gation to join in. Human nature is a strange thing never a greater puzzle perhaps than when it conscientiously abjures one of the few pure pleasures with which the hands of virtue are strengthened here below.

shadow of death upon him, feeling it to be a solemn duty which he must work while there was still life to fulfil; and who is there that can hear it without the sense of its sublimity being enhanced by the remembrance of its being the work of the dying for the dead?

It is not possible to conceive that any religious compositions should exceed those of Handel in true sublimity. There is something which tells us that a majesty of music surpassing his is not to be heard in the flesh. We feel that the sculptured grandeur of his recitative fulfils our highest conception of Divine utterance--that there is that in some of his choruses which is almost too mighty for the weakness of man to express, as if those stupendous words, "Wonderful! Counsellor! The Prince of Peace!" could hardly be done justice to till the lips of angels and archangels had shouted them through the vast Profound in his tremendous salvos of sound; and yet that, though the power of such passages might be magnified by heaven's millions, their beauty could hardly be exalted. We feel in that awful chorus, "And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed," that those three magical notes which announce in claps of thunder "That all flesh

The mistake consists in ever bringing such matters into the bondage of religious conscience, instead of leaving them to the liberty of mere feeling. At most the objection can be but relative. "To him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean,' not to others; therefore let him not require the same abstinence from them. But we confess that we are not inclined to be so tolerant with that objection against the private character of the performers, which, in default of all real argument against the music, is so triumphantly brought forward. We do not admit that the work is to be condemned in the workman, or the art in the artist. At the same time, if there be any line of life the members of which invariably give occasion for scandal, it is but natural and right that it should fall into disrepute. But this is not the case with music. Of course, if we employ foreigners, we must expect them to offend our canons of morality as much in the profession of music as in any other calling. But this does not apply to our sacred perform-shall see it, together," might better ances. There the parts are, with rare exceptions, filled up by our own countrymen and country women, who, as far as human judgment can decide, are as blameless in their lives and conduct as those who hear them, or those who do not.

belong to an order of ethereal beings, with wings, that they might rise spontaneous with the sounds, than to a miserable race who are merged in clay and chained to earth, though they feel they hardly stand upon it when they hear them.

As regards the composers, we are unwil- Mozart brings no such overpowering senling to believe that any ever attempted to sations. His music man can sing and listen express the awful truths of sacred subjects to, and none but man. It is the very voice without hearts attuned to the task they had of humanity-poor, prayerful, supplicating, undertaken. Handel was jealous when the wretched humanity with folded hands and bishops sent him words for anthems, as he uplifted eyes-"Dona eis requiem"-" salve felt it implied his ignorance of the Holy nos"-the words have not more intensity of Scriptures. "I have read my Bible," said prayer than the music. His Agnus Dei's he "I shall choose for myself;" and his are wrung from full hearts, unable of themselection was better than theirs. Haydn selves to help themselves. We feel it is wrote at the commencement of all his scores, music in sympathy with beings who know "In nomine Domini," or " Soli Deo Gloria ;" themselves to be fallen, and yet the heirs of and at the end of them, "Laus Deo." When immortality-that he has invented for his I was occupied upon the Creation," he says, fellow-creatures another medium of appeal "always before I sat down to the piano I against the trials and temptations of this life prayed to God with earnestness that he would-nay, that his music might be turned into enable me to praise Him worthily." We may perhaps damage this anecdote by adding that whenever he felt the ardor of his imagination decline, or was stopped by some insuperable difficulty, he rose from the pianoforte and began to run over his rosary--but it was a method, he says, which he never found to fail. Mozart composed his Requiem with the

VOL. XVI. NO. I.

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an argument for purgatory itself, and tempt many to believe that it could help them beyond it. The distinction between Mozart and Handel is that given in Dryden's ode: the one raises a mortal up to heaven, the other brings an angel down.

A whole Bridgewater treatise might have been not unworthily devoted to the wonder

family, as well as the practical buffoonery of the time, led to a great deal of burlesque imitative music, both in Germany and in Italy, in the seventeenth century. The cackling of hens all on one note and ending with a fifth above, the mewing of rival cats in nice chromatic order, with a staccato, of course, by way of a spit, were favorite pastimes of the severest German contrapuntists; and even Marcello, the Pindar of Music, as he was called, has left two elaborate choruses, one for soprani, the other for contr'alti, which baa like sheep and mou like oxen. These were the avowed absurdities of men who liked occasionally to drop their robes of dignity; but at all times the close power of imitation which music affords has been a dangerous rock for the musician. Haydn in his finest music did not steer clear of it: one feels that the servile representations of the tiger's leaps, of the stag's branching horns, of the pattering hail-(why he gave a pert staccato triplet accompaniment to the rolling of "awful thunders" is not so easily occounted for)-are so many blots on his glorious Creation. The verdure-clad fields, the purling of the "limpid brook," the mild light of the moon as she "glides through silent night," delight us not so much from the correctness of the musical image, for the same music would express other words, as from the intrinsic sweetness of the melody, the exquisite song with which Haydn always overflows. But his "rising sun with darting rays" is an utter failure: it is a watchman's lantern striking down a dark alley, not the orb of day illuminating the earth. There is nothing in it of that "majestic crescendo of Nature," as Carl Maria von Weber has so musician-like expressed himself, and which he himself has rendered in his little known music of the Preciosa, where we feel pile upon pile of heavy cloud to be slowly heaving and dispersing, while the majestic luminary ascends, almost laboriously, here and there tearing a rent through a veil of vapor with a thunderbolt bass note, till the whole earth is full of his glory.

rus? It begins with the closest imitation. There are the single decided ominous notes, like the first heavy lumps of ice striking the earth in separate shots. They fall faster, yet still detached, when from a battery which we have felt hanging suspended above our heads, "down comes the deluge of sonorous hail," shattering everything before it; and having thus raised the idea, he sustains it with such wonderful simplicity of meansthe electric shouting of the choruses "Fire! Hailstones!" only in strict unison-the burst of the storm changing only from quavers into semi-quavers-the awful smashing of the elements only the common chord of the key, and that the natural key-till we feel astonished how the mere representation of the rage of the elements should have given occasion for one of the grandest themes that musician ever composed.

There is a sense of sublimity conveyed by storms and tempests which, however frequently vulgarized by the mere tricks of performers, must ever make them favorite subjects for audiences and composers. Even our old favorite Steibelt's Storm, in spite of strumming school-room associations, when the lightning used to break time, and come in at the wrong place, and then have to begin all over again, has a moral as well as a dramatic meaning which justifies our youthful predilections. It was not the noise and din of two handfuls of notes with all the pedals down, which juvenile amateurs declare to be "just like thunder," but at which we felt inclined to stop our ears with an instinct of the profaneness of the likeness, and yet the contemptibility of the attempt; but it was the gradual lulling of the winds and hushing of all nature which preceded the crash, and then the clearing of the air after it, the tinkling of the rain-drops all sparkling with the light that is bursting out in the west, and finally that happy chorus of birds in the return of that gay chirping ritornell, in four sharps, which tells you that all is over and no harm done to any one. Beethoven's Tempest also, All dramatic music must be full of imita- in his Pastoral Symphony-which, by-the-by, tion; herein lies its greatest charm and great- is like Thomson's Seasons set to music-is the est snare. The notes must tell the incident grandest and most fearful of all storms, as as well as the text, often instead of it. The M. Oulibichef says, which ever thundered composer must give us his definite thoughts; in the basses, whistled in the flutes, bellowed his skill lies between defining them over and blustered in the trumpets, and lightened much or over little; it is his art so to treat and hailed in the violins;" but who can rethe subject that you feel it is subservient to sist the sweet enchantment of those modulahim, not he to that-making you forget even tions, when the thunder is heard retreating the thing imitated in the resources it has de- in the distance, and timid sounds of inquiry veloped. What grander example in the rise up from leaf and flower, and birds anworld is there than Handel's Hailstone Cho-swer, and steps emerge, and in a moment

"'tis beauty all, and grateful song around!" The sternest conductor smiles involuntarily on his platform, and we grin to ourselves at our lonely piano. We should like every great musician to leave to the world his definition of a storm.

