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"O sweet and trange it seems to me, that ere this day is done,

The voice that now is speaking may be beyond the sun

For ever and for ever with those just souls and

true

And what is life, that we should moan? why make we such ado?

"For ever and for ever, all in a blessed homeAnd there to wait a little while till you and Effie come

To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast

And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest."

We remarked in a late article upon American poetry, the common and gratifying tendency of our sons of song, to base poetry upon truth, and to keep it in tune with nature. All that is of true and lasting worth in poetry lies in the soundness of its views of human life, and the condition of man in the world. To the poet who understands and feels this, nothing is commonplace, nothing trivial, and the most

common incidents of daily life are invested with solemn interest. Look at the simple, common occurrence, of a young girl's early death, as narrated and appreciated by Tennyson. He takes us, not to a pinnacle of the temple whence to see all the kingdoms of the world, not to amaze us with some vision of darkness, some crushing conception of vastness, or of reckless, wrathful power, rioting amid measureless, hopeless desolation, that, like Byron, he might make our hair stand on end and freeze our blood, which seemed to be the only object of one school of poetry; but by the side of a fast-fading maiden, smitten in her spring-time, and about to say farewell for ever to all things beneath the sun, teaches our heart to mingle with our common, frail humanity, to weep with it, and love it, and cleave to it. There he teaches us to be gentle, compassionate and kind, and accustoms us to scenes through which we are all destined to pass in the pilgrimage of life.

A well printed American edition of the works of Tennyson, in two volumes, was issued from the Boston press in 1842.

A VARIETY of forceful and emphatic circumstances unite at the present time in imparting interest and solemnity to the topic of this paper. It is employing a multitude of the most earnest and reflecting minds in every part of the world. The prospects of Christianity are contemplated, not by the amiable enthusiast, not by the lonely and rapt prophet alone, but by all classes of those thoughtful persons who, not absorbed and deafened by the ever gurgling present, turn their eyes, to the slow risingcurtain of futurity, and take earliest note of the tramp, and the shadows of coming events.

The originality and comprehensiveness of the Christian enterprise are strikingly obvious. Looking back to its commencement, we say its founders differed from all other men in the vastness of their aim, in the boldness of their plan, in the reach of their philanthropy. Most singular was it that a carpenter and some few fishermen should start from profoundest obscurity, and in the academy, the temple, and the grove, stand forth the authoritative propounders of a

faith, radically new, and utterly subversive of all extant systems of philosophy and moralsa faith which mocked the reasoning of sage and sophist-which grasped with the power, but without the peril or the blindness of a Sampson, the pillars of existing institutions, hoary with age, sanctioned by the millions of the living, and hallowed by the myriad millions of the dead- -a faith which at first seemed like a reed shaken by the ocean, but which was soon to become an ocean rocking the reed, and burying in its bosom, the wisdom, and learning, and systems of the past.

Not less singular was the bold comprehensiveness of the evangelic scheme. Others had legislated for a clan, a province, a kingdom; this gave law to the WORLD. Others had cautiously yielded puerile mysteries, and esoteric jargon, to the initiated few; this flung sunlight to the mass, to the ends of the earth, to Jew and Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free. Other systems, political and religious, had marked and checkered the earth with lines and

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divisions, and arrayed its population in numberless antagonist squadrons to vex and devour each other; this proclaimed all men of one blood, with one common interest, and attracted them by blandest persuasives, to gather in loving unity at that most central and selected spot in the moral universe, the throne of "our Father in heaven."

Sad it is to think of the long delay of Christianity to complete the circuit of the globe. The causes of that delay, the obstructions to its march, we need not now stop to consider. At present, we remark with utmost confidence, that this devoutly wished for consummation may be regarded as neither improbable nor distant. A variety of circumstances betoken it. Events in the political and commercial world are tending to it. Faith and piety are waiting and working for it. The rapid and palpably apparent decay of the existing false religions of the world, are preparing the way for it. There is not," suggests a popular author, "one healthy, prosperous religion among all the false systems of unchristian nations, with self-preserving, self-propagating power to be found. They are all in superannuation and wrinkles, in dotage and decay, and soon must fall into shapeless, unregretted ruins. Christianity, hale and strong, full of hope and love, full of impulsive power, is in the field, and Almighty God is with her. Her energies are not required for selfdefence and protection, and she can expend them in philanthropic effort for the world's redemption."

