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Single pipes and double pipes, tinkling lyres and many-stringed citharas, not to forget herdsmen’s reed flutes, cymbals, and tambours, all made melody and noise together. An imposing procession that must have crammed the courtyard wound out into the Corinth road. Here was the demarch of Eleusis, a pompous worthy, who could hardly hold his head erect, thanks to an exceeding heavy myrtle wreath.
"The lovers of impassioned and classical numbers may promise themselves much gratification from the muse of Brooks, while the many-stringed harp of his lady, the Norna of the Courier Harp, which none but she can touch, has a chord for every heart."
But let me once be persuaded that all these heart-awakening utterances of human hearts of men of like faculties and passions with myself, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing are but as a Divina Commedia of a superhuman O bear with me, if I say Ventriloquist; that the royal harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as a MANY-STRINGED INSTRUMENT for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-and-blood of our common humanity, responded to the touch, that this SWEET PSALMIST OF ISRAEL was himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an AUTOMATON poet, mourner, and supplicant; all is gone, all sympathy, at least, and all example.
The religion of Christ spread over all a halo of purity and holiness; large monasteries filled with pious monks, and convents of devout and pure virgins abounded; bishops and priests in the churches chanting psalms, each accompanying himself with a many-stringed harp, gave forth sweet harmony, unheard at the time in any other part of the world.
The trees turned into naked black ghosts; or, rather, into many-stringed harps whereon the northwest gales alternately shrieked and roared. The fire-blue lake was a sheet of leaden ice, twenty inches thick. The fields showed sere and grayly lifeless in the patches between sodden snow-swathes.
And she played on her lute, too, on the lute he had given her of old, those slender fingers making ravishing music on the many-stringed instrument, though her pose as she played was more witching still. What a beautiful glimpse of white shoulders and dainty lace her straight-cut black bodice permitted!
Then, I said, if these and these only are to be used in our songs and melodies, we shall not want multiplicity of notes or a panharmonic scale? I suppose not. Then we shall not maintain the artificers of lyres with three corners and complex scales, or the makers of any other many-stringed curiously-harmonised instruments? Certainly not. But what do you say to flute-makers and flute-players?
It is rather pleasant, something like a low accompaniment to the notes of the more tuneful birds; the murmurous music of a many-stringed instrument, forming the indistinct ground over which runs the bright embroidery of clear melodious singing.
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