And so given into our hands, its pores all
full of music; stained, like the meerschaum, through and through,
with the concentrated hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which
have kindled and faded on its strings.
Now I tell you a poem must be kept AND USED, like a meerschaum, or
a violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;--the more
porous it is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is
capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own
humanity,--its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its
aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine
secondary color derived from ourselves. So you see it must take
time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature,
by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can
penetrate.
Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect
anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from
the maker's hands? Now you know very well that there are no less
than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are
strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to
make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in
harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were
a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona,
or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty
years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets
tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.
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