MUSIC AT HOME

WE find in the American Agriculturist the following: “No family can afford to do without music. It is a luxury and an economy; an alleviator of sorrow, and a spring of enjoyment; a protection against vice and an incitement to virtue. When rightly used, its effects, physical, intellectual and moral, are good, very good, and only good. Make home attractive; music affords a means of doing this. Contribute kindly feeling, love. Music will help in this work. Keep out angry feeling. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.” Be economical. Pleasure, recreation, all must have, and no pleasure costs less in proportion to its worth than home music. Make your sons and daughters accomplished. What accomplishment is more valuable than music? Fit your daughters to support themselves in the future, if need be. There has been no time in many years when any young lady having sufficient knowledge to teach music could not pleasantly earn a respectable support in that way. “But,” some may say, “I have no ear for music, nor have any of my family.” Probably not one of you has ever tried it faithfully. Perhaps your sons had no natural “ ears” for reading, or your daughters natural hands for writing; and certainly unless they had learned these things they would never have been accomplished in them. Music does, indeed, come more naturally to most people than many other accomplishments that are next to universal; yet it does not come to all without much time spent in careful cultivation. “The one best means of introducing music to the family, and inducing its cultivation is to procure a good musical instrument. If none of your daughters or sons can play at all, yet if they have a good instrument at hand, some of them will learn. In almost every family this will be the case. Buy an instrument and try the experiment; if it succeeds only to a very small ex tent, the cost will be repaid many fold.” Says Shakespeare :—

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.