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thanked--may very possibly lay the blame of their fickleness upon it, and bring a host of witnesses into court to testify to their general good behaviour--their calmness, and amenity, and inoffensiveness, till exposed to the evil influence of AEolus's unruly troop--the most wholesale agitators going, and never so happy as when raising a riot. N.B.--The whole tribe of zephyrs, gentle airs, and evening and morning breezes, will please to consider themselves as _not_ included under the term _wind_; to which alone, in its common-place hectoring style, this tirade is meant to apply. (We hate any thing important being popped within a parenthesis, but as the literary sin pinches us less than the immorality, we must here state what truth requires us to say--that the above, being written during a fit of the spleen, induced by the hubbub of winds and waters adverted to, must be received by the candid reader with considerable allowance.) So much for the wind, which has blown _music_ completely out of our head for a while. What a pity we did not bethink us of placing our AEolian harp in the window, before it had sunk into those short angry gusts which are now alone heard--the mere dregs of the gale; and so have drawn our inspiration from that which puffed it out! But, somehow or other, our bright thoughts generally present themselves too late to be of any use; and this is one in that predicament! Some people profess to be never tired of music, but to enjoy it _a l'outrance_, at all times and in all places. With such, we must own, we have no sympathy. With all our _love_--not mere liking--for the art, we still hold that it is indebted for its charm to the categories of time and place, at least as much as its neighbours; for (but this confession should be made in the smallest, most modest-looking type in the world) there are both times and places when we hate it cordially, and fervently wish that neither harmony, nor its ancestor, melody, had ever been invented. In some such mood as made the very heavens themselves odious and pestilential to Hamlet, does music appear to us as unlike itself, as they really were to his crazed imagination of them; and we look forward with malicious pleasure to the time when, if Dryden is to be believed--but your poets are not always prophets--"music shall untune the sky," as a period when all the miseries it has inflicted on us shall be amply revenged by its perpetrating, or assisting at, this gi
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