ework of the '_Bananier_,' the
plaintive melody of '_La Savane_' sighs past on the evening breeze,
Spanish eyes flash out temptingly from the enticing cadence of the
'_Ojos Criollos_,' and Spanish guitars tinkle in the soft moonlight of
the '_Minuit a Seville,_' and Tropical life awakes to melody under the
touch of the Creole poet of the piano, Mr. Gottschalk.

There are many beings, otherwise estimable, to whom the Tropical sense
is wanting; who are ever suspicious of malaria lurking under the rich,
glossy leaves of the orange groves; who look with disgust and loathing
at the exaggerated proportions and venomous nature of all creeping
things; who find the succulence of the fruit unpleasant to the taste,
and the flowers, though fair to the eye, deadly as the upas tree to all
other sense;--for whom it is no compensation to feel, with the first
breath of morning air, the dull, leaden weight of life lifted, or no
happiness to watch the sea heaving and palpitating with delight under
the rays of the noon-day sun, and to know that the stars at night droop
down lovingly and confidingly to the embrace of warm Tropical earth.
With an insensibility to these influences, there can be but little
sympathy or appreciation of the works of Mr. Gottschalk; for all that is
born of the Tropics partakes of its beauties and its defects, its
passionate languor, its useless profusion and its poetic tenderness. And
where else in the United States, can we look for a spontaneous gush of
melody? Plymouth Rock and its surroundings have not hitherto seemed
favorable to the growth and manifestation of musical genius; for the old
Puritan element, in its savage intent to annihilate the aesthetic part of
man's nature, under the deadening dominion of its own Blue Laws, and to
crush out whatever of noble inspiration had been vouchsafed to man by
his Creator, rarely sought relief in outbursts of song.

Psalmody appears to have been the chief source of musical indulgence,
and for many a long, weary year, hymns of praise, nasal in tone and
dismal in tendency, have ascended from our prim forefathers to the
throne of grace on high.

Such depressing musical antecedents have not prepared New England for
greater efforts of melody than are to be found in the simple ballads
supposed to originate with the plantation negro, who, in addition to his
other burdens, is thus chosen to assume the onerous one of Northern
song, as being the only creature frivolous enough t