But how feeble, how purposeless, how silly they all are in this place! What does Hercules want of a wax doll? Or Samson of a child's grasp to carry off the gates of Gaza? We have again the "Anvil Chorus." To be sure, it goes well. The artillery is fired with strict precision, because it can't be fired any other way. It emphasizes the initial notes of the bars very grandly and very effectively, but then what is the use of emphasizing such stuff at all? The firemen pound their anvils very precisely, and on the very second of time, and make a very hearty cling-clang; but it would be to more purpose were a hundred horses waiting to be shod. There is no music in all this. It is noisy; it is sensational; it is humbug; it is anything you please--but music. And yet the audience is hugely delighted and they demand the _bis_ each day; and this, too, in Boston, where the purists live--where art is supposed to have its home and flourish like the green bay tree. Tell it not in Gath that a Boston audience has _encored_ Verdi's Anvil Chorus, performed by red-shirted firemen, batteries of artillery, etc., and allowed the grand chorals of Luther and "He Watching Over Israel," which were done as they have never been done before--which were so full of sublimity and majesty and dignity, and so musically excellent in their treatment that it made one's heart fairly stop beating--to go by almost without recognition. It seemed to me that all possibilities of life and all conditions of the hereafter were bound up in that performance of Mendelssohn's chorus. Zerrahn himself approached it with fear and trembling. The organ was silenced. The instruments were toned down. He would not even trust himself upon the conductor's stand, but took his place right in the heart of the vast chorus. How sweetly the sopranos take the opening of the theme, and then come the tenors alone--"Shouldst thou walking in grief." How sublimely that prayer is delivered? Then how part after part rises in splendid climax and finally dies away in a soft _piano_, with just the faintest ripple of sounding, like the plashing of waves on a beach, stealing across the orchestra! There is a slapping of hands among the audience as if the music had been tolerated, but they will go crazy when the Anvil Chorus comes.