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Mistake me not, reader, -- nor imagihat I am by nature destitute of those exterior tendages, hanging ors, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me. -- I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those duits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exaess, in those ingenious labyrinthine is -- those indispensable side-intelligencers.her have I incurred, or done any thing to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which strained him to draw upon assurance -- to feel "quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the pass of my destiny, that I ever should be.
When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will uao mean -- for music. -- To say <u></u>that this heart never melted at the course of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel. -- "Water parted from the sea" never fails to move it strangely. So does "In Infancy." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentle-woman -- the ge, sure, that ever merited the appellation -- the sweetest -- why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S----, ohe blooming Fanheral of the Temple who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that abs se, which was afterwards destio overwhelm and subdue his nature quite, for Alice W----n.
I even think that seally I am disposed to harmony. But anically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising "God save the King" all my life; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary ers; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached.
I am not without suspi, that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way on my friend A.s piano, the other m, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlor, -- on his return, he leased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspis had lighted on Jenny. But a grace, snatched a superior refi, soon vinced him that some being, -- teically perhaps defit, but higher informed from a principle on to all the fis, -- had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friends peion, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny.
Stifically I could never be made to uand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note in music is; or how oe should differ from another. Much less in voices I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thh bass I trive to guess at, from its being superemily harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarow what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as juring as Baralipton. It is hard to stand alone -- in an age like this, -- (stituted to the quid critical perception of all harmonious binations, I verily believe, beyond all preg ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut) to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the magifluences of an art, which is said to have su<var>?</var> especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. Yet rather thahe did current of my fessions, I must avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty. I am stitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenters hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unected, u sounds are nothing to the measured maliusic. The ear is passive to those sirokes; willingly enduring stripes, while it hath no task to . To music it ot be passive. It will strive -- mi least will -- spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully p upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, a rid of the distrag torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the uending assemblage of ho on-life sounds; -- and the purgatory of the Enraged Musi bees my paradise.
I have sat at an Oratorio (<var>..</var>that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watg the faces of the auditory i (what a trast to Hogarths laughing Audience!) immoveable, or affeg some faiion, -- till (as some have said, that our occupations in the world will be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment; or like that --
-- Party in a parlour,
All silent, and all damned!
Above all, those insufferable certos, and pieusic, as they are called, do plague ater my apprehension. -- Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by uted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon hoo an intermiedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and straio keep pace with it; to gaze oy frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to i extempore tragedies to ao the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime -- these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music.
I deny not, that in the opening of a cert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable:-- afterwards followeth the languor, and the oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the ings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches -- "Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amabilis insania, ais gratissimus error. A most inparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, ag an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagihey act, or that they see done. -- So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in suplations, and fanta99ｌｉb?ical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them -- winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the se turns upon a sudden, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, endure no pany, think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspi, subrusticus pudor, distent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they think of nothing else: tinually suspeg, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; whiow, by no means, no labour, no persuasions they avoid, they ot be rid of it, the ot resist."
Something like this "se-turning" I have experie the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov--; who, by the aid of a capital an, himself the most finished of players, verts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor heavens*.
[Footnote] * I have been there, and still would go;
Tis like a little heaven below.--Dr. Watts
When my friend ences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradveruck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim abbey, some five and thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of ion into my young apprehension -- (whether it be that, in which the psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself doves wings --or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best se his mind) -- a holy calm pervadeth me. -- I am for the time
--rapt above earth,
And possess joys not promised at my birth.
But when this master of the spell, not tent to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive, impatient to overe her "earthly" with his "heavenly," -- still p in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German o, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphied, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant tritons, Bach, Beethoven, and a tless tribe, whom to attempt to re up would but plunge me again in the deeps,I stagger uhe weight of ha藏书网rmony, reeling to and fro at my wits end; -- clouds, as of frankinse, oppress me -- priests, altars, sers, dazzle before me -- the genius of his religion hath me ioils -- a shadowy triple tiara is the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous -- he is Pope, -- and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too, -- tri-eted like himself! -- I am verted, a a Protestant -- at once malleus hereti, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies tre in my person -- I am Mar, Ebion, ahus -- Gog and Magog -- what not? -- till the ing in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and, a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reciles me to the rationalities of a purer faint aores to me the geerrifying aspey pleasant- tenanced hosts and hostess.
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