Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/352

336 The New South Two weeks later he wrote: I have writ the most beautiful piece "Field-larks and Black- birds," wherein I have mirrored Mr. Field-lark's pretty eloquence so that I doubt he would know the difference betwixt the flute and his own voice. In the summer he confessed to Hayne: Are you, by the way, a musician? Strange, that I have never before asked this question, — when so much of my own life consists of music. I don't know that I've ever told you, that whatever turn I have for art is purely musical; poetry being, with me, a mere tangent into which I shoot sometimes. I could play passably on several instruments before I could write legibly; and since then, the very deepest of my life has been filled with music, which I have studied and cultivated far more than poetry. Inspired with this new faith, he again repaired to New York, this time determined to settle his future. He reveUed in the musical associations which he quickly formed. By November he had been engaged by Asger Hamerik for the posi- tion of first flute in the new Peabody Orchestra forming in Baltimore. On 29 November he wrote his declaration of independence to his father: Why should I, nay, how can I, settle myself down to be a third- rate struggling lawyer for the balance of my little life as long as there is a certainty almost absolute that I can do some other thing so much better. Several persons, from whose judgment there can be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I am the greatest flute-player in the world; and several others, of equally authoritative judgment, have given me an almost equal encouragement to work with my pen. . . . My dear father, think how for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragements of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways — I say, think how, in spite of all these depress- ing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumer- ate, those two figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you as to me, that I begin to have alright to enroll myself among the