A PAIR OF GREAT INSTANCES. 501 public; and D'Israeli became a Radical Conservative, vaulting into place and power by the same means-a Conservative yielding the suffrage to the millions of the lowest, most uneducated, and unenfranchised of the community. Thus both of them commenced their career, the one amidst the laughter of all England,-the other amidst the laughter, not only of all France, but of Europe. The Strasburg Eagle created laughter; by the Coup d'Etat, as has been said, he prefixed an "S" to the "L," and turned laughter into slaughter-one letter making all the difference between comedy and tragedy! In character these two men strongly resembled each other; both of them loved to pose before their separate countries and before Europe with an air of mystery-silent, inscrutable, grave; yet, again, both were political Ishmaelites, brooding over their schemes till they permitted them to start forth to amaze and to astound. It would be wrong to say that either was destitute of all human sympathy; and their sympathies took just the same way of illustration: Napoleon, no doubt, had sympathy with Italians-his own race; D'Israeli, with Jews—he was a Jew. They furnish as fine a pair for an historical parallel as any two which could be found in Plutarch. Napoleon began his public life as a Republican-D'Israeli, as a Chartist. The parallel might be followed out through pages; but alike, in either instance, it would appear that the love of excelling was the prime passion. Napoleon has been cast out of France, but he will be sure to have some grateful recognition. D'Israeli did literally and really nothing for England, but his monument stands in Palace Yard, as he, no doubt, would wish it should stand. Other great statesmen, but undecorated and unadorned, are there, representatives of illustrious families-the last Earl of Derby, for instance, from the long line of the Stanleys; D'Israeli only, of all, shines in furbelow and feather, he alone in the robes and collar of the garter, giving the indications of a character to whom it was everything to excel, and ending a career, concerning which nothing nobler can be said, than that he wrote. "The Revolutionary Epic," and "Vivian Grey." Is it possible to forbear laughing at what we see going on around us, as impudence poses itself in its many antics, to obtain the notice of the moment or the hour? The hoardings of the streets are periodically invested in placards, from men who affix their names to bills assuring you that, of all persons in the town or the city, in the county or the country, they are the men most fitted for this office or that; seeming to say to all spectators, "Oh, look at me, I beseech you, look at me! Am I not beautiful? Am I not the perfect one? Do you not see that I can do this thing-I alone-as no one else can do it?" The husband of Queen Anne was, as we know, Prince George. There was some little dispute going on as to the place he was to take in a certain procession, when he said to those who were making the arrangements, "For God's sake, gentlemen, don't forget that I am Prince George of Denmark!" Behind almost every placard calling for votes,-for common councillor or alderman, for member of School Board, or member of Parliament,-we hear the expletive and its "Don't forget me!" Ah! but if often it moves the disgust, it sometimes moves the indignation to hear the big drum with its ass's skin, and the brazen trumpet with its blatant breath out-sounding Aaron's bells and the music of the spheres! ROM such a text it seems that Shakspeare would teach, what we surely instinctively feel, that all true music is only as when sound catches silence and detains her in his embrace. Silence may be almost spoken of as the very equation of harmony. Melodious noises there may be, which have no very great depth; but the highest harmonies throb along the spheres of silence. What an illustration of this is that delicious moonlit scene from which the two lines we have quoted are taken; and how the delicately musical words elevate the soul to those vast spheres, the blue concave and star-fretted vault, which to the soul of the poet was alive with sweet sounds. It has been said that Shakspeare caught some of his terms of expression from Cicero's dream of Scipio; the passages are alike, and Cicero's words delicately beautiful. Scipio is represented dreaming that a celestial friend lifted him away from earth to where he beheld, sailing below him, the world and its attendant planets. "What delicious sound is that I hear?" said Scipio to his friend. 