egends say,
On their shoulders held the sky.

* * * * *

THE GREAT INSTRUMENT.

Early in the month of November the mysterious curtain which has hidden
the work long in progress at the Boston Music Hall will be lifted, and
the public will throng to look upon and listen to the GREAT ORGAN.

It is the most interesting event in the musical history of the New
World. The masterpiece of Europe's master-builder is to uncover its
veiled front and give voice to its long-brooding harmonies. The most
precious work of Art that ever floated from one continent to the other
is to be formally displayed before a great assembly. The occasion is one
of well-earned rejoicing, almost of loud triumph; for it is the crowning
festival which rewards an untold sum of devoted and conscientious labor,
carried on, without any immediate recompense, through a long series of
years, to its now perfect consummation. The whole community will share
in the deep satisfaction with which the public-spirited citizens who
have encouraged this noble undertaking, and the enterprising; and
untiring lover of science and art who has conducted it from the first,
may look upon their completed task.

What is this wondrous piece of mechanism which has cost so much time and
money, and promises to become one of the chief attractions of Boston and
a source of honest pride to all cultivated Americans? The organ, as its
name implies, is _the instrument_, in distinction from all other and
less noble instruments. We might almost think it was called
organ as being a part of an unfinished _organism_, a kind of
Frankenstein-creation, half framed and half vitalized. It breathes like
an animal, but its huge lungs must be filled and emptied by alien force.
It has a wilderness of windpipes, each furnished with its own vocal
adjustment, or larynx. Thousands of long, delicate tendons govern its
varied internal movements, themselves obedient to the human muscles
which are commanded by the human brain, which again is guided in its
volitions by the voice of the great half-living creature. A strange
cross between the form and functions of animated beings, on the one
hand, and the passive conditions of inert machinery, on the other! Its
utterance rises through all the gamut of Nature's multitudinous voices,
and has a note for all her outward sounds and inward moods. Its thunder
is deep as that of billows that tumble through ocean-caverns, and its