I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony.  But organically I am incapable of a tune.  I have been practising “God save the King” all my life; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it.  Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached.

I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me.  For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.’s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour,—­on his return he was pleased to say, “he thought it could not be the maid!” On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny.  But a grace, snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being,—­technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all the fine arts,—­had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them.  I mention this as a proof of my friend’s penetration, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny.

Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note in music is; or how one note should differ from another.  Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor.  Only sometimes the thorough bass I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh and disagreeable.  I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim.  While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring as Baralipton.

It is hard to stand alone—­in an age like this,—­(constituted to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut)—­to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art, which is said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions.—­Yet rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you, that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty.

I am constitutionally susceptible of noises.  A carpenter’s hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness.  But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music.  The ear is passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring stripes, while it hath no task to con.  To music it cannot be passive.  It will strive—­mine at least will—­’spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics.  I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!  I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common-life sounds;—­and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise.