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io National Music of the World. |
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entered silently, one by one, and each, having folded her white kerchief on her head, dropped on her knees, the prayer accompanied by some pretext of musical accompaniment—was picturesque enough to hold the recollection of those who witnessed it, and with the majority, it appears, to confuse clear artistic perception.
Almost the strongest impression I recollect to have received from a tune, belongs to a Methodist funeral, which wound its way up a hollow north-country lane, on a grey October afternoon. The coffin was not caparisoned; the people who walked before and behind it joined in a plain dry burial psalm—sung as provincial psalm-singers used to do forty years ago in England. It was not merely the presence of death, which is felt so potently by the young; but it was the unexpected, sincere intrusion of that droning music into a still landscape, which has printed that melody on my memory.
What has been said will apply to any part-song of German students or vineyard girls, heard in the stony lanes of a Rhine or Moselle or Danube village by moonlight, after a happy day's pleasure—to any miserable Italian opera, drunk in as so much nectar by tourists, resolute on finding opera in Italy (especi- |
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