Chapter the Fourth.-Musicians.

HANDEL.

THE time may come when Music will be universally recognised as the highest branch of Art; as the most powerful divulger of the intellect's profoundest conceptions and noblest aspirations; as the truest interpreter of the heart's loves and hates, joys and woes; as the purest, least sensual, disperser of mortal care. and sorrow; as the all-glorious tongue in which refined, good, and happy beings can, most perfectly, utter their thoughts and emotions. Perhaps, this cannot be till the realm of the physical world be more fully subdued by man. The human faculties have hitherto been, necessarily, too much occupied with the struggle

for existence, for security against want, and protection from the elements, with the invention of better and swifter modes of locomotion and of transmission of thought, to advance to a general apprehension of the superior nature of Music. "Practical men"-men fitted for the discharge of the world's present duties by their manifestion of the readiest and fullest capacity for meeting its present wants, are, naturally and justly, those whom the world most highly values in its current state of civilisation.

This necessary preference of the practical to the ideal may lead many who cannot spare a thought from the every-day concerns of the world to deem, hastily, that the stern and energetic quality of Perseverance cannot be fully developed in the character of a devotee to Music. But, dismissing the greater question just hinted at, it may be replied that it is the evident tendency of man to form the lightest pleasures of the mind, as well as his gravest discoveries, into what is called "science;" and the lives of numerous musicians show that vast powers of application have been continously devoted to the elaboration of the rules of

harmony, while others have employed their genius as ardently in the creation of melody. These creations, when the symbols are learnt in which they are written, the mind, by its refined exorcism, can enable the voice, or the hand of the instrumental performer, to summon into renewed existence to the end of time. Before symbols were invented and rules constructed, the wealth of Music must, necessarily, have been restricted to a few simple airs such as the memory could retain and easily reproduce. Perseverance-Perseverance, has guided and sinewed men's love of the beautiful and powerful in melody and harmony, until, from the simple utterance of a few notes of feeling rudely conveyed from sire to son by renewed utterance, Music has grown up into a science dignified and adorned by profound theorists, like Albrechtsberger, and by sublime creative geniuses, such as the majestic Handel, and sweetest Haydn, and universal Mozart, and sublime Beethoven.

For their successful encounter of the great "battle of life," a hasty thinker would, also, judge that the extreme susceptibility of musi

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