his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of their lord and leader.  Into lonely prisons with improvident artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy hymns with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies in which it learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were shut up in it; then again to the gentle dilettante who calmed it down with easy melodies until it answered him softly as in the days of the old maestros.  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.

Don’t you see that all this is just as true of a poem?  Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin.  The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don’t understand it at first.  But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind’s muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world’s crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric.  Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.  Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its hundredth birthday,—­(Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,)—­the sap is pretty well out of it.  And here is the song of an old poet whom Neaera cheated.—­

“Nox erat, et coelo fulgebat Luna sereno
Inter minora sidera,
Cum tu magnorum numen laesura deorum
In verba jurabas mea.”