Mine own unmanly weakness, that made me
A fellow-mourner with him.

"Amet. I believe thee.

"Men. He look'd upon the trophies of his art,

Then sigh'd, then wip'd his eyes, then sigh'd, and cried:

Alas, poor creature! I will soon revenge

This cruelty upon the author of it;

Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,

Shall never more betray a harmless peace

To an untimely end:' and in that sorrow,
As he was pushing it against a tree,

1 suddenly stept in."

We have already quoted several beautiful and philosophical passages on music, from the writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Of the following, from De Quincey's "Vision of Sudden Death," we would say,

"List, mortals, if your ears be true,

And hearken even to ecstacy!"

"Fragment of music too pasionate, heard once and heard no more, what aileth thee that thy deep-rolling chords come up at intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and after forty years have lost no element of horror? . . . Music and incense, blossoms from forests, and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst natural carolling and the echoes of sweet girlish laughter. Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, wailing over the dead that die before the dawn. Then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue. The golden tubes of the organ, which, as yet, had but muttered at intervals-gleaming amongst clouds and surges of incense-threw up as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart-shattering music." 1

'De Quincey, vol. iv., p. 354.

And in his "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," we find this magnificient description:-"The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams -a music of preparation and of awakening suspense-a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where-somehow, I knew not how-by some beings, I knew not whoma battle, a strife, an agony was conducting-was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet, had not the power to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power; for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. 'Deeper than ever plummet sounded,' I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment

allowed, and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells! And with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells; and again, and yet again reverberated-everlasting farewells!

"And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud-‘I will sleep no more!'"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning thus writes in her vision of Poets:

"So works this music on the earth;
God so admits it, sends it forth,
To add another worth to worth-

"A new creation-bloom that rounds
The old creation, and expounds
His Beautiful in tuneful sounds.

""Now hearken!' Then the Poet gazed
Upon the angel glorious-faced,
Whose hand, majestically raised,

"Floated across the organ-keys

Like a pale moon o'er murmuring seas,
With no touch, but with influences.

"Now flashing sharp on sharp along,
Exultant, in a mounting throng,—
Now dying off into a song

"Fed upon minors,-starry sounds
Moved on free-paced, in silver rounds,
Enlarging liberty with bounds.

"And every rhythm that seemed to close,
Survived in confluent underflows,

Symphonious with the next that rose:"

and, in her exquisite Sonnet entitled "Perplexed Music," thought and language are alike beautiful:

"Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand;
Whence harmonies we cannot understand,
Of God's will in His worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad, perplexed minors. Deathly colds
Fall on us while we hear and countermand
Our sanguine heart back from the fancy-land,
With nightingales in visionary wolds.
We murmur,-'Where is any certain tune
Or measured music, in such notes as these?'-

But angels, leaning from the golden seat,

Are not so minded: their fine ear hath won

The issue of completed cadences;

And, smiling down the stars, they whisper-SWEET."

The perfect adaptation or sympathy between music and our inmost thoughts and feelings, is at once its origin, and the key to its universality. It lightens labour -sweetens sorrow-banishes care-and gives expression to joy; its tones

"Tremble along the frame and harmonize The attemper'd organ, that ev'n saddest thoughts Mix with some sweet sensations."

Hence the Indian palanquin bearer, and the German shepherd boy; the driver of the vetturino, or the

Venetian gondolier; the spinner at the wheel, and the weaver at the loom; the Highland girl wading in the mountain stream; the student, the soldier, and the sailor-all have their songs, sung or remembered alike under the scorching noontide sun of the tropics, or by the pine-shadowed shores of Canada, when

"The rapids are near, and the daylight past."

To the imaginative artist, even a blotch on a wall may suggest a picture; and so with the musical composer, and the varied aspects of Nature-there being music in his own soul. In like manner, too, the musical listener will frequently shape a few notes, or even vague sounds, into the richest orchestral effects, hearing all distinctly in the mind's ear, surrounded with numerous accessories and crowding associations.

Once upon a time we knew a schoolboy, who, if he but chanced on the street to hear an urchin blowing a whistle or playing on a Pan's pipe, would forthwith conjure up Sicily, Theocritus, Mount Ida, and "the Muses in a ring;" wild thyme and the drowsy hum of Hyblæan bees, Syrinx and the old mythologies, with many a sweet 'old pastoral. Then he would hear the little boy piping sweetly under the great plane-tree by the fountain of Callirhoë-the boy who, when asked where he learned to play so well, answered with a look of wondering simplicity, that "it piped itself!" He would also listen in reverie to the Genius in The Vision of Mirza, or to the sweet melodies of the good Genius in Vathek. He would hear Blake's happy "Songs of Innocence," or the child piping in Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia, "as if he would never grow old!" Each or