“Come here, my girl. Seat thee by me,
For there is a good spirit on thy lips.
Thy mother praised to me thy ready skill;
She says a voice of melody dwells in thee,
Which doth enchant the soul. Now such a voice
Will drive away from me the evil demon
That beats his black wings close above my head.”
William Godwin makes his savage Tyrell amenable to well warbled melody. Readers of Scott will remember how a frenzied Highlander is soothed into self restraint by the minstrelsy of Annot Lyle. Goethe makes the first bar of an air by Gretchen suffice to lull the sorrows of young Werter, who protests that “instantly the gloom and madness which hang over me are dispersed, and I breathe freely again.” Another Charlotte—our English Richardson’s—is less successful in her manipulation of medicinal melody, when essaying to subdue an angry spirit by the spells of song: “I go to my harpsichord; music enrages him. He is worse than Saul; for Saul could be gloomily pleased with the music even of the man he hated,” But this is antedating Saul’s aversion; in those days Saul loved David greatly.
Dr. Croly, in an eloquent paragraph of his elaborate eastern romance, records how carefully music, “of all pleasures the most intellectual, that glorious painting to the ear, that rich mastery of the gloomier emotions of our nature,” was studied by the Jewish priesthood, and with a skill that influenced the habits of the country. “How often,” exclaims Salathiel, “have my fiercest perturbations sunk, at the sounds that once filled the breezes of Judæa! How often, when my brain was burning, and the blood ran through my veins like molten brass, have I been softened down to painless tears by the chorus from our hills, the mellow harmony of harp and horn, blending with the voices of the youths and maidens of Israel!”
It is characteristic, as Herr Kohl observes, of music-loving Bohemia, that in the lunatic asylum of its capital, music should be considered one of the chief aids and appliances for the improvement of the patients. In addition to the garden concerts, in which all assist who can, there is chamber music—quartets, trios, etc.,—every morning and evening in the wards; and a musical director takes high rank in the official staff of the establishment.