inhabited any other body than those melodies and harmonies in which it dwells for us. Something of a personal love, however, is felt in his most religious strains: it is the worship of the Holy Virgin; the music of that phase of the religious sentiment, which Swedenborg might call conjugal love.
To Beethoven s three or four great Masses, it comes most natural to add the term solemn; for, with him, all is a great effort. It is the very sentiment of the man,—aspiration, boundless yearning to embrace the Infinite. With him the very discontent of the soul becomes religion, and opens sublime visions, which are like a flying horizon of ever near, yet unattainable order and beauty. In the inexhaustibleness of the heart's cravings, he finds revelations; and out of those depths, with gloomy grandeur, with fire now smothered and now breaking out, and always with a rapt impetuosity, the worship of his nature springs, escaping like a flame to heaven.
Then, too, besides this captivating music of the Catholic church, we should think of the plain church, the voices of the united multitude, in simple, solemn, sublime strains, presenting themselves as one before the Lord. Even our modern psalm, as monotonous and artificial as it often is, satisfying scarcely more than the grammatical conditions of a musical proposition, has oftentimes an unsurpassable grandeur. Where thousands sing the same slow melody, the mighty waves of sound wake in the air their own accompaniment, and the effect is that of harmony. On this broad popular basis, Handel built. He is the Protestant, the people's man, in music. In him the great sentiment of a common humanity found expression. The individual vanishes: it is the mighty music of humanity; his theme, the one first theme, and properly the burthen of all music, humanity's looking-for and welcome of its Messiah. What a prediction and foreshadowing of the future harmony and unity of the whole race is that great Oratorio! What are those choruses, those hallelujahs and amens, but the solemn ecstasy, the calm, because universal and all-sympathizing, everywhere sustained excitement, which all souls shall feel;
