Or it may be heard
at some Methodist Camp Meeting upon a Welsh hillside, but in the churches
it is gone for ever. If I were a musician I would take it as the subject
for the _adagio_ in a Wesleyan symphony.
Gone now are the clarinet, the violoncello and the trombone, wild
minstrelsy as of the doleful creatures in Ezekiel, discordant, but
infinitely pathetic. Gone is that scarebabe stentor, that bellowing bull
of Bashan the village blacksmith, gone is the melodious carpenter, gone
the brawny shepherd with the red hair, who roared more lustily than all,
until they came to the words, "Shepherds with your flocks abiding," when
modesty covered him with confusion, and compelled him to be silent, as
though his own health were being drunk. They were doomed and had a
presentiment of evil, even when first I saw them, but they had still a
little lease of choir life remaining, and they roared out
[wick-ed hands have pierced and nailed him, pierced and nailed him to
a tree.]
but no description can give a proper idea of the effect. When I was last
in Battersby church there was a harmonium played by a sweet-looking girl
with a choir of school children around her, and they chanted the
canticles to the most correct of chants, and they sang Hymns Ancient and
Modern; the high pews were gone, nay, the very gallery in which the old
choir had sung was removed as an accursed thing which might remind the
people of the high places, and Theobald was old, and Christina was lying
under the yew trees in the churchyard.
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