The German is addicted to Fatherland, and if any human being on the face of the earth has a right to be, it is the German. If any other nationality has a better literature, grander poets, more inspired dreamers, sublimer musicians, better artists, or deeper thinkers, I have not heard of it. The ties which bind him to the Fatherland are too strong ever to be broken, and on the invisible strings which stretch from his heart to Germany are continually sounding the home melodies. Could any more beautiful idea be conceived than the fact that on Friday evening, when the grand chorus at the Fest Hall[1] were singing the glorious German poem, "What is the German's Fatherland," in every part of Germany, in every city, village and hamlet, wherever there was a singing society, this same song was being sung on the same evening, in honor of their brethren assembled at Chicago? We may laugh at the peculiarities of the Germans, but when we approach German art, it must give us pause. Berlioz and Scribe took the skull of a fool, who had once laughed at the incantation music of Der Freischutz, and when the orchestra had reached that point, placed it before them and said: "Now, laugh if you dare. The music of Von Weber is thundering round you." No man who was not destitute of a soul, and utterly wedded to all gross things, could have felt any other than a religious feeling in the great swell of human voices on Thursday evening, as it surged in great waves of harmony, as it rose like the march of a storm in the Battle Hymn of Rienzi, full of martial inspiration and clarion cries, or died away in the gentle and placid melody of the Lindenbaum of Schubert, sweetest of all song-writers. The man who could go away from that concert without feeling that he was a better man, without having recognized that human nature may soar to the infinite on the wings of song, has sunk his soul so far into the uncleaness of life, that Gabriel will have some difficulty in finding it, what time he sounds his final trumpet call.