Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/43

Rh is clouded by dull superstitions, while his heart is nourished and united with the life of all lives by this refreshing dew!

The growing disposition, here and there, among select musical circles, to cultivate acquaintance with this form of music, is a good sign. What has been called sacred music in this country has been the least sacred in every thing but the name, and the forced reverence paid it. With the superstitions of the past, the soul of nature also was suppressed; and the free spirit of music found small sphere amid our loud protestings. A joyless religion of the intellect merely, which could almost find fault with the sun's shining, closed every pore of the self-mortified and frozen soul against the subtle, insinuating warmth of this most eloquent apostle of God. The sublime sincerity of that wintry energy of self-denial having for the most part passed away, and the hearts of the descendants of the Pilgrims having become opened to all worldly influences, why should they not be also visited by the heavenly corrective of holy and enchanting music, which is sure to call forth and to nourish germs of loftier affection? Can the bitter spirit of sectarianism, can the formal preachings of a worldly church which strives to keep religion so distinct from life, can the utilitarian ethics of this great day of trade, give the soul such nourishment and such conviction of the higher life as the great religious music of Mozart and Haydn and Beethoven? The pomp and pageantry of the Mass we have not. But the spiritual essence lives in the music itself; and a mere quartette of voices, a social friendly group, bound alike by moral and by musical sympathies, may drink this inspiration, may pour it out on others. The songs and operas of the day, which take the multitude, become insipid in comparison with such music.

Greatest of all masters in this peculiar line was Mozart,—the boy Mozart we might say,—who wrote the major part of his eighteen Masses ere he had reached his twenty-second year; and yet they seem, the best of them, to have been wrung from the profoundest experiences of the long-tried heart of a man, as well as to pour forth the raptures of a bright seraph-soul, which has not yet buried any portion of its heavenly inheritance in the earth.