THE BIBLE IN MUSIC.

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Note 66.

THE BIBLE IN MUSIC.

UPON the art of harmony the inspiration of the Bible has been direct and essential. It has been truly said that "perfect music comes directly from the Supreme Will." "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord," was the divine mandate to the singers of Israel. So long as faith and obedience were one, the songs of Zion went up from every gate of the Holy City. When a recreant people separated harmony and the Bible, the majestic spirit of song was dumb for many sorrowful years; but the angelic voice at St. Cecilia echoes through the dark mazes of the Catacombs and breaks the long silence. Ere yet its melody thrills the world, northern barbarism drives music and its sister arts into the cloisters for a thousand years. There music languished; but through the civilizing power of the Bible deliverance came. Thought and feeling were strengthened, harmonized, assimilated, and the divine word again woke in the world the notes of infinite melody. The songs of the angels at Bethlehem burst upon the soul of Handel, and he caught and fixed their harmony in the strains of his Messiah. Beethoven saw the Transfiguration, and his Mount of Olives is a wonder to man. The peace of Eden comes down the centuries in the sacred page, and Haydn heard "the morning stars singing together over the cradled earth." The mourning of the first mother over her dead child: the wail of David over Absalom: the agony of the Virgin Mother over her Crucified Son: these tuned the minor chords of Mozart's soul, and the requiem he left the world has sobbed over the dust of unnumbered mortals.

Rejecting all that is local and finite in the Scriptures, Christian art seizes thoughts that are universal and infinite. Inspired like David of old, it writes these immortal thoughts in mosaic of precious stones: chisels them in Parian marble paints them on glowing canvas: builds them in majestic architecture: sings them in triumphant songs. Draw

ing inspiration from the sources of everlasting truth, it has built up a system universal in its scope: given expression to a principle enduring as time. The Bible is its studio, in which the Christian artist finds types that are always free, models always significant of eternal perfection.

Having the source of its expression in human nature, and the source of its inspiration in divine truth, art mirrors the spirit and word of the Bible, as the Bible mirrors the infinite God. M. W. GEORGE.

Note 67.

THE BIRD'S DEATH AND BURIAL.

(Adapted.)

THE cherry-trees were scarlet with their latest fruit. Beyond a hedge of prickly thorn a narrow flower-garden stretched, spanned by low stone walls, made venerable by the silvery beards of lichens. The earth was full of color from carnations, roses, and lilies. Everywhere above this garden whirled butterflies purple and jeweled. Red-starts in their ruby dress, blue warblers, wasps with pinions light as mist, velvet-coated bees, with their pleasant harvest song, flew ever in the sunlight, murmuring, poising, praising, rejoicing while, from an ivy bough, a mavis, in her simple coif of white and gray, was singing with all the gladness of her summer joys.

:

Suddenly, there broke upon the garden air a shrill sound. of pain. The birds flew high above, screaming and startled. The leaves of the ivy bough shook as with a struggle. The child rose and looked. A line of twine was trembling against the foliage, and in its noosed end the throat of the mavis had been caught. It hung trembling, clutching the air convulsively with its feet. It had flown into the trap as it had ended its joyous song and soared up to join its brethren.

THE BIRD'S DEATII AND BURIAL.

161

The child unloosed the cord from the tiny neck, set it free, and laid it down upon the ivy. The succor came too late. The little gentle body was already without breath. The feet had ceased to beat the air, the small, soft head had drooped feebly. The lifeless eyes had started from their sockets. The throat was without song forevermore.

Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and curled round and round about the small, slain body, piteously bewailing its fate, and giving out vain cries of grief. Vain: for the little, joyous life was gone. The life that asked only of God and man a home in the green leaves a drop of dew from the cup of a rose : a bough to swing on in the sunlight: a summer day to celebrate in song.

All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without lament. It had saved the soil from destroying larvæ, and purified the trees from foul germs. It had built its little home unaided; and had fed its nestlings without alms. It had given its sweet song lavishly to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of men and now it lay dead in its innocence, trapped and slain, because a human greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper coin.

The little girl knelt down, scraped a hole in the earth, laid moss in it, put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with handfuls of fallen rose leaves and sprigs of thyme. Around her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad cries. Who now would wander with him through the sunlight? Who now would rove with him above the blossoming fields? Who now would sit with him beneath the boughs, hearing the sweet rain fall between the leaves? Who now should wake with him while yet the world was dark, to feel the dawn break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the unborn day? LOUISA DE LA RAMÉ.

Note 68.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

Ir was as true of Wendell Phillips as of the Chevalier Bayard, that he was a knight without fear and without reproach. He was so deeply mourned, not because his fellowcitizens accepted all that he said. The tribute was to his singular sincerity and courage, and the ability and grace with which he asserted the most unwelcome truths against the most powerful public opinion.

He was the only public critic who took the responsibility of the most stringent personal denunciation of those who, in his opinion, compromised in the least degree with the mammon of unrighteousness. If the faculty of Harvard College took part in a dinner to Paul Morphy, at which there was wine, Phillips denounced them as unfit guardians of youth. If Abraham Lincoln voted as Phillips thought wrong, upon a question involving slavery, Lincoln was the slave-hound of Illinois. If Rufus Choate spent his genius to secure the acquittal of an undoubted criminal, thieves inquired if Choate were well before they dared to steal.

Phillips' life was one of the most inspiring in our history. It was a consecrated devotion to humanity, to succoring the oppressed, defending the defenceless, and pleading for the dumb. Eyes was he to the blind, feet to the lame. By genius and taste and temperament he was singularly fitted for the most brilliant success, political, social, or professional. To whatever was beautiful, sumptuous, refined, luxurious, even all the delights of scholarship and lettered ease, this urbane and graceful spirit was adapted. But like the old apostle, who preached only Christ and Him crucified, he renounced "all delight of battle with his peers," all prizes and laurels of pleasure and ambition, and with infinite sweetness, and with no air of sacrifice or of reluctance, he turned to know only the wrongs of his fellow-men. The lines of Boyle O'Reilly, when he died, tell only the truth in fervid music :

66

WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

For his life was a ceaseless protest, and his voice

Was a prophet's cry.

To be true to the truth and faithful, though the

World were arrayed for the lie."

163

So great and unsullied a consecration, so signal an illustration of the moral sublime, explains the profound feeling that attended the death of a man of no official position, of no literary, or scientific, or social distinction, and publicly known only as an orator from whose opinions there was often general and strong dissent.

But that oratory was one of the forces of national and moral regeneration. The dissent will pass like clouds of the morning. It is not the Samuel Adams who was doubtful of Washington, and opposed to the Constitution, that we recall; it is the tribune of American independence. So, in Lowell's phrase, of which the orator was very fond, time will gather up into "history's golden urn" only the memory of the unquailing youth who, loyally co-operating with the great leader, Garrison, passed into full maturity pleading with the hardened conscience of his country against the deadliest wrong to human nature that history records; and whose unselfish and resistless appeal at last drew from it the word that freed a race, as the sunrise drew music from the stony lips of Memnon.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

Note 69.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE.

SOCIAL Science affirms that woman's place in society marks the level of civilization. From its twilight in Greece, through the Italian worship of the Virgin, the dreams of chivalry, the justice of the civil law and the equality of French society, we trace her gradual recognition: while our common law, as Lord Brougham confessed, was, with