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Here am I, the Professor, a man who has lived long enough to have plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries, which are not always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particularly awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding with the fox oftener than with the stork, loving better the breadth of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well; finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation Hercules; and the question is, whether there is anything left for me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!
Moreover, this apparatus is supposed to be a key-board in function as well as in appearance, the vibration of each one fibre giving rise, it is believed, to the sensation of one particular tone, and combinations of such vibrations producing chords.
In one of his letters he speaks of a polonaise being ready in his head. These facts indicate that he composed mentally, although, no doubt, during the improvisations, many themes occurred to him which he remembered and utilized. When he improvised he did not watch the key-board, but generally looked at the ceiling.
Each little wave in turn beats against a little bone called the hammer; the hammer beats against another called the anvil, and this against a third called the stirrup; and the quiver of the stirrup is passed on to a little window, opening into a little room with a spiral key-board; and from this, the wave travels along a nerve to the brain. As the waves reach the brain, the brain hears.
Abraham Lincoln, with the clear thought in his mind of what he would say, found the sentences that came to him colorless, wooden. A wonder flashed over him once or twice of Everett's skill with these symbols which, it seemed to him, were to the Bostonian a key-board facile to make music, to Lincoln tools to do his labor. He put the idea aside, for it hindered him.
"Just attending to a little private matter," he answered, his mind working like a key-board of a telephone station. This man evidently did not know he had not read the papers. "Well, it seems strange to see you way up here," said Mr. Kenny genially. "Stopping here?" "Yes," said Hurstwood uneasily, thinking of his handwriting on the register. "Going to be in town long?" "No, only a day or so."
It seemed an age since we had seen a living being! One of the soldiers scrambled into the cart and tapped out a tune on the cracked key-board, and we all laughed with relief at the foolish noise... Then we walked on and were alone again. We had seen other ruined towns, but none like this. The towns of Lorraine were blown up, burnt down, deliberately erased from the earth.
He had lit the gas-jets at either side of the key-board, and they threw quite a light upon him as he played, and upon the huge organ-pipes above his head. Nina thought she had never seen anything as beautiful as were their illuminated surfaces. She did not know what they were, but that did not matter. She thought they looked very much like exceedingly pointed slippers set upright upon their toes.
How should one conceive of this mysterious key-board and its hidden connections? How should one comprehend and imagine it? Was it not, after all, the most wonderful thing about the great instrument on which the symphony was played?
I only know that when with a thickening throat I had come to an end, and my forehead had fallen on to the key-board, and there was no other sound in the air but the far-off surging of the sea. I heard somebody calling me in a soft and tremulous whisper, "Mary!" It was he. I went out to the balcony and there he was on the lawn below.
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