Ideal voices and beloved
of those who have died, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.
Sometimes, within our dreams, they speak;
sometimes the mind can hear them in our thoughts.
And with their sound for an instant return
sounds from the early poetry of our lifelike music in the night, faraway, that fades.

Do we not hear voices, gentle and great, and some of them like the voices of departed friends,— do we not hear them saying to us, "Come up hither?"

Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.

Wymarzone, ukochane głosy
tych, co umarli, albo tych, co dla nas
tak są straceni, jak umarli.

Czasem do nas przemawiają w snach
czasem je w zadumaniu słyszy umysł.

A z ich brzmieniem powraca na chwilę
dźwięki najpierwszej naszego życia poezji,
jak muzyka, która nocą, gdzieś w dali, dogasa.

Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave.

Music, When Soft Voices Die

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory — Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.

The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.

Such souls,
Whose sudden visitations daze the world,
Vanish like lighting, but they leave behind
A voice that in the distance far away
Wakens the slumbering ages.

Now when I hear spoken—mostly by the older people who are passing away—it is to me very good. ...the sound is like a warm wind that arises from my childhood. It is the music of memory. ...much of the power and magic and music of words consist not in the meaning but in sound. Storytellers, actors, and children know this too.

Such souls,
Whose sudden visitations daze the world,
Vanish like lightning, but they leave behind
A voice that in the distance far away
Wakens the slumbering ages.

Music is often the kingdom the dead inhabits in our soul.

I am listening for the voices
Which I heard in days of old.

books are the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of man. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. Their work is, at least, in the two higher compartments of our threefold life. In a room well filled with them, no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none, as friends to the individual, they are first and foremost among the compages, the bonds and rivets of the race, onward from that time when they were first written on the tablets of Babylonia and Assyria, the rocks of Asia minor, and the monuments of Egypt, down to the diamond editions of Mr. Pickering and Mr. Frowde.