For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm; She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm, In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills, Or carolling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please, Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys. Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim, As, floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn."
--Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red, (Wedded since, and a widow--something like ten years dead,) Hearing a gush of music such as none before, Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.
Just as the "Jubilate" in threaded whisper dies, --"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden cries (For she thought 'twas a singing creature caged in a box she heard,) "Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the _bird!_"
If General Henry Knox, of Revolutionary memory, the first Secretary of War of the Republic, had dreamed that the successor to his portfolio, after an interval of seventy years, would recommend to Congress the purchase of a thousand camels for military purposes, he would have attributed the fancy to excited nerves or a too hearty dinner. Had he dreamed, further, that the grotesque mounted corps was to be employed in regions two thousand miles beyond the frontier of the Anglo-Saxon pioneer of 1789, to guard travel to an actual El Dorado, the vision would have appeared still more extraordinary. And its absurdity would have seemed complete, if he had fancied the high road of this travel as leading through a community essentially Oriental in its social and political life, which was nevertheless ripening into a State of the American Union. Yet if General Knox could be roused from his grave at Thomaston, he would see the dream realized. On the Pacific lies El Dorado; among the fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains there is a community which blends the voluptuousness of Bagdad with the economy of Cape Cod; and within two years a regiment of camel-riders will be scouring the Great American Plains after Cheyennes, Navajoes, and Camanches.
The propagation of the religion of which Joseph Smith was the prophet has just begun to attract the notice its extraordinary success deserves. So long as the head of the Mormon Church was considered a kind of Mahometan Sam Slick, and his associates a crazy rabble, it was vain to expect that the whole sect could be treated with more attention than any of the curiosities in a popular museum. But a juster appreciation of the constitution of the Mormon community begins to prevail, and with it comes a conviction that questions are involved in its relations to the parent government which are not exceeded in importance by any that have ever been agitated at Washington. Brigham Young no longer seems to the American public a religious mountebank, only one grade removed from the man Orr, who claimed to be the veritable Angel Gabriel, and was killed in a popular commotion which he had himself excited in Dutch Guiana. On the contrary, he begins to appear as a man of great native strength and scope of mind, who understands the phases of human character and knows how to avail himself of the knowledge, and who has acquired spiritual dominion over one hundred and fifty thousand souls, combined with absolute temporal supremacy over fifty thousand of the number.