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I found they proceeded from a mountain-horn; and their effect was heightened by a plaintive female voice. Struck as if by enchantment, I started from my dreams, listened with breathless attention, and learned, or rather engraved upon my memory, the 'Ranz des Vaches' which I send you.
Farewell, ye green meadows, Farewell, sunny shore, The herdsman must leave you, The summer is o'er. Second Variation of the Ranz des Vaches.
Your majesty, thousands of the noblest Tyrolese have lost their lives in this contest; thousands lie wounded and in great pain; the soil of the Tyrol, formerly so tranquil and peaceful, is reeking yet with gore; the fields are not cultivated; where prosperity formerly reigned, there is now distress and starvation; where peace and tranquillity prevailed, there rages an insurrection; where merry and happy people used to live, and where nothing was heard formerly but the ringing notes of the Ranz des Vaches and the merry Jodlers of the herdsmen, there are to be seen now only pale, mournful invalids, tottering along painfully, and nothing is heard but the booming of artillery and the lamentations of the impoverished and starving mountaineers.
The same evening at sunset he was floating on the lake of Brienz, in an open boat, close under the cascade of the Giessbach, hearing the peasants sing the Ranz des Vaches. He slept that night at the other extremity of the lake, in a large house, which, like Saint Peter's at Joppa, stood by the water's side.
And whenever the way seemed long, Or his heart began to fail, She would sing a more wonderful song, Or tell a more marvelous tale. So she keeps him still a child, And will not let him go, Though at times his heart beats wild For the beautiful Pays de Vaud; Though at times he hears in his dreams The Ranz des Vaches of old, And the rush of mountain streams From glaciers clear and cold;
It was there he heard, under peculiar circumstances, and probably for the first time, the plaintive sound of a mountain-horn, breathing forth the few notes of a kind of "Ranz des Vaches." "The 'Ranz des Vaches' which I send you," he says in one of his letters, "is neither that with which our friend Jean Jacques has presented us, nor that of which M. De la Bord speaks in his work on music.
AIR Variation of the Ranz des Vaches. Ye meadows, farewell! Ye pastures so glowing! The herdsman is going, For summer has fled! We depart to the mountain; we'll come back again, When the cuckoo is calling, when wakens the strain, When the earth is tricked out with her flowers so gay, When the stream sparkles bright in the sweet month of May. Ye meadows, farewell! Ye pastures so glowing!
Hungarian singers and Tyrolese singers and Swiss peasant-women, who were to chant the /Ranz des Vaches/, and milk cows or make syllabubs, were engaged. The great marquee was decorated as a Gothic banquet-hall; the breakfast itself was to consist of "all the delicacies of the season."
At the foot of his resting-place is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of its colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships, and the heavy guns, which, when they roar, shake the soil in which he lies; and in the steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet chimes which are the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes follow him all the world over. In Pace!
I can answer for myself, at least; and I know that the air of "Home, sweet Home," has affected me quite as much as the "Ranz des Vaches" would appeal to the sensibilities of an Alpine Jodeller! I got home-sick now. The passion took complete possession of me.
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