"Earth hath _this_ variety from heaven."

(Blessings on the poet for that line! We have a most firm belief in
Milton, and receive his representations of heaven as we would those of a
Daguerreotype.)

But it is even so. There is but one step from the sublime to the
ridiculous, and this entrancing art, it seems, has taken it; sorely
dislocating its graceful limbs, and injuring its goodly proportions in
the unseemly escapade. There--we have played over a simple air, one that
thrills through our heart of hearts; and as the notes die on our ears,
soothing though the strain be, we feel our indignation increase, and
glow still more fiercely against this--music, as it is by courtesy
called, for Heaven knows it has no legitimate claim to the name!--till
it reaches the crusading point, and we rush headlong to a war of
extermination against bars, rests, crotchets, quavers--undaunted even by
"staves," and formidable inflated semibreves.

We hate your crashing, clumsy chords, and utterly spit at and defy
chromatic passages from one end of the instrument to the other, and back
again; flats, sharps, and most appropriate "naturals," splattered all
over the page. The essential spirit of discord seems let loose on our
modern music, tainted, as it were, with the moral infection that has
seized the land; it is music for a democracy, not the stately, solemn
measure of imperial majesty. Music to soothe! the idea is obsolete,
buried with the ruffs and farthingales of our great-grandmothers; or, to
speak more soberly, with the powdered wigs and hoops of their daughters.
There is music to excite, much to irritate one, and much more to drive a
really musical soul stark mad; but none to soothe, save that which is
drawn from the hiding-places of the past.

We should like to catch one of the old masters--Handel, for
instance--and place him within the range of one of our modern
executioners, to whose taste(!) _carte-blanche_ had been given. We think
we see him under the infliction. Neither the hurling of wig, nor yet of
kettle-drum, at the head of the performer, would relieve his outraged
spirit: he would strangle the offender on the spot, and hang himself
afterwards; and the jury would, in the first case, return a verdict of
justifiable homicide, and, in the second, of justifiable suicide, with a
deodand of no ordinary magnitude on the musical instrument that had led
to the catastrophe.

There is no repose, no refreshment to the mind, in our p