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Updated: May 14, 2025
Pleasant thoughts, delightful associations, awoke as I listened; and almost unconsciously I repeated to myself the beautiful story of the Lutist and the Nightingale, from Ford's 'Lover's Melancholy. Here it is. Is there in English poetry anything finer?
"My lutist shall sing you something, in English, of course! for all the world is being Anglicized by degrees, and there will soon be no separate nations left. Something, too, of romantic southern passion is being gradually grafted on to English sentiment, so that English songs are not so stupid as they were once.
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when Ala al-Din looked at the King's daughter, he saw with her a young lady to whom he heard her say, "Thy company hath cheered me, O Zubaydah." So he looked straitly at the damsel and found her to be none other than his dead wife, Zubaydah the Lutist. Then the Princess said to Zubaydah, "Come, play us an air on the lute."
As a youth he became an excellent lutist, then thought of devoting himself to painting, but when he was seventeen studied medicine, and at the University of Pisa fell in love with mathematics. Isaac Newton, born in 1642, very frail and sickly, solitary, had a very low piece in the class lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at sixteen tried farming.
The Brazen Serpent only ranks second to it; both are masterpieces, and Antwerp must envy the Prado. The Crown of Thorns, and the portraits, particularly that of the Countess of Wexford, are arresting. His Musician, being the portrait of Lanière the lute-player, and his own portrait on the same canvas with Count Bristol, are cherished treasures. The lutist is especially fascinating.
Here the Princess drew forth the jewel and, placing her hand upon the facet where was figured a couch, rubbed it; and behold, a couch appeared before her and she mounted upon it with Ala al-Din and his wife Zubaydah, the lutist, saying, "I conjure thee by the virtue of the names and talismans and characts engraver on this jewel, rise up with us, O Couch!"
The birds peck the berries or the corn, and fly away to the groves, where they sit in seeming happiness on the branches, and waste their lives in tuning one unvaried series of sounds. I likewise can call the lutist and the singer; but the sounds that pleased me yesterday weary me to-day, and will grow yet more wearisome to- morrow.
On a rostrum beyond and above the crowded heads the musicians swayed at their work tabouka players with strong, nervous thumbs; an oily, gross lutist; an organist, watching everything with the lizard eyes of the hashish taker. Among them, behind a taborette piled with bait of food and drink, the Jewish dancing woman from Algiers lolled in her cushions, a drift of white disdain....
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