We have done with the story: let us return for a few moments to Mozart’s part of this Opera—the music. Off of the stage, in a salon or concert-room, the effect of this Opera is most beautiful; for on the stage the immoral, vulgar story, low buffoonery and farce-like appearance of many of the scenes, are sadly at variance with the elevated and almost religious tone of the music, and disgust even a hearty admirer, if he is candid enough to admit it.
Let us here take leave of this subject and of Mr. Dwight: begging of him in future, if he is not able to be original, to at least copy good models of style and morals, and not inflict upon the community his own exaggerated, loose-principled, Boston notions. Luckily, however, his style is so confused and mystified, that much of the injurious effect is lost. We have heard these Boston non-religionists talk, and we know with what goût they “defy the moral” of any matter, to use Mr. Dwight’s own words; then, how can one expect better principles, where such laxity of morals are avowed. The closing sentence in this Don Giovanni article is a pretty fair specimen of this anti-religious, moral-defying kind of literature; indeed, the whole article is—for “passion life,” “innate gospel of joy,” and such English run-mad expressions dance through the whole article, enlivened and varied, once in a while, with some of the fire-engine vernacular.
Shame! shame upon such literature! Mr. Dwight talks of the “divine good of the senses and the passions,” and longs for that “pure and perfect state,” when these grosser parts of our nature “shall be—not dreaded, not suppressed; but regulated, harmonized, made rythmical and safe, and more than ever lifesome and spontaneous, by Law as broad and as deep themselves.” A pretty state of affairs we should have in such a hereafter as these people long for. All this is entirely foreign to our old-fashioned notions of Heaven and a hereafter. It may be the Heaven of an Agapedome, or a Woman’s Rights Convention, but it is not the Heaven of a Christian. And they will find out, sooner or later, that there is a real hereafter—a solemn, and stern judging hereafter; and though they may imagine that their transcendental “Souls, with their capacity for joy and harmony, is of that godlike and asbestos quality,” as to defy punishment, punishment will come, and pretty effectual it will be, and they will see all this “spiritual asbestos quality”—why not gutta percha, just as well—of little account, when they are found with lamps untrimmed, and talents buried in the earth.
Mount Edgecumb.
THE AUTOGRAPH OF GOD.
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BY GEORGE W. BUNGAY.
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The thirsty earth, with lips apart,