"By Babel's streams we sat and wept!"
How sudden, yet how unviolent, the transitions among all our feelings! Under no other power so swift and so soft as that of Music. The soul that sincerely loves Music, offers at no time the slightest resistance to her sway, but yields itself up entirely to all its moods and measures, led captive by each successive strain through the whole mysterious world of modulated air. Not a smile over all that hush. Entranced in listening, they are all still as images. A sigh—almost a sob—is heard, and there is shedding of tears. The sweet singer's self seems as if she felt all alone at some solitary shrine—
"Her face, oh! call it fair, not pale!"
Yet pale now it is, as if her heart almost died within her at the pathos of her own beautiful lament in a foreign land, and lovelier in her captivity never was the fairest of the daughters of Zion!
How it howls! That was a very avalanche. The snow-winds preach charity to all who have roofs overhead—towards the houseless and them who huddle round hearths where the fire is dying or dead. Those blankets must have been a God-send indeed to not a few families, and your plan is preferable to a Fancy-Fair. Yet that is good too—nor do we find fault with them who dance for the Destitute. We sanction amusements that give relief to misery—and the wealthy may waltz unblamed for behoof of the poor.
Again, what a howling in the chimney! What a blattering on the windows, and what a cannonading on the battlements! What can the night be about? and what has put old Nox into such a most outrageous passion? He has driven our Winter Rhapsody clean out of our noddle—and to-morrow we must be sending for the slater, the plumber, and the glazier. To go to bed in such a hurly-burly, would be to make an Ultra-Toryish acknowledgment, not only of the divine right, but of the divine power of King Morpheus. But an Ultra-Tory we are not—though Ultra-Trimmers try to impose upon themselves that fiction among a thousand others; so we shall smoke a cigar, and let sleep go to the dogs, the deuce, the devil, and the Chartists.