Things are to
be learned which it will be worth the while to learn. Formerly I
heard these
^Rumors from an Aeolian Harp^.
There is a vale which none hath seen,
Where foot of man has never been,
Such as here lives with toil and strife,
An anxious and a sinful life.
There every virtue has its birth,
Ere it descends upon the earth,
And thither every deed returns,
Which in the generous bosom burns.
There love is warm, and youth is young,
And poetry is yet unsung,
For Virtue still adventures there,
And freely breathes her native air.
And ever, if you hearken well,
You still may hear its vesper bell,
And tread of high-souled men go by,
Their thoughts conversing with the sky.
According to Jamblichus, "Pythagoras did not procure for himself
a thing of this kind through instruments or the voice, but
employing a certain ineffable divinity, and which it is difficult
to apprehend, he extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the
sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and
understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and
consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through
them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody than
anything effected by mortal sounds."
Travelling on foot very early one morning due east from here
about twenty miles, from Caleb Harriman's tavern in Hampstead
toward Haverhill, when I reached the railroad in Plaistow, I
heard at some distance a faint music in the air like an Aeolian
harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of
the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and
applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was
so.
