1839.] Rot your Italianos. 415
fifty more that I could name, every night of my life, without being weary of them. These, after all, are the strains that come home to our hearts; these are the sounds at which the very falling of a pin is an interruption "grating harsh discord" to our ears—which float around us in our slumbers—which haunt us in our rambles—which are with us in the woods and by the streams, lapping in an elysium of harmony the discordant and jarring passions of our most unmusical "working-day world." The concert-room, with its "intricacies of laborious song," moves our wonder and charms our ear; but it stirs not our feelings: we are no more touched by "Vivi tu," much as we may applaud its execution, than we are by the street-minstrel, whom we bribe with a whole penny to bestow his oft-repeated "All round my hat," on the unsuspecting inhabitants of some more distant locality. I cannot enjoy music, any more than I can read poetry, in a crowd—except it be our own magnificent National Anthem, or some strain which, stirring us as with the sound of a trumpet, summons up at once in a thousand bosoms other and nobler associations than those which music more generally endeavours to awake; strains at which every heart beats more proudly—to which every tongue bursts forth in involuntary chorus—which kindle to a blaze in our bosoms all the pride, and the honour, and the love of our fatherland, which, though they may for a time burn dimly, may never, like the Shebir's fire, be wholly extinguished. To revel in the full luxury of music, I must have no hired minstrel, no crowded benches, no glare of lamps, no "bustle, squeeze, row, gabbery, and jaw:"—I must have a still calm eve, in some quiet bower far removed from the "hum of human cities," with "one fair spirit for my minister," who needs not to ask or to be told what string to strike one who loves, as Hove, the "auld warld sangs" and simple melodies of a more simple generation—one whose purer taste rejects the
"Shakes and flourishes, outlandish things,
That mar, not grace, an honest English song,"
but clings still to the "merit, not the less precious that we seldom hear it," the pathetic simplicity which nature prompts—whose heart is in the strain she wakens, forgetful for the time of external things, and breathing only in its own created atmosphere of harmony. This is to me a banquet at which there is no chance "that appetite should sicken, and so die." To such a feast I would even be selfish enough to wish no fellow guests. I would have no voice to break the spell,—to startle the spirit from its trance of enchantment—to mar with the sounds of earth the tones which bless us with dreams of heaven.
Our own Shakspeare, in one of the most exquisite productions of his genius, has drawn a lover of music after my own heart. I love that music-loving Duke of Illyria before he has spoken two lines:—
"Now, good Cæsario, but that piece of song,
That old and antique song we heard last night:
Methought it did relieve my passion much
More than light airs, and recollected terms,
Of these most brisk and giddy-pated times."
And again,
"Mark it, Cæsario—it is old and plain:—
The spinsters, and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,
Do wont to sing it."
Yes! Shakspeare has sought for the standard of taste in music in a quarter which may perchance provoke the sneer of the professor; but he has sought it in the true one, for all that—he has sought for it in the people—in the class to whom music is the only one of the fine arts capable of being thoroughly enjoyed;—who turn confused from scientific and perplexing combinations of sound, to some more simple strain which they can feel, and understand, and remember—whose taste is the taste of nature, and therefore the true one.
Coleridge's "Lines composed in a Concert-Room" are a host in my favour. Truly, indeed, does he say
