Music, of all pleasures the most intellectual, that glorious painting to the ear, that rich mastery of the gloomier emotions of our nature, was studied by the priesthood with a skill that influenced the habits of the country. How often have my fiercest perturbations sunk at the sounds that once filled the breezes of Judea! How often, when my brain was burning and the blood ran through my veins like molten brass, have I been softened down to painless tears by the chorus from our hills, the mellow harmonies of harp and horn blending with the voices of the youths and maidens of Israel! How often have I in the night listened, while the chant, ascending with a native richness to which the skill of other nations was dissonance, floated upward like a cloud of incense, bearing the aspirations of holiness and gratitude to the throne of Him whom man hath not seen nor can see! [Sidenote: The Glory of the Past] But those times are sunk deep in the great gulf that absorbs the happiness and genius of man. I have since traversed my country in its length and breadth; I have marked with my weary feet every valley, and made my restless bed upon every hill from Idumea to Lebanon, and from the Assyrian sands to the waters of the Mediterranean; yet the harp and voice were dead. I heard sounds on the hills, but they were the cries of the villagers flying before some tyrant gatherer of a tyrant’s tribute. I heard sounds in the midnight, but they were the howl of the wolf and the yell of the hyena reveling over the naked and dishonored graves, which the infidel had given, in his scorn, to the people of my fathers. But the study to which the largest expenditure of wealth and labor was devoted was, as it ought to be, that of the sacred books of Israel. It only makes me rebellious against the decrees of fate to think of the incomparable richness and immaculate character of the volumes over which I have so often hung, and look upon the diminished and degraded exterior in which their wisdom now lies before man. Where are now the cases covered with jewels, the clasps of topaz and diamond; the golden arks in which the volume of the hope of Israel lay, too precious not to be humiliated by the contact with even the richest treasure of earth? Where are the tissued curtains, which hid, as in a sanctuary, that mighty roll, too sacred to be glanced on by the casual eye? But, the spoiler—the spoiler! The Arab, the Parthian, the human tiger of the north, that lies crouching for a thousand years in the sheepfold of Judah! Is there not a sword? Is there not a judgment? Terribly will it judge the oppressor.