opportunity as of taste-some who don't care for bad music, and never hear good if so hard a lot can be imagined-but there is only one class of men who condemn it, and those are fanatics; and there is only one order of beings, according to Luther, who hate it, and those are devils. But "If Music and sweet Poetry agree, As needs they must, the sister and the brother," it is among the poets that we shall find the most invariable appreciation of the art of numbers. And what a row of undying names rise at the mere suggestion-all bound up with melodious associations, who have done due homage to the power of sound, and been in just return linked for ever with her most exquisite productions-thus sending their immortal ideas in double channels to the heart! Shakspeare, whose world-hackneyed mottoes come over our minds with freshened power and truth, as we seek to analyze what he at once defined-nowhere with such instinctive truth as in the words he has put into Caliban's mouth "The isle is full of noises, Yet from many poets music receives only that conventional homage which one art pays to another. We need hardly recall Pope's poetry-nor Swift's-nor Goethe's-to know that she had no zealous worshippers in them all men of better heads than hearts, who understood the feelings more by a process of anatomy than by sympathy. Others again feel the contingent poetry attending particular music too much to be real enthusiasts for the music itself. Byron loved the music that came to him "o'er the waters." Burns of the heart" to have any cold judgment was too much possessed with the "tuning about that of the voice. Scott loved the hum of the bagpipe, and would have liked the beating of the tom-tom had it been Scotch though the verse of each has been as much Moore, they themselves could have sung as a fund of inspiration to the musician as if, like tion Mr. Wordsworth's musical sympathieswell as they have written. We should quesdirect or indirect. The materials of his We do not poetry are not akin to music. long to set his deep thoughts to melodythey leave nothing unexpressed for the musician to say. No poet who has been so much read has been so little sung. Nor does music Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and in her turn seem to inspire him with poetry: hurt not;❞— Milton-music-descended-who, when the chord of sweet sound is struck, dwells upon it with such melting luxuriance of enjoyment, exalts it with such solemn grandeur of feeling, and clothes it with such sounding harmony of verse as makes us feel as if an earlier Handel might have been given to the world, if a previous Milton had not been needful to inspire him ;-old Cowley too, who asks the same question all have asked "Tell me, oh Muse! for thou, or none, canst tell, The mystic powers that in bless'd numbers dwell" though he goes on, in the fantastic metaphor of the day, to relate how Chaos first "To numbers and fixed rules was brought and Dryden, who overflows with love for the art, and has left in Alexander's Feast a manual of musical Mesmerism never to be surpassed. Who will not think of Collins-and his death listening to the distant choir of Chichester? -he tells us, for example, of the Ranz de Vaches "I listen, but no faculty of mine Avails those modulations to detect, A musician might have said this—a mere musician-but, we confess, we are rather puzzled with it from so true a poet. It is curious to observe in this, as in every other art, how the two extremes combine the greatest number of admirers. Handel and Jullien hold the two ends of the great net which draws all mankind; the one catching the ear with the mere beat of time-the other subduing the heart with the sense of eternity. But it is in the wide territory between them that the surest instincts must be tried. Here, there are amateurs of every shade and grade, some learned in one instrument, others infatuated for one performer-some who listen ignorantly, others intelligently, but both gratefully, to whatever is really musicothers again, conspicuous as musical wickedness in high places, who care for none but their own. Doubtless some acquaintance with the principles of the art, and practical skill of hand, greatly enhance the pleasure of the listener; but still it is a sorrowful fact | keys, saddens at minors--smiles at modulathat the class of individuals who contentedly perform that species of self-serenade which goes by the ominous title of "playing a little," are the last in whom any real love for it is to be found. There is something in the small retailing of the arts, be it music, painting or poetry, which utterly annihilates all sense of their real beauty. There is a certain pitch of strumming and scraping which must be got over, or they had better never have touched a note. Apparently the highly-gifted and cultivated amateur, on the other hand, is one of the most enviable creatures in the world. Beauty must always dazzle, and wealth buy; but no disparity in the respective powers of attraction ever strikes us so great as that which exists between the woman who has only to lift her hand, or open her mouth, to give pleasure, and her who sits by and can do neither. But we know that superiority of all kinds must have its penalties, and none more keenly felt than in the ranks of private musical excellence: and though the firstrate amateur may command all the higher enjoyments of the art, without those concomitants of labor, anxiety, and risk which devolve on the professed artist-though she may be spared all the hardships and many of the temptations which lie so thick in the path of her professional sisters, yet the draught of excitement is