In music, too, Harriet was not without opportunities for culture. Her mother, Roxana, played the guitar from her girlhood. Her father was devoted to the violin which always lay near him in the attic study to be taken up whenever the strain of his work made him feel the need of relaxation. Under the influence of such parents it is not strange that every member of the Beecher family began singing at a very early age. One of Harriet’s sisters said that she learned to read music by note as soon as she learned to read print. Dr. Beecher must have had the soul of music within him. He once said that if he could play what he heard inside his soul he would beat Paganini. But not being able to do that he had to content himself with “Merrily O” and other melodies of a simple sort. But whatever he may have lacked in execution he managed at every church he served as minister to infuse into the singing a portion of his own buoyant enthusiasm. In earlier days the Puritan singing had been of a plaintive and minor kind. Lyman Beecher called forth a song of a bolder, livelier, more triumphant character, and uniting his endeavors with those of Lowell Mason, the great leader in later New England hymnology, he worked a great change in the psalmody of his country. We do not think of the New England meeting-house as being the home of music, but to Harriet Beecher the singing in the Sabbath service must have meant a great deal. The Puritan music, with its solemn undertone of deep emotion, had a mysterious power over her. When the “wild warble” of “St. Martin’s,” which ran like this: [Music: St. Martin’s] or “China” with its weird yet majestic movement of which this first line may remind us: [Music: China] when these old beloved tunes swelled and reverberated through the church they expressed to her a solemn assurance of victory. In the old fuguing tunes, too, there was a wild freedom and energy of motion that came from the heart of a people who had been courageous in combat and unshaken in endurance. They were like the ocean when it is aroused by stormy winds when deep calleth unto deep in tempestuous confusion, from which at last is evolved peace and harmony. Whatever a trained musician might say of such a tune as old “Majesty,” no person of imagination and sensibility could ever hear it well rendered by a large choir without deep emotion. So thought Harriet; and when back and forth from every side of the church came the different parts shouting On cherubim and seraphim, Full royally He rode, And on the wings of mighty winds, Came flying all abroad, there was at least one young heart in the audience that could scarcely contain its rapture and that held itself quite still until the tempest sank away to peace in the words: He sat serene upon the floods, Their fury to restrain, And He, as sovereign Lord and King, Forevermore shall reign.