Favorite Songs and Hymns For School and Home, page: 0306

450 Of The World's Best Songs And Hymns, With Lyrics & Sheet music for voice & piano.

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	306	FAVORITE SONGS FOR SCHOOL AND HOME.
	This touching song, "The Sands o'Dee," by Charles Kingsley, occurs in his novel of " Alton Locke." The hero says: «� After singing two or three songs, Lillian began fingering the keys, and struck into an old air, wild and plaintive, rising and falling like the swell of an yEolian harp upon a distant breeze. ' Ah! now,' she said,' if I could get words for that! What an exquisite lament somebody might write to it' . . My attention was caught by hearing two gentlemen, close to me, discuss a beautiful sketch by Copley Fielding, if I recollect rightly, which hung on the wall�a wild waste of tidal sands, with here and there a line of stake-nets fluttering in the wind�a gray shroud of rain sweeping up from the westward, through which low, red cliffs glowed dimly in the rays of the setting sun �a train of horses and cattle splashing slowly through		shallow, desolate pools and creeks, their wet, red and black hides glittering in one long line of level light. One of the gentlemen had seen the spot represented, at the mouth of the Dee, and began telling wild stories of salmon-fishing and wild-fowl shooting�and then a tale of a girl, who, in bringing her father's cattle home across the sands, had been caught by a sudden flow of the tide upon the beach and was found next day a corpse hanging among the stake-nets far below. The tragedy, the art of the picture, the simple, dreary gran�deur of the scenery, took possession of me, and I stood gazing a long time, and fancying myself pacing the sands. . . As I lay castle-building, Lillian's wild air Still rang in my ears, and combined itself somehow with the picture of the Cheshire Sands, and the story of the drowned girl, till it shaped itself into a song."
	THE SANDS O' DEE.		Francis Boott. Charles Kingsley.
	Architecture is one of the most fascinating arts, and its study has been to many a man a sublime life-work. Lincoln and York Cathedrals, St. Paul's and St. Peter's, the arch of Titus, Theban temple, Alham-bra, and Parthenon, are monuments to the genius of those who built them. But more wonderful than any arch they ever lifted, or any transept window they ever illumined, or any Corinthian column they ever crowned, or any Gothic cloister they ever elab�orated, is the human ear. Among the most skillful and assiduous physiologists of our time have been those who have given their time to the examination of the ear, and the studying of its arches, its walls, its floor, its canals, its aqueducts, its galleries, its intricacies, its convolutions, its divine machinery; and yet, it will take another thousand years before the		world comes to any adequate appreciation of what God did when He planned and executed the infinite and overmastering architecture of the human ear. The most of it is invisible, and the microscope breaks down in the attempt at exploration. The cartilage which we call the ear is only the storm-door of the great temple clear down out of sight, next door to the immor�tal soul. Such scientists as Helmholtz, and De Blain-ville, and Rank, and Buck, have attempted to walk the Appian Way of the human ear, but the mysterious pathway has never been fully trodden but by two feet� the foot of sound and the foot of God.� Talmage. Instruction by the living voice has this advantage over books, that as being more natural, it is also more impressive. Hearing rouses the attention and keeps it alive far more effectually than reading.�Hamilton.