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There would be no more telling them by their notes. Thrushes and jays, wrens and chickadees, finches and warblers, all would be singing one grand medley. Inappreciably but ceaselessly the work goes on. Here and there is born a master-singer, a feathered genius, and every generation makes its own addition to the glorious inheritance.
The story of that day was told by one of the burghers who fought in the ranks of Lucerne, a shoemaker, named Albert Tchudi, who was both a brave warrior and a master-singer; and as his ballad was translated by another master-singer, Sir Walter Scott, and is the spirited record of an eyewitness, we will quote from him some of his descriptions of the battle and its golden deed.
it caroled, as a naturalist has translated the wonderful, silver-sweet prelude of the master-singer of the woods, the nightingale of America, rising, trilling until now with the voice-throwing magic of the ventriloquist, its song seemed to come from quite another corner of the thicket, while girls' hearts melted in their breasts, as, climbing a maypole of ecstasy, the notes trembled fluted upon a gossamer pinnacle of gladness at the close of a perfect day.
Beckmesser wishes extremely to become his son-in-law, wherefore he thinks it would be best to give the young lady no choice, to decree simply and finally that the winner of the prize for song should be her husband. He feels cocksure of his superiority as a master-singer, but dubious, it would seem, of his power to enthrall the fancy of a young girl.
His meditation is interrupted by the apprentices snatching up and carrying off the chair. With a half-melancholy smile and a gesture of delicate mockery at himself for the spell he has so completely fallen under, reluctantly the last master-singer turns to the door, and the curtain falls. The second act shows the exterior of Pogner's house and of Sachs's, his neighbour across the street.
I forgot to tell you this yesterday but to-day I proclaim it aloud. It is my desire to become a master-singer. Receive me, master, in the guild!" The masters are flocking in, bakers, tailors, coppersmiths, grocers, weavers. Pogner turns to them, delighted. "Hear, what a very interesting case. The knight here, my friend, is desirous of dedicating himself to our Art.
The maiden may refuse the one to whom you master-singers award the prize, but she may not choose another. A master-singer he must be. Only one crowned by yourselves may become a suitor for her."
And David enlarges further on the great and various difficulties in the way of him who aspires to become a master-singer. A "bar," let him know, has manifold parts and divisions, full difficult to master the law thereof!... And then comes the "after-song," which must not be too short, nor yet too long, and must contain no rhyme already used in the foregoing stanzas.
As to the master-singer, he tells us of himself that 'A merry man was he, I wot, The night he made the lay, Returning from the bloody spot, Where God had judged the day. On every 9th of July subsequently, the people of the country have been wont to assemble on the battlefield, around four stone crosses which mark the spot.
Some of the parts which he is said to have played are the ghost in Hamlet, Adam in As You Like It, and Old Knowell in Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humor. In 1616, at the age of fifty-two, this master-singer of the world, who, in De Quincey's phrase, was "a little lower than the angels," died and was buried in the parish church at Stratford.
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