And mine is broken--mine is broken!

Harps in heaven play high, play low;
In the cold, rainy wind I go
To find my harp, as green as spring--
My splintered harp without a string!'

She sang with passion. The wail of the lost was in her voice. She had
not the slightest idea what the words meant (probably they meant
nothing), but the sad cadence suited her emotional tone, and the ideas
of loss and exile expressed her vague mistrust of the world. Edward
imagined her in her blue-green dress and violet crown playing on a
large glass harp in a company of angels.

'Poor child!' he thought. 'Is it mystical longing or a sense of sin
that cries out in her voice?'

It was neither of those things; it was nothing that Edward could have
understood at that time, though later he did. It was the grief of rainy
forests, and the moan of stormy water; the muffled complaint of driven
leaves; the keening--wild and universal--of life for the perishing
matter that it inhabits.

Hazel expressed things that she knew nothing of, as a blackbird does.
For, though she was young and fresh, she had her origin in the old,
dark heart of earth, full of innumerable agonies, and in that heart she
dwelt, and ever would, singing from its gloom as a bird sings in a
yew-tree. Her being was more full of echoes than the hearts of those that
live further from the soil; and we are all as full of echoes as a rocky
wood--echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of