ricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic,
should be a mere sound which is gone and perishes? Can it be that
those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange
yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know
not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and
comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself. It is not so; it cannot
be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the
outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they
are echoes from our home; they are the voice of angels, or the
_Magnificat_ of saints, or the living laws of Divine governance, or
the Divine attributes, something are they beside themselves, which we
cannot compass, which we cannot utter."[6] And with him, as with St.
Philip, may we not say that music held "a foremost place in his
thoughts and plans"?[7] True, out of its place, he will but allow that
"playing musical instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to
the idle."[8] Music and "stuffing birds"[9] were no conceivable
substitutes for education properly so called, any more than a
"Tamworth Reading-Room" system could be the panacea for every ill; but
so long as an art in any given case did not tend to displace the more
serious business of life; should it become for such an one an "aid to
reflection," or, _per contra_, profitably distract him; in brief, if
it anywise helped a soul on to her journey's end, then welcome the
"good and perfect gift."

[Footnote 1: Cardinal Capecelatro's _Life of St. Philip Neri_,
translated by the Rev. Thomas Alder Pope, of the Oratory, vol. ii. p.
83.]

[Footnote 2: _Discourses to Mixed Congregations_, p. 297, Fourth Edit.
1871.]

[Footnote 3: _Idea of a University_, dis. iv. p. 80, Sixth Edit.
1886.]

[Footnote 4: _Oxford University Sermons_, p. 346, Edit. 1884.]

[Footnote 5: _Idea_, dis. ix. 230. Dr. Chalmers writes to Blanco
White: "You speak in your letter of the relief you have found in
music.... I am no musician and want a good ear, and yet I am conscious
of a power in music which I want words to describe. It touches chords,
reaches depths in the soul which lie beyond all other influences....
Nothing in my experience is more mysterious, more inexplicable."
(Blanco White's _Life and Correspondence_, edited by Thom, 1845, vol.
iii. p. 195.)]

[Footnote 6: _Oxford University Sermons_, pp. 346, 347. Writing to her
brother about the passage on music, p