Title:  King Midas

Author:  Upton Sinclair

Release Date:  January, 2004 [EBook #4923] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 27, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of the project gutenberg EBOOK, king Midas ***

Edited by Charles Aldarondo (aldarondo@yahoo.com).

KING MIDAS

A ROMANCE

By Upton Sinclair

  I dreamed that Soul might dare the pain,
    Unlike the prince of old,
  And wrest from heaven the fiery touch
    That turns all things to gold.

New York and London

1901

NOTE

In the course of this story, the author has had occasion to refer to Beethoven’s Sonata Appassionata as containing a suggestion of the opening theme of the Fifth Symphony.  He has often seen this stated, and believed that the statement was generally accepted as true.  Since writing, however, he has heard the opinion expressed, by a musician who is qualified to speak as an authority, that the two themes have nothing to do with each other.  The author himself is not competent to have an opinion on the subject, but because the statement as first made is closely bound up with the story, he has allowed it to stand unaltered.

The two extracts from MacDowell’s “Woodland Sketches,” on pages 214 and 291, are reprinted with the kind permission of Professor MacDowell and of Arthur P. Schmidt, publisher.

PART I

In the merry month of May.

KING MIDAS

CHAPTER I

  “O Madchen, Madchen,
  Wie lieb’ ich dich!”

It was that time of year when all the world belongs to poets, for their harvest of joy; when those who seek the country not for beauty, but for coolness, have as yet thought nothing about it, and when those who dwell in it all the time are too busy planting for another harvest to have any thought of poets; so that the latter, and the few others who keep something in their hearts to chime with the great spring-music, have the woods and waters all for their own for two joyful months, from the time that the first snowy bloodroot has blossomed, until the wild rose has faded and nature has no more to say.  In those two months there are two weeks, the ones that usher in the May, that bear the prize of all the year for glory; the commonest trees wear green and silver then that would outshine a coronation robe, and if a man has any of that prodigality of spirit which makes imagination, he may hear the song of all the world.