afely stored in the lecture-room beneath the Music Hall. In March the
_Great Work_ arrived from Germany, and was stored in the hall above.

"The seven-years' task is done,--the danger from flood and fire so far
escaped,--the gantlet of the pirates safely run,--the perils of the sea
and the rail surmounted by _the good Providence of God_."

The devout gratitude of the President of the Association, under whose
auspices this great undertaking has been successfully carried through,
will be shared by all lovers of Art and all the friends of American
civilization and culture. We cannot naturalize the Old-World cathedrals,
for they were the architectural embodiment of a form of worship
belonging to other ages and differently educated races. But the organ
was only lent to human priesthoods for their masses and requiems; it
belongs to Art, a religion of which God himself appoints the
high-priests. At first it appears almost a violence to transplant it
from those awful sanctuaries, out of whose arches its forms seemed to
grow, and whose echoes seemed to hold converse with it, into our gay and
gilded halls, to utter its majestic voice before the promiscuous
multitude. Our hasty impression is a wrong one. We have undertaken, for
the first time in the world's history, to educate a nation. To teach a
people to know the Creator in His glorious manifestations through the
wondrous living organs is a task for which no implement of human
fabrication is too sacred; for all true culture is a form of worship,
and to every rightly ordered mind a setting forth of the Divine glory.

This consummate work of science and skill reaches us in the midst of the
discordant sounds of war, the prelude of that blessed harmony which will
come whenever the jarring organ of the State has learned once more to
obey its keys.

God grant that the _Miserere_ of a people in its anguish may soon be
followed by the _Te Deum_ of a redeemed Nation!

* * * * *

THE KING'S WINE.

The small green grapes in countless clusters grew,
Feeding on mystic moonlight and white dew
And mellow sunshine, the long summer through:

Till, with blind motion in her veins, the Vine
Felt the delicious pulses of the wine,
And the grapes ripened in the year's decline.

And day by day the Virgins watched their charge;
And when, at last, beyond the horizon's marge
The harvest-moon dropt beautiful and large,