These pieces are strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted.

At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere.

Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.
Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem?
Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin.

The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first.
But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric.

Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.