Franklin Square Song Collection - online songbook

200 favorite songs and Hymns for Schools, Homes Lyrics & Sheet Music

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	58	FRANKLIN-SQUARE SONG COLLECTION.
	Influence of Music.—Man is as much a child of the beautiful as he is of wisdom or genius, Na­ture never drives us if she can avoid it; she prefers to allure us. She makes all things charming. She paints the fields and the woods that we may go to them, led by affection. She makes the face of youth beautiful, throws color on the cheek, and makes the lines of smiles and laughter come and go, and she sends the soul into the eyes, that young years may build up everlasting frienship. Yielding to his Di-		vine Master's guidance, man follows the beautiful, and to the idea of home or temple or garden or city, he comes with both hands full of ornament. He claims for his house and his dress what God gives to the peach, or the leaf, or the rose. In this deep philosophy music comes as the decoration of a thought. Man submits his truths to several steps of this ennobling work. He found them in prose and he asks Milton or Dante, or Tennyson or Long­fellow to frame them into poetry, but not yet satisfied
	I'VE BEEN ROAMING.		Chas. E. Horn.
	be takes the thought to the great musician and asks Mozart or Weber or Schubert to pour still more color on the blessed thought. It was not enough for the Greeks that some of their truth took the poetic form of the drama, it must also be sung on the stage, so that between the uplifted hands of both Poetry and Music all might see how sorrowful was CEdipus or how sweet Antigone. Thus all through its history, music has ever been the final decoration		of a sentiment. Poetry has done much when it has gathered up some of the pensive meditations of man when he draws near his long home and has called this rhythmical arrangement a poem. Even read to us, its flow of harmonious feet is impressive; but when Mozart goes further, and wreathes those words with his composition into a requiem, then is the cup of our realization full, and all the pomp and splendor of earth sink like the summer sun.—Swing.