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Only the beardless priests understood Salammbo; their wrinkled hands, which hung over the strings of their lyres, quivered, and from time to time they would draw forth a mournful chord; for, feebler than old women, they trembled at once with mystic emotion, and with the fear inspired by men. The Barbarians heeded them not, but listened continually to the maiden's song.
On the discovery being made that many of the ancient German ballads were still preserved among the lower classes, chiefly among the mountaineers, they were also sought for, and some poets tuned their lyres on the naive popular tone, etc., first, Hebel, in the partly extremely natural, partly extremely affected, Alemannic songs, which have found frequent imitators.
Here Dicky coughed and said "I didn't think he meant anything, but the day after Noël was talking about singing ballads in Rome, and getting poet's lyres given him, H.O. did say if Noël had been really keen on the Roman lyres and things he could easily have been a stowaway, and gone unknown." "A stowaway!" said my Father, sitting down suddenly and hard.
The house had been built immediately after the war, at a period when Reisenburg, flushed with the success of its thirty thousand men, imagined itself to be a great military nation. Trophies, standards, cannon, eagles, consequently appeared in every corner of the Opera-house; and quite superseded lyres, and timbrels, and tragic daggers, and comic masks.
Anciently it filled the cups over which chirped the sprightly Popes of Avignon; and in later times, only forty years back, it was the drink of the young Félibrien poets Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, Mathieu and the rest while they tuned and set a-going their lyres. But it is passing into a tradition now.
The writings of Shelley would furnish matter for a hundred volumes: they are an admirable museum of ill-arranged curiosities they are diamonds, awkwardly set; but one of them, in the hands of a skilful jeweller, would be inestimable: and the poet of the future, will serve him as Mercury did the tortoise in his own translation from Homer make him 'sing sweetly when he's dead! Their lyres will be made out of his shell."
Let us bless them; for, like lyres of Amphion, at their sound arose the bell-bearing tower, which made cities beautiful and their people happy. O St. Chrysostom! there were other golden mouths than thine that preached by the Bosphorus, and their pulpits were the airy chambers of the first Christian towers.
But Donald's fervent passion for this warlike weapon of his fathers was unrestrained by thoughts of other lands. Had any man suggested that Irish music was superior, he would doubtless have bidden him begone and dwell with other lyres. Such suggestion I did not dare to make. On the contrary, I smiled as he fondled his windy octopus, which he did with mysterious tenderness.
It was a bare, resounding room smelling of stables, with cane forms along the walls, and the walls ornamented at regular intervals with painted lyres and little cut-glass branches for candles, which seemed to be shedding their old-fashioned drops as other branches might shed autumn leaves.
He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the House."
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