Or it may be heard at some Methodist Camp
Meeting upon a Welsh hillside, but in the churches it is gone forever.
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 to a tree. (See
illustration.)
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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