which came in ever and anon like big drops of musical rain. All this I felt as well as heard, without the slightest knowledge of quartetto or staccato. How he did it, I know as little as I know how the sun shines, or the spring brings forth its blossoms. I only know that music came from his soul into mine, and carried it upward to worship with the angels.
Oh, the exquisite delicacy of those notes! Now tripping and fairy-like, as the song of Ariel; now soft and low, as the breath of a sleeping babe, yet clear as a fine-toned bell; now high, as a lark soaring upward, till lost among the stars!
Noble families sometimes double their names, to distinguish themselves from collateral branches of inferior rank. I have doubled his, and in memory of the Persian nightingale have named him Ole Bulbul.
Immediately after a deep, impassioned, plaintive melody, an adagio of his own composing, which uttered the soft, low breathing of a mother’s prayer, rising to the very agony of supplication, a voice in the crowd called for Yankee Doodle. It shocked me like harlequin tumbling on the altar of a temple. I had no idea that he would comply with what seemed to me the absurd request. But, smiling, he drew the bow across his violin, and our national tune rose on the air, transfigured, in a veil of glorious variations. It was Yankee Doodle in a state of clairvoyance—a wonderful proof of how the most common and trivial may be exalted by the influx of the infinite.
When urged to join the throng who are following this star of the north, I coolly replied, “I never like lions; moreover, I am too ignorant of musical science to appreciate his skill.” But when I heard this man, I at once recognised a power that transcends science, and which mere skill may toil after in vain. I had no need of knowledge to feel this subtle influence, any more than I needed to study optics to perceive the beauty of the rainbow. It overcame me like a miracle. I felt that my soul was, for the first time, baptized in music; that my spiritual relations were somehow changed by it, and that I should henceforth be otherwise than I had been. I was so oppressed with “the exceeding weight of
