Music has a most humanizing effect.  The cultivation of the art has a most favourable influence upon public morals.  It furnishes a source of pleasure in every family.  It gives home a new attraction.  It makes social intercourse more cheerful.  Father Mathew followed up his Temperance movement by a Singing movement.  He promoted the establishment of musical clubs all over Ireland:  for he felt that, as he had taken the people’s whisky from them, he must give them some wholesome stimulus in its stead.  He gave them Music.  Singing classes were established, to refine the taste, soften the manners, and humanize the mass of the Irish people.  But we fear that the example set by Father Mathew has already been forgotten.

“What a fulness of enjoyment,” says Channing, “has our Creator placed within our reach, by surrounding us with an atmosphere which may be shaped into sweet sounds!  And yet this goodness is almost lost upon us, through want of culture of the organ by which this provision is to be enjoyed.”

How much would the general cultivation of the gift of music improve us as a people!  Children ought to learn it in schools, as they do in Germany.  The voice of music would then be heard in every household.  Our old English glees would no longer be forgotten.  Men and women might sing in the intervals of their work,—­as the Germans do in going to and coming from their wars.  The work would not be worse done, because it was done amidst music and cheerfulness.  The breath of society would be sweetened, and pleasure would be linked with labour.

Why not have some elegance in even the humblest home?  We must of course have cleanliness, which is the special elegance of the poor.  But why not have pleasant and delightful things to look upon?  There is no reason why the humbler classes should not surround themselves with the evidences of beauty and comfort in all their shapes, and thus do homage alike to the gifts of God and the labours of man.  The taste for the beautiful is one of the best and most useful endowments.  It is one of the handmaids of civilization.  Beauty and elegance do not necessarily belong to the homes of the rich.  They are, or ought to be, all-pervading.  Beauty in all things,—­in nature, in art, in science, in literature, in social and domestic life.

How beautiful and yet how cheap are flowers.  Not exotics,—­but what are called common flowers.  A rose, for instance, is among the most beautiful of the smiles of nature.  The “laughing flowers,” exclaims the poet!  But there is more than gaiety in blooming flowers, though it takes a wise man to see the beauty, the love, and the adaptation, of which they are full.

What should we think of one who had invented flowers; supposing that, before him, flowers were unknown?  Would he not be regarded as the opener-up of a paradise of new delight? should we not hail the inventor as a genius, as a god?  And yet these lovely offsprings of the earth have been speaking to man from the first dawn of his existence until now, telling him of the goodness and wisdom of the Creative Power, which bade the earth bring forth, not only that which was useful as food,—­but also flowers, the bright consummate flowers, to clothe it in beauty and joy!