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. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the
country, its message sent not by men, but by gods. Perchance,
like the statue of Memnon, it resounds only in the morning, when
the first rays of the sun fall on it. It was like the first lyre
or shell heard on the sea-shore, - that vibrating cord high in the
air over the shores of earth. So have all things their higher
and their lower uses. I heard a fairer news than the journals
ever print. It told of things worthy to hear, and worthy of the
electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton
and flour, but it hinted at the price of the world itself and of
things which are priceless, of absolute truth and beauty.
Still the drum rolled on, and stirred our blood to fresh
extravagance that night. The clarion sound and clang of corselet
and buckler were heard from many a hamlet of the soul, and many a
knight was arming for the fight behind the encamped stars.
"Before each van
Prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears
Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms
From either end of Heaven the welkin burns."
- - - - - - -
Away! away! away! away!
Ye have not kept your secret well,
I will abide that other day,
Those other lands ye tell.
