Copyright © 2019 by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, all rights reserved. Items in the Archive may be shared in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Redistribution or republication on other terms, in any medium, requires express written consent from the editors and advance notification of the publisher, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Permission to reproduce the graphic images in this archive has been granted by the owners of the originals for this publication only.
Now that "enthusiastic cherishing from the few, gradually growing less few"
This sense forbids my taking up the pen carelessly to intrude upon your attention.
I. Mr. H.H. Gilchrist
II. A request in another direction: I must begin by a détour. All men & women of generous soul who read you in your writings feel a brother's, the Poet's hand extended to them.
I came to grasp it; my humility to God, my esteem to you.
Tho' unknown to you I shall make no attempt to establish my fitness to ask your aid
in
I have already treated in choral & orchestral setting three great heads of human
absorption—the theological, the humanitarian & the erotic—the first,
upon Keble's
Of my "Song of Humanity" I endeavour to convey the spirituality in these
words—
"A celebration of man's high destiny—
truth above the Faiths, the Religion of moral goodness,
Fraternal sonship, responsive and responsible—Hope illimitable, beautiful,
strong, unvanquishable
"Through sorrow & the inscrutable—the experience of Omnipotent order
& love."
To the third production "Hymn to Venus" to which I allude I have written as
'Argument'—"That which annihilates man's capacity as a moral being, is the
presumption of his need of a regeneration that
Were he, at his coming, hailed as a creative 'form, virtuous but capable of sin'responsibility, placed upon him of an innate
pure & noble moral nature, the relations of man to man would be radically, &
absolutely altered.
Between woman & man there would be gentle ministering to holy yearnings where now
is sullen unrest, physical & mental misery; and worse
Man would find edification in what now is his shame—the human God—imaged form, which lasts not beyond this fair earth.
The sculptor's highest inspiration could be no man's lust:
alas! the word ever conveyed a meaning.
In this lyric the poet sings of life as it was without
Venus, & without the bond of fraternity. Indeed, he tells of life as it is with us today "'mid weary thoughts of man &
God"faiths
for our salvation which have their base & rising of other elements than those of
the eternal laws of human love (which is the divine), & that Christly religion,
moral goodness, which alone gives proof to see
feel & know an Almighty
God—a Father of all benevolence, tho' peace & joy, throes & heaviness
hold the present of the
Such, be it affirmed, was the composers' conception of the lot of man while contemplating the subject before him."
I would next treat as a subject some
And now I return to my request—merely, that you may indicate to me where & how I might find a text for such a work as I have in mind—an Opera or a Dramatic Oratorio. For both purposes alike the literary expression should pass briefly on in lucid meaning, never involved.
The verse interwoven in blank & lyric structure.
I should more than value your