esire,
My breast is all on fire!
In softened raptures now I die!
Can empty sound such joys impart?
Can music thus transport the heart
With melting ecstacy!
Oh! art divine! exalted blessing,
Each celestial charm expressing--
Kindest gift the heavens bestow,
Sweetest food that mortals know!
But give the charming magic o'er--
My beating heart can bear no more!"

George Frederick Handel was born at Halle, in Lower Saxony, on the 24th
February, 1684. His father (who was a surgeon, and was sixty-three
years old when this child first saw the light) determined to make a
lawyer of him: but nature had resolved to make him a composer; and the
struggle between nature and the father commenced at the very cradle of
the future author of the "Messiah."

Scarcely had he begun to speak when he articulated musical sounds. The
doctor was terribly alarmed, when he discovered instincts which in his
eyes were of so low an order. He understood nothing of art, nor of the
noble part which artists sustain in the world. He saw in them nothing
but a sort of mountebank, who amuse the world in its idle moments.
Uneasy, and almost ashamed at the inclinations of his son, the father of
Handel opposed them by all possible means. He would not send him to any
of the public schools, because there not only grammar but the gamut
would be taught him--he would not permit him to be taken to any place,
of whatever description, where he could hear music--he forbade him the
slightest exercise of that nature and banished every kind of musical
instrument far from the house.

But he might as well have told the river that it was not to flow. Nature
surmounted every obstacle to her decree. The precautions taken to stifle
the instincts of the child served only to fortify by concentrating them.
He found means to procure a spinet, and to conceal it in a garret,
whither he went to play when all the household was asleep--without any
guidance finding out everything for himself, and merely by permitting
his little fingers to wander over the keyboard, he produced harmonic
combinations; and at _seven_ years of age he discovered that he knew how
to play upon the spinet.

The poor father soon discovered his mistake, and in the following
manner. He had, by a former marriage, a son who was valet to the Duke of