love letters of a musician

These crisp, spring-like mornings always remind me of the sweetest book I found at an antique store years ago. It's called Love Letters of a Musician by Myrtle Reed. The edition I have is a very worn treasure that was printed in 1909 (althoug written in 1898!). It's seriously so completely beautiful and romantic and heartbreaking all at once.

   "Today I have had a long walk through the woods and fields. The Earth has thrown off her lethargy and waked into living. Everything is budded now, and soon will come the time of blossoming.

The hepaticas and windflowers, rash children of the woods that they are, have already made little pink and white spots of beauty among the brown, dead leaves. There is a tender flush on Nature's withered face, that means rebirth and resurrection.

On the southern slope of a hill I found a yellow violet. There seems to be a passion this year for early rising. The trilliums, brave and bonny in their new attire, are too proud to speak to the passer-by. I bent down to one of them, but not a glance could I get.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit was turning tender eyes that way. He stood, well-dressed and haughty, close beside Mistress Trillium, who leaned towards him with an air of delicate encouragement. Perhaps that is why she had no inclination to look at me.

The plain of woods just east of the maple grove seems like a vast festival. The guests are brilliant and stately, only moving aside gracefully when some gay wind goes by. The hepaticas are gowned in white just touched with a delicate pink, the windflowers are clothed with a warmer shade, and the violets, in their ever varying purple, almost monopolise the field.

  The air is full of meaning. One feels that something great is about to happen, whether it be some ceremonial procession, in which all the guests are to join, swinging their perfumed censers and chanting the ever joyous hymn of spring, or whether some sweet fairy symphony is to be played on hidden strings, too far off and faint for our human ears to hear.

I think they miss you, Sweetheart, unless your passing this way once is joy enough for one field. You have been beside me all day, singing softly to yourself as you have always done in the woods, and every now and then turning your face, fairer and sweeter than any flower that grows, up to mine. There are no depths in any stream like the ube brown, soft tenderness of your eyes, no mel- etmt ody in wind or wave like the ever-changing music of your voice, and no sweetness in all the world is like that within the scarlet chalice of your lips.

I wonder what the flowers do when the stars come out! Do they wait, half-shyly half-fearfully, for the dawn? Perhaps they cuddle down closer among their leaves and listen to the slumbrous voices of the night.

I open my window a tiny crack when the spring nights come, and put my violin against the casement, and listen. The delicate fingers of May pick out melodies upon those strings, such as Mozart never sang. Faint, far-off, and tender, like some half-hushed lullaby, I have heard a dream-song to-night that the wind never played before. I have taken my violin away now and opened the window wide. And then, because I know it will never reach you and because it comforts my heart to give it, I send a kiss across the sleeping world to where my Lady sleeps."