mate form; nay, the mere thought of death gives a more beautiful form to life itself." Recalling death's idealising effect on Charles Kingsley, Professor Max Müller uses very much the same terms as De Quincey does in depicting Charles Lamb's look in sleep. In both cases the restlessness of expression induced by a life of constant struggle, had given place to one of sublime repose. There remained in Kingsley's "only the satisfied expression of triumph and peace, as of a soldier who had fought a good fight, and who, while sinking into the stillness of the slumber of death, listens to the distant sounds of music, and to the shouts of victory." Cowper's face, in which the spirit in his lifetime had so often looked out in the frenzy of despair, wore in death, as described by his cousin, J. Johnson, an appearance of “calmness and composure, mingled as it were with holy surprise." The reflected dawn, is it fanciful to suppose, of that rapture whose visioned glories long afterwards inspired Mrs. Browning's poem on Cowper's grave? I I Johnson, in a verbal account of the scene given to Mr. Marsh, whose daughter communicated it to Professor Moule, adds an illuminative touch to the biographer's version, which is that the gloomy shadow resting upon Cowper's face only lightened after death. "The change," quotes Professor Moule, came about half an hour before death. Cowper was past speech, almost past movement, but on a sudden he looked 'joy unspeakable,' and so lay till he expired." VII THE PROPHECY OF MUSIC Music, sister of Sunrise, and herald of life to be." Of all the agencies which help to teach the soul of man its immortality, music is to some the most convincing. "God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome :'tis we musicians know." So Browning declares through the charmed soul of his Abt Vogler. "Can it be," asks Newman, speaking of the few notes out of which such infinite combinations of harmony are evolved, “that those mysterious yearnings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not where, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; something are they beside themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter, though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them." Milton, to whose harmoniously attuned spirit, "voice and verse" united in music were "pledges of heaven's joy," worshipping in fancy within the cloisters' dim, religious light, gives voice to the rapture which "a solemn music" had power to awaken in him, bringing down celestial visions to his gaze "There let the pealing organ blow And bring all heaven before mine eyes." It is of "Church Music" also that George Herbert sings "Now I in you without a body move, We both together sweetly live and love . . Comfort, I'll die! for, if you post from me, You know the way to heaven's door." Thoreau attributes this illuminative power to all 1 Adelaide Procter, in her poem "Sent to Heaven," known in Blumenthal's setting as "The Message," makes music the medium of conveying a message from one on earth to a friend passed into the unseen. music. "Let us hear a strain of music," he writes, "and we are at once advertised of a life which no man has told us of, which no preacher preaches." And, in greater detail: "There are in music such strains as far surpass any faith which man has ever had in the loftiness of his destiny. . . . Things are to be learnt which it will be sweet to learn. This cannot be all rumour. When I hear this I think of that everlasting something which is not mere sound, but is to be a thrilling reality, and I can consent to go about the meanest work for as many years as it pleases the Hindoo penance, for a year of the gods were as nothing to that which shall come after." Not only that solemn music in which Milton delighted, not only on those sacred occasions to which Archbishop Trench refers— "When, out of reach of earth's dull chime, The music of the solemn spheres, Or in the desert to have sight but the very commonest strains may exercise the same transporting power on the soul: "For even that vulgar and tavern-music," avows Sir Thomas Browne, "which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer. There is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers." Shakespeare does not fail of an allusion to this heaven-suggesting influence of music. Lorenzo says to Jessica : "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Sit, Jessica" Then, the music lifting the lover's thoughts at once from earth to heaven, to the music of the spheres, and of "immortal souls "Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold : There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims,— Such harmony is in immortal souls ; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it!"'* Quaint John Norris, of Bemerton, finds the same half stimulus, half satisfaction for his eternal longings in music. In a poem entitled "The Retractation" he thus retracts the charge of vanity he had made, with Solomon, against all sublunary things, withdrawing music, which he couples with friendship, from the imputation "But now, great Preacher, pardon me ; I cannot wholly to thy charge agree, For Music sure and Friendship have no vanity. No, each of these is a firm, massy joy, Because they've better music there, and firmer love." "The Merchant of Venice," Act V., Scene 1. |