h its native sea."

And an anonymous writer (it does not seem that he had good cause for
hiding his name) thus discourses on the music of the sea:--

"The gray, unresting sea,
Adown the bright and belting shore
Breaking in untold melody,
Makes music evermore.

Centuries of vanished time,
Since this glad earth's primeval morn,
Have heard the grand, unpausing chime,
Momently new born.

Like as in cloistered piles
Rich bursts of massive sounds upswell,
Ringing along dim-lighted aisles
With spirit-trancing spell;

So on the surf-white strand
Chants of deep peal the sea-waves raise,
Like voices from a viewless land
Hymning a hymn of praise.

By times, in thunder-notes,
The booming billows shoreward surge;
By times a silver laugh it floats;
By times a low, soft dirge.

Souls more ennobled grow
Listing the worldly anthem rise;
Discords are drowned in the great flow
Of Nature's harmonies.

Men change and 'cease to be,'
And empires rise and grow and fall;
But the weird music of the sea
Lives, and outlives them all.

The mystic song shall last
Till time itself no more shall be;
Till seas and shores have passed,
Lost in eternity."

But the wind is one of Nature's chief musicians. Sometimes singing his
own songs, or lending his aid in awaking to musical life the leaves
and boughs of the trees; whistling melodies among the reeds; entering
the recesses of a hollow column, and causing to issue from thence a
pleasing, flute-like sound; blowing his quiet, soothing lays in
zephyrs; or rushing around our dwellings, singing his tuneful yet
minor refrain,--in these, and in even other ways, does this mighty
element of the Creator contribute to the production of melody in the
world of nature. A writer in "The Youth's Companion" speaks very
entertainingly of "voices in trees." He says,--

"Trees, when played upon by the wind, yield forth a variety
of tones. Mrs. Hemans once asked Sir Walter Scott if he had
noticed that every tree gives out its peculiar sound. 'Yes,'
said he, 'I have; and I think something might be done by the
union of poetry and music to imitate those voices, giving a
different measure to the oak, the pine, the willow, &c.' The
same journal from which we take this anecdote mentio