ble-cloth was laid out on the grass near the fires, while the young Spartans were serving the strongly-resined wine in gourds to the singing warriors sitting cross-legged round the supper. With the delicious roast lamb the Greeks generally serve olives, onions, boiled beans, sheep-cheese and a variety of fruits, among which the grapes and fresh figs of Lakonia bear away the highest prize. At table we met a Greek clergyman, Papa Oikonomides in Mistras, who generally receives strangers, and thus accompanied by our host, we left our servants and gensd'armes to the enjoyment of their processions and religious ceremonies, which continue during all night till dawn of day. We expressed our astonishment to Papa Oikonomides at not having met many people in the mountains travelling to the fair at Mistras, but he answered that the fair at Tripolis, in Arkadia, on the same day, was more frequented; the roads there being more open and more secure; Sparta had but little communication with the rest of Morea, except by sea; yet even this road through the valley of Eurotas was full of danger to the merchant. The Maniotes were still armed, and often levied black-mail on the plain. Even the day before our arrival a skirmish took place quite near Mistras, in which a party of merchants beat off an attack of the mountaineers with some loss on both sides. The house of the Papa was comfortable and pleasantly situated in the upper town among the gardens. He was married of course. Being welcomed by his wife and fine, ruddy children in his neatly furnishsd parlor, all speaking a correct and even elegant language, we could not but reflect on the extraordinary change which has taken place in Greece since the days of Chateaubriand, in 1806. He, the pilgrim to Jerusalem, describes the savage Turkish manners of the proud and cruel Osmanlies, at Mistras, then a large city, and like Tripolizza, mostly inhabited by Turks, who insulted, bastinadoed and impaled the poor Greeks with impunity. Yet fifteen years later the sword of retribution fell heavily on the infidels of Mistra. They were burnt, together with their city-a new village of wooden houses and bazars had hardly been raised, before an ordinance of King Otho, promising a high-road through the hills to the coasts and the interior, ordered the Spartans to remove to the banks of the Eurotas, near Old Sparta.

These circumstances increased the movement in town during our stay. Many inhabitants were removing down to the river, where churches, schools, tribunals, government buildings, silk manufactories, bazars, and many private dwelling-houses

were building,-all giving evidence of the rapid progress of this interesting and beautiful, but hitherto neglected and distracted country.

We shall at present take leave of Mistrás, and in our next number invite the attention of the reader to the old Dorian city on the Eurotas, to its history, its inhabitants and monuments, many of which have lately been discovered, and are not well known in our Western Hemisphere.

NATIONAL MUSIC.

He who would give a true place to the fine arts as regards their dignity, must remember that a landscape is not everywhere adorned with majestic mountain ranges, or those ranges always veiled with the sunrise's glories; the barren plain and the monotonous mead have yielded up their tribute to its grandeur. Nature's music is not alone the thunder, whose full flashing peals fill to satiety the heart's capacity of emotion.

Nor must he who would determine of the effeminating tendency of music, forget the varied moods of nature or the allcapacious nature of the human soul. He who should steal from his duties to laugh among the streamlets, or sigh amidst the reeds, would find the spent hours barren and unprofitable. While one, overwhelmed with various burdens, would be soothed and comforted by gentle murmurs, or lost amidst a variety of voices.

Art is as all-embracing as nature. The oratorio is nature's anthem to the Deity. Genius is ever God's interpreter through nature's language, and is most thoroughly religious. In art it never has spoken except in the overflowing fulness of faith. The Iliad is pregnant with the Greek God, the Paradiso Inferno with the sublime or dread realities which no earthly vision pierces. The Paradise Lost is a living monument to the truth that genius has an abiding faith in, though it does not babble about what mediocrity parades and professes. The creations of Raphael and Angelo are worthy to be the glorified men and women through whom God, at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in times past. The Apollo is a living memorial of the realization of a beauty more divine than that which com

mon minds conceive of. In the Miranda of Shakspeare, a sweet hope is born, which flashes over the human with coruscations of the divine.

Genius is enthroned on the mountain-tops of thought; it sees and feels what other men see and feel, but more largely and clearer; it lives a larger, more generous, and broader life; quaffs deeper of the wine of joy, is more liable to be seared by the thunderbolt. Moses on Mount Pisgah is typical of the nearness of pure souls to the Unknown. I know not where I would have St. Cecilia placed with her lyre, but I would place the divine Beethoven on the highest pinnacle of land, and by gentle persuasions bribe my fancy to give to his hands a lyre whose chords should accurately respond to nature's every tone, and over all, and about all, in and out, should flash and inwind a combination of their harmonies. If art has been called effeminating, it is not art that is to be blamed, but its unnatural applications. It was certainly not effeminating in the view of the noble Handel, who could reply to the courtly compliments of his sovereign," Sire, I have endeavored not to entertain you, but to make you better." Nature no where tasks one organ of our nature at the expense of all others. Niagara does not thunder in a dungeon, or in a gas-lighted saloon, but while it addresses through the ear the soul, there are varied delights for the eye, and thought and feeling are born of all. Nor does any one thing in nature occupy an undue place. Hence the secret of Shakspeare's success-his very healthfulness. Hence the Bible's greatness. The true cffice of art is to reveal-in Greece it expressed ineffable beauty, though human and outward-as sculpture and painting have for their peculiar office to express thisin Italy, it revealed a diviner beauty and grandeur, though still tangible, as it could be compassed by the mind, through the eye-in Germany, under Italian tutelage, as regarded expression for while the North gives birth to stern and grand thoughts, the cold star-lighted river must needs have the warm sun of the South to unlock its frigid currents-there arose a wild and mysterious birth, wherein the gorgeous, the grand, the mystic and the beautiful in the soul found such fitting expression, that men started from their own thoughts and feelings, so unaccustomed were they to their representation.

