Franklin Square Song Collection - online songbook

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

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	146	FRANKLIN-SQUARE SONG COLLECTION.
	Another grand voice of nature is the thunder. Ignorant people often have a vague idea that thunder is produced by the clouds knocking together, which is very absurd, if you remember that clouds are but water-dust. The most probable explanation of thunder is much more beautiful than this. Heat forces the air-atoms apart. Now, when a flash of lightning crosses the sky, it suddenly expands the air all round it as it passes, so that globe after globe of sound-waves is formed at every point across which the lightning travels. Light travels		so rapidly (192,000 miles in a second) that a flash ot lightning is seen by us and is over in a second, even, when it is two or three miles long. But sound comes slowly, taking five seconds to travel a mile, and so all the sound-waves at each point of the two or three miles fall on our ear one after the other, and make the rolling thunder. Sometimes the roll is made even longer by the echo, as the sound-waves are reflected to and fro by the clouds on their way; and in the mountains we know how the peals echo and re-echo until they die away.
				Ira D. Sankey. Elizabeth C. Clephane, 1868.
	THE NINETY AND NIN		E.
	"We have selected music," says Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, in his preface to the Plymouth Collection, " with reference to the wants of families, of social meet­ings, and of the lecture-room, as well as of the great congregation. But the tunes are chiefly for congrega­tional singing. We have gathered up whatever we could find of merit, in old or new music, that seemed fitted for this end. Not the least excellent are the pop­ular revival melodies, which, though they have been often excluded from classic collections of music, have		never been driven out from among the people. These have been gathered up, and fitly arranged, having already performed most excellent service. They are now set forth with the best of all testimonials—the affection and admiration of thousands who have experienced their inspiration. Because they are home-bred and popular, rather than foreign and stately,, we like them none the less. And we cannot doubt that many of them will carry up to heaven the devout fervor of God's people until the millennial day."