so to speak,
of harmony,--are not only provided for in the swell-organ, but may be
obtained by special adjustments from the several systems of pipes and
from the entire instrument.

It would be anticipating the proper time for judgment, if we should
speak of the excellence of the musical qualities of the great organ
before having had the opportunity of hearing its full powers displayed.
We have enjoyed the privilege, granted to few as yet, of listening to
some portions of the partially mounted instrument, from which we can
confidently infer that its effect, when all its majestic voices find
utterance, must be noble and enchanting beyond all common terms of
praise. But even without such imperfect trial, we have a right, merely
from a knowledge of its principles of construction, of the preeminent
skill of its builder, of the time spent in its construction, of the
extraordinary means taken to insure its perfection, and of the liberal
scale of expenditure which has rendered all the rest possible, to feel
sure that we are to hear the instrument which is and will probably long
remain beyond dispute the first of the New World and second to none in
the Old in the sum of its excellences and capacities.

The mere comparison of numbers of pipes and of stops, or of external
dimensions, though it gives an approximative idea of the scale of an
organ, is not so decisive as it might seem as to its real musical
effectiveness. In some cases, many of the stops are rather nominal than
of any real significance. Even in the Haarlem organ, which has only
about two-thirds as many as the Boston one, Dr. Burney says, "The
variety they afford is by no means what might be expected." It is
obviously easy to multiply the small pipes to almost any extent. The
dimensions of an organ, in its external aspect, must depend a good deal
on the height of the edifice in which it is contained. Thus, the vaulted
roof of the Cathedral of Ulm permitted the builder of our Music-Hall
organ to pile the _facade_ of the one he constructed for that edifice up
to the giddy elevation of almost a hundred feet, while the famous
instrument in the Town Hall of Birmingham has only three-quarters of the
height of our own, which is sixty feet. It is obvious also that the
effective power of an organ does not depend merely on its size, but that
the perfection of all its parts will have quite as much to do with it.
In judging a vocalist, we can form but a very poor guess of the