pernicious to all alike, and one which we instinctively shrink from seeing at the lips of those we love. Not that we would disparage such a position. It is, and always will be, an enviable one to be able to confer pleasure at will, and generally a lovely and becoming one in the person of a woman. We know, too, that there are cool heads and pure hearts who can innocuously breathe the incense of admiring crowds, and who walk humble, though unwilling, Juggernauts over every form of adulation-little as it is usually believed of them; but even such, in the universal equalization of human happiness, have their trials, and keen ones tooand, among them, that of perpetually feeling their better selves overlooked in the homage paid to an adventitious gift, is an unfailing humiliation to a delicate mind. Upon the whole we are inclined to think that the most really enviable partaker of musical felicity, the one in whom the pleasure is most pure for himself and least selfish for others, is he who has no stake of vanity or anxiety in the matter-but who sits at overture, symphony, or chorus, with closed eyes and swimming senses--brightens at major tions, he knows not why,--and then goes forth to his work next morning with steady hand and placid brow, while ever and anon the irrepressible echoes of past sounds break forth over desk or counter into jocund or plaintive hummings, as if the memory were rejoicing too much in her sweet thefts to be able to conceal them. Happy hummings these for wife or sister, to whose voice or piano he is for ever a petitioner for pleasure it is a pleasure to give, and who lead him with "that exquisite bit of Beethoven" as with a silken string. We should hardly say that an ear for melody is the highest criterion of a taste for music. It sets heads wagging, and feet tapping-sends the ploughman whistling forth, and takes many a stall at the Opera; but we suspect it is rather the love of harmony which is the real divining-rod of the latent treasures of deep musical feeling. Grétry danced when a child to the sound of dropping water, foreshowing perhaps in this the light character of his taste and compositions; but Mozart, it is well known, when an infant of only three years old, would strike thirds on the clavichord and incline his little head, smiling to the harmony of the vibrations. Nothing proves more strongly the angelic purity of music than the very tender age at which the mind declares for it. No art has had such early proficients, and such eager volunteers, and no art has so surely performed in manhood what it promised in infancy. All the greatest musicians-Handel, Haydn, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, (it seems not Beethoven, however,)—were infant prodigies. There seems to be nothing to dread in prematureness of musical development-it grows with the growth and strengthens with the strength in natural concord; when we see a child picking out airs on a piano, or silent at a concert, we may rejoice in our hearts. It is difficult to imagine how a Greek child could ever evince its natural predilection for music-those two chief elements of the art which test the highest and the lowest grade of musical inclination, time and harmony, being alike unknown to them. The whole Greek world, it would seem, and many centuries of the Christian, never advanced so far even as the knowledge of those harmonious thirds which the little Mozart instinctively enjoyed. We seek in vain for any indications of that which we feel to be the real nature of music and its purpose as regards the human heart. They either used it outwardly as a mere sing-song enhancement of that luxu- | rious pleasure which all Orientals take in story-telling or verse-reciting, or they sought for it inwardly as an abstract thing on which to try their powers of thought, and not their springs of emotion, They ascertained the existence of a deep science in music before they suspected a deeper instinct. They studied her grammar before they knew her speech. Instead of combining her tones in fullness of harmony, they split them into divisions incognisable to our modern ears. They loaded her with a complex theory in which no indication of a right system can be traced; and then made her over to the study of philosopers and the performance of poets, without suspecting that there was a realm yet undiscovered independent of both. To define what ancient music was, seems, by the confession of all who know anything of modern, to be as hopeless as it is a thankless task. To living ears there is more real music to be found in the first organ tune that strikes up under our windows than in all the fragments of soft Lydian measures that have been deciphered. It would be absurd, however, to measure the void occasioned among the people of ancient Greece by the absence-even if total -of real music, by that which would ensue under the same circumstances to us. What void could there be with such a language as theirs, which held music, as it were, in too close an embrace for her to have any independent action? Had there been less melody in their speech and verse, there would have been more room for music as a separate art. Music and poetry seem in some combination or proportion to have supplied a certain measure of enjoyment to every cultivated people; but where poetry itself had such power as with the Greeks, it may justly be supposed that what we call music would not be missed. In the most glowing days of Italian poetic imagination there was, comparatively speaking, no music; and even the best music of modern Italy has never been able to disengage itself from the sweet melody of its language-they have flowed together in natural affinity-the word Addio is a song in itself. Only in that nation where the language is hardly musical enough to be spoken, has music raised her voice independently; and how exquisitely! Whether this theory be true or not, however, it is certain that "in the Isles of Greece where Sappho loved and sung," that which we now call music was so unknown, that were old Timotheus to rise from the dead we imagine no change or development in modern civilization could astonish him so much as that in the art of music. He would be delighted with our post-office-interested in our railroadsashamed of our oratory-horrified at our public buildings, but dumbfounded at our musical festivals. The most ingenious theory we have met with on the subject of Greek music is that propounded in Dr. Moseley's few pages. Taking into consideration the total disparity between the effect of the ancient specimens of melody, when transposed into our modes of notation and performance, and that so enthusiastically commented on by contemporary writers, this gentleman has sought for an explanation of the riddle in a manner of execution dependent entirely on the rules of rhythm and quantity. The choruses of Eschylus and Sophocles he found, upon examination, to be divisible into lines of seven syllables each. Coupling this with the fact of there being seven notes in the Greek Diatonic Scale, and seven alternate singers of Strophe and Antistrophe, he has come to the conclusion that the music of the Greek chorus, like that of the Russian hornband of the present day, might probably be performed on the principle of a note to each person thus producing an effect of which, under any other circumstances, the meagre skeletons of melody that have been handed down would give no idea. The theory is curious, and might be met by an inquiry into the origin of that peculiar horn-musicbelonging as it does to a country where nothing truly national goes back less than a thousand years, and where the earliest form of ritual music is preserved as strictly in the commonest church as it is in the Pope's chapel itself. Many will superficially attribute it to that simple relation of master and slave which may degrade a man to a mere note, or any other form of the cipher it pleases; but we are not disposed to look upon it in that light. Setting aside the circumstance that the idea was too ingenious to have proceeded from any Russian czar or boyar before the time of Catherine the Great, in whose reign the Russian horn-music was well known, we must own that we see no degradation in it at all. The man of one note has as much to do, to say the least, as many a brother horn in our orchestra, who patiently bides his time through intervals of fifty bars, and far more scope for his sense of time and expression-in which the proficiency of the Russian hornist is marvellous. His instrument may have but one note, but so have others, and his note has the merit of | the beautiful musical tradition of St. Cecelia being indispensable to the piece. If D or G was founded. There is no proving whether be ill, all are stopped. The case, however, the music of the day was borrowed from the of the Greek chorister is not strictly parallel. chorusses of the idolatrous Greek, or the According to this hypothesis he represents hymns of the unbelieving Jew, or whether, not only one note, but one syllable; and, in in the exclusiveness of early Christian feela people whose instincts for poetical accent ing, it was independent of both. Not till were so acute that they compelled even that the end of the sixth century is the silence of music to bow before them, it is difficult to broken with the Gregorian chants, which imagine how such a division of labor could rise up from the vast profound of the past produce the requisite effect. like solemn heralds of a dawning world of sound-pure, solemn, and expressionlesslike those awful heads of angels and archangels we discover sometimes in rude fresco beneath the richer coloring and suppler forms of a later day. It was these chants, it may be supposed, given in the thrilling tones of young singing boys, whom the Popes had already trained in their service, that melted the great heart of Charlemagne when on a visit to Hadrian I., and caused the importation of the antiphonal books into the monasteries of middle Europe. At all events it may safely be accepted that to the development of that art which charms modern ears and hearts, all the labors of Greek musicians never contributed one iota; but on the contrary, greatly clogged its progress-everywhere raising up before the timid gropers after musical truth a wall of false theory which they had not the courage to pull down. We are apt, and no wonder, to look upon the Greeks as more than men in matters of art. It is as well that painted statues and enharmonic intervals remain to prove their fallibility. Mr. Kiesewetter opens his History with a decided repudiation of their musical services : "It is a preconceived and deeply-rooted opinion that our present music has been perfected upon that of the Greeks, and that it is only a further continuation of the same. Authors, even of our own times, talk of the revival of ancient music in the middle ages. True, there was a period when the music of the Christian West sought counsel with that of the heathen East, and the decisions of Greek writers were looked upon as the source of all true musical inspiration; but the fact is that the later music only prospered in proportion as she disengaged herself from the earlier, and then first attained a certain degree of perfection when she had succeeded in throwing off the