In 1658 was born in London a boy named Henry Purcell. Music seemed to grow with him. When he was very young he was put into the choir school at Westminster Abbey, and it was only the other day I was standing in the old school-room where the boy Purcell sat, and looking at a quaint old picture of him which hangs upon the wall.
The Westminster boys were taught music very fairly by old Cook and Humphries. It must have been a cheerful life. To-day the school has been enlarged and beautified, but even then it surely possessed the charm of peace, and yet great harmonies, for it stands almost in the shelter of the Abbey, and all day long the boys had the dear old cloisters to run about in, and twice a day they listened to glorious music on the organ. Purcell grew full of musical fire, and when he was eighteen he was appointed organist of the great Abbey. He wrote constantly—catches, glees, songs, and hymns, which to this day are listened to and sung with delight.
It was when Purcell was about nineteen that he one day received an invitation from a school-master to call, on musical business, at his house in Chelsea. Thither he went. He found a young ladies' school, and an energetic master who wished his pupils to perform something operatic. So Purcell wrote the music, and Tate the words, of Dido and Æneas, a little operetta, in which he himself performed, and which was so successful that henceforth he wrote chiefly for the stage.
But all the time everybody in London was singing or playing his glees and madrigals. In Westminster was a famous old tavern known as Purcell's Head, and clubs used to meet there to sing his music. Meanwhile we can fancy Milton as a youth playing his most solemn music in that quaint room of his with its faded hangings and grand organ, and at the theatre elaborate performances of The Tempest, The Indian Queen, and other plays, to which was added "Mr. Purcell's musicke."
Those were rollicking and riotous times. Purcell's sweet music seems to come in with some feeling of soothing sounds, but had the times been better, he would have done more, I am sure, in his noblest direction. Everything at court and around it was careless and reckless. Dryden, the poet, who wrote many of the plays for which Purcell furnished music, bitterly regretted when he was older that he had wasted so much time amusing an ungodly people. Purcell seems only to have thought of his music, and certainly at this date, two hundred years after his death, his sweetness and charm are as strongly felt. In 1695 he died, and his tomb is in the Abbey where his childish feet so often passed and repassed, and beneath the organ where he so often played in his most innocent and most happy years.
Opera seems from the end of the seventeenth century to have gone on gaining new force and beauty in every country, and to-day it is supposed by some critics to have attained its highest form in Wagner's music. I fear those eager Italian gentlemen who used to meet in Conte Vernio's brilliant rooms would be very much alarmed by some of the German operas of to-day, and I own that, with all love of Wagner's great music, there is a peculiar charm in the old airs of operas which people try to scoff at now. Ten minutes ago an organ-grinder stopped under my window and began droning out "Ai nostri morte," that sweet air in Verdi's Trovatore, and I felt as if it was very near the Italy of the seventeenth century. But this must not make you think that Wagner has not science and strength and the utmost beauty on his side.
WHAT THE SPRING BROUGHT TO LITTLE LAME ELSIE.