Imagination is not thought, neither is fancy reflection:

'Thought paceth like a hoary sage, but imagination hath wings as an eagle;

Reflection sternly considereth, nor is sparing to condemn evil,

'But fancy lightly laugheth in the sun-clad gardens of amusement.

'Steer the bark of thy mind from the syren isle of reverie.'

But if he has not confused them, he has certainly allowed fancy to stray within precincts which belong more fitly to her graver counterpart. Witness the following passage on the locality of hell, which we subjoin, as much for its singular beauty, as for its marvellous strangeness.

'At the birth of this same world, there was struck off from its burning mass at a tangent, a mournful satellite, to be the home of its immortal evil; the convict shore for exiled sin and misery: a satellite of strange differences, as guessed by Virgil in his musings upon Tartarus: where half the orb is, from natural necessities, blistered up by constant heats, the other half frozen by perennial cold. A land of caverns, and volcanoes, miles deep, miles high: with no water, no perceptible air: imagine such a dreadful world, with neither air nor water! Incapable of feeding life like ours, but competent to be a place where undying wretchedness may struggle for ever. A melancholy orb, the queen of night, chief nucleus of all the dark idolatries of earth,-the Moon, Isis, Hecate, Ashtaroth, Diana of the Ephesians!

This expression of a thought by no means improbable, gives an easy chance to shallow punsters: but ridicule is no weapon against reason. Why should not the case be so? Why should not Earth's own satellite, void as yet, be, on the resurrection of all flesh, the raft whereon to float away Earth's evil? Read of it astronomically: think of it as connected with idols; regard it as the ruler of earth's night; consider that the place of a Gehenna must be somewhere; and what is there in my fancy quite improbable? I do not dogmatize as that the fact is so, but only suggest a definite place at least as likely as any other hitherto suggested. Think how that awful melancholy eye looks down on deeds of darkness! how many midnight crimes, murders, thefts, adulteries, and witchcrafts, that would have shrunk into nonentity from open honest day, have paled the conscious Moon ! Add to all this, it is the only world, beside our own, whereof astronomers can tell us; It is fallen.'-P. 168-9.

What in the world may be the meaning of this last sentence we leave to the Astronomical Society to explain: at least, we can suggest no other clue to our readers; for the bold confidence of the assertion quite excludes any hypothetical solution of the difficulty. It must evidently be the interpretation of some acknowledged fact, not a mere personal and peculiar deduction of the author's own; for it is stated absolutely and simply, as if it were a circumstance as well ascertained as the Moon's distance from the Earth, or the general conditions of its orbit. But we are quite at a loss for an explanation. Perhaps Mr. Tupper will furnish us with it in a second edition: for the present, we must be content to take our leave of him in obscurity.

54

ART. III.-A Short Account of Organs built in England from the reign of King Charles the Second to the Present Time. London: Masters. 1847.

THE use of musical instruments in churches has been much debated; and it is well known that the Eastern Church has decided against it. Nor is it to be denied that there is a general ground to which the objector appeals with some plausibility. He takes the ground, that the noise of instruments is a very dead and material kind of praise to offer to God. God, he says, is worshipped with the heart, and from the heart the mouth speaketh. The praises of God ought to come from the person himself who offers them; and the sounds ought to be signs of genuine feeling, and devotional warmth. But the sounds which come from an instrument are simply mechanical, and signs of nothing. However magnificent the music from an orchestra or organ, it is a material creation, and a mere show and outside, in a devotional point of view. There is plausibleness in such a view, so far as this, that it must readily be granted that brass and wood are not themselves devotional agents in the work of song and praise. But there, we must say, we think the argument on that side terminates; for what the admission is to lead to, and what advantage it will give to the opponent of the use of instruments, it is difficult to see. Brass and wood are material things; but so is the human throat too. The music of the human voice is no sign, necessarily, of any devotion within; indeed, it must with shame be confessed, that, as a matter of fact, it is very often not. A man uses his own throat just as he would use an instrument; the bodily organ is as external to his own proper self as a flute or trumpet; and his own mind sometimes does, and sometimes does not, sympathize and unite itself with the sounds which issue from it. The use of the human voice then, and the use of musical instruments, stand exactly on the same ground; both are used as means of musical expression, and a person may express real and genuine feeling by the one medium, just as he can by the other. Indeed, we know that musical instruments were used under the old dispensation, and were sanctioned by Divine authority then: nor do we see that Christianity has any thing in it which repeals such a sanction. For if it be said that Christianity is a more spiritual religion, and therefore less allied to mere material modes of expression, the answer still is, that it does make use of the latter in making use of human throats.

It sanctifies the human throat for the purposes of song and praise; and therefore it may sanctify wood and tin for the same purposes.

Moreover, there is a great omission, of which such an argument against instrumental music is guilty; we mean, the omission of all reference to the hearer in the case, as distinguished from the singer. Music is considered only as it comes from the singer. But there is surely a hearer in the case too. Even if a whole congregation sings, every individual in it is partly a performer, and partly a listener; and the whole congregation is in one of its aspects the choir, and in another the audience. In the latter capacity it is of decided importance that what is heard should be as grand and as impressive as possible. The difference of its coming from a human throat, and coming from an instrument, is not here a difference ad rem. All grand music, simply as so much music heard and taken in, produces an effect, and excites emotions; and if the music is of the sober and devotional kind, it tends to produce religious emotions. The congregation, we repeat, ought to be considered in its aspect as an audience, as well as in its aspect as a chorus. The grander and nobler the mass of sound which strikes its ear, in this latter capacity, from whatever source proceeding-the better. So much addition of grandeur is so much gain: and if an objector comes and says-yes, but all this grand effect comes from metal, and not from men; we answer-never mind, you hear it: it is music. Nobody asks you to be thinking all the time of wood and tin, because this music comes from wood and tin. You are not required to know where it comes from: you hear it, that is enough for you. If the music is disagreeable to you, you have then a right to complain; but if it is not-if it is beautiful music, and has the other requisites of style which church music should have, and if the hearing of it tends to excite devotional feeling, then use it for your edification, and be glad of it.

