Hood’s is a most astonishing example of revivalist poetry:

"That," he replied, flecking an ash from his coat lappel, "has no name that I know of; some people call it 'The Soul.'"

A pained sensation shot through Ruth at his words, for he had plainly been improvising, and he must have felt what he had played.

"Here, Ruth, sing this," he continued, turning round and picking up a sheet of music.

"What?" she asked without moving.

Kemp looked at her expectantly. He said he had not known she sang; but since she did, he was sure her voice was contralto.

"Because your face is contralto."

She turned from his eyes as if they hurt her, and walked over to Louis's side.

It could hardly be called singing. Louis had often said that her voice needed merely to be set to rhythmic time to be music; in pursuance of which idea he would put into her hand some poem that touched his fancy, tell her to read it, and as she read, he would adapt to it an accompaniment according to the meaning and measure of the lines, --grandly solemn, daintily tripping, or wildly inspiriting. It was more like a chant than a song. To-night he chose Tennyson's Bugle-song. Her voice was subservient to the accompaniment, that shook its faint, sweet bugle-notes at first as in a rosy splendor; it rose and swelled and echoed and reverberated and died away slowly as if loath to depart. Arnold's playing was the poem, Ruth's voice the music the poet might have heard as he wrote, sweet as a violin, deep as the feeling evolved, --for when she came to the line beginning, "oh, love, they die in yon rich sky," she might have stood alone with one, in some high, clear place, so mellow was the thrill of her voice, so rapt the expression of her face. Kemp looked as if he would not tire if the sound should "grow forever and forever."

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