Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood.It was heard only at times, - a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast, - a whistling boy would have drowned it for his next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a hundred square miles.I used to wonder what this might be.Could it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring city? That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and fell in regular rhythm.I remember being told, and I suppose this to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves, after a high wind, breaking on the long beaches many miles distant.
I should really like to know whether any observing people living ten miles, more or less, inland from long beaches, - in such a town, for instance, as Cantabridge, in the eastern part of the Territory of the Massachusetts, - have ever observed any such sound, and whether it was rightly accounted for as above.
Mingling with these inarticulate sounds in the low murmur of memory, are the echoes of certain voices I have heard at rare intervals.I grieve to say it, but our people, I think, have not generally agreeable voices.The marrowy organisms, with skins that shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once thin and strenuous, - acidulous enough to produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets with the katydids.I think our conversational soprano, as sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great industrial centres, for instance, - young persons of the female sex, we will say, who have bustled in full-dressed, engaged in loud strident speech, and who, after free discussion, have fixed on two or more double seats, which having secured, they proceed to eat apples and hand round daguerreotypes, - I say, I think the conversational soprano, heard under these circumstances, would not be among the allurements the old Enemy would put in requisition, were he getting up a new temptation of St.Anthony.
There are sweet voices among us, we all know, and voices not musical, it may be, to those who hear them for the first time, yet sweeter to us than any we shall hear until we listen to some warbling angel in the overture to that eternity of blissful harmonies we hope to enjoy.- But why should I tell lies? If my friends love me, it is because I try to tell the truth.I never heard but two voices in my life that frightened me by their sweetness.
- Frightened you? - said the schoolmistress.- Yes, frightened me.
They made me feel as if there might be constituted a creature with such a chord in her voice to some string in another's soul, that, if she but spoke, he would leave all and follow her, though it were into the jaws of Erebus.Our only chance to keep our wits is, that there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred a little by and by come into harmony with it.- But I tell you this is no fiction.You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a fable, but what will you say to Mario and the poor lady who followed him?
- Whose were those two voices that bewitches me so? - They both belonged to German women.One was a chambermaid, not otherwise fascinating.The key of my room at a certain great hotel was missing, and this Teutonic maiden was summoned to give information respecting it.The simple soul was evidently not long from her mother-land, and spoke with sweet uncertainty of dialect.But to hear her wonder and lament and suggest, with soft, liquid inflexions, and low, sad murmurs, in tones as full of serious tenderness for the fate of the lost key as if it had been a child that had strayed from its mother, was so winning, that, had her features and figure been as delicious as her accents, - if she had looked like the marble Clytie, for instance, - why, all can say is -[The schoolmistress opened her eyes so wide, that I stopped short.]
I was only going to say that I should have drowned myself.For Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a MESALLIANCE, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said "Haow?") that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a single moment.
The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have said, that of another German woman.- I suppose I shall ruin myself by saying that such a voice could not have come from any Americanized human being.