Congregation quaver alike or together, it sounds in the Ears of a Good Judge like five hundred different Tunes roared out at the same Time, with perpetual Interfearings with one another." Still, confused and poor as was the singing, it was a source of pure and unceasing delight to the Puritan colonists,--one of the rare pleasures they possessed,--a foretaste of heaven; "for all we know Of what the blessed do above Is that they sing and that they love." And to even that remnant of music--their few jumbled cacophonous melodies--they clung with a devotion almost phenomenal. Nor should we underrate the cohesive power that psalm-singing proved in the early communities; it was one of the most potent influences in gathering and holding the colonists together in love. And they reverenced their poor halting tunes in a way quite beyond our modern power of fathoming. Whenever a Puritan, even in road or field, heard at a distance the sound of a psalm-tune, though the sacred words might be quite undistinguishable, he doffed his hat and bowed his head in the true presence of God. We fain must believe, as Arthur Hugh Clough says,-- "There is some great truth, partial, very likely, but needful, Lodged, I am strangely sure, in the tones of an English psalm-tune." Judge Sewall often writes with tender and simple pathos of his being moved to tears by the singing,--sometimes by the music, sometimes by the words. "The song of the 5th Revelation was sung. I was ready to burst into tears at the words, _bought with thy blood_." He also, with a vehemence of language most unusual in him and which showed his deep feeling, wrote that he had an intense passion for music. And yet, the only tunes he or any of his fellow-colonists knew were the simple ones called Oxford, Litchfield, Low Dutch, York, Windsor, Cambridge, St. David's and Martyrs. About the year 1714 Rev. John Tufts, of Newbury, who had previously prepared "A very Plain and Easy Introduction to the Art of Singing Psalm-tunes," issued a collection of tunes in three parts. These thirty-seven tunes, all of which but one were in common metre, were bound often with "The Bay Psalm-Book." They were reprinted from Playford's "Book of Psalms" and the notes of the staff were replaced with letters and dots, and the bars marking the measures were omitted. To the Puritans, this great number of new tunes appeared fairly monstrous, and formed the signal for bitter objections and fierce quarrels.