tion of sentiment and sounds. The efficacy of the chant in fervent intonation; the lullaby for sweet, soft tone; the festival song for bright, happy tone; the dramatic song for artistic tone, express the emotions more forcibly than mere oral recitation can possibly do.

The child's lack of self-consciousness, his spontaneity and freedom of action, his highly developed imitative power, make him a delightful pupil-companion. If a doubt exists as to what the child's conception of his song may be, observe how the idea, "the image in mind." as Cady styles it, is translated by a very young child. His fidelity is astonishing; he feels the emotion. Melody, harmony, and rhythm are the a-b-c of his inner life. Character building is the end of all culture. The sentiment of the child's song ingrains itself into his moral fibre. Reverence is the heart-impulse in response to noble appeal of melody and thought. A child lives a pure life while he breathes a pure song atmosphere.

These influences are far-reaching and penetrating, and like the lifegiving sunlight warm and develop the germ latent in every child's heart. Apropos of this, our beloved Fræbel says: "The most difficult and the most important part of the training of children consists in the development of their inner and higher life of feeling and of soul." The study of music should accomplish this. To continue: "This, then, is the object or purpose of our work; to purify the child nature, so that his voice is as sweet as he is sweet; to ennoble him by contact with the highest in thought and feeling that brain and thought can produce; to have him know that his fellow is his brother, and that God is his Father."

This is the use to which we put music, and measurably we accomplish our purpose.

SONGS FOR CHILDREN.

BY MISS FANNIE ARNOLD, OMAHA, NEB.

When Mr. Stewart, president of the Department of Music, wrote, asking that I contribute something about "Songs for Children," it seemed quite an easy task, looking from February beyond to July; but when I began to think over the matter I found I did not believe in songs, or many songs, for the intermediate grades.

The idea is to teach the scale, intervals, three kinds of time, and recommend about ten songs, one per month, for the first year, and reduce the number to four or five the second year.

Music is a distinct language, represented by signs. Musical language is very positive, while words are vague, and frequently add nothing to that which is already complete. Children should become acquainted with the language of music, by singing exercises, "songs without words," written by composers who know how to write for the voice; not instrumentalists who may be able to score well and write a remarkably beautiful "piano fantasie," but one who can think music, through that most beautiful of all instruments, the human voice. Pupils of the third, fourth, and fifth year become greatly interested in writing melodies of their own in different keys and the simpler kinds of time, and while we may not find any great originality in their little tunes, who can doubt the knowledge of the representative signs of the divine language gained by this fascinating drill, and that many embryo creators of exquisite composition may get their first suggestions in the grades of our public schools.

When a melody of some merit is written, the little composer, who doesn't always happen to be a boy, goes to the blackboard, reproduces the inspiration, and is rewarded by the entire school singing the song without words.

When teachers pay more attention to the educational side of music, and disabuse their minds of the old-fashioned idea that children can be developed into good sight-readers, with a refined taste for only the best in musical compositions, by the frequent singing of vapid, inane songs, it is quite possible that the committee of fifteen will devote more than four or five lines to the subject of music, "the sister to reading, correct intonation, and enunciation."

Mr. Stewart has asked me to sing some of the songs we have been most successful in using in the first and second years, giving some little explanation as a preface to each.

"Hum, Honey Bee; Hum!" a delightful song, credited to my predecessor, Miss Lucia Rogers, is well adapted to placing tones forward, giving the sweetest of quality, and the sustained notes are conducive to the development of proper breathing. [Song.]

"Bye, Baby, Night is Come," a dainty classic from Wilson G. Smith, to be sung mezzo-voce, introduces octaves and intervals somewhat difficult for first year pupils, yet this song has been most successfully taught by our Omaha teachers. [Song.]

"Early to Bed," a bright, jolly song by our president, Mr. N. Coe Stewart, is doted on by our little people, and is always sung with great dash and spirit. [Song.]

"Going to London," by Arthur Foote, contains one difficulty in the sharp 2, and is sometimes misunderstood by first grade teachers; but the vision of the rocking-chair excursion makes it a song full of interest to the little folks. [Song.]

"Going to the Fair," by Chadwick, is a song very fascinating to the second-year pupils, and while we have chromatic tones again, and the long, sustained effect on seven of the scale, it has a go and spirit about it that makes it a success always. [Song.]

"The Minuet," by Leopold Damrosch, is another artistic song for second year, and again come the chromatic difficulties; but it can be taught by scale names on the blackboard very successfully. [Song.]

The last, "A Song from a Child's Garden of Verse," by Stevenson (music by Nevin), finishes this impromptu song recital, and if, in singing these songs, I have suggested the simplest point that may be of value to any teacher present, the end is attained. [Song.]

MIND AND MUSIC.

BY THEO. H. JOHNSTON, CLEVELAND, OHIO.

The tie which in this life binds man to woman and knits together for eternity the souls which love is not more organic nor more vital than the natural union of mind and music. What God has joined together let no schoolman put asunder. But during 2,000 years music has suffered and deserved the calumny and humiliation of unnatural and demoralizing grass-widowhood.

