contralto voices of mothers blending all social sounds into harmony, of the rich baritones singing in staccato the full vigorous music of manhood, and of the deep undertone of bass, now in trillo, now dolente, rolling through the whole. Think of the vast untrained choir,-of all the chords and discords mingling in the charivari of the world.

We of the present have caught up our part in the fugue of this grand piece of music called Life; we are running over the notes that were sung to us by the singers of the past, and that will soon be taken up by another generation, to be again repeated and passed on to the next. We all of us are performers, and must needs be of the audience; we cannot but listen, whether entranced by the sweetest harmony, or distracted by the harshest discord; we cannot cry to the one as we cry to the Prima-Donna, encore ! neither can we slip the coin into the hand of the other, as we do into the hand of the street musician, and whisper, Pass on!

The essential characteristic of all music, written or unwritten, is its influence over our emotional nature; it touches us at all points, and sways our changing moods, helps a halting memory, and calls up the ghosts of the unseen. The sound of a well-known foot-fall on your garden-walk brings instantaneously up in your mind the portrait and biography of your friend, before he has crossed your threshold. The early crowing of the cock calls up rural scenes, tinted with the first rays of the rising sun; you see the ploughman yoking his horses to the plough, and the milkmaid with pail in hand unlocking the byre door. Simply to hear the eerie cry of the curlew, is to tread the rugged pathway and to breathe the fresh fragrance of the lone moor. You have archæological leanings, the rusty caw of solemn rooks takes you away to solitudes of old baronial seats, to lichened ruins of " nameless masonries," where the silence is broken only by sympathetic music from antique rookeries. The charm of the cuckoo's solo lies not so much in what he sings as in what he suggests; his twin notes call up at once the April scene, with its smiles and tears, its sunshine and shadow, and its bursting buds on bush, and tree, and flower. The unwritten notes of that lyrical cage-prisoner in your parlour are to you memoranda of boyhood, of happy holidays, and of ramblings in the summer-woods. The whirling rustle of falling leaves in bleak October, is the pensive music not only of falling leaves; to you it is

the dirge of the fallen leaves of past Octobers.

When Robin

seeks the shelter of your window-sill from the first flakes of falling snow, and sings his plaintive ditty without variation, you accept it as the prelude to the coming oratorio of storms, and it unrolls before you a whole panorama of winter scenes. The chorus of driving rain on your window of a stormy night sets you off again on that dreary Highland tour; you see huge mountains scumbled over with dark clouds and trailing mists; you hear the musical downpour of rain, the rushing of rills, and the wail of winds. You have vividly brought up in your mind that whole scene in Glendripping where you shied the storm, and where you first heard that same fantasia played on the window-pane of the old hut with not-to-beforgotten emphasis.

The singers of unwritten song touch not only our emotional nature, they also at the same time reveal their own; their song seems to come from their heart of hearts, as fragrance from the bosom of the flower. You have of a summer's day been soothed by the hum pianissimo of insects, the running tenor of the bee, the castanet accompaniment of the grasshopper; you have felt the spell of these our Oberons and Titanias, our Robin Goodfellows, as they opened their little hearts to you in song, and touched you cunningly with the essence of sweet harmony.

Among our lower fellow-creatures none so charm us, or so reveal their own emotions, as do our feathered singers. They are a family of gifted vocalists; each seems to the manner born, makes his début at once, and plays his rôle with all the cool self-possession of the experienced artist. There is a cheery freshness in the warblings of these gay minstrels of the wood; they sing the old ballads—the lovesongs of the past, with all the spirit of original composers. You love these sweet melodists as you love flowers: they are indeed the flowers of the animal world; there is the fragrance of the rose about the song of the blackbird, and a rapture in that of the thrush, that to the ear of fancy seems the peal of harebell chimes. Robin's familiar voice is ever with you as the pet flower you shelter from the winter's cold, and the homely sparrow speaks simply as do the wayside weeds. The salutation of the first swallow in spring affects you as do good news from a far country: how warmly you welcome your old friend; you shake hands with him up to the elbows; he touches you

by his recitative song of liberty, and breaks the fetters of your winter dreams.

The lark rises with his joyous carol, and in his spiral flight entrances you, and draws you upwards; the celestial ring of his preRaphaelite-like tones so touches your inner ear, that for the moment you feel as if the earth were left behind. The song of these joyous singers is always gay; you find all the voices but the grave; almost the only attempt at bass is by the solemn crow, and he is rarely heard alone there is, however, no finer illustration of the effect of the aerial perspective of sound than that of the receding music of a choir of rooks at even-tide.

