“Music was ordain’d,
    Was it not, to refresh the mind of man,
    After his studies, or his actual pain?”

Many fly to music to soothe and compose the mind, others seek it as a means of new and fresh excitement.  Neither are now able, in the music of their country, to find all they seek.  We are not, however, without hope for the future.  Never till now has music formed an element in national education; and the movement now extending throughout the land, must of necessity be the means of elevating and refining the musical taste of our countrymen.  Improvements, like those already manifest in the sister arts of painting and sculpture, may be now about to show themselves in music.  Even our sons may wonder at the taste which could tolerate the music which their fathers had applauded and admired; and England, long pre-eminent in the useful arts and sciences, and the serious and more weighty affairs of life, may at length become equally distinguished in the fine arts, and all those lighter and more elegant pursuits, which, throughout the history of mankind, have ever formed the peculiar characteristics of a high degree of civilization and refinement.

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PHILHELLENIC DRINKING-SONG.

BY B. SIMMONS.

    Come let us drink their memory,
      Those glorious Greeks of old—­
    On shore and sea the Famed, the Free,
      The Beautiful—­the Bold! 
    The mind or mirth that lights each page,
      Or bowl by which we sit,
    Is sunfire pilfer’d from their age—­
      Gems splinter’d from their wit. 
        Then drink we to their memory,
          Those glorious Greeks of yore;
        Of great or true, we can but do
          What they have done before!

    We’ve had with THE GREAT KING to cope—­
      What if the scene he saw—­
    The modern Xerxes—­from the slope
      Of crimson Quatre-bras,
    Was but the fruit we early won
      From tales of Grecian fields
    Such as the swords of Marathon
      Carved on the Median shields
        Oh, honour to those chainless Greeks,
          We drink them one and all,
        Who block’d that day Oppression’s way
          As with a brazen wall!

    Theirs was the marble land where, woo’d
      By love-born Taste, the Gods
    Themselves the life of stone endured
      In more divine abodes
    Than blest their own Olympus bright;
      Then in supreme repose,
    Afar star glittering, high and white
      Athene’s shrine arose. 
        So the days of Pericles
          The votive goblet fill—­
        In fane or mart we but distort
          His grand achievements still!