At the same time we own that it is not from any walk of imitative music, however enchanting, that the highest musical pleasure can be derived. It is not in the likeness of anything in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth, that the highest musical capacity can be tried. It is not the dipping passage like a crested wave in "The floods stood upright as an heap," or the wandering of the notes in "All we like sheep have gone astray," in which Handel's intensest musical instinct is displayed; for beautiful as are these passages, and full of imagery to eye and ear, they smack of a certain mechanical contrivance; but it is in the simple soothing power of the first four bars of the first song in the " Messiah" which descend like heavenly dew upon the heart, telling us that those divine words "Comfort ye," are at hand. This we feel to be the indefinable province of expression, in which the composer has to draw solely upon his own intense sympathies for the outward likeness of a thing which is felt and judged of only in the innermost depths of every heart.

at the highest tones of her voice, (in answer to her brother, who urges her not to forget that she is a Roman,) though it rends our hearts, does not take us by surprise, for we know it at once to be the natural music of her feelings. Her "implacable Venus!" hissed out pianissimo in the lowest alto tones, (in adjuration of the goddess who is persecuting her,) comes home to us so closely in the truth of its expostulating despair, that we forget even the falseness of the power to whom it is addressed. The very name of Venus cannot disturb our sympathy. Intonation like this teaches us to follow the varied passions of such music as the Scena in the Freischutz with greater intelligence of its matchless truth; we feel that the cantabile of all Mozart's opera airs is amenable to this standard, and their immortality of beauty, their hold over our hearts through every various fashion of music, only to be understood by it.

But in all this the art has had a stated object to fulfil, and we have sought for definite causes to account for definite effects. Let us now turn to those pure musical ideas which give no account of their meaning or origin, and need not to do it to that delicious German Ocean of the symphony and the sonata-to those songs without words which we find in every adagio and andante of Mozart and Beethoven-far more, we must say, than in those dreamy creations, beautiful as Not but what much of the truth of dra- they are, expressly composed as such by matic musical expression is copied from the Mendelssohn. These are the true indepennatural declamation of the human voice, and dent forms of music, which adhere to no never was true till Glück adopted this as a given subject, and require us to approach model. This is why the Italian recitative, them in o particular frame of feeling, but derived as it is from a people of so much rather show the essential capacities of the violent passion, and pathos of articulation, muse by having no object but her, and her must ever be an uncongenial thing to most alone. We do not want to know what a ears unlearned in this land of quiet speech. composer thought of when he conceived a Most English minds dislike violent exclama- symphony. It pins us down to one train of tion; we object to it in our dwellings and in pleasure--whereas, if he is allowed the free our pulpits; we shrink from it even in the range of our fancy without any preconceived mouths of those foreigners to whom it is na- idea which he must satisfy, he gives us a tive; it stuns our ears and shocks our habits; hundred. There is a great pleasure in merely we disapprove of such an outlay of passion watching Beethoven's art of conversationon small occasions; but let us hear it where how he wanders and strays, Coleridge like, the subject is commensurate with the vehe- from the path, loses himself apparently in mence-let us see Rachel in her Corinne or strange subjects and irrelevant ideas, till you Phædre, and we at once understand the wonder how he will ever find his way back true source of all musical expression. We to the original argument. There is a peculiar feel that this is the musica parlante that delight in letting the scenery of one of his founded the opera-that every passion in the symphonies merely pass before us, studying mouth of the true interpreter has its key and the dim Turner-like landscape from which obits time-that many of her passages only re-jects and landmarks gradually emerge, feeling quire a note struck here and there by the orchestra to convert them into recitative. Her" Donne moi ton cœur, barbare," pitched

a strange modulation passing over the scene like a heavy cloud, the distant sunlight melodies still keeping their places, and showing the

