ssociated choral music as well with
their labors as with their pleasures; but I may cite particularly
France, which counts to-day more than eight hundred Orpheon societies,
composed of workingmen. How many of these, who formerly dissipated their
leisure time at drinking-houses, now find an ennobling recreation in
these associations, where the spirit of union and fraternity is
engendered and developed! And if we could get at the statistics of
crime, who can doubt that they would show it had diminished in
proportion to the increase of these societies? In fact, men are better,
the heart is in some sort purified, when impregnated with the noble
harmonies of a fine chorus; and it is difficult not to treat as a
brother one whose voice has mingled with your own, and whose heart has
been united to yours in a community of pure and joyful emotions. If
Orpheon societies ever become established in America, be assured that
bar-rooms, the plague of the country, will cease, with revolvers and
bowie-knives, to be popular institutions.

Music, when employed in the service of religion, has always been its
most powerful auxiliary. The organ did more for Catholicism in the
Middle Ages than all its preaching; and Palestrina and Marcello have
reclaimed and still reclaim more infidels than all the doctors of the
Church.

We enter a house of worship. Still under the empire of the external
world, we carry there our worldly thoughts and occupations; a thousand
distractions deter us from religious reflection and meditation. The word
of the preacher reaches the ear indeed, but only as a vague sound. The
sense of what is said is arrested at the surface, without penetrating
the heart. But let the grand voice of the organ be heard, and our whole
being is moved; the physical world disappears, the eyes of the soul
open; we bow the head, we bend the knee, and our thoughts, disengaged
from matter, soar to the eternal regions of the Good, the Beautiful, and
the True.

GARNAUT HALL.

Here or hereafter? In the body here,
Or in the soul hereafter do we writhe,
Atoning for the malice of our lives?
Of the uncounted millions that have died,
Not one has slipped the napkin from his chin
And loosed the jaw to tell us: even he,
The intrepid Captain, who gave life to find
A doubtful way through clanging worlds of ice,--
A fine inquisitive spirit, you would think,
One to cross-question Fate complacently,