With a sigh for the glories of other days, I will conclude this chapter on epigrams with the following epigrammatic sermon, which an unknown poet affixed to the gate of a village cemetery :

ON ORATORIOS IN NEW YORK.

now IT STRIKES A STRANGER.

New-York, November 18, 1847.

MY DEAR TOM: While waiting for buyers of my famous new patented machine, I have endeavored to occupy myself with sightseeing, as I have already written you; and last week, (November the tenth,) I went to the Tabernacle to hear the American Musical Institute' perform the 'Oratorio of Elijah,' by the great Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. You know I have had the reputation of being a sort of musical genius myself, and have obtained some notoriety in our parish choir for playing the bass-viol and leading the singers in the First Congregational singing-seats, before I entered college; and I therefore promised myself a great treat. I too had been myself the basso, as they here call the leader of the bass singers, in our Thanksgiving anthems; so I felt certain that I was pretty well qualified to sit as a critic of low degree upon the performances, and even of the oratorio of Mendelssohn.

On going into the Tabernacle I purchased a book containing the words and the finger-post remarks of Mr. Henry C. Watson, which helps the unlearned and unmusical to know when they are to be astonished and what they are to admire. You may be surprised that in a musical city like this that such guide-posts should be deemed necessary, and it so seemed to me; but at the Institute I found this very necessary. The Tabernacle is a circle, and holds seated two thousand five hundred spectators and five hundred performers. The seats of the singers rise from a platform and extend on both sides of the organ, which is one of the largest in the city. It is here all the great concerts are given.

About seven o'clock the performers and singers began to muster, and pile up, row above row, to the outer circle; the ladies, as was fitting and proper, being placed on seats in front of the platform, the instruments filling the seats in front of the organ; and there was no lack of these. There were dozens of fiddles, half a dozen double bass-viols, and trombones and French-horns, and all other instruments, too many to be counted; and last, not least, two tremendous kettle-drums, and a man of muscle and resolution to manage them. Such were the notes of dreadful preparation. All was expectation; the like of which Milton has described, when Death and Satan were about to begin their fearful fight.

But here I must lay down my pen, and give up the task I have assumed. I fear, first, my own powers of description, and then, dear Tom, of your powers of comprehension. You, who have never heard any thing more intertwisted than the good old harmonies of Billings and Holden, what can you know of an oratorio by the most magnificent imagination of the musical world, whose theme was

Elijah the Prophet; the scenes in whose life are here narrated by musical symbols? But to give you a glimpse of the work Mendelssohn has achieved, I will tell you, in the fewest words possible, the outline of this great oratorio. It opens by Elijah's denunciation, that for three years neither dew nor rain should descend upon Israel.' An overture follows, descriptive of the passions of the people in rebellion against GoD and His prophet; then the cries of the people, caused by the drought, and Elijah is driven by the chorus, who personate the people, into the desert. Elijah reäppears at the Brook of Cherith, and then to the widow at Shunem, who receives him with fear, and whose dead son Elijah restores. Then opens the scene on Mount Carmel, with the worshippers of Baal, whose cries to their false gods are reëchoed by the chorus of idolaters. They grow fierce and frantic under the mocking recitatives of Elijah. Then comes a choral of the true believers, and Elijah in a recitative calls on GoD for fire from Heaven. It descends; the false prophets are slain. Elijah then ascends the Mount, and there is a beautiful duett between him and his messenger, as to the signs of the coming rain. So ends Part First. In the Second Act Jezebel comes forward to avenge her priests. Obadiah delivers his warning message to Elijah, who retires to the desert, is fed by ravens, and the angel, in a recitative, directs him to eat and go to Horeb. Then opens the scene of Elijah at the mouth of the cave, when God made his manifestations in the whirlwind, the earthquake, and 'the still small voice,' all which you must recollect is painted to the ear by sounds, and the oratorio closes with the choruses and recitatives expressing the grandeur of Elijah's character and the promises of the coming Messiah. Such was the music to be rehearsed.

When I tell you that the performances of the evening in no degree realized all this, you will not be surprised. The performers, though so numerous to my inexperienced eyes and ears, were too few. The piece required as many thousands as there were hundreds, and was written for so vast a number of musicians and singers. The Institute were therefore compelled to submit to the incongruities of having the recitatives of the angel and of Jezebel sung by the same lady, and the chorus of Baal and of God's people by the same voices. Then the instruments were not well blended in their tones, and there was a man with a trombone of vast size, and a pair of lungs which would have helped out olus in a storm, blowing out despair and death in tones which overwhelmed the whole body of performers.