breadth of the ground by the slow pace at
which they shift towards us.
There is an in-
finite interest in following the mere wayward
mechanism of his ideas-how they dart up a
flight of steps, like children on forbidden
ground, each time gaining a step higher and
each time flung back-how they run the
gauntlet of the whole orchestra, chased fur-
ther and further by each instrument in turn;
are jostled, entangled, separated, and dis-
persed, and at length flung pitilessly beyond
the confines of the musical scene. But wait;
one soft bassoon link holds the cable, a timid
clarionet fastens on, other voices beckon,
more hands are held out, and in a moment the
whole fleet of melody is brought back in tri-
umph and received with huzzas. It is suffi-
ciently amusing, too, to watch how he treats
his instruments, how he at first gives them all
fair play, then alternately seizes, torments,
and disappoints them, till they wax impa-
tient, and one peeps in here and another tries
to get a footing there, and at first they are
timid and then bold, and some grow fretful
and others coquettish, and at length all deaf-
en you with the clamor of their rival claims.
There is varied pleasure in these and many
other fantastic ideas which he conjures up
but there is quite as much in sitting a pas-
sive recipient and giving yourself no account
of your enjoyment at all."

ideas of the composer, like himself, often disappoint us. Rameau declared that he could set a Dutch newspaper to music. Haydn cared not how commonplace the idea might be which was given him to compose to. It matters not whether the depths of musical inspiration be stirred by a pebble or a jewel; at most, we can but judge of the gloom or sunshine that is reflected on their surface.

There is that in Beethoven's works which might well give credibility to the report of his being the son of Frederick the Great, and probably led to it. This grand genius and crabbed eccentric man never loved or trusted. He shut himself up with his music to be out of the way of his fellow-creatures. His deafness only gave him the excuse of being more morose. We hear this to a certain degree in his music. His instruments speak, but they do not speak like men. We listen to their discourse with exquisite delight, but not with that high and complete sympathy which Mozart's wordless speech gives. High as he is above us, Mozart is still always what we want and what we expect. There is a sense and method in all he does, a system pursued, a dominion over himself, an adaptation to others, which our minds can comprehend. He is as intensely human in his instrumental as in his vocal music, and therefore always intelligible. Beethoven is perpetually taking us by surprise. We do not know that we have such sympathies till he appeals to them

them. He keeps our fancy in a perpetual
flutter of wonder and ecstasy, but he rarely
speaks direct to the common humanity be-
tween us. More delicious musical odes than
his Longing Waltz, Hope Waltz, and Sorrow
Waltz there cannot be, but they were so
named for him. It may be questioned
whether he ever expressly thought of these
subjects. We never feel that he inspires the
highest idea of all-the idea of religion.
His "Mount of Olives" is exquisite; we are
grateful for it as it is, but it might have been
composed for an emperor's name's-day, only
Beethoven would never have done such a
civil thing. His grand Missa Solennis" is
the most wonderful moving tableau of musi-
cal painting that was ever presented to out-
ward ear and inward eye.
Each part is ap-
propriate in expression. The "Kyrie Elei-
son" is a sweet Babel of supplications; the

It is very interesting to know that in that magical symphony of C minor, where those three mysterious notes compose the ever-re---he creates them first, and then satisfies curring theme, Beethoven was possessed by the idea of "Fate knocking at the door,' but we are not sure that we should wish to have that black figure with its skeleton-hand always filling up the foreground of our thoughts. We never enjoyed that symphony more than once under the impression that it represented a military subject, and those inquiring notes seemed the outposts reconnoitring. The mere leading idea of the composer is often utterly incommensurate with the beauty of the composition. If, like the Frenchman, we ask Beethoven's Sonata in G, "Sonate, que veux-tu ?" it does not satisfy us to hear that it means a quarrel between husband and wife; that the plaintive, coquettish repartee of the passages is all recrimination and retort, and those naïve three notes which end the last bar, the last word! No, pure wordless music has too mysterious and unlimited a range for us to know precisely what it means. The actual idea from which it may have sprung is like the single seed at the root of a luxuriant many-headed flower, curious when found, but worthless. The

Gloria in Excelsis Deo" is a rapturous cry; the quartette "Et in terrà pax-hominibus bonæ voluntatis" is meant for beings little lower than the angels; the "Credo" is the grand declamatory march of every voice in