last fetters, real or conventional, of old Hellenic doctrine. There had been long nothing further in common between them but the mere fundamental elements of tone and sound. Even had ancient Greece continued to exist for two thousand years more, no music, in any way analogous to ours, could possibly have proceeded from her. systems in which the art was bound, the purposes for which she was used, the very laws of the State regarding her, offered unconquerable impediments to her development. The old Greek music perished in its infancy, an interesting child, but one predestined never to arrive at maturity. For the human race her fall was no loss." The The first few centuries of the Christian era have transmitted no sounds to posterity. We know nothing of the low chanting which echoed in the catacombs of Rome; which Constantine listened to, and which St Ambrose reformed. We have no idea on what But the course of true music was not to run smooth. It lay too deep at the human heart not to be subjected to every human caprice. Strange theories of concord were propounded and laid down by old monks, themselves probably hard of hearing, which, if ever performed in presence of their brethren, must have made them bless the thickness of their cowls. No convent penance, Mr. Kiesewetter remarks, could have exceeded that "sweet commixture of sounds" compounded of consecutive fourths and fifths, which good Thibaldus, who died 930, so complacently announces in his " Orgawith that contraction of the brow and winenum." We listen to the specimens he gives ing of the nerves with which we see a child place a pencil upright on a slate, and know what must ensue before we can prevent it. This ingenious discord was partly the result of a revived respect for the doctrines of Boethius--a disciple of the Greek theory of music, in the fourth century, who, unfortunately, suffered martyrdom after he had written those commentaries which have been the curse of all musicians, instead of before; and also partly from the state of the times. We might be tempted to ask how such a perversion of the common use of what is called ear could have occurred; but we must remember that the science we were boasting of a few pages back, has here to be taken into consideration. If music united the double importance of an art and a science too, she had to struggle with the difficulties and vicissitudes of each. As an art she had the Chanson de Roland and the Complaint of the Chatelain de Courcy, indications both of military fire and lover-like pathos are to be traced; and in a song by Thibaut, king of minstrels and of Navarre, there is a passage upon the words "et pleurs, et plains, et soupirs," which, even at this day, a young lady with long curls would be requested to repeat. very little chance till her science was defined, and as a science she had to run the gauntlet of the same tedious scholastic absurdities which accompanied the course of all knowledge in those days. Theories were her bane, as they have been the bane of every system of ethics and physics. Even the celebrated Guido of the eleventh century, whose name has come down to us as one of the early musical fathers, seems to our ears to have done but little towards developing the pleasing properties of the art; for though he invented the sol fa, or the art of solmisation, and is said, like another Mainzer, to have taught Pope John XX. to read music in one lesson, yet the harmonies thus admitted to the pontifical ears were such as any of Mr. Mainzer's fifteen hundred little choris-servative system, took no note of the changes ters, if all accounts of them be true, would have repudiated in one grand unison of horror. The history of music was destined in some measure to be analogous with that of poetry. While learned men, in the silence and abstraction of their closets, were perverting her from a pleasure to a problem, occasionally sending forth some discordant torso of sound, laboriously fabricated all wrong upon the profoundest theories of right, a wild growth of sweet sounds had sprung up spontaneously in the world without, which, casting off all doctrines and trusting only to a native sense of what was pleasing, spoke the native tongue intelligible to all ears. It was the Troubadours who first directed music in the way she should go, as the expression of all those feelings which belong to romance-it was they who released her from the tyranny of schools, from the uncongenial fellowship of chemistry, logic, and the black art, and the tedious homage of pedantic old monks, with cold hearts and cracked voices. It is true they knew nothing of the monochord or tetrachord, save what all musical ears know without being aware of it. They had never studied the law of vibrations-nor looked into Boethius or Thibaldus; but they followed the art with instinct of heart and ear, wooed her with skill of finger and voice, and devoted her to the service of the gentle and fair, who were satisfied with "des mots bien trouvés et des sons bien chantés," and never troubled their heads about any theory of sound. Meagre as is the music of the Troubadours' songs, we feel that they contain the germ of that which the Greeks never sought after, and the convent never suspected. In the specimens Burney gives of The world was now fairly possessed with the sweet infection. The stream of melody flowed steadily on, to be joined in due time by those mighty tributaries of measure, harmony, invention, modulation, pathos, and grace, which have swelled it to that fullness of tide all civilized Europe now rejoices in. The Church, meanwhile, true to her con in musical feeling that were going on with- |