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Show ERAS OF SOUND THAT HAVE GONE INTO OBLIVION Vhat vanished sounds, what fine phosts of the ear, rise from the known years! Screaming upon their axles, in a storm of dust and hoofs, the war chariots charge over the Biblical plain; the measured plash of oars in banks rises from some galley bound for Ostia, the heavy wooden pound of the quartermaster's timing mace heard muffled from he-lowdecks he-lowdecks ; behind Pentelie colonnades, the stringed music of lost Instruments Instru-ments mingles with a vast chanting before the gods. One hears the hiss of streams of Greek fire from Byzantine citadels, bells ringing against thunderstorms in Gothic cities; the popgun sound of Renaissance artillery, the rumble of the first coaches on the first good roads, and the howl of wind in the rigging of an Eighteenth century man-of-war in foul weather at anchor an-chor in the downs. They are all gone ; men will hear them no more; and in our own day the last sounds of the handicrafts descend, fighting gallantly, toward the same ' oblivion. It may be that they will bold their ultimate own, and presently mount, passing on their upward way the whole huge childishness of modern noise down-tumbling. down-tumbling. What contemporary sound, one pauses to ask, will summon up our own strange years? The universal grind of gears when traffic starts again at a light, the demoniac tattoo of a riveter? In my own mind, it is something more subtle, more like the dry, merciless, electrical tick one hears in the pressured silence of a power room, a small sound, obedient, without life, and astronomically alien to the bones of man. Henry Beston in the Atlantic Monthly. |