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Updated: June 20, 2025
"In those times, my son, tombs were erected along the roadsides. Mine was placed two miles out from the city, on the Florence road. A young plane-tree grew up over it, and threw its shadow across it, dappled with sunlight and full of bird songs and twitterings, freshness and joy. Near by, a fountain flowed over a bed of water-weed, where the boys and girls came laughing merrily to bathe together.
They say that, at the sight of the Apollo, the body erects itself and assumes a more dignified attitude: in the same way, the soul should feel itself raised and ennobled by the recollection of a good man's life! A ray of the rising sun lights up the little table on which I write; the breeze brings me in the scent of the mignonette, and the swallows wheel about my window with joyful twitterings.
The rustle of their wings, high over head, could be heard down on the water; and their soft, shrill twitterings, and the thirsty nibbling of their beaks; for the seas were hushed, and the winds hung away in cloud-land. Far away from any shore, and beginning to be weary, their eyes caught sight of a white form resting between sky and sea.
A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who now haply listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of that slender image of a voice. We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far, but as far as it went, it was good.
How silent it was under the pines! the more so because of that vague stir in the air among them. What nameless perfumes! emanations from the resinous earth, from the old trunks, from the foliage. What delightful mysteries in their nooks! Bird twitterings intimate and charming; chirpings of the mothers to their newly fledged young; little cries of joy, and counsel, and innocent surprises!
And now, with the blood seeming to flow more swiftly through our chilled frames, came the pipings and twitterings of the birds at the edge of the forest; there was a misty light, then a roseate flush overhead which rapidly changed to orange above and below.
The only birds that sang during the month unless we include the red-bellied nuthatches, whose frequent quaint twitterings should, perhaps, come under this head were the chickadees and a single robin. The former I have down as uttering their sweet phoebe whistle which I take to be certainly their song, as distinguished from all their multifarious calls on seven of the thirty-one days.
As a rule, she would have been ready to drop with fatigue after so many sleepless hours and such severe exertions; but to-day she felt as fresh as the birds in the trees by the roadside, which greeted the sun with cheerful twitterings.
The chickens pecked hungrily, and there was a satisfied note in the twitterings of the downy little group as Mrs. Chamberlain turned to the preparation of her supper again. "Yes, he's th' peertest chicken of th' lot; an' I'd most as soon he'd been more like th' rest he's always gettin' out of th' box."
That is the mind of Mozart which people have called frivolous, just because in his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory of Solomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anything in art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous with the twitterings of Papageno.
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