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The estate, comprising, I think, forty-two acres, all told, including upward of twenty acres of second-growth woodland above the hill, perfectly useless except for kindling-wood and for the sea-music which the pine-trees made, was offered to my father at a reasonable enough figure, to be his own and his heirs' forever.
And here, in the rose-radiance of the sunset, with the sea-music in the dim air, he wrote his letter to her. My Lady: How beautiful it is to think that there is nothing to prevent my loving you! There is much everything to prevent me from telling you that I love you.
There was no sound, yet to intense listening the air became full of sea-music. It was the night of Homer, the island-charm of the Odyssey. "Answer me quickly, Cecily; we have only a few minutes, and I want to say a great deal. You have talked with Miriam?" "Yes." "You know that she repeats what Mallard has instructed her to say? Their one object now is to get me at a distance from you.
It was singular, with how few and how simple means was created the impression of purity and repose that this chamber produced! It brought to mind the pearly interior of a shell, and a fanciful person might have listened for the sea-music whispering through. The walls were papered with pale gray, relieved by a light pink tracery, and the white-muslin curtains were set off by a pink lining.
Talcott played also on the flute, far better than I did myself; and we frequently made a trio, producing very respectable sea-music better, indeed, than Neptune often got for his smiles. In this manner, then, we travelled our long road, sometimes contending with head-winds and cross-seas, sometimes becalmed, and sometimes slipping along at a rate that rendered everybody contented and happy.
When the rain at length ceased, lightning flashed ceaselessly about the dark heights of Aspromonte; later, the moon rose, and, sailing amid grandly illumined clouds, showed white waves rolling in upon the beach. Wherever the train stopped, that sea-music was in my ears now seeming to echo a verse of Homer, now the softer rhythm of Theocritus.
All this we may joyfully admit, knowing how much there is to be said on the other side, and seeing in the Dutchman only a foretaste of Wagner's greatest work. A really great work it assuredly is. We have the magnificent sea-music, and, in spite of outer incoherences, the smell and atmosphere of the sea maintained to the last bar of the opera.
The grand music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources. It seemed the voice of the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbourhood in that lonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the sea-music, and had become resonant of itself with those living harmonies heard only in the Psalmist's song.
She brought it and settled down again by my chair, and, as a punishment of ignorance, and for the good of her soul, I began to read aloud. She is an impressionable young person and yet one of remarkable candour. If she had not been held by the sea-music of the poem, she would not have kept her deep, steady brown eyes fixed on me.
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