Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/171

Rh to prove that good words are also an element of success, it is only necessary to mention that the words of "Rock me to Sleep, Mother," written by Florence Percy (Mrs. Akers), have been set to different music by as many as seven composers. The music most generally accepted is by Leslie. Among the writers of words for songs, are George Cooper, Mrs. M. A. Kidder, George W. Birdseye, W. Dexter Smith, Jr., etc. George P. Morris was a very successful writer of words. Composers, of course, frequently set to music the words of eminent poets, and also often write their own words.

There are songs for all emotions and occasions. There are songs for all times and seasons. The most dramatic scenes are necessarily the most appropriate to music. Hence it is that there are so many sailing songs, and songs for the night and Summer. A Summer evening in the country, or on some beautiful lake, is always provocative of music.

"It is safe to estimate," says a recent writer, "that fully one-third of the most admired songs of the day have in them something about moonlight; and, of course, they are only really appropriate when sung by moonlight.

wrote Bulwer many years ago, and music might be addressed in the same terms. Most young people of musical tastes are disposed to follow the advice of the lover in Moore's poem:

And Summer nights are usually resonant with the songs of girls and boys as well as of frogs and zephyrs."

Our popular songs are not up to the literary mark, perhaps; their sentiment is not double-refined, and even their sense is not always the clearest; but the masses make their choice, and while grander words and finer versifications are left unnoticed, these attain universal circulation.

There has probably been an improvement in sentiment, at least, in our best songs, upon those which used to be sung in the olden times. The most famous of those were drinking songs, of which the best known is, perhaps, that written by a chaplain named Walter De Mapes, of undue jollity, in the service of Henry H., which commences:

It may be noticed that the most popular sentimental and humorous songs in the English language are those attributed to the Irish, Scotch or negroes. The quaint and careless variations from the English words, especially in the Scottish and negro songs, seem to