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XX.

BLANK VERSE AND LITERAL TRANSLATION.

HE harmonies of unrhymed decasyllabic metre, at least in our language, require more length for their development than rhyme; not that rhyme cannot embrace the same compass, far from it, but that it can dispense with it, and, in the sparkling couplet of Pope, does dispense with it. The rhythmic relations of a passage in blank verse extend over many lines, as we find it in Milton, and every line must distinctly contribute to the harmony of the whole, and not terminate in itself; nay, must often be content to have no marked character of its own, but serve as a stone in the building-up of the entire passage.

This difference between blank verse and the ordinary couplet will be apparent in any page of Milton or Pope, in the respective metres; and the difference will be likely to come out particularly strong in the reading of most persons, especially those who tell you they do not like blank verse, and are used to Pope. Such a one may read you the latter in a way to please you both, but put him to any, the most orchestral passages of Paradise Lost, and a change comes; he will read you every line as he reads the couplet, and come down with a thump at the end of the first line, and with a thump at the end of the second, and feel his ear baulked and disappointed at their not rhyming, and so drive heavily through, stopping so often to take up instead of driving on to the end of the stage.

Now a bad reader would read good blank verse into the bad blank verse that a literal translator would be likely

to start with making, viz. lines which are unconnected by rhythmic relation. The exigencies of literal translation forbid the rhythmic grouping of lines to the extent required by this kind of verse; and without it the music disappears, and a flatness creeps over it, which will not have the build of even good prose. For, in this respect, worthy Monsieur Jourdain would not have been so much out, as the alternative is not between prose and verse. Rhythmically considered there may be that which is neither; each has a rhythm of its own, so that breaking up verse will not constitute prose, any more than counting off prose into syllables will constitute verse. Each will have to be taken to pieces, and put together again on a different principle, to constitute the other.

XXI.

ON MUSIC IN EDUCATION.

music be taught at all let it be thoroughly from the outset, as they would teach a professional; it is not longer about, and will vex the

soul of the pupil much less. He or she will be

able to do all that is done the other way in half the time; and, if a girl, retain it, and transmit it to her children, and brighten her husband's home with moderate and graceful exercise of this accomplishment. Yes, and this in a way that shall be of worth for its own sake, and not owe too much to their mutual fondness, and recollection of earlier days, when dear Harry was in extasies with that piece, or that song, at which so played or sung he would have yawned horribly from any but his Caroline.

I said if taught at all; for, as a general accomplishment,

I have strong doubts about it-doubts which a parent should solve for himself before committing his child to the consequences. Among my objections is its absorbing effect, which runs over the man's life, and is not limited, as a knack for poetry is, by the skill of the performer. If a boy take to writing indifferent verse, at least he has no opportunity of inflicting it on his friends, who, if he attempt it, will deliver themselves on the sauve qui peut principle, and soon reduce him to letting them off that; he will soon sicken of writing what none will listen to, and of printing, if he go that length, what none will buy. But if he play on some instrument, though but indifferently, or sing, although so poorly that none would care to hear him, yet he may exercise, ay, and will be courted to exercise, those indifferent accomplishments every week of his life in musical society of friends, all meeting together in that spirit of mutual forbearance which puts up with the short-comings of others in a performance where each fancies himself to be doing the thing in superior style. For I have observed that any singing, provided it be not absolutely out of tune, will do for this matter; and people, on the strength of it, meet periodically as punctually as if they were paid for it. Its charm cannot be the music itself, for I have known some of them, as auditors, quickly weary of much finer performance, and am therefore inclined to refer their enthusiastic devotion at their own meetings to the pleasure of taking a part in them. The quorum magna pars fui is a principle of great prevalence; a man looks complacently on a flower of his own raising, when he might get a bunch of them for a penny. So it is the tendency of a little taste for drawing to eye with partiality a head of one's own sketching, or a landscape that hath the ego stamp upon it, yea, with a warmth that goes nigh to tread on the heels of the honest feeling with which we look on a Raphael or a Claude, but, of course, with a feeling of another kind,

and in the absence of the better thing with which to compare it.

In these musical parties, though meeting but at stated times, there is the desire, in the interval, to be ready for them, and play one's part well, which entails practising, either alone or a few together; so that, on the whole, the effect is pretty much this, that all their leisure is taken up in it. Is this desirable for those who are capable of any thing higher? Let us not misunderstand—music is a high thing; and a Handel, a Mozart, and a Beethoven have reached a pitch in their exercise of God's gift, that may line and level with a Homer, a Dante, and a Shakespeare; and it is a well-crowned life-work, so far, to have done what they have done; but it may be an ill spending of life to devote it, or the leisure for improving it, to the indifferent representation of what they have done. Our relation to them in so doing were no higher than that of a poor player to Shakespeare, and without the excuse of its being for a livelihood. I am not criticizing, far from it, the propriety of this thing for adults, in the intervals of serious occupation, in which they have earned the right to spend their leisure as their own discretion and experience find best; but I do, most seriously and earnestly, and in no carping spirit, put in a word for the young, who are on the threshold of life, to have it well weighed by those who have influence with them how far he or she should be committed to a course which will gradually, but infallibly, shut out every other avenue of self-improvement by weaning them of the inclination to enter it.

The tendency of this is not always even to cultivate the best taste for the thing itself, but rather to narrow one's estimate of the art to the particular channel in which our groove runs. This may be observed in artists. A catholic taste for painting is, perhaps, no where more rare than among them, the tendency being to break up into prefer

ences for particular styles. In all matters this tendency is strong, but it is intensified in the person who is himself a doer in the art or science; for he can hardly help being drawn into undue preference of his own sphere.

W

XXII.

BODY AND SOUL.

ZHEN death comes, what if this indestructible soul, on leaving the body, be companioned by an indestructible floating germ of the latter, that disengages itself, at the same time, from the lifeless mass of muscle and bone, of which it is the essential and vital principle, and seed-atom? Then together the twain journey, whither it is their Creator's will they should, free as the thistle-down on this earth of ours, that mounts in the air and away, to settle and spring into new life remote from the parent plant. For, in a certain sense, we are the seed of ourselves, the outshoot of something that preceded, even in this identity of ours, which is but the identity of conscious succession that keeps handing down the early part of ourselves to the latter, and thus giving us a sense of being the same.

The change were no greater, to another state of body and soul in another world, than the actual changes that body and soul undergo here. Look at the man of fifty, and compare him with his portrait as a child of six. What changes in the body in the interval !-every particle, the philosophers say, having changed once in seven years; and it must be so or we should never have done growing. And yet the changes are probably not greater than the changes of character, opinions, knowledge, views, and