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Updated: May 16, 2025
"Her little feet have been set upon the rough pathways, almost since the beginning, and her hands catch at my heart-strings, they are so frail. They're fluttering always like frightened birds, and the fluttering is in her voice, too." "And her face?" "Ah, but I've dreamed of her face!
As she said, they were made of heart-strings. A vast spider's web seemed to spread its tender cordage round each household, for the crippling of every winged creature within its radius. Fragments of torn wings attested the struggles that had taken place among the treacherous gossamer. "And the maddening thing is," cried Algitha, "that there is nobody to swear at.
And to say that she took hold of them and played rhapsodies of her own making on their heart-strings would be to undervalue what she did. They were dumb while she sang, but they rose at her.
As I went to the piano I thought of Edgar Allan Poe's exquisite poem: "In Heaven a spirit doth dwell, Whose heart-strings are a lute; None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy stars, so legends tell, Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice all mute."
The qualities which constitute true greatness in a statue such as this are, if we apprehend them aright, first, that sublime simplicity of Idea which omnipotently sways the beholder, and alike inspires his coarseness or his culture; next, that personality, that moving humanness of feeling, which holds him by his very heart-strings, and makes him forget its marble, to accept its flesh and blood; and, finally, that wondrous skill of nice manipulation, which, neglecting nothing in the myriad of anatomical and physiological details, not even the faintest sigh or the dimmest tremor, tells, fibre by fibre, a tale that all may read, and comes to us with a story "to hold children from play and old men from the chimney-corner."
His words I can give, but your own fancy must supply the advantages of an intelligent, expressive countenance, and, what is perhaps harder still, the harmony of his glorious brogue, that, like the melodies of our own dear country, will leave a burden of mirth or of sorrow with nearly equal propriety, tickling the diaphragm as easily as it plays with the heart-strings, and is in itself a national music that, I trust, may never, never scouted and despised though it be never cease, like the lost tones of our harp, to be heard in the fields of my country, in welcome or endearment, in fun or in sorrow, stirring the hearts of Irish men and Irish women.
I pressed the gloves passionately against my eyes to keep in the tears. If my day-dreams had been the only question, I should have changed my mind now. If the home grievances had been all, I should have waited for time and patience to mend them. I could not have broken all these heart-strings. I should never have run away.
Sometimes she almost forgot it. As for its wailing, she had grown so used to it that she hardly heard it, any more than she did the ticking of the clock. And yet, tighter than anything else in life, was the hold that little thing had on her heart-strings.
A thousand memories rose from out the past and began pulling at his heart-strings. Inch by inch he felt himself slowly slipping back into the old life again, like a boat that has slipped her moorings and glides silently and almost imperceptibly out into the easy-flowing current. The struggle grew more intense within him as the minutes passed.
"He had been reading Heine," said Wingfold. "And burlesquing him," returned Bascombe. "Fancy hearing one of the fellow's heart-strings crack, and taking it for a string of his fiddle in the press! By the way, what are the heart-strings? Have they any anatomical synonym? But I have no doubt it was good poetry."
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