Volume I Part 24 (1/2)
Sing the Slaughter-lover blue Broad and true!
Sing the Slaughter-lover blue!
_O Fire!--O Fire!
O Steel!--O Steel!_
Battle where the savage Sword Is sole Lord,-- Battle of the savage Sword!
_O Fire!--O Fire!
O Steel!--O Steel!_
O Sword! !
_O Fire!--O Fire!
O Steel!--O Steel!_
Let the Rainbow's ic rays Round thee blaze!-- Let the Rainbow round thee blaze!
_O Fire!--O Fire!
O Steel!--O Steel!
O Fire!--O Fire!
O Steel and Fire!
O Oak!--O Oak!
O Earth!--O Waves!
O Waves!--O Earth!
O Earth and Oak!_
TO H E KREHBIEL
NEW ORLEANS, February, 1884
DEAR K,--Charley Johnson's co his Rabelaisianto Havana, and I shall ask hiet, if possible, the music of the erotic mime-dance,--the Za prizes for a good opera Why don't you coest the inable--knocks Wagner endwise and all the trilogies: ”THE WOOING OF THE VIRGIN OF POJA,” from the ”Kalewala” The ”Kalewala” is the only essentially _musical_ epopea I know of Orpheus is a mere clumsy charlatan to Wainaly enor in the Talmud, Ramayana, or Mahabharata O! the old woer who turns all that hear hiical chant!--and the songs that make the stars totter in the frosty sky!--and the ates of iron! And then, too, the episode of the Eternal Sht into shape; and the weird sleigh-ride over the Frozen Sea; and the words at whose utterance ”the waters of the great deep lifted a thousand heads to listen!” And the story of the Earth-giant, aroused by ical force froician the runes by which all things are created,--the enchanted songs by which the Beginning was et a _prose_ translation: no poetical version can preserve the delightful goblinry and elfishness of the original, whereof the hty harp
I have also a delightful Malay poem which would make a much finer operatic subject or dramatic subject than the European _feeries_ modelled upon the Hindoo drama of Sakuntala, or, as my French translator writes it, _Sacountala_ I have an inexhaustible quarry of monstrous and diabolical inspiration
Yours truly, etc
I spend whole days in vocal efforts--vain ones--to imitate those delicious arabesques about the Na,--and do suddenly awake by night with a Voice in my ears, as of a Summons to Prayer Bismillah!--enorraph upon the Music of the Witches' Sabbath_