Nor should it be supposed that, in the opera--in the fine pieces of Metastasio, for instance--the poetry is disgraced by being but the handmaid of music, and that the former is therefore reduced unduly in the scale of comparative merit. This is not the case with him who is an equal admirer of the two arts. Such as these will admit that it is but in a very small degree that music is designed to please a sense. They will insist that its design is to excite emotions that poetry, to the same extent, cannot awaken. What speech in the whole Iliad rouses more exulting courage than the 'Marsellois Hymn?' The music of 'Pleyel's German Hymn' not only of itself produces an effect to awaken a feeling of grief, but no words that I have ever read are capable of producing that feeling in an equal degree. Take for example, the lamentation of David for the loss of Absalom--and if that passage, and others like it, are enough to melt or break the heart, there is a kind of music, of which 'Pleyel's Hymn' is an example, that will affect it more deeply yet. Words, considered as auxiliary to music, merely show the subject on which the emotion rests, but have nothing to do with the emotion itself; _that_ is produced by music alone--and long before any words are known to an air, the emotion will have been produced. We shall have imagined the subject--and when we come to know the words, we shall discover one of three things: first, that the subject is what we imagined--secondly, that it is something analogous to our perception--or, thirdly, if neither of the two former, that the words and air are ill-adapted to each other. Indeed, what do we mean by saying, 'these words are adapted to the air,' if the air have no character of its own? And what is its character but its peculiar power of awakening certain emotions? Admitting that it is better that fine poetry and fine harmony should be united, when possible--and that this union, of course, produces additional delight to a refined mind,--it still seems to me very absurd to condemn the pieces which are constructed upon ideas conveyed in poetry of an inferior class, _merely because such is the character of the poetry_. Music is the governor of the heart, and all she asks of Poetry is a subject,--and then, delightful magician! it is her province to call up, by her sweet spell, the corresponding emotions! SIN ESTIMATED BY THE LIGHT OF HEAVEN. By Edward Payson. _Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance._