SINGING AT WORK. "While many a merry lay and many a song Cheer'd the rough road, we wish'd the rough road long," 273 is the testimony of the wayfarers in Johnson's poem. M. Simonin, in his account of the miners in the mountains of the Tuscan Maremna singing at their work, and singing well, cannot resist, as one of his reviewers in this country said at the time, the temptation of a playful hit at our dull islanders. "In England," he says, referring to the mining population, "the women and girls either do not sing, or, if they do, sing out of tune." Good authority assures us that the Cornish people are, like all their allied races, strongly imbued with a taste for music, and that the women when engaged in similar tasks to those of the Italians, breaking up metallic ore at the surface, etc., are noted for singing choruses in parts with a correctness rarely exceeded, unless perhaps in Germany. Mr. Charles Reade tells us of the dredging-song of the fisherman of the Firth of Forth, that this old song is money to them. And thus he demonstrates his proposition :-dredging is practically very stiff rowing for ten hours; and the fishermen are agreed, alike those of Newhaven and their rivals, that this song lifts them through more work than untuned fishermen can manage. Mr. Reade, having heard the song, and seen the work done to it, inclines to think it helps the oar, not only by keeping the time true, and the spirit alive, but also by its favourable action on the lungs. "It is sung in a peculiar way: the sound is, as it were, expelled from the chest in a sort of musical ejaculations; and the like, we know, was done by the ancient gymnasts; and is done by French bakers, in lifting their enormous dough, and by our paviors." Readers of Great Expectations will remember the song Joe Gargery used to hum fragments of at the forge, of which the burden was Old Clem, whom Mr. Dickens takes to have stood in the 274 SINGING AT WORK. During the military passage of St. Bernard in 1800, the ascent from the village of St. Pierre to relation of a patron saint towards smiths; the song imitated the measure of beating upon iron; but Old Clem seems to have been in no sense identical with Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith. Readers of Goethe may recall Jetter the tailor, in Egmont, sitting at his work, humming a French psalm, thinking nothing about it, neither good nor bad, but singing it just because it is in his throat; yet forthwith pounced upon as a heretic, and clapped into prison. Readers of La Fontaine will bethink them of the cobbler who sang from morning to night, while his rich neighbour had no heart for singing, and negotiated with him on the subject. Readers of the old dramatists may hold in lively remembrance the chatter of the citizen's wife in Beaumont and Fletcher, who so delights in old Merrythought's maxim, "Never trust a tailor that does not sing at his work! his mind is on nothing but filching." "Mark this, George," the good woman bids her husband; 'tis worth noting: Godfrey, my tailor, you know, never sings; and he had fourteen yards to make this gown; and I'll be sworn Mistress Penistone, the draper's wife, had one made with twelve." To quite another category as well as another age belongs the sweet Puritan girl of The Minister's Wooing, who, as she moves about at her household work, sings snatches of old psalm tunes, making the Doctor, as he listens, think about angels and the Millennium. "Solemnly and tenderly there floated in at his open study window, through the breezy lilacs, mixed with low of kine, and bleat of sheep, and hum of early wakening life, the little silvery ripples of that singing, somewhat mournful in its cadence, as if a gentle soul were striving to hush itself to rest." As charmed the Doctor is as we find Felix Mendelssohn to have been when he was extemporizing one day in his lodgings in Rome, and heard suddenly a splendid contralto voice repeat SINGING IN HARNESS. 275 the summit being painful and laborious in the extreme, the soldiers-a hundred of them harnessed to each gun, and relieved by their comrades every half mile-were inspirited to the toil by the music of each regiment playing at its head; and they animated each other by warlike songs, the solitudes of the Alps resounding with their strains. "I'll sing to thee," says one footsore exile to another, in a dramatic fragment of Mr. Procter's,— "I'll sing to thee, And cheer thee on our melancholy march. it was a theme out of his Fantasia. His friends too listened a voice that had often entranced them; the young maid in the landlady's service was in the habit of singing popular Italian airs while at her work. On that day, however, his biographer relates, Mendelssohn started up in surprise. Through the opened window the songstress was to be seen, packing all sorts of fruit into a large basket. “Oh, if I could only once hear her sing near!" exclaimed the maestro. "Call her in, then," his companions urged. "But will she come?" The painters were bolder than the musician, and persuaded her to come in; and she sang, and Mendelssohn accompanied her extempore as she sang. But he may, after all, and in the long run, have liked best to hear her singing in her own way, and that was at work. Be that as it may, however, he provided for the musical education of this girl in the most self-sacrificing manner; and by the testimony of one of his most distinguished pupils, the simple maid of the Piazza d'Espagna became an excellent singer, renowned for the culture of her rare contralto voice. 276 SONGS OF PILGRIMAGE. Sweet music; ay, endure fatigue and thirst, Hunger and such poor wants." Sorrowful is the speaker; and sorrowing Cowper would have said, not after a godly sort, but rather one of those he describes as ignorant "That Scripture is the only cure of woe. BY XVI. Songs of Exile. Psalm cxxxvii. 3, 4. Y the waters of Babylon, there the Hebrew exiles sat down; and there they wept, when they remembered Zion. Their harps they hanged upon the willows in the midst thereof. Weeping, they were required by their captors to sing; those who wasted them required of them mirth: "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" The Hebrew Melodies bid weep for those that wept by Babel's stream, whose shrines are desolate, whose land a dream; weep for the harp of Judah's broken spell; for, "When shall Sion's songs again seem sweet? And Judah's melody once more rejoice The hearts that leap'd before its heavenly voice?" They sat down and wept by the waters of Babel, and thought of the day when their foe, in the hue |