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THE MUSE OF THE NEW CENTURY 783
of Beethoven, Gluck, Mozart, and all the great masters, expressed in melody. On her bookshelf are laid away many who in their time were immortal, and there is still room for many more, whose names we hear sounding along the telegraph-wire of immortality.
A terrible amount she has read, far too much, for she has been born in our time ; much must be forgotten again, and the Muse will know how to forget.
She thinks not of her song, which will live on into a new millennium, as the books of Moses live, and Bidpai's fable of the fox's craft and success. She thinks not of her mission, of her great future ; she is still at play, amid the strife of nations which shakes the air, which produces sound-figures with the pen and with the cannon, runes that are hard to read.
She wears a Garibaldi hat, yet reads her Shakespeare, and thinks for a moment, ' He can still be acted when I am grown up ! Let Calderon rest in the sarcophagus of his works, with his inscription of fame.' As for Holberg, —the Muse is cosmopolitan, she has bound him up in one volume with Moliere, Plautus, and Aristophanes, but reads Moliere most.
She is free from the restlessness which drives the chamois of the Alps, yet her soul longs for the salt of life as the chamois does for that of the mountain. There dwells in her heart a restfulness, as in the legends of Hebrew antiquity, that voice from the nomad on the green plains in the still starry nights ; and yet in song her heart swells more strongly than that of the inspired warrior from the Thessalian mountains in the days of ancient Greece.
How is it with her Christian faith ? She has learned the great and little table of Philosophy ; the elementary substances have broken one of her milk-teeth, but she has got a new set now. In her cradle she bit into the fruit of knowledge, ate it and became wise,—so that Immortality flashed upon her as the most inspired idea of the human mind.
When will the new century of Poetry arise ? When will the Muse be recognized ? When will she be heard ?
One beautiful morning in spring she will come rushing on her dragon, the locomotive, through tunnels and over |
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