, an unworded as an unanswered question on our lips. No man will ever know what Egypt was; no mortal has lifted her veil. Therefore the part her music played is shrouded in a mystery in keeping with her usual secretive habit of mind. Something we may know of its actual use and scope, but its inner, deeper symbolism—no one knows that but the dead gods and the violin. For its ancestors learned the secret in pagan celebrations at Giseh and Dakkah thousands of years before Christ came.
5The Egyptians of course were, first and foremost, pantheists. In the priests this pantheism was a dignified and consecrated thing, albeit its observances might shock the Occidental sensibilities
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.