The voice of nature never ceases; the chords upon her wondrous harp are never unstrung. Put your ear close to the lips of flowers, you hear the whispered hymns of summer winds, or, late in autumn, the rustling among the reeds and rushes. The wild notes fortissimo of the sou'-wester sway your emotions as the storm the mountain pine, and the pean of the hurricane stirs you as do martial music and the wail of the battle-field. You have listened to the rhythm of the running stream, the sonorous downpour of the waterfall, and have felt the music of the ocean-wave break and leave its mark upon the shores of your mind. You have been of the audience at the grand oratorio of the thunderstorm, have felt the suspense of the ominous preceding calm before the bursting of the tempest, marked the prelude patter of large rain-drops on leaves, heard the first faint notes in the far distance, the swelling of the chords, and the grand outburst of God's own music awaking echoes in your inmost soul.

The unwritten music of a country has a hand in moulding the character of its people. The summer harmonies sung among the hills, and breathed from every lonely glen, the whispered symphony along the heath, the glad voice of autumn winds, and the persistent wail of storms in our rugged climate, toned the hearts and nerved the arms of our fathers to stern energy and endurance. All this music of long ages has gone to make us what we are.

We do not require a knowledge of music to tell us what mean those notes upon the major or the minor key; that knowledge is inherited by us, and will continue a part of us. Sing in a strain of pensive wailing to that baby in its mother's arms, you see the little lip quiver, and the emotional tear-drop fill the eye.

The negro has inherited the melancholy rhythm of down-trodden humanity; you read his history in his tones; there is a thread of sadness running through the whole, a mournful wail of broken hearts, and sounds of deep-drawn sighs. In his simple hymns you almost hear the clank of ankle-chains, and the occasional spasmodic outbursts of feeling seem as the throes of nature that amidst its sorrow yet would fain be glad.

Unwritten music is the great emotional bond of brotherhood; that touch of nature that makes all the world kin : it links us to the past, to our fellows, and to nature. We start at times to find embodied in rhythmic sound, even without words, a joy akin to the sleeping music we own within ourselves, and for the moment feel as if it filled the hungry yearning of the soul for an ideal beauty and perfection longed for, but not here realised.

THE POETRY OF KEATS.

By W. A. STEEL.

HE name of Keats is surrounded by pathetic associations. He

and incompleteness:

remembering him and his bright gifts, with the quick end which came to them, we feel anew, for one keen moment, the "burthen of the mystery." We recognise as not unbefitting, that his great memorial in literature should be a "Lament." Not surely without justification are these feelings awakened within us by his name; for Keats lived a life of many trials, and passed from it by an early and yet a slow decay. He was a true, even a great poet, nor was he unconscious of his rare and wonderful endowment. He passionately desired life, for fame and poetry and love's sake; but just when he had given the world ample proofs of his genius, and had seen them at last beginning to be acknowledged, he had to surrender all his hopes, and bow his head to death. Twenty-six years were his, and no more, while even this poor span was embittered by heavy sorrows. He died lingeringly, compelled to watch the gradual and unarrested ebbing of existence. During his struggle, not for kindly recognition and applause alone, but for very bread, he suffered the assaults of a criticism coarser and more savage than was common even in that day, when literary discussions were habitually debased by political rancour. Thinking

of it all, we can enter into the passionate rebellion against destiny which possessed his spirit for some months before his end, and understand how he felt when he told his friend Severn to write upon his tombstone: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Far more prophetic, however, than this despairing sentiment, was the hope Keats expressed in a letter to his brother George: "I Ι think I shall be among the English Poets after my death." His name, indeed, is not "writ in water," but deep and indelible in the enduring marble. When he no longer lived to be flattered or insulted, English criticism, with a too late remorse, opened its eyes to the full beauty and power of his verse, and wondered at the exuberance, the prodigality, the magnificence, and all the unparalleled promise of his young achievements. But it was soon discovered that no tenderness of remorse was needed to magnify his work into something worthy to endure; that, altogether apart from the circumstances of its production, the poetry of Keats had qualities of its own which deserved, and would command, a place among the glories of our literature.

summer.

It is necessary, no doubt, if we wish to form an estimate of what Keats might have done, and of the rank which properly belongs to him, to remember that his writings are the unripened fruits of early We are to regard them as no more than hints of what it lay in him to accomplish. So judging, the faults which abound in his writings will hardly appear as faults, because they are just such defects as we expect to characterise the early efforts of true genius. Unpruned luxuriance of fancy, excess of ornament, indistinctness of outline, the absence of the "shaping mind" which gives form and substance and proportion; almost of necessity these are the faults of a youthful authorship which gives real promise of high excellence. Excess and extravagance years will inevitably check, ripening the immature judgment, but the poet who from the beginning is meagre and correct, will probably fail to improve upon his first performances. If we must say the poetry of Keats is overladen, we can justly pass a like criticism upon Shakespeare's earliest poems, and in a general way upon all the productions of genius in its youth. It might indeed be affirmed, with a large measure of truth, that the very faults of Keats's work, being what they were, rather added to, than subtracted from, the promise of his future.