Long afterwards, however, some chance happening revived for me with surprising distinctness the memory of the serenade;--and simultaneously, like a revelation, came the certainty that the whole spell of the melody--all its sadness and all its sweetness--had been supremely and uniquely _feminine_.
--âAssuredly,â I reflected, as the new conviction grew upon me, âthe primal source of all human tenderness has been the Eternal Feminine.... Yet how should melody uttering only the soul of woman have been composed by man, and bestir within man this innominable quickening of emotional reminiscence?â
--â_Every mortal man has been many millions of times a woman._â
Undoubtedly in either sex survives the sum of the feelings and of the memories of both. But some rare experience may appeal at times to the feminine element of personality alone,--to one half only of the phantom-world of Self,--leaving the other hemisphere dormant and unillumed. And such experience had found embodiment in the marvellous melody of the serenade which I had heard.
That tremulous sweetness was never masculine; that passional sadness never was of man:--unisexual both and inseparably blended into a single miracle of tone-beauty. Echoing far into the mystery of my own past, the enchantment of that tone had startled from their sleep of ages countless buried loves, and set the whole delicate swarm fluttering in some delicious filmy agony of revival,--set them streaming and palpitating through the Night of Time,--like those myriads eddying forever through the gloom of the vision of Dante.
They died with the music and the moon,--but not utterly. Whenever in dream the memory of that melody returns, again I feel the long soft shuddering of the dead,--again I feel the faint wings spread and thrill, responsive to the cooing of those spectral flutes, to the throbbing of those shadowy mandolines. And the elfish ecstasy of their thronging awakes me; but always with my wakening the delight passes, and in the dark the sadness only lingers,--unutterable,--infinite...!
The most stupendous apparition of red that I ever saw was a tropical sunset in a cloudless sky,--a sunset such as can be witnessed only during exceptional conditions of atmosphere. It began with a flaming of orange from horizon to zenith; and this quickly deepened to a fervid vermilion, through which the crimson disk glared like the cinder of a burnt-out star. Sea, peak, and palm caught the infernal glow; and I became conscious of a vague strange horror within myself,--a sense of distress like that which precedes a nightmare. I could not then explain the feeling;--I only knew that the color had aroused it.