'You are listening," was the reply, "to the music of the spheres; while upon earth you did not hear it, for the same reason that the people who live near the cataracts of the Nile are unconscious of the roar of the water-entering their ears incessantly, they are insensible to it; so with the sound produced by the heavenly bodies, we must come to a sufficient distance. before we can perceive it." Shakspeare turns this silence of the spheres. into his well-known wonderful words : "Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins: Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it." -and then Shakspeare gives the philosophy, the reason why the soul can draw into itself "a concord of sweet sounds," when Jessica says, 504 MELODIES IN COLOUR. "I am never merry when I hear sweet music." And her lover replies, "The reason is, your spirits are attentive." Thus it is only in the silence of the soul, its attenuation, or drawing out, thinning, refining, and drawing off the thick lees of bodily sensationreally in its abstraction from "the noises of the earth" and the "muddy vestures of decay," that it can enter into the spheres of unison and harmony. Thus again, as we have said it, the noblest and truest music is an adumbration from silence, speaking to the soul in its moods of deepest and holiest silence. Many of the phrases of Shakspeare show how keen his perception was of the power and the depth of silence; it is the only equation of the deepest passions, whether of joy or grief. Silence," he says, "is the perfectest herald of joy." Silence is the safeguard of the soul-as he says again,— ` 66 "Be checked for silence, never taxed for speech." Thus our sweet poet Whittier says, "With silence only as their benediction, God's angels come, Where, in the shadow of a great affliction, The soul sits dumb!" As the Psalmist said, "I was dumb: I opened not my mouth because Thou didst it." We may be thankful that we are not bound up in reserves; that we do not live in a speechless and soundless world; we may still believe that in the "soft stillness" we are most closely related to our highest inheritance, and are made most aware of hints which speak to us of disembodied being, and the essential harmony which lives in created things. Hence, also, it is that there is a silence which is well-known, by poets, to perform like music; as one writer speaks: "The forest whose alleys shoot on Like the mute minster-aisles, when the anthem is done, Feel the silence to consecrate more than the chant." Silence and sound, then, are both terms of mere relation. If Scipio, in his trance, heard the star-like choristers rolling out their anthems in sounds altogether inaudible to ordinary ears, clairvoyant people have also in their trance-dream, as in the instance of Théodore Gautier, murmured out words about the melodies in colour; giving to the various rays the notes forming an octave; so that the story of the blind man who, when asked for his notion of the colour red, replied that it seemed to him "like the sound of a trumpet," was perhaps not giving an illustration of absurdity, but of some subtle and hitherto undetected law of human perception. So that, it seems, with this kind of possession, a spirit,-when it sits silently, and can be abstracted from the care which gnaws, the worry THE ARCHITECTURE OF SOUND. 505 which frets, the people who tease, and the engagements which perplex and frighten,-enters into a state like that "soft stillness;" it is so in all high states, whether of the lover or the student. There is something like it in that music which Shakspeare says is "the food of love"-music not loud, not resonant, not wildly passionate, but like that of which he speaks, “That strain again; it had a dying fall: Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound In higher states still, the soul becomes its own architect. Who has not sat on some soft knoll, or by some gentle stream in the immuring solitude, and, while sacred tolls of church bells from some incalculable distance came, mellowed and mellowing to the ear, reared out of the aërial sounds, fabrics and phantasm-scenes-a sort of sonorous mirage? Who has not done the same in the drawing-room, where some deft fingers moved over the keys, if the rackety wretches who constitute most drawing-room assemblies permitted a moment's stillness from their puerile inanities? And so it was when Mrs. Hemans was dying, if we may trust the tradition which attributes those magnificent verses, Despondency and Aspiration, to her last illness. The verses read like an experience; the frame numbed, as by the dew of death, the pores of the spirit opened to spirit sights and sounds :— “When silently it seemed Before my passive sight, and slowly curling, Of visioned beauty grew, Like a wrought banner, fold by fold unfurling. With dreamy motion! Silvery seas were there Lit by large dazzling stars, and arched by skies Still gathering lustre on th' illumined way, "And then a glorious mountain-chain uprose, A soaring solitude of woods and snows, While as it passed those regal peaks unveiling, I heard, methought, a waving of dread wings, And mighty sounds, as if the vision hailing From lyres that quivered through ten thousand strings- |