Haunting Fingers - A Phantasy In A Museum Of Musical Instruments

"Are you awake,     Comrades, this silent night?     Well 'twere if all of our glossy gluey make     Lay in the damp without, and fell to fragments quite!"      "O viol, my friend,     I watch, though Phosphor nears,     And I fain would drowse away to its utter end     This dumb dark stowage after our loud melodious years!"     And they felt past handlers clutch them,     Though none was in the room,     Old players' dead fingers touch them,     Shrunk in the tomb.      "'Cello, good mate,     You speak my mind as yours:     Doomed to this voiceless, crippled, corpselike state,     Who, dear to famed Amphion, trapped here, long endures?"      "Once I could thrill     The populace through and through,     Wake them to passioned pulsings past their will." . . .     (A contra-basso spake so, and the rest sighed anew.)     And they felt old muscles travel     Over their tense contours,     And with long skill unravel     Cunningest scores.      "The tender pat     Of her aery finger-tips     Upon me daily I rejoiced thereat!"     (Thuswise a harpsicord, as from dampered lips.)      "My keys' white shine,     Now sallow, met a hand     Even whiter. . . . Tones of hers fell forth with mine     In sowings of sound so sweet no lover could withstand!"     And its clavier was filmed with fingers     Like tapering flames wan, cold     Or the nebulous light that lingers     In charnel mould.      "Gayer than most     Was I," reverbed a drum;     "The regiments, marchings, throngs, hurrahs! What a host     I stirred even when crape mufflings gagged me well-nigh dumb!"      Trilled an aged viol:     "Much tune have I set free     To spur the dance, since my first timid trial     Where I had birth far hence, in sun-swept Italy!"     And he feels apt touches on him     From those that pressed him then;     Who seem with their glance to con him,     Saying, "Not again!"      "A holy calm,"     Mourned a shawm's voice subdued,     "Steeped my Cecilian rhythms when hymn and psalm     Poured from devout souls met in Sabbath sanctitude."      "I faced the sock     Nightly," twanged a sick lyre,     "Over ranked lights! O charm of life in mock,     O scenes that fed love, hope, wit, rapture, mirth, desire!"     Thus they, till each past player     Stroked thinner and more thin,     And the morning sky grew grayer     And day crawled in.