ut corrupting the natural taste, or blending with it
any prepossession in favour of sleights and dexterities of hand, then
would their notes be tuned to passions and to sentiments as natural and
expressive as the tones and modulations of the voice in discourse. The
music and the thought would not make different expressions; the hearers
would only think impetuously; and the effect of the music would be to
give the ideas a tumultuous violence and divine impulse upon the mind.
Any person conversant with the classic poets, sees instantly that the
passionate power of music I speak of, was perfectly understood and
practised by the ancients--that the Muses of the Greeks always sung, and
their song was the echo of the subject, which swelled their poetry into
enthusiasm and rapture. An inquiry into the nature and merits of the
ancient music, and a comparison thereof with modern composition, by a
person of poetic genius and an admirer of harmony, who is free from the
shackles of practice, and the prejudices of the mode, aided by the
countenance of a few men of rank, of elevated and true taste, would
probably lay the present half-Gothic mode of music in ruins, like those
towers of whose little laboured ornaments it is an exact picture, and
restore the Grecian taste of passionate harmony once more to the delight
and wonder of mankind. But as from the disposition of things, and the
force of fashion, we cannot hope in our time to rescue the sacred lyre,
and see it put into the hands of men of genius, I can only recall you to
your own natural feeling of harmony and observe to you, that its
emotions are not found in the laboured, fantastic, and surprising
compositions that form the modern style of music: but you meet them in
some few pieces that are the growth of wild unvitiated taste; you
discover them in the swelling sounds that wrap us in imaginary grandeur;
in those plaintive notes that make us in love with woe; in the tones
that utter the lover's sighs, and fluctuate the breast with gentle pain;
in the noble strokes that coil up the courage and fury of the soul, or
that lull it in confused visions of joy; in short, in those affecting
strains that find their way to the inmost recesses of the heart,

Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony.--_Milton_.

USHER.

* * * * *

THE AFFLICTED POOR.

Say ye--oppress'd by some fantastic woes,
Some jarring nerve