And of all instrumental contrivances for attaining this end, i. e. for producing a grand effect, and at the same time concealing from eye and thought the machinery by which it produced it, none, perhaps, could have been more successful than the organ. It is indeed a marvellous musical engine, and the collection of so much body of sound under the control of one finger, gives a kind of magical ease to its operations. Here is no effort, no elaboration obtruded upon us; no rapid working up and down of hundreds of fingers, on flutes, fiddles, and clarionets; nothing to remind us of material machinery and manual evolutions: huge volumes of sound seem to proceed spontaneously from some invisible abyss; and music floats on all sides of us, without telling us where it comes from, and

surrounds us like the air. There is a mysterious obscurity, moreover, in the very composition of that mass of sound which issues from an organ. It neither seems to come from one instrument, nor from many: it is too rich, complex, and vast to appear to come from one; it is too compact and united to appear to come from many. Such an instrument is wonderfully in keeping indeed with the rich and labyrinthal architecture of the buildings for which it was made; and affords one instance, among many others, how harmoniously the same spirit often develops in different departments. Gothic architecture and organ music seem made for each other. In the ecclesiastical fabric, in the ecclesiastical instrument, we have the same complex mysterious creation; we see the same occult and awful style of richness and grace.

The little book before us, A Short Account of Organs built in England from the reign of King Charles the Second to the Present Time,' will be an interesting one to the lovers of the organ. It gives in short space much curious information about many of our English instruments, both those which have been destroyed, and those still in existence; and anecdotes connected with the personal history, as it may be called, of some of our great organs, show the writer to be a zealous gleaner in this department, though we do not agree with all his remarks as a musical critic. Here is an account given of the organs built by Bernard Smith, by the Harrises, father and son, by Schreider, Schwarbrook, Byfield, Bridge and Jordan, by Green, Avory, England, Hill, Gray, Bishop, and other eminent organbuilders. And now for a very few plain practical observations, on some questions connected with the position which the organ should occupy in the church service.

It is debated, then, a good deal, whether the organ accompaniment should be a full or a slender one in the church services. And this, though applying to all parts of the church service, is a question which comes before us most prominently in the chanting of the Psalms. There are two theories of organ-playing here; one for a very slight accompaniment, and another for a decided and solid one. One organist is very much afraid of overwhelming the voices of his choir; another is not so nervous on this point, and thinks his instrument ought to be heard. Without denying that both views have their true and their false tendencies, we shall not pretend to such philosophical impartiality here as to leave the subject with this general sentiment; but we shall avow a preference. On the whole, speaking simply as ordinary hearers who have unconsciously formed a judgment from a comparison of the effects upon their ears on these occasions, we must declare a preference

for the latter view of the organ's functions. We confess that, in attendance on cathedral service, we like to hear the organ: a good substantial accompaniment has an unquestionably pleasing and satisfying effect; nor does it appear, unless pushed to a great extreme, to take from, but rather to add to, the effect of the voices. There is, indeed, a summary argument on this subject, to this effect; that the more we hear of the organ, the less we must hear of the voices; that we must choose which we would rather hear; and that the choir must, in reason, have the preference. But we do not think the question can be settled in this way; for it is not so true that hearing one sound does prevent us from hearing another—we may hear both together. An organ accompanies a set of voices: we hear the organ-we hear the voices. It is not necessary that we make our choice between the two, we may enjoy both. Undoubtedly there is a point at which the noise of the instrument may overwhelm the voices; nor do we want any approach at all to the power of the great organ, which would be, as a continuous accompaniment, intolerable. But, up to a certain point, the fulness of an organ accompaniment does not at all interfere with the audibleness of the voices. If you have two sounds going on at the same time, one of which is opposed to and discordant with the other, then, that the more you hear of the one the less you hear of the other, is true enough: the neighbourhood of a cartwheel will mar the tones of a piano forte, and a Canary-bird will prevent you hearing a word your friend says. But this is not so much the case when the two volumes of sound are in one and the same line, one supporting the other. Practically, a good full organ accompaniment, if not excessive, does not prevent us from hearing the choir; it rather forms a background of sound, which satisfies and fills our unconscious ear, while our conscious ear is addressed more particularly to the choir; it sets off the voices as a good background in a painting sets off the figures.

For it must be remembered that, with all its sweetness and grace, the human voice is an instrument which has its weak points and its defects, requiring a little charitable covering. An organ is never nervous, but a singer sometimes is; an organ has never to clear its throat, or take breath, in order to produce the note: a singer has. There are various hiatuses in the course of the human voice, which require some friendly complement; nor does it answer to have it brought too much bared and denuded to our ear. A substantial organ accompaniment supplies this assistance; it represents, as it were, the human voice, whenever that voice itself comes to any one of its natural chasms and failures, and preserves the line of continuity; it