on shore-excited and bewildered, but quite out of his element.

The emotional plane of Italy is one thing, and that of Germany is another. Your clown may put on the monk's cowl, but he forgets to wipe off the paint, and by-and-by, in spite of his costume, he will grin and throw his somersault as usual. Let any one who doubts that music is reaily capable of pitching a high plane for the emotions to work in, recall Beethoven's love-song "Adelaide." No modern Italian master could have written that song. No one can suppose the melody to be expressive of languid sentimentality. We are thrilled; we are not dissolved, we are moved, yet without losing our self-control; and we are too much in earnest to be the mere sport of our emotions. They sweep with flame and thunder through the soul, leaving its atmosphere purified and sweetened by the storm. Let us now think of any popular Italian love-song, e.g. "Si fossi un Angelo del Paradiso non potere vivere di te diviso." Most of our readers may have heard this song by Marras, and it is a very typical one. The emotions are all upon a low plane. The kind of man who could so express his love is an artificial sentimentalist, his feeling is at once exaggerated and extravagant, but not deep; and we have a shrewd idea that the whole thing is poured out by a sham lover, in the presence of some person of doubtful character, by the light of an artificial moou. Without doing absolute violence to the

obvious intention of Beethoven, you cannot sentimentalize "Adelaide," whereas it is impossible to do anything else with such a song as "Si fossi un Angelo." If the reader admits the justice of the above remarks, he can hardly refuse to believe that music not only expresses the various qualities of emotion, but has also the power-subject, no doubt, to perturbing influences of determining the level of emotion, or what may be termed the moral atmosphere of feeling.

And now it is a very noteworthy thing, as bearing upon the life of a Nation, that whatever the spirit which pervades its music happens to be,-whether that spirit be languid and erotic, as in Italy; or frivolous, graceful, noisy, and, at times, blustering, as in France, the music of patriotic tunes and national anthems is invariably earnest and dignified. The tune known as Garibaldi's Hymn, which raged like a fever throughout Italy during the revolution, is so fresh and buoyant and manly in its cheerful vigour and determination, that it fails to suggest a single characteristic of modern Italian music, save only that exemplary one of clear and facile melody. The time for Love-languor is past; the sun of Liberty has dawned, the breeze is on the mountain, the bugle sounds the reveillé, and the youth of Italy, active, alert, hopeful, and confident, march cheerfully to the deliverance of their beautiful but enslaved country. In the Marseillaise there is an almost sombre severity,

wholly unlike the frivolous superficial grace and sentimental pathos of the ordinary French school. The men who sing it are not playing at war, like fools; nor are they mere children, delighting in its outward pomp and circumstance. They trudge on, footsore and weary, knowing all the horror and the pain that is in store for them, and still willing to conquer and to die. That is the spirit of the Marseillaise; and in it, as in Garibaldi's Hymn, the seriousness of the crisis has called forth the finest qualities of both the French and Italian characters, and banished for a time what is languishing in the one and frivolous in the other. I need hardly allude here to the Austrian and Russian hymns, or to our own national anthem, as there has never been any question about the musical merit, dignity, and earnestness of these.

Philosophers have often been at a loss to explain the secret of the strange power which patriotic tunes seem to exercise over the people, and especially over the armies of nations. Historians have been contented simply to record the fact; but the mystery is at an end if we are willing to attribute to music the power which I have claimed for it, of pitching high the plane of the emotions, and driving them home with the most efficacious and incomparable energy.

The laws which regulate the effect of music upon the listener are subject to many strange perturbations. Unless we admit this to be the case, and try to detect

the operation of certain irregular influences, we shall be at a loss to understand why, if music really has its own planes as well as progressions of emotion, gay music should make us sad, and solemn music should sometimes provoke a smile. Musical perturbations are sometimes due to the singer, player, or conductor,sometimes to the listener. Madame Lind-Goldschmidt had, or let us rather sy has, the power of perturbing a trivial melody of any kind almost to any extent. A magical prolongation of single notes here and there, until the vulgarity of the rhythm be broken-a pause, a little appogiatura, even a smile and the original melody, such as we may know it to be, is changed and sublimated into the high expression of a high individuality. Ernst, certainly the most romantic player we have had since Paganini, possessed the same marvellous quality of perturbing almost everything he played until it became absolutely nothing but a melodic expression of his own wild mood. Those who remember the way in which he was wont to play one of his great solos on Hungarian airs, with orchestral accompaniments, will remember the profound meditation, almost coma, into which he seemed to fall in the middle of one of those slow and measured melodies -losing the sense of time and rhythm-allowing, as it were, his own soul to float out upon the waves of melody, which swelled and shook with sensitive thrills, holding the audience breathless, until, in the utter stillness of the room, it was impossible to tell when the notes actually ceased to vibrate. Such players as

he must be classed under the head of Those who express themselves through the music," just as such players as Joachim belong emphatically to the class of those who invariably express the composer's thought, not their own. It is hardly necessary to allude to the manner of any living conductors, to establish the fact that immense powers of perturbation are in the hands of orchestral conductors. We had no idea that Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise could be made to sound positively trivial until it was our misfortune to hear it under the auspices of a thoroughly sentimental and incompetent conductor.

But the perturbations in the natural effect of the music which come from the listener are even more numerous and perplexing. They proceed chiefly from association and memory. If one is by the death-bed of a friend, and a band passes in the street playing a cheerful tune, that tune will sound even more sadly than a really mournful air, which might serve at once to express and to relieve the deep heaviness of the heart. An unhappy girl, out of her mind for the loss of her lover, singing a merry song to herself in a madhouse, will make the joyous melody sound sad enough-sad as the raptures of an imprisoned skylark hanging caged in the London streets. On the other hand, a grave tune may, in like manner, be fairly perturbed out of all sobriety; and, as we have shown it is possible to pass from gay to grave in the lunatic asylum, so we may pass from grave to gay, in spite of our best intentions, upon hearing some well-known