Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, 1892-07-21
III,

But had not Denis Warren already made,
or found, scores and scores of songs, and had
not lncessant experience taught him that
there was not penny worth of fortune in
the whole pile.
Nothing of the sort. One does not give
to things made of wax the name OF flowers;
or, If one does, it is only out of moment 8
foolishness Denis Warren had covered
many sheet of music paper, but now be
knew that he had made a song, and never
before. Before his eyes had CHANGED to fall
upon that particular branch of Goldenrod,
he was self despised nobody; in one
moment he knew himself to be in very
truth the genius that he had once only
imagined himself to be. All in a moment
there had blossomed into his brain, with
stars for notes, the freshest and the most ex-
quislte melody that he had ever heard;
more exquisite indeed-it was as if music
had been waiting till that moment for its
crown. And this was not only a real song,
full and finished in itself in the first
moment OF Its creation;.it was-as he knew
In that self-same moment, germ from
which other melodies, no less e1quisitely
fresh, would spring and blossom, and which
an artist might enrich with all the treas
ures, of harmony, till their stood forth
masterwork of the world: the arch-dra ma of
passion translated from life into song.
When hopeless and helpless, his first
thought, and the burden of all his thoughts,
had been ''Poor Mabel" Now he had but
one thought-to crystallise the melody be-
fore 1t could escape him; for such things,
unless secured at once, are swifter to vanish
than to come. Moreover q song of that sort
leaves no room in either heart or brain for
any other thing or creature; not even for
Mabel. Having given her all the explana-
tion of what had happened to him that he
felt to be needful, Denis took paper and
pencil, and in the excitement of giving visi-
BILE substance to his melody forgot the very
existence of Mabel. There was no need to
put it to the coarse test of the piano. He
could hear it in himself-he had become the
most sensitive Of instruments, with nerves
for strings To turn it suddenly into sound
would seem, as yet, too grossly profane.
And even before the melody was half be-
fore his eyes, the notes became not only
sounds, but live words, which, all un-
thought, seemed to drop from his pencil.
He had never suspected himself of being a
poet; and yet the air drew from him, with
itself, the very words it needed in order to
be sung with all its meaning.
"Hadn't you better get some sleep?" at
last he heard asked in q far-off voice that
did not seem wholly strange to him. He
was too absorbed in his new life even to
resent an interruption, of which indeed he
was but mechanically aware He ought to
have been craving for sleep and rest, and,
before any possible sleep, for food, even if
he had been able to forget that there was
somebody else who needed them too He
rose from his seat, however, for he had SO
far become mere highly strung instrument
that he might have been played upon by a
chilo.
Perhaps he slept; but certainly he
dreamed. But it was not of his music. 1t
was of branch of Goldenrod which he did
not know he had ever seen.