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The music was of the most wild, a queer metallic sound, and the airs were full of unexpected harmonies and nerve-racking chords. It fired the sense, in spite of the hideous singers. They all sat there with perfectly immovable faces and entirely still hands, singing without gesticulations what were evidently passionate love-songs! Nothing could have been more incongruous or grotesque!
In the evenings in camp they often joined in weird love-songs, in memory of the fair maids of their hearts whom they had left behind, on the other side of the Himahlyas. Kachi hurried away in a state of great excitement. He was back in a few minutes. "How many coolies will you take, sir?" "None will come." "Oh, I will get them," said he, with assurance. "Will five do?"
Why had I not thought this out before coming? French love-songs; out of the question. Italian prayers and German lullabies were plentiful in the repertoire, but seemed sadly out of place for this occasion. I thought of Lucrezia Borgia's "Brindisi"; but that instantly went out of my mind.
"He is welcome. Conduct him to me. Come nearer, ye slaves, and seat yourselves behind that clump of rose-bushes. You can sing and play while I am receiving my visitor, for Osman Bey loves music. Do me honor, my slaves, and sing the love-songs of Djumeil and his Lubna."
But the love-songs of the ouzels and the love-looks of the daisies gradually reassure us, and manifest the warm fountain humanity that pervades the coldest and most solitary of them all. After the lakes on the High Sierra come the glacier meadows.
We encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship. In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines the steadfastness of the action.
While some believed that in Dante they beheld as in very truth they did the author of the poem, and in consequence the body of the unknown poet that had haunted their imaginations, others merely appreciated that the unknown poet, whoever he might be, had declared himself very patently the adorer of Monna Beatrice, wherefore it was to be inferred that all those other love-songs, which the golden youth of Florence loved to murmur to the ears of their ladies, were so many roses and lilies and violets laid on the same shrine.
"You may sleep soundly," said he; "the coots and ducks have come northward, and the spring is here at last. To-morrow will bring us sport to repletion, for the sounds you hear are the love-songs of the sea-birds, whose voices, however harsh, grow sweet when the sun brings back again the season of love and flowers."
She knew by heart the love-songs of the last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away. She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long chapters in the intervals of her work."
It was during this period of my existence that the poetic gifts I had discovered myself possessed of whilst at Pesaro, burst into full bloom; and not a little relief did I find in the penning of those love-songs the true expression of what was in my heart which have since been given to the world under the title of Le Rime di Boccadoro.
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