Franklin Square Song Collection - online songbook

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

Share page

Visit Us On FB

	a 70	FRANKLIN-SQUARE SONG COLLECTION.
	The greatest privilege of a city life seems to be its musical opportunities. In the cultivated or moun­tainous country a banquet is provided for the eye. And there, too, we can have intellectual pleasures—com­munion through books wiih the best minds, thoughts, .and experiences of our own age and history. The city .alone can give us a chorus,a sublime organ, and an orchestra. In these some of the rich and manifest ad­vances of modern over ancient civilization are summed up. . . . Perhaps there is a music of the spheres, but		we can only imagine it—we know nothing of it. I have sometimes thought that if a blind spirit could be supported in space so as to hear, as this globe rolled by him, the notes that are borne on it—the myriad-voiced melody of birds, the sweeping of winds over all the zones, and the sheets of sound, now sombre, now cheerful, they waken from the forests which they stir; the low, lisping penitence of the peaceful sea, and, through all, the thunderous mellow bass of the stirred ocean, beating on a thousand leagues of rock—that
	KELVIN GROVE.		Thomas Lyle.
	spirit might imagine it was a mighty organ rolling by, touched on every key, alive in every ^top, and aroused by every pedal to the praise of God. The highest music is religious. And, in speaking of orchestra, organ «nd chorus, as supplying the supreme civilized privilege of the city, let me go further and express my belief that the greatest fortune that can befall a person in the line of art is—more than seeing Rubens' picture of the Descent from the Cross, or Titian's Assumption, or Da Vinci's Last Supper, or Raffaelle's Transfiguration, or		the Dresden Madonna—to hear Handel's " Messiah," when it is given with a competent combination of power and gifts. I always wonder, when I hear that oratorio, that in every city a grand cathedral service is not made out of it, or of selections from it, once a month, certainly every Christmas—that the promise of Christ, and the blessedness of his grace, and the beneficence of his reign, and glory of his triumph, may have fit interpretation in words and in ways that oversweep the petty divi­sions of catechisms and creeds.—Rev. T. Starr King.