The Song of Songs

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genius, of God-given fancy, with the hall-mark of creative restlessness on his thunder-headed brow. Others called him a good-for-nothing, a dirty scoundrel, who ran af

articles of luxury left her from the middle-class comfort of her youth, or from her husband's liberal moods. But these s

h, during that period, had carried off no less than six prizes, expressed its satisfaction with the accomplish

ping of shoes before strangers' doors, the half-hour waitings in dark corridors, the abashed sitting down on the narrow edges of chairs, the sighs, the stammering, the wiping of eyes

and yokes and bindings and strings. Now came the whizz of the sewing machine the whole day and the whole night. Now came pricked fingers, inflamed eyes, swollen knees, vinegar compresses about feverish

r had passed; another conductor appeared and challenged comparison. For a couple of weeks the papers contented themselves with mortifying him by flattering allusions to the f

ght as a marriage dowry to her husband, sinking it, for no reason at all, in a grey pool of self-reproach and anxiety; she who for many years had not tried a coloured ribbon on her sunken breast, who had not troubled to arrange a lock of hair on her forehead, which kept growing higher and higher-this woman became vain again. Each time she received her meag

She would receive her repentant husband in her ou

prayer, which, with the dropping of the rosary beads, secretly insinuates dreamy stipulations with Providence, and dissolves the whole universe into one great minor harmony of yearning? Wh

esired it. And she had scarcely felt it as her right and his atonement, when he led her to the altar at the command of her father, an honest subordinate in a court

the least presentiment; and when it came she took it without complaint; she loved him so very

uld come. She had in her possession a pledge which chained him to her for

sthetic delight in her inner and outer loveliness. But for a real father's love, she knew, there was no room in his gypsy heart. Even in ho

all. He might easily have put it in the bag with which he had departed on his great journey. In fact, he had attemp

the fifteen years of his Philistine life, everything remaining from the titanic storm

enough-contained the work of his l

ith such respect, with such tender and reverent awe, as this work,

a new world of sound, the beginning of a musical development,

song had been split up by the newest school into a series of small subtle effects. The art of the future belonged to the oratorio, but not that constrained wooden production hitherto suff

terwove the day with a mild, mysterious light, which no one saw, yet every one felt. It shot rays of light into the distant future, and so filled a child's palpitating heart with anticipatio

usehold divinity, which gave purity and sanctity to the home. She had imbibed reverence for the sheets of paper, scrawled ove

"Why don't you sing 'O du lieber Augustin' or 'Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan?'" he used to

ually forgot everything sounding like a song,

hung window-curtains over her shoulders, wound old lace about her neck, and wove spangles taken from shoes into her hair. Singing, weeping, and uttering shouts of joy, with genuflections

able that he, a vagabond, cast out by his own parents when a child, might abandon wife and daughter to want and pining-but to believe

dried up entirely and grew ever more deformed, and the layer of paint with which she kept herself young rested upon cheekbones sharpening from week to week, there lay