Despite widespread claims that Santayana authored the verse from which this line is taken, we found no evidence among his published and unpublished work to verify this. See The Complete Poems of George Santayana: A Critical Edition, edited by William G. Holzberger, (Bucknell University Press, 1979).

In 2014 a researcher named Randolph Wagner discovered that the line was authored by Reginald Holmes and is from the poem “The Magic of Sound” which appeared in Holmes’ book Fireside Fancies (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1955).