II. THE SECRET OF THE POWER OF PATRIOTIC

SONG.

1. Were we to ask the secret of this transcendent power of patriotic song, I think it would be found consisting mainly in the principle of association of ideas — of ideas so completely correlated that the latter of necessity brings up a long and brilliant train which, in the hallowed glow of feeling music only can impart, come trooping in upon the mind with a redoubled strength and splendor.

A patriotic song is an enchanted key to memory's deepest cells; it touches secret springs, it kindles sacred flames in chambers of the soul unvisited by other agencies. It wakes to life ten thousand slumbering chords and makes them thrill and pulsate-just as if some loving angel's finger touched them-to the grand Godgiven sentiment of liberty.

A patriotic song, like the enchanter's magic wand, calls up the honored forms from

"Fame's eternal camping ground;"

it makes the immortal patriots live and breathe again; reveals the long lines of gleaming bayonets on the battle-field; renews the headlong charge of the impetuous cavalry; repeats again the wild huzza of the invincible phalanx of the infantry; makes us hear once more the exulting scream of victory, and points our moistened eye to the torn and bloodied flag still fluttering in the breeze, and to the nation, rocked by the scathing tempest, righting itself once more beneath the rainbow of enchanting peace flung sweetly over it.

We hear a patriotic song in boyhood from the lips of an honored sire who has filled our greedy ear with the wild adventures of his old campaigns; we listen to the rousing strain on some cold winter evening by the ample hearthstone- the rude queen's arm with battered stock, still hanging in its leathern loop above the mantle piece - -we hear the grand old stories and each note of music then becomes a chain of gold linked with the deeds of heroes Adams, Warren, Schuyler, Washington.

We hear the song again in riper years - it opens the flood-gates of patriotic feeling, and

gilds it with the sunniest dreams of our young, bounding life.

The nation in its glory, with its imposing cavalcade of illustrissimi, marches along before the eye of finest fancy, and rises heaven-crowned to its magnificent destiny!

2. Again, a patriotic song, as the old Marseillaise, is the embodiment of a nation's grandest thought. It ever springs, Minerva-like, out of some dreadful exigence. It is a child of agony-but still a child of liberty-a rainbow on the darkest fold of the terrific storm!

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When Rouget de l'Isle 1 in winter poverty struck from the broken strings of his crushed heart the electrifying dithyrambics of the Marseillaise, that heart was France. What his whole bleeding country felt, that single soldier felt; and with more of truth than of the pompous Louis Quatorze, it could be said of that young brave-The kingdom it was he!

1 Joseph Rouget de l'Isle, born 1760, received a pension of 1500 francs per annum for the composition of the words of the Marseillaise. The song was first sung by the Marseilles confederates, or Girondists, in 1792. It was suppressed by the Bourbons, but came up again in 1830, and has since been one of the national hymns of France.

Money, some years ago, was offered for a national hymn. Futility! money may buy machinery-sometimes in the form of menbut inspiration, never!1

The very sentiment of a national song is the grand idea of the liberty-loving people—the words are from the burning heart of the nation itself - God speaking through it—they are the synthetic expression of the politics of the nation they are the golden censer that enshrines the hopes of the nation. They hence become the living tongue of the nation, the leader of the nation, the guardian angel of the nation.

From the very spirit then in which they are conceived; from the very truths which they enunciate, as well as from the associations which they awaken, they become eloquent preachers in every crusade against oppression - engines mightier than the rifled cannon — because behind the rifle cannon for defending liberty.

As they spring, electric flashes, from the heart of a nation, so are they in turn winged

1 In the spring of 1861, a committee of gentlemen of New York offered the sum of $500 for the best national hymn

with such power to reenkindle the heart of a nation, and while true music, always of itself awakens thoughts of the invisible, the spiritual and the grand, so being allied to words that breathe as heard in our great national anthemsit in union aids to swell the tide of patriotic emotion till it surges over the barriers to human progress and leaves the constellated stars of freedom shining in unclouded radiance over us.

III. BUT LITTLE MUSIC IN THE OLD COLONIAL TIMES.

1. I have intimated that a great national song is the offspring of a great national emotion; hence we could hardly look for any remarkable patriotic hymn in this country anterior to the revolution.

Our forefathers were too busy to be musical; too sedate to listen to secular songs; too dis

adapted to the then existing condition of the country. Something like twelve hundred competitors presented lyrical pieces, but not one of them was deemed of sufficient merit to claim the prize.