Books › The heart of music : the story of the violin, 1906 › scan 309
Scan 309
The heart of music : the story of the violin, 1906
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1The One Perfect Thing
3And now we have the violin, unshouldered by lesser things; now we have our imprisoned spirit of the bright outer spaces, singing through strings and wood; now we have our tree-dryad given a voice, our Heart of Music incarnate and triumphant; now we have the One Perfect Thing.
5Haweis, delightful if inaccurate enthusiast, declares that the violin even possesses the peculiar attributes of a human body. He becomes eloquent, this dear, rhapsodic, clerical violomaniac, when he speaks of the sheer physical beauties of the fiddle he loves: ". . . The grace of the curves, the surface never flat or board-like, but full of a beauty of levels, like the satiny surface of a fine human body! You might almost believe," he pursues, "that a whole system of muscles, a very living organism, lay beneath the back and belly, swelling with undulating grace."
7Heron-Allen's fancy, that every violin maker puts part of himself into his work, must be true. So intimate and sweet a connection as exists between the maker and his fiddle must mean no ordinary bond. Such tender labour and unremitting devotion, such exquisite sympathy and unbelievable response in thrilling melody — these
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