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"Say that once more, my Suzanne," he murmured with infinite gentleness, "oh! the exquisite sweetness of your voice, which is like dream-music in mine ears.... Oh! to hold you in my arms thus, for ever ... until death, sweeter than life ... came to me in one long passionate kiss."
We could easily fancy that our picture of the Shepherdess was meant to illustrate a scene in Arcadia. Here is the meadow "enamelled with eye-pleasing flowers," the sheep "feeding with sober security," and the young shepherdess herself knitting. Though she is not singing with her lips, her heart sings softly as she knits, and her hands keep time to the dream-music.
Again and again the dream-music drifted out on the air. The plain was now filled with peace-pipes. When the last blended tones died away, the whole tribe were seated on the long plateau, and every old warrior was smoking a pipe of peace. Gretchen saw that her spirit, through the violin, had calmed the sea. She was sure now that she had rightly read her mission in life.
Doubtless there is a certain general fitness, in various stanza forms, for this or that poetic purpose: the stanzas employed by English or Scotch balladry are admittedly excellent for story-telling; Spenser's favorite stanza is unrivalled for painting dream-pictures and rendering dream-music, but less available for pure narration; Chaucer's seven-line stanza, so delicately balanced upon that fourth, pivotal line, can paint a picture and tell a story too; Byron's ottava rima has a devil-may-care jauntiness, borrowed, it is true, from his Italian models, but perfectly fitted to Byron's own mood; the rhymed couplets of Pope sting and glitter like his antitheses, and the couplets of Dryden have their "resonance like a great bronze coin thrown down on marble"; each great artist in English verse, in short, chooses by instinct the general stanza form best suited to his particular purpose, and then moulds its details with whatever cunning he may possess.
Nothing could Stern catch of the words; but like some faint and far re-echoing of a half-heard melody, dream-music perhaps, a vaguely reminiscent undertone struck to his heart with an irresistible, melancholy, penetrant appeal. "That tune! I know it if I could only think!" the engineer exclaimed. "Those words! I almost seem to know them!"
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