Southern Standard

The Influence of Music.

There is a strange, unaccountable, and dream-like beauty in music, which can subdue the proudest spirit, and gliding into the hush of the heart, will nestle there, stilling its most tremulous throbbings, and filling it with the calm, peaceful memories of the far long ago.

All tribes, in all times have owned the spell, from the time when Pan first taught the Thracian shepherd to carve his love-notes in the invisible air, and fill the summer nights with softest, sweetest flute music, down to the present moment. It is the universal language of all and awakening strange pulsations even in the most obdurate heart.

Most of us have experienced the luxury of tears, when listening to an old ballad. We know of an old man who, having led a long career of vice and crime, was at length banished from the country; and who, while undergoing his period of banishment amidst the wilds and jungles of a distant land, heard, in the summer eventide, a sweet-voice, singing in his own language the very song which had lulled him to his infant slumber, when he knew crime by name, and knew it only to abhor. It had been sung, too, by the cradle of an infant sister, a little one who had died young and was now in heaven; the mother, too was no more. But the song-the old song had not lost its influence over him yet. Back came trooping upon him the old memories which had so long slumbered down there in the unconsumed depths of his heart; the mother and father; the house-hold gatherings; the old books; the old school-house; the time-worn church, half-hidden by the old yew trees, where he had first heard the Bible read, all came back upon him as if it were but yesterday; and overpowered by his feelings, he gave vent to them in a flood of tears. And then the old man grew calm, and his latter days were his best days; and when that song came again to his grave in the old village yard where he lay down his wearied limbs, and sank peacefully away in a common grave.-Eliza Cook's Journal.