But, dear Tom, you who have never heard any thing more complicated than an anthem, cannot understand all this; but your sweet cousin, whose clear silver tones go to the very heart's core, will better catch the ideas I would present. Ah, Tom! I would not give one of her songs for all I heard last evening! As I listened, my heart went back to your father's parlor. I saw her sitting at her piano, so quiet and self-possessed, her beautiful shoulders covered by her rich ringlets; and once more I lived over the hours when,

with my violoncello in hand by her side, I accompanied her in those sweet overtures which she brought with her from school; and the little quarrels we had as to the time; the necessity there was for me to lean forward and scan the notes; the absolute necessity of putting my arm round her waist in doing so, while her tresses were floating over my cheeks; and then, recalled by too close a pressure, her pretty confusion, and her soft hand removing mine, and her eye so bright and piercing, and yet so sweetly reproving me for my trespasses; all these sweet thoughts came thronging on amid the hurlyburly of trumpets and drums and the screams of the chorus in full blast, showing how strong is the power of association, and how the mind, awakened to what it loves, remembers the past, however dissimilar the thoughts and the sounds which call up the memories of other days. Pardon me, my dear fellow, for this digression; but though I can't paint by words what Mendelssohn has done by notes, and which the Musical Institute' attempted to describe by sounds, yet I will do my best by a way of my own, and will use materials more within my grasp and your comprehension. You must remember that good old tune of Holden's, set to this verse of Dr. Watts' hymn, in the Village Collection :'

So pilgrims on the scorching sand,
Beneath a burning sky,

Long for a cooling stream at hand,
For they must drink or die.'

I shall never forget the effect of this tune upon me when we went to church at Sandy Hill Meeting-house, on a hot Sunday afternoon, to visit your cousin at Aunt Mary's. There sat in the singing-seats, all in white, a row of sweet young girls, all very pretty; and then there was Ben Johnson with his big bass, and Tom Jones and all his bass singers; and when they came to this verse, Long for a cooling,' sang the tenor, Long for a cooling,' piped up the treble; Ben came in with a smash and rasp on the big bass that shook the very ground-tier of the meeting-house; while his bass-men in the rear, roaring out like so many bears, as though they would devour these girls, sang out Long for a cooling;' after which, as you know, all the voices blend in and come out even at the end. This, you will recollect, is the way it ran:

As you were yourself very much moved by the voices of those young ladies on that occasion, you will certainly recollect the tune I speak of; and if so, you will have a clue, about the size of a packthread, to help you through the labyrinth of an oratorio upon this

one verse.

You must imagine the scene to open in a desert. The caravan enters, and you hear the big bassos scraping out dull, heavy sounds, which indicate that the camels are weary and the sand very deep; after recitatives expressing thirst and agony, and choruses wailing and fainting, the fiddles strike up a brisk movement, which is caught by the viols and reëchoed by the bassos; and then come the trombones and the chorus, all singing to the top of their voices; and let the words be: The long sought well is near; its curb we see !'

But if performed à-la-mode the Institute, you could not distinguish a single word without the book before you. Now Mr. Henry C. Watson would have indicated all this by some such sign-post marks as the following:

The Aria is in F minor. Its character is that of deep, intense and overwhelming misery; this is followed by the chorus in D minor, portraying the despondency and despair of the caravan; this is immediately followed on the words, The well is nigh, its curb we see,' by a change in the key of G major. The effect of which is strikingly overwhelmingly grand; indeed the chorus from beginning to end is a series of brilliant and original conceptions.' The caravan reaches the well-it is dry! Then there comes on a general crash of all concerned, and the trombone man outdoes himself, and threatens to burst his brass or his belly, both of which seem endangered by his zeal to reach to the conceptions of the composer. After an Adagio recitative, responded to by the chorus, they set out again, when the old camel who heads the procession falls down, and then comes another smash, indicating that the entire crockery of the caravan is all broken to pieces. The rider makes a recitative over the mishap; and then comes a Terzetto of men, contesting who shall rip open the camel's stomach, to get what Hood terms a 'second-hand swig at his cistern' this is followed by a general uproar of the instruments and choruses, who all claim their share. The orchestra now commence in dull dubious notes, which seem to have no beginning nor ending,and this indicates the contest among the camels as to who shall be the leader; a task which you will remember they do not care to take upon themselves. The caravan moves on. Then rises a Simoom of the Desert, which covers up the entire caravan, whose sounds become stifled by the heat and dust, and so gradually die down into the stillness of death. Now all this is not attained without the most piercing cries of the chorus, and the very loudest blasts of the trombones; the gloomy thunders of the kettle-drums, and open throats of all the pedal-pipes of the high organ.

Now, Tom, do you catch the idea? My own opinions as to this oratorio have been confirmed by the judgment of a gentleman then staying at our hotel, whose lady was one of the most attractive creatures I have seen. They had arrived a few days before the tenth