Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/273

 the limbs of a dancer, who, a-tiptoe, prepares to bound into her ecstacy of motion. Away! The song soars into the air as if it had the wings of a kite. Here swooping, there swooping, wheeling upward, falling suddenly, checked, poised for a moment on quivering wings, and again away. It is waltz time, and you hear the Hours dancing to it. Then the horns. Their melody overflows into the air richly, like honey of Hybla; it wafts down in lazy gusts, like the scent of the thyme from that hill. So my stringed instruments to the left cease rustling, listen a little while, catch the music of those others, and follow it. Now for the rising of the lark! Henceforward it is a chorus, and he is the leader thereof. Heaven and earth agree to follow him. I have a part for the brooks—their notes drop, drop, drop, like his: for the woods—they sob like him. At length, nothing remains but to blow the hautboys; and just as the chorus arrives at its fulness, they come maundering in. They have a sweet old blundering "cow-song" to themselves—a silly thing, made of the echoes of all pastoral sounds. There's a warbling waggoner in it, and his team jingling their bells. There's a shepherd driving his flock from the fold, bleating; and the lowing of cattle.—Down falls the lark like a stone: it is time he looked for grubs. Then the hautboys go out, gradually; for the waggoner is far on his road to market; sheep cease to bleat and cattle to low, one by one; they are on their grazing ground, and the business of the day is begun. Last of all, the heavenly music sweeps away to waken more westering lands, over the Atlantic and its whitening sails.

And to think this goes on every day, and every day has been repeated for a thousand years! Generally, though, we don't like to think about that, as Mr. Kingsley has remarked, among others; for when he wrote, "Is it not a grand thought, the silence and permanence of nature amid the perpetual noise and flux of human life!—a grand thought, that one generation goeth and another cometh, and the earth abideth for ever?" he also meant, "Isn't it a melancholy thought?" For my part, I believe this reflection to be the fount of all that melancholy which is in man. I speak in the broadest sense, meaning that whereas whenever you find a man you find a melancholy animal, this is the secret of his melancholy. The thought is so common and so old; it has afflicted so many men in so many generations with a sort of philosophical sadness, that it comes down to us like an hereditary disease, of which we have lost the origin, and almost the consciousness. It is an universal disposition to melancholy madness, in short. Savages who run wild in woods are not less liable to its influence than we who walk in civilized Pall Mall. On the contrary, a savage of any brains at all is the most melancholy creature in the world. Not Donizetti, nor Mendelssohn, nor Beethoven himself ever composed such sad songs as are drummed on tom-toms, or piped through reeds, or chanted on the prairies and lagoons of savage land. No music was ever conceived within the walls of a city so profoundly touching as that which Irish pipers and British harpers made before an arch was built in England. Now this bears out our supposition; for the savage with the tom-tom, the piper with his pipe,