gotten the words. We may sit unmoved during the recital of the finest verses; but the moment the harper's fingers sweep the strings, the melody rouses us to a fine fanaticism. The song was body before,-it is soul now; its harmonies are complete; and to every march of the melody the heart-strings throb responsive. Nature is double all through;-body and soul, matter and spirit, as if the universe were a repeated marriage of the two elements. To the fertility of the fields is added beauty of tint, and form, and colour: the brown soil has a soul, and that soul is the flower, which would exist in vain were there no other souls to make common cause with its life and history. To man-the prose of the worldis added woman, its poetry.

These many spirits of the world seem made for man. The rainbow may span the heavens; but unless seen by man, its arches have been built in vain. When it bridges over the unpopulated desert, it is but a thousand drops of rain, which the green leaves drink in without knowing of their prismatic beauty; but when it embraces the corn ridge and the village, a thousand loving eyes look up, and angels are seen treading it as a pathway between the heaven and the earth. Hence, knowing its mission, the rainbow only visits spots where human souls abide. It is for the soul of man that all these many souls are born, and the soul of song as truly so as any. Where is the music of nature so rich as on the skirts of cultivated districts, where flowery gardens feed innumerable humming bees, and thick bosses of thatch shelter the trusting robin! It is a fact, that in the deep forest the birds that sing are few; and the more lonely

the spot, the more hoarse and dissonant the voices of the creatures. Everywhere the dear birds hover and flit on hasty wing; but only near the dwelling of man hover those whose song is sweetest: in his garden they take shelter and bring up their young; in the close copse or mossy orchard they cower from the noonday heat; and return again and again, in spite of the persecutions they meet with at his hands, to heighten his enjoyments, to cheer his social hours, and renew the sentiments of past delight. In the lonely mere, and over the dark moorland hover many birds, but they are such as only hoot and scream; and where the wild waves play together fly seabirds, whose only language is a dismal scream.

Nature pushes up towards the region of poetry in sound as she does in colour. As she weaves rainbows from the fragments of a falling cloud, so she struggles to weave music from every voice of animate and inanimate things. The wind howls in the November branches, but sings amid the shrubby foliage of June; the rivulet makes a whizzing sound while creeping through the matted sedge, but laughs like a merry maiden when it sparkles among the yellow pebbles, and tinkles like a bell when it beats up a fallen rock.

It is because music stands above all the utilities of sound, because it appeals to the sentiments of men, because it is soul claiming kindred with soul, that man has loved it first among the spiritual possessions of the world, and has sought in its voice an answer to his longings for the good and fair. Nowhere upon the face of all the world is to be found a people in whose hearts music has not a welcome. The rude Indian stands upon

the shelly beach and listens in love to the singing of the waves. He suspends the hollow shell upon the delicate fibre of the palm, and strikes it with his hand, that it may give forth song. He fashions the marsh reed or the stem of grass into a flute, and enchants his listening children with its voice. And when the toils of the chase are done, he gathers together his fellow-huntsmen, and in the purple of the evening air they sing together their songs of joy.

It was the consciousness of union between the soul of man and the soul of song which begot those lovely conceits of antiquity which represented nature as a musical or rhythmic harmony. Plato said, the soul of man was itself a harmony, and had its nearest sympathies in music. Bolder still was the sage of Samos, when he said that the orbs of heaven were so harmonious in their motions that it must be accompanied by ravishing songs,-that the worlds warble in their ceaseless march, while the blue deeps beat back the chorus and repeat the echo of their psalms.

All fables, when understood, become facts. Orpheus is no fable; he is the poet skilled in harmony whom the ages honour with the attributes of divinity in remembrance of the solace which men found in his songs. The Orphic hymns are lost, but fragments of his legendary life remain to testify how closely men cling to the remembrance of pleasure. When Orpheus bewailed the death of his wife Euridyce, the sweet sound of his lyre caused a forest of elms to spring up, and the charm of his harp was so great that the woods nodded, the brown rocks broke their bonds and marched entranced towards

him. That the extravagance is only superficial, witness the repeated references of poets, who return again and again to these lovely legends because there is a truth beneath them which is universal :

"Therefore the poet

Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods;
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage,

But music for the time doth change his nature."

The universal poet saw the breadth of the myth, and added:

"The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
And his affections dark as Erebus."

SHAKSPERE.

The spirit of the world was young when music was made the handmaid of religion; and it still affords a glimpse of that antiquity to know that deeds of heroism and valour were sanctified in song, and that music completed the glory of the inauguration and the festival. Whether at the Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games, or at the victories of Romulus, 750 years before Christ, when the army, horse and foot, followed the chariot of the conqueror, hymning their gods in songs of their country; or whether at the marriage feast or the funeral prayer, the charm of music still predominates,-interweaves itself with the fate and circumstances of man, and creeps into his heart like a sunbird seeking for a home. It is this power which rouses a rude peasantry from the lethargy of serfdom to repossess

themselves of liberties long lost, under the impulse of their national melodies. The effect produced on the Swiss soldiers, when in the service of the French, by an ancient air of the Rannes des Vaches, was so powerful that it was forbidden to be played, so forcibly did it remind the men of the mountainous homes which they had left, and of the hearts that were beating and the eyes that were weeping for them.

National song, of all other, holds a powerful sway over the minds of those in whom it awakens thoughts of fatherland and freedom. What would be the poetry of any nation, or any age, if robbed of the spirit of its song? What would be left of Scottish character if the ballads of the Caledonian bards were swept away? if the harps of the minstrels perished with the fingers that first swept them? The song that cheered the shepherd boy while tending his sheep, comes back to him in the hour of oppression and danger; and even upon the battlefield, that melody calls up the moors and mountains of his native land; the wild woods and the streams come back, and the breezy freshness of the heather fans his cheek again, as he marches with a firm step and a nervous arm to win his liberty or die. It is said that he who writes the songs of a nation may at the same time predict its history, for patriotism has ever burned the brighter when music fanned the flame, and the human breast has ever throbbed with a holier devotion when the soul of song was stirring at the heart strings.

The same tender emotions which move the cameldriver to sing to his camel, as he shares with the patient brute his dates and barley-bread, and then ceases in his