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386 THE AKRON OFFERING. March, 1850. For the Offering. Letters for the Offering. Number IV. By Lily Lute.1 Now is the cold and dreary winter time, and I have not spoken to you since the autumn; it seems to me a long, long time. But hark! there goes that serenade again, and if I could only make my old quill2 dance to the music, how beautifully I would write; but I cannot write when I hear music, for somehow it casts such a spell over me that I long to cover my eyes and see the sounds as they come to my veiled vision in the most beautiful forms and colors. I like the story of the Artist who was in Italy with Ole Bull, and when Ole played any thing that pleased him he would say, “play that again, Ole, while I paint it, for it is the most exquisite red I ever saw, and there! that is the finest blue in the world!” and so on of any color the music suggested to his mind.3 But that serenade! How delightful when the long evening is drawing to a close, and all without, the trees, the yard, the house-tops and as far as the eye can reach, over hill and plain, seems sleeping beneath a mantle of purity, 1. For more on Lily Lute, see pp. 3; n. 15, p. 44; and 453–57. 2. Steel pens gradually replaced quill pens in the nineteenth century. 3. This anecdote is part of “Recollections of Ole Bull” by American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child (1802–80). Ole Bornemann Bull (1810–80) was a Norwegian violinist. See The Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 5, no. 2 (February 1846): 75, Google Books, http://books.google.com /books?id=PFlFAAAAYAAJ. March, 1850 387 that sparkles as if set with diamonds, whenever Rob Horn looks down from his cold place among the clouds.4 And then all is so cozy and warm within, and every thing appears so dreamlike; the candle is dying away in the socket, the old clock ticks, ticks away on the wall, the cricket chirps away on the hearth, and old Tabby lifts her head from the rug and purrs, as we draw the great arm chair nearer the fire, and sink down amid the cushions watching the red coals mouldering and falling through the grate—then mayhap we drop off into the land of dreams, and “Ah! mortal tongue can never tell Those symphonies which seem Too bright for harp or evening bell; The music of a dream.”5 Then from the sweet dream we are awakened by the dulcet tones of viol, guitar or flute, which fill the still air with melody—O, I can think of nothing more heavenly than dreaming where music sounds;—and how much I thank those handsome Troubadours, who of late have made such delicious music beneath my windows. Speaking of serenades, reminds me of one I had while in Cincinnati, in the winter of 1843. I was boarding on Third street, opposite a Music Store, and so near the Assembly Rooms that I could hear the music made there for dancing, almost nightly, and on a clear night could distinctly hear the Garrison band at Newport;6 so that either one or the other of these estab4 . The moon. This is an obscure literary allusion. In a story by American writer Caroline Chesebro’ (1825–73), a spirit punishes “Rob Horn” for his ambitious duplicity in love by transforming him into “The Man in the Moon.” See “The Man in the Moon: A True Story,” Graham’s Magazine 34, no. 2 (February 1849): 91–87, Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=INYRAAAAYAAJ. The story is also collected in Chesebro’, Dream-land by Daylight: A Panorama of Romance (New York: Redfield, 1851), Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=ojIgAAAAMAAJ. 5. As noted later in this sketch, these lines are from “The Music of a Dream” by Cincinnati painter and poet Horace S. Minor (1822–c.1849). Minor edited and contributed to The Shooting Star, a lost and forgotten Cincinnati literary magazine. In a biographical notice he is described as a “conception of Shelley”: “that physical gentleness, combined with intense love of the ideal beautiful, good and free, with its rebellious warfare upon the dwarfing and deforming conventionalities of life, were his; but he committed no breach of those conventionalities, and his morals were irreproachably pure.” See William...

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