PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN.

THE LORD.

THE HEAVENLY HOST-afterwards MEPHISTOPHEles. The three Archangels advance.

RAPHAEL.

IN choral emulation blending*

With brother spheres, the sun hath chimed As erst, his course fore-ordered ending,

In stately step, to thunder timed.

* From the earliest ages there has been a remarkable tendency in the mind of man, to connect rhythmical harmony with the motions of the heavenly bodies. In the sacred writings we find music distinctly alluded to as coeval with creation.

"4. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth ? declare, if thou hast understanding.

“5. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest ? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

His aspect gives the angels might-
Though none to fathom him have power;
The works, above thought's loftiest flight,
Are glorious as in time's first hour.

"6. Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner-stone thereof;

7. When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy ?"-Job 38.

Founded upon this is the passage in Milton's Hymn to the Nativity, which has so often been compared with this chorus: "At last surrounds their sight

A globe of circular light,

That with long beams the shamefaced night arrayed;

The helmed cherubim

And sworded seraphim

Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displayed,

Harping, in loud and solemn quire,

With unexpressive notes, to Heaven's new born Heir.
Such music as 'tis said

Never before was made,

But when of old the sons of morning sung,

While the Creator great

His constellations set,

And the well-balanced world on hinges hung:

And cast the dark foundations deep,

And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.

Ring out ye crystal spheres,

Once bless our human ears,

GABRIEL.

And swift beyond conception's range,

Wheels round and round Earth's gorgeousness;

If ye have power to touch our senses so;

And let your silver chime,

More in melodious time;

And let the base of Heaven's deep organ blow;

And with your ninefold harmony,

Make up full consort with the angelic symphony."

Among the Heathens, we find Apollo alike the god of the sun and music, the seven strings of his lyre typifying the seven planets (counting the moon as one); and the Greek mythology was derived from the Egyptian, which probably goes back to the earliest distortion of the truth as known to Noah, and his immediate descendants.

Milton has a fine passage to the same effect

"That day, as other solemn days, they spent
In song and dance about the sacred hill;
Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphere,
Of planets and of fixed, in all her wheels,
Resembles nearest, mazes intricate.
Eccentric, intervolved, yet regular

The most when most irregular they seem;
And in their motions harmony divine

So smooths her charming tones, that God's own ear
Listens delighted."

Nor is it to be supposed that so beautiful an association escaped such a mind as Shelley's.

Celestial light to interchange

With deep night's awful solemnness.

Panthea." "Tis the deep music of the rolling world,

Kindling within the strings of the waved air;

Eolian modulations.

Ione.-Listen too,

How every pause is filled with undertones,
Clear, silver, icy-keen awakening tones,
That pierce the sense, and live within the soul,

As the sharp stars pierce winter's crystal air,

And gaze upon themselves within the sea."

But Dryden soars yet higher, nearer perhaps to the truth than he himself was aware

"From harmony, from heavenly harmony,

This universal frame began,

When Nature underneath a heap

Of jarring atoms lay,

And could not raise her head,

The tuneful voice was heard on high,

Arise ye, more than dead;

Then Hot and Cold, and Moist and Dry,

In order to their stations leap,

And music's power obey.

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,

This universal frame began ;

From harmony to harmony,

Through all the compass of the notes it ran—

The diapason closing full on man."

Torrents of foam the sea uprears,

Against the rock's deep roots to hurl ;*

It is strange that a mysterious instinct, implanted in the human breast, should, from the earliest times, have impelled the loftiest of human minds to associate the idea of audible harmony with the midnight heaven, an object which seems of all others, a gigantic embodiment of silence; but it is stranger still, that the researches of modern science appear on the point of establishing that what seemed a stately but baseless dream of the poet-world, is in reality the foreshadowing of the revelation of a pervading law of nature, and of connecting Harmony, through vibration, with the most important principles with which we are acquainted-what may be called the great driving powers of the universe-light, heat, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, nervous action, and possibly something more.

"Agitation with water turns out to be another of these restoratives. The foulest air, shaken in a bottle with water for a sufficient length of time, recovers a great degree of its purity. Here then again, allowing for the scale upon which nature works, we see the salutary effects of storms and tempests. The yeasty waves, which confound the Heaven and the sea, are doing the very thing which was done in the bottle. Nothing can be of greater importance to the living creation than the salubrity of their atmosphere. It ought to reconcile us therefore to those agitations of the elements, of which we sometimes deplore the consequences, to know that they tend powerfully to restore to the air that purity, which so many causes are constantly impairing."-Paley's Natural Theology.