The Greek was near enough Nature to feel her rhythmic movement and hear the quiring of her whirling orbs. For him music was a divinity, co-ordinate in rank and dignity with those who gave to men the wisdom of the gods. But the stolid, practical folk who forced upon Europe their laws and language had neither imagination nor sense of harmony. From what time Rome began to dominate music lost rank and has never regained it.

The man that hath no music in himself is fit for treasons, and he who has it within him and cannot utter it is, in his emotional nature, a dwarf or a cripple. The mystery of the world of sense, the high stirrings of the intellect, the longings of the heart, and the eternal underlying purpose of it all, music, and music alone, can harmonize. Like an echo of the invisible world, she gives to us the ground tone of that divine concord which the entire universe is destined one day to sound; she restores the counterpoint of life. Can I tell you what it is, this counterpoint? Have you listened to the ceaseless lapping of tiny waves against a boat keel; have you heard their silvery ripple over shoals, their purling through the pebbles of a brook bed, their sough and swirl against the tide rocks,

their soft sobbing on the sea shore? Blend in these an obligato of human heart cries, and you have counterpoint - the tumultuous. sweep of the most immeasurable force in nature.

Of all the arts seemingly so nearly akin, music, poetry, painting, sculpture,-music alone has neither an historic past nor a master whose canons of criticism are universally recognized; no Homer to fix forever the laws of epic narration; no Phidias to give the world a changeless ideal in statuary; no Angelo or Raphael to set the utmost limit of the creative hand; no Shakespeare encircling, embracing, containing in his single cosmic soul the total of human experience.

Music has no such master, and cannot have. For every word of uttered passion, for every spoken sigh of love or hate, of high ambition or unholy greed, a thousand waves of passion have broken noiseless, unheard, unknown, against the unechoing cliffs of silence. What countless fears and hopes, what joys and griefs arise in us and die unuttered! Ceaselessly by day and in the dreams of night the heavy hand of life sweeps unresting across the harpstrung human soul, but how rarely the vibrations break the open air of speech. Not all the myriad stars which sang together at creation's dawn could voice them; no master's hand could grasp their various chords, even though he had the thousand fingers of Aurora. Here, then, a reason why music has no Shakespeare, no all-resounding voice against which the stormiest individual cry is but the thin chirping of a bird against a tempest. "Painting, sculpture, and poetry of necessity involve some reference to nature; music does not. They are dependent for their subjects upon material physical phenomena external to the artists; music is not. Music could exist if there were no world of nature. Raphael's Madonna may not be a copy of a beautiful woman, but unless there were beautiful women, it could never have been painted. Shakespeare did not draw his characters from life, but life must supply us with the facts through which alone we recognize them as human. Even seers and dreamers, like Shelley and Blake, whose thought is farthest removed from our everyday prosaic world, were yet compelled to weave their imagery from the rainbow, and storm cloud, and leaping flame. Take away from poetry the material facts of nature and life, and there would be nothing left but melodious nonsense." Separate these arts from the world of objects and they cease to exist; their basis and essence is physical. Music, on the other hand, is psychological. Given sound as a plastic medium and it asks nothing more. It lives of itself, and creates by spontaneous activity. It is in all and around all, like the ether out of whose movements the nothing. ness of primal chaos grew into the universe of worlds.

We live and move and have our being in an all-environing sea of harmony. On this ocean floats our tiny life-craft, and at the end we but sink into it as the Buddhist into the all-composing Nirvana. In grief and in gladness, from the highest flights of fancy as from the dull business of bread-winning, we modulate with a few deft chords into the joyous major of universal harmony.

What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole gross world of sense and have not this language of the soul? if he catch not the keynote of life and accord not himself to the rhythm of eternity?

It is much to learn a foreign language; it adds to our own another world. But he who masters the keyboard possesses the secret things of the universe.

These coarse animal bodies of ours hunger and thirst daily for food and drink. We spend most of life to feed and clothe them. But there is a breath of the abiding God in us which daily hungers and thirsts for the eternal verities. Shall we feed the passing, the death-marked, the decaying, and feed not the deathless, the divine?

I hold with the Athenian that the father who educates not his child has in old age no claim upon him. It is a crime to beget those whom we cannot or do not prepare for a well-rounded life. To train a child in the three R's, to give him a trade or even a profession, neglecting that emotional side of his nature, which speaks the language of art and music, or else is dumb, is likewise criminal; like allowing him to enter upon life a cripple when a surgeon's hand could straighten his body.

With hardly an exception, the great musicians were masters of the keyboard at ten or twelve. In Germany this is accomplished by children of ordinary capacity. I need not tell you what every acrobat knows that the greatest dexterity can be gained in these early years only; but I may be allowed to emphasize the fact, that, with the keyboard well in hand at twelve or fifteen, the time of most rapid emotional development finds the youth equipped for its adequate and rational expression, and every year of ripening judgment broadens and deepens the maturing emotional nature.

I say nothing in this scheme of the child's wishes. When it is proven that the infant knows more and has sounder judgment than men and women of maturity, it will be soon enough to model our educational systems upon the views of babes and sucklings. It is the parents' most solemn duty to train the child, with his will or against it, to meet successfully the natural demands of body and soul. Music is not merely an exquisite delight-not alone the purest diversion of which our natures are capable. It is co-ordinate in dignity and creative power with the highest intellectual faculties; in truth, is inseparable from them. "The undevout astronomer is