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Anciata Directory 03
Page 03
I struggled up on my feet and proceeded to carry the big vessels to the river bank, where I intended to construct the raft. The effort to take each heavy bottle those few metres seemed almost beyond me in my exhausted state. At last I proceeded to strip the floor of the hut, which had been made with split _assahy_ palms (_Euterpe oleracea_ L.), in order that I might make a frame to which I could fasten the bottles. With a great deal of persuasion I got Filippe and Benedicto to help me. The long pieces of _assahy_ were too heavy for our purpose, and we had the additional trouble of splitting each piece into four. It was most trying work in our worn-out condition. Then we had to go into the forest and collect some small liane, so that we could tie the pieces together, as we had no nails and no rope.
"That is very ungracious," I said. "You are as perverse as I was about Byron when the old banker quoted him with tears. I was going to say, and I will say it, that Tennyson, with all his faults, was a great lord of music; and he put into words the fine, homely domestic emotion of the race--the poetry of labour, order, and peace. It was new and rich and splendid, and because it seems to you old-fashioned, you call it mere respectability; but it was the marching music of the world, because he showed men that faith was enlarged and not overturned by science. These two were great, because they saw far and wide; they knew by instinct just what the ordinary man was thinking, who yet wished his life to be set to music. These little men of yours don't see that. They have their moments of ecstasy, as we all have, in the blossoming orchard full of the songs of birds. And that will always and for ever give us the lyric, if the skill is there. But I want something more than that; I, you, thousands of people, are feeling something that makes the brain thrill and the heart leap. The mischief is that we don't know what it is, and I want a great poet to come and tell us."
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