I hear those odes, symphonies, operas, I hear in the William Tell the music of an arous’d and angry people, I hear Meyerbeer’s Huguenots , the Prophet , or Robert , Gounod’s Faust , or Mozart’s Don Juan .
I hear the dance-music of all nations,
- The waltz, some delicious measure, lapsing, bathing me in bliss,
- The bolero to tinkling guitars and clattering castanets.
I see religious dances old and new, I hear the sound of the Hebrew lyre, I see the crusaders marching bearing the cross on high, to the martial clang of cymbals, I hear dervishes monotonously chanting, interspers’d with frantic shouts, as they spin around turning always towards Mecca, I see the rapt religious dances of the Persians and the Arabs, Again, at Eleusis, home of Ceres, I see the modern Greeks dancing, I hear them clapping their hands as they bend their bodies, I hear the metrical shuffling of their feet.
I see again the wild old Corybantian dance, the performers wounding each other, I see the Roman youth to the shrill sound of flageolets throwing and catching their weapons, As they fall on their knees and rise again.
I hear from the Mussulman mosque the muezzin calling, I see the worshippers within, nor form nor sermon, argument nor word,
But silent, strange, devout, rais’d, glowing heads, ecstatic faces.
I hear the Egyptian harp of many strings,
- The primitive chants of the Nile boatmen,
- The sacred imperial hymns of China,
- To the delicate sounds of the king, (the stricken wood and stone,)
- Or to Hindu flutes and the fretting twang of the vina,
A band of bayaderes.