Art is to interpret man, to interpret nature, to interpret what is told us of heaven, to lead us to the study of ourselves, the observation of nature, the comprehension of things above us. No wonder if it be effeminating, when we apply so high an office to so distorting a purpose as mere amusement. We

are not to turn from nature to worship art, but from the art born of nature to nature, and from art heaven born to things of Heaven. We should become familiar with its masterpieces in every form, until we make them our own, living realities, ennobling, uplifting. Music may amuse us, not art; song amuse us, not poetry; sculpture move us to laughter, painting excite our merriment, not art. She bears a Gorgon shield, with which she avenges herself on those who pry on her secrets to ridicule. Music is her speech, as are sculpture, architecture and painting; but these are no more her revelations, than words are the fiery denunciations of prophecy.

Art is cosmopolitan, universal, devotional, immortal. It is not of so much consequence what our home products are, as regards national elevation, as what we see and value, what we engraft upon ourselves. Look once upon the vast and placid ocean, feel its silent hintings of the infinite, and shake off if you can the influence from the spirit; you cannot. Will Europe or Asia monopolize the ocean's grandeur? Nor can they the influence of their art. Not that we would not encourage noble home creations, since their being born of us will make them dearer, and consequently more liable to touch the heart. But for the present purpose of American culture, especially in music, it is of importance what is introduced among us.

As a previous paper in this journal, devoted to the dignity of music as an art, deferred to another time, the defining of the present position of American music, it may be not inaptly spoken of here. Not as regards it as an American art, but what scion we will engraft into our stock, as a means of national culture.

Music is a science, has sweet syllablings and majestic speech, is melody, is harmony, deep as the spheres below, high as the heavens above, sensual as sense, spiritual as spirit, broad as the ocean, flowery as the spring, grand as the storm, terrible as the tempest, serene as infant slumber, wild as enraged and uncontrollable passion, sweet as first love, despairing as despair, has voices of melting pity, tones of seraphic sympathy, has syren voices too, tames the savage, effeminates the weak, softens the stern, is wild, is devoted. A very Proteus in hue and form, yet, like the soul of genius, its prototype, of infinite capabilities.

The night is clear and starry in the great metropolis, taste and fashion are assembled in one of their favorite saloons. The wand is raised. The first accords of the awful andante afford a key to the gorgeous thoughts that, dolphin-hued, swept

over the soul of the composer, as with such celerity the music of the favorite Don Giovnnai, like frost-work in beauty rose under his pen. Follow its mazes, lost in its bewilderingly sweet serenade to the few last bars. Majestic accords, awful ghost, terrible retribution, leap through the expanded soul. Music is here married to art: her high office, to expand, ennoble, is done once for all. When it is forgotten, if forgotten it ever can be, come again and spend an evening with the soul of the great Mozart. Next comes the Swedish Nightingale-is she not divine? Not in the bird song, nor yet in her arias, divine though these be, but in the highest region of art, where to be truly great the artist must ever soar. Clear, calm voices of the infinite steal silently, expand widely, soar loftily, pure toned and transparent in her Messiah, the Messiah of Handel, the Messiah of the human race. Goodness, beauty, genius heavenborn, hallow in our memories the most sacred conceptions to which the soul aspires. Nor is it true that her bird song should be sung to the many, her noblest effort be directed to the few. Art is democratic, is universal as genius. Its loftiest note, its most graceful line, its loveliest gleam glides to the hearts of all. Difficult execution may be addressed to scientific minds alone, as may all mere performances; the ear may require culture to value studied harmonies, but that which is peculiarly the genius of any art, delights and ennobles all.

Of the capabilities of the human voice as an organ of music no doubts are admissible. Those who have not given to it its full meed of praise, have required of it impossibilities—that it render in one person the torturing passions of the most fiendish nature as well as the most serene delights. And not only can it not in one express all sentiments of which the human heart is capable, all thoughts with which the infinite inspires the finite, but it has rarely been found so perfect an instrument as to render with equal purity the lower, the middle, and the higher notes. As much as its most perfect tones excel that of any one instrument, a single voice is only a melody, and too few glorious human voices have been cultivated or brought before the public to test what noble harmonies their combination is susceptible of. Of all those which America has been privileged to hear, none other is at all comparable with Lind's in rendering the noblest music. The finished execution of the Countess Rossi, her faultless manner of producing the opera, her charming manner and lady-like air, with an occasional marvellous sweetness of tone, blind the lovers of