"
Emerson's _Harp._
Now began an era of infinite happiness, of days that were never
long enough, of evenings when bedtime came all too soon.
Oh that there had been some good angel who would have taken in hand
Anthony Croft the boy, and, training the powers that pointed so
unmistakably in certain directions, given to the world the genius of
Anthony Croft, potential instrument maker to the court of St. Cecilia;
for it was not only that he had the fingers of a wizard; his ear
caught the faintest breath of harmony or hint of discord, as
"Fairy folk a-listening
Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
And for music to their dance
Hear the hedge-rows wake from trance;
Sap that trembles into buds
Sending little rhythmic floods
Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
Thus all beauty that appears
Has birth as sound to finer sense
And lighter-clad intelligence."
As the universe is all mechanism to one man, all form and
color to another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody.
Notwithstanding all these gifts and possibilities,
the doctor's wife advised the Widow Croft to make a plumber
of him, intimating delicately that these freaks of nature,
while playing no apparent part in the divine economy,
could sometimes be made self-supporting.
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