Our mind has some time dwelt with interest upon this inquiry-What will be the effect of the universal prevalence of the Christian religion upon the temporal interests of mankind, upon the political and social condition of the human family? Thus far, history shows that wherever the faith of Christ has prevailed, it has exerted a prodigious power. We speak not now of its power to save the souls of those who embrace it, but exclusively of its action upon men, individual and social, in their present state of existence. We speak of its tried and ascertained influence, in civilizing and socializing man, in elevating and harmonizing society, in prolonging and gladdening life, in promoting literature, and science, and useful arts, in repressing the ravages of vice, and in reclaiming and cultivating the waste matter and mind of the world.

One effect of a universal Christianity would be a vast increase in the population of the globe. The arrest of vices which abridge life, the im

provements in the arts which prolong it, the cessation of wars, following inevitably in the train of the gospel, will produce a vast and teeming population, hitherto unequalled in the history of the world. And while a universal Christianity even reduplicates the dwellers upon earth, she may afford them ample subsistence by quelling luxurious appetites, by instilling the precepts of frugality and industry, and by reclaiming the wastes, and wildernesses, and uncultivated gardens of the world. She may not, indeed, make Sahara yield wheat, or vines and olives; she may not crown Zembla with eternal verdure; she may not restore the hanging gardens of Babylon, or the commerce of Tyre, or the grandeur of Fersepolis; but she may pour over the territory of Palestine, over the valley of the Nile, over the choked and voiceless realms of the ancient East, a people like those, who, on Plymouth rock, summoned the wilderness to bud and blossom as the

rose.

The Christian system is destined also, when supreme, to bless society by reclaiming from dormancy and perversion its wasted intellect. There is unroused intellect enough in this world, at any time, to ennoble it; there is perverted intellect more than enough to degrade and doom it. Christianity achieves wonders upon the mind, unequalled except by her wonders upon the heart. Over both, she stands with the grief of a Mary, and the benignant power of a Saviour at the tomb of Lazarus, and bids the hand and foot-bound dead come forth. The progress of Christianity, as noted in authentic records, has been equivalent to a series of intellectual as well as spiritual creations. In the islands of the sea, among the natives of our forests, and the benumbed tribes of the east, she has walked forth a quickener of the dead, performing a sublimest resurrection service over torpid and unconscious mind; and when her round of mercy is accomplished, and an awakened world shouts the consummation, this earth will present a galaxy of intellect, inferior in glory only to the intellect of heaven, resplendent not like the night heaven; with dumb and unshrinking orbs, but like the third heaven, with living and rejoicing spirits.

Such is the view of the future which even a sober and calculating philosophy is bound to take, and which the progress of time is daily changing from prediction to history. It was with this prospect before him that Cowper gave utterance to these glowing

lines:

Music, as ordinarily performed, includes melody, rhythm and harmony. Any simple succession of pleasing sounds constitutes melody. Rhythm, is the adjustment of sounds to each other in a certain proportion, so as to produce variety of movement according to a definite law. A melody becomes rhythmical, when it takes time and accent. Harmony, is the concord of different sounds produced together. The air of a tune, in the common style of arrangement, is a rhythmical melody; of which the other parts, or the instrumenal accompaniment, make the harmony. The entire effect of music, then, in its ordinary forms, is the result of these several things combined. You listen to a common choral tune, as performed upon the organ with its appropriate accompaniments; it strikes you as one whole; and if you have paid no attention to the nature of musical arrangement and execution, or have not reflected particularly on the subject, it does not occur to you but that the pleasure you experience is as simple as when you listen to the singing of a robin. But in truth it is a very complex pleasure You have as its cause, first, pleasing sounds; secondly, variety in these sounds, a variety in accordance with a law which produces a regularly measured movement; and thirdly, the consonance of several series of sounds, all harmonizing with the leading melody and with each other. Or to state the whole more briefly, you have sound, measure and concord; variety conjoined with order, and diversity with sameness; all conspiring to the end of exciting pleasurably the sensibilities of the soul.

