O let thy blessed spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art."

The Sunday before the death of "Holy George Herbert," Izaak Walton
says, "he rose suddenly from his bed, or couch, called for one of his
instruments, took it into his hand and said--

"My God, my God, my music shall find Thee;
And every string
Shall have his attribute to sing."

And having tuned it, he played and sung--

"The Sundays of man's life,
Threaded together on Time's string,
Make bracelets to adorn the wife
Of the eternal, glorious King;
On Sundays heaven's door stands ope,
Blessings are plentiful and ripe,
More plentiful than hope."

The thought to which Herbert has given expression in his lines on
Easter--that "All music is but three parts vied and multiplied"--was
also in the mind of Christopher Simpson, who, in his work on "The
Division Viol," 1659, uses it as a musical illustration of the
doctrine of Trinity in Unity. He says: "I cannot but wonder, even to
amazement, that from no more than three concords (with some
intervening discords) there should arise such an infinite variety, as
all the music that ever has been, or ever shall be, composed. When I
further consider that these sounds, placed by the interval of a third
one above another, do constitute one entire harmony, which governs and
comprises all the sounds that by art or imagination can be joined
together in musical concordance, _that_, I cannot but think a
significant emblem of that Supreme and Incomprehensible Three in One,
governing, comprising, and disposing the whole machine of the world,
with all its included parts, in a most perfect and stupendous
harmony."

It is interesting to notice an earlier and remarkable allusion to the
union of sound from the pen of Shakespeare--

"If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing."

VIOLINS FROM A MEDICAL POINT OF VIEW.

"Music and the sounds of instruments--says the lively Vigneul de
Marville--contribute to the health of the body and the mind; they
assist the circulation of the blood, they dissipate vapours,