This analysis of the elements which are usually combined to produce musical effect, is complete in respect to pure music; i. e. music which aims to please the ear only, and not to convey ideas to the mind, or to awaken particular sentiments in the heart. But the greater part of the musical performances to which we are accustomed to listen, are designed not only to gratify the ear with melodious, rhythmical and harmonious sounds, but to excite the imagination and the fancy, and to inspire the soul with thoughts and feelings of some certain definite character. Music of this sort, adds two other means of effect to its own proper elements, viz., expression and language. The skilful composer so arranges the succession of sounds and the movement of his piece, as that it shall produce, when heard, distinct conceptions in the mind without the use of words; as, for example, in the Battle of Prague, is represented by mere sounds and movement, the marching of troops, the confusion of battle, the thunder of artillery, and the groans of the wounded and dying; or when words are used, the spirit of the music is made to correspond with their meaning and to heighten it. This is expression. In making use of language, music addresses the understanding and the heart directly; speaking out its meaning plainly, and leaving little comparatively for suggestion to supply. She borrows chiefly here from her sister Poetry, whose graces she blends sweetly with her own, while she also enhances their beauty and adds greatly to their effect. And thus the pleasure with which you listen to the performance of a

song or psalm, when its parts are all complete, is produced by the combined effect of melody, rhythm, harmony, expression and words.

The primary ground of the power of music to affect the soul, must doubtless be sought in the structure of our being. God has so constituted our physical organs and our spiritual sensibilities, as to render us, without our choice or effort, susceptible to the influence of music. Of this ultimate fact, any explanation is beyond our power. We cannot comprehend the nature of the connection between the outward impression of sound and the inward emotions thereby awakened; all we can say is, that our being is so adjusted to the laws of nature that the fact cannot be otherwise. Suppose an Æolian harp to be a conscious thing, and every vibration, as the wind breathed softly over it, to be a thrill of pleasure, and you have an appropriate emblem of your own spirit, as the tones of sweet music reach it through the ear. The production of enjoyment is immediate and direct, and the arrangement is an admirable proof of the divine Creator's goodness, opening to us, as it does, a source of rich and infinitely varied happiness.

But while the primary effect of music consists in direct action on sensibilities exquisitely susceptible to pleasurable excitement from such a cause, it owes no small part of its power to what may be called a secondary or indirect action. It excites the faculty of association, and thus calls up before the mind, with peculiar vividness, recollections of the past, conceptions of the absent, and imaginations of the future and the ideal. The power of music to produce enjoyment in this manner, is a matter of delightful consciousness with all persons of lively sensibility. It is in tracing the workings of this power, that we find the romance, or the poetry of music. There is propriety in saying that there is poetry in music; for sounds accomplish the same end as poetry, in transporting the spirit, as it were, without itself, filling it with images and visions, touching it with tender feeling, and inspiring it with desires for the pure, the beautiful and the true. And probably in many persons, this more remote pleasure, which is experienced as the soul revels and feasts itself amid the memories and the fancies which music has summoned up, is far greater than that primarily and immediately occasioned by the music itself.

We may refer for illustration to experience. There is some simple air which you used to hear in childhood. You sat, perhaps, at your mother's knee and heard her sing it. You

were then as cheerful as the lark, full of bright dreams and childish hopes, and surrounded with all the sweets of home and of parental and fraternal love. Years have rolled by. Those parents are in heaven. The circle of loving hearts is broken up, and they who once composed it are scattered on the sea of life. You are pressed with the cares and duties of the present, and the past is almost to you as if it had never been. But now and then, by accident, you hear the familiar tones of that old melody. It may be but a few notes or a single strain you hear. It is enough. It transports you back in a single moment; the days of buried years return. Loved ones long scattered reassemble. The dead come back to life. You are greeted again by a mother's kindly smile, and again your heart leaps with the joyous impulses of childhood. Music, touching the chain of the soul's associations, has wrought all this with a power surpassing magic.

Again, you sit by your open window in the twilight of a summer's evening. Your heart is pensive, or it may be sad. Soothed into reflection by the influence of the tranquil home, you are thinking as the features of the landscape grow indistinct and fade away into the shade of night, how all that is bright and beautiful on earth must fade and disappear from mortal sight, as the day of life expires and the shadows of the tomb come on. But, hark! the soft sweet modulation of a distant flute, floating on the still air, comes stealing on your ear. It enters into your soul. It seems to you like the unearthly tone of an angel's harp, it is so pure and perfect, and it transfers your thoughts to heaven. From meditation on the perishable and transient charms of earth, you rise to wander amid the glories of that celestial state where life and beauty are alike bright and undecaying. You are filled with the absorbing vision of immortality, and of perfection of being and of bliss. You weep, perhaps, but yet are happy. The spirit of music hath breathed upon your soul.

This effect of music on the suggestive faculties of the mind, has often been noticed and described by poets. Take for example, the following passage from the opening of the Sixth Book of Cowper's Task.

"There is in souls, a sympathy with sounds;
And as the mind is pitched, the ear is pleased
With melting airs of martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touched within us, and the heart replies.
How soft the music of those village bells,

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Falling at intervals upon the ear

In cadence sweet, now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again, and louder still
Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on!
With easy force it opens all the cells
Where memory slept. Wherever I have heard
A kindred melody, the scene recurs,
And with it all its pleasures and its pains,
Such comprehensive views the spirit takes,
That in a few short moments I retrace

The windings of my way through many years."

The following from a song of Moore is another fine example.

"When through life unblest we rove,
Losing all that made life dear,
Should some notes, we used to love

In days of boyhood, meet our ear,
Oh! how welcome breathes the strain,
Wakening thoughts that long have slept;
Kindling former smiles again,

In faded eyes that long have wept!

"Like the gale that sighs along

Beds of oriental flowers,
Is the grateful breath of song,

That once was heard in happier hours.
Fill'd with balm the gale sighs on,

Though the flowers have sunk in death; So when pleasure's dream is gone,

Its memory lives in Music's breath.

"Music! oh! how faint, how weak,

Language fades before thy spell! Why should feeling ever speak,

When thou canst breathe her soul so well?"

The writing of Mrs. Hemans abound with allusions to that effect of music-whether it be the music of nature or of art-which it is our object to illustrate; and the whole conception in this specimen which we select, is highly beautiful. It represents a lady in sorrow and bereavement, sitting by the side of a stream and listening to the music of its sweetly murmuring None but a spirit exquisitely susceptible to the power of sound could have conceived it.

water.

"Flow, Rio Verde-in melody flow;

Win her that weepeth to slumber from wo;
Bid thy waves music roll thro' her dreams;
Grief ever loveth the kind voice of streams;
Bear her lone spirit afar on the sound,
Back to her childhood, her life's fairy ground:
Pass like a whisper of love that is gone!
Flow, Rio Verde, softly flow on!

Dark glassy water, so crimsoned of yore,
Voices of sorrow are known to thy shore:
Thou shouldest have echoes for grief's deepest

tone;
Flow, Rio Verde, softly flow on!

Such is the power of music on the nicely strung susceptibilities of the human soul. From its effect in the production of a pure and often exquisite enjoyment as it falls upon the ear and vibrates on the heart, it is capable of ministering directly and largely to the substantial happiness of those who feel its influence. From its effect on the associations-on the springs of thought, imagination and desire, it is not only capable of producing pleasure, but of exerting a most powerful influence on character. How greatly it may be made to contribute to the moulding of the habits, and the refining and ennobling of the taste and feelings of the soul, can only be fully understood by those who have witnessed the results of actual experiment. As it would be almost an impossibility that persons born and reared in the midst of nature's richest loveliness, and who had daily looked on sweet green fields, and luxuriant groves, on lakes in their placid stillness and beautiful reflections, and mountains with their waving pines and graceful sweeps, should not have their minds filled with images of beauty, and their tastes more than usually refined; so it is inconceivable that children should be accustomed from their earliest years to the purest and best influences of music, and not have more tender sensibilities, a quicker apprehension of the touching and the beautiful, and richer treasures of deep affection in the soul.

Especially does it appear that it must be so, when we take into view the fact that music so generally employs, when it speaks to us, the language of impassioned Poetry. The lay of the minstrel, which of itself is fitted to work like a potent spell upon the heart, when music breathes in and through it, becomes possessed of seven-fold power. Perhaps there is no way in which thought can be carried into the depths of the soul with such effect, as when at once armed with the graces and energy of poetry, and with the life, and warmth, and soul-bewitching influence of song. And music, in the shape of popular songs, ought certainly to be regarded as one of the most powerful agencies that can operate upon the youthful mind. Unfortunately, a large proportion of this class of musical production is decidedly corrupting and pernicious in its character. The words are full of insipid sentimentalism; and the power of music is thus made a means wherewith to vitiate the taste and pervert the heart. There is great need of caution in respect to this matter, on the part of parents. If you set a young lady of fifteen to prastise "